Simple healthy quick meal

 It's dinner time again, and today, I'm going to make a pot of stew, a traditional Dublin stew, and the main reason is this, because it's easy, quick, inexpensive, very tasty, nutritious, and also I make a full pot so I have a dinner, ready for the next 3-4 days, very handy and it's always great when you get home, and you have a dinner already made, just needing to be reheated. Also stews are always better a few days later, the flavour comes out amazingly, especially this stew.

OK, a quick little background on this stew. It's defined I suppose as a poor-mans stew, dating back to the 1700's, and basically a family would use up what ingredients they would have, any veg and meat and boil it up, usually because their were a lot of family members to feed. And traditionally barley would have been the main ingredient to bulk it up due to it been so cheap

So try this, it's very easy, basically it's sliced bacon, pork sausages, carrots, celery, onions and potatoes. And you really just prepare all the veg, and boil it all together in a pot, simple as that..

- Pork sausages .

- Sliced bacon.

- Carrots, celery, potatoes, onion.

- Water.

- (optional) Thyme Rosemary, Stock cube.

- Salt, Cracked black pepper

Step 1. Peel 5 carrots, 1 onion, wash half a head of celery, peel 5-6 medium potatoes, 16 pork sausages, 10 bacon slices.

Step 2. Half the carrots then slice them, chop the onion to 1 inch squares, slice the celery, cut the potatoes in to 2 inch chunks, half the sausages and slice the bacon. It really doesn't matter about size, it's all getting cooked at the same time.

Step 3. Place all the ingredients in to a 5 litre pot, fill with cold water. Add a little salt, plenty of cracked black-pepper, no need for stock cubes(not a fan) as the meat should be salty enough. Also, fresh thyme or rosemary is a great touch. Bring to the boil, then simmer for a half an hour. When the potatoes are cooked, turn off and leave to rest for half an hour, if your not starving. Really excellent the next day too.

It's as simple as that. And you can get a few days dinner out of the pot too, saving plenty of time, especially when you just arrive home from a hard days grafting.