Stovies!

I made a traditional Scottish meal for dinner tonight! Stovies. In honor of this, I will do my best to write the rest of the blog and recipe in Scottish.

Oi!
(hello)

 Fit leich?
(how you doing?)

Nae ta bad. Foos du?
(not too bad. How're you?)

Stovies are a Northeast Scotland tradition. Usually, they're made from the leftovers of the Sunday Roast, using the neeps (parsnips), tatties (potatoes), meat and a wee (a little)  bit of drippings all thrown into one pot. The origins of stovies are said to come from a time when masters would give their servants the left over food from Sunday lunch. They would take this home or to their quarters and make a dish that could last them all week and was easy to cook. This is a warm homey dish for quinies (girls) and loons (boys), wifeys (women) and mannies (men) alike.

Ok, enough Scottish slang. That's hard and I dunna ken (don't know) that I can keep going. 

Ingredients:
For the beef. 
1 lb beef cubed (good scottish beef is recommended)
1/4 cup beef stock
1 cup water
1 cup merlot or other red wine
3 cloves garlic chopped
1/2 onion chopped

Stovies:
Cooked beef
3 large or 6 small potatoes, quartered
1/4-1/2 cup of milk
1/4 tsp rosemary
salt and pepper to taste
1/4 tsp garlic

Roasted beets
4-5 beets roughly chopped into bitesize pieces (Fig 1)
olive oil or butter
salt and pepper to taste
Fig 1: Beet hands. Might be in your best interest to not wear a white shirt while doing this.

I cooked the meat a couple of days ago. You could probably do it all in the same day, though.

1. Sweat the onion and 2 cloves of garlic (chopped) over low heat.
2. Drizzle with olive oil.
3. Once onions are translucent, put the beef in
4. brown the beef- usually between 5 and 10 minutes, depending on the size of the beef.
5. Bring water and stock to a boil in a large stock pot.
6. Dump beef and onion and garlic in.
7. Add merlot
8. add last clove of garlic
9. Simmer for 2-3 hours
10. Boil the potatoes in a large pot of salted water. Drain when tender when pierced with a fork. Return to pot.
11. Pour milk over potatoes, smash with a fork- should NOT be smooth, remain chunkey.
12. Take meat and onion mixture (which should be amazingly tender now) and put into frying pan, along with some of the merlot broth (to taste).
13. Add potatoes. Over medium heat, heat through and mix together. Add rosemary, garlic, salt and pepper to taste.

For the beets:
Preheat oven at 350. At step 10 above, put chopped beets into a bowl. Drizzle olive oil or melted over beets. Sprinkle generously with salt, and not so generously with pepper, and mix it all around. Wrap in aluminum foil packet. Bake for 45-60 minutes.

Traditionally, stovies are served with piping hot with oatcakes, beetroot and skirlie (which is like oatmeal stuffing) but as Mike said, 'if you ate that, you'd sink to the bottom of the ocean'. So, instead, we had broccoli (Figure 2).
  

Fig. 2: Dinner! Looks gross- a bit like 

German textbook food- but is tasty!!

Cheers!