Food, Beer and Lack Thereof

Toward the end of the week in Ireland Pauline and I started to get desperate. Desperate for food that tasted like anything other than a potato. We found ourselves staring longingly at vegetable stands wishing we could just get a nice green salad. Everything in Ireland comes with butter, including most sandwiches that have no business being served with butter. There is literally no sandwich they will not put butter on. When you order a sandwich that is lucky enough to come with a few side salads, you get a sandwich with butter, cole slaw that tastes like butter and some lettuce that is doubly outweighed by the dressing in which it has been drenched.

It seems a great mystery that there are simply no herbs in the food. You’d think in a country where it is constantly raining and everything is green that they would be able to intentionally grow a few greens, but they don’t seem to manage it.

The one thing they can make fantastically well is soda bread. I just love the stuff and am going to try to make it at home. They also do scones well, but again, we’re talking about grains. If you like eating grains incessantly, Ireland is your place.

Oh, I almost forgot about the beer. Every bar serves the following: Guinness, Carlsberg, Budweiser and Heineken (listed in order of quantity ordered). When you go to a British pub there are scores and scores of beers to choose from. It makes absolutely no sense that Ireland, as much as they love grains, hasn’t figured out how to make good beer out of it.