Time for the craft portion of Ireland. You can find plenty of ideas for Irish related crafts if you google "St. Patrick's Day crafts". However, the wife loves Celtic knots. So, I googled that specifically and found a Celtic Knot Heart craft.  The linked site provides a printable that you can cut out and decorate before interweaving the two parts together, forming your knot.

The boys cut theirs out, colored it 2 shades of sparkly green using the really cool sparkly pen/crayon things someone gave them and got my help with the interweaving part.

These are basically potato pancakes. We got the recipe here. 

You grate a couple of potatoes and combine them with mash potatoes, flour, egg, and milk. Then, drop your mixture in pancake sizes onto a griddle (or pan) and cook them on both sides just like you would a pancake.

Now, when I was looking into this to see how to make it...I found that a lot of Americans "Americanize" this dish when they make it by using beef instead of lamb aka mutton. Well, I didn't want to do that so I had to set out to find lamb.  Not every grocery store sells it after all. When I found it...I had to really take a beat and look at the different cut options because I had no familiarity with lamb cuts. I went with loin chops.

We used this recipe which called for barley.  Barley is harder to find than lamb...at least where I live.  So, we left barley out and followed the REST of the recipe.

With a couple of seasoning differences (especially the barley, dang it), this is very similar to traditional beef stew.  Meat, potatoes, carrots, onions.  In lieu of the barley, I'm glad I at least mixed it up a bit by definitely including the mutton.

So, the picture here looks very similar to Shepherds Pie, right? 

Well, it is. There are a couple of different seasonings, like adding in thyme and bay leaves. Otherwise, it's awfully close to being the same thing.  The big difference? It contains only root vegetables. Carrots, onions, potatoes.  There are no peas and other items. So, both were good, but I liked the extra variety in the Shepherds version.

We used the recipe from https://www.carriesexperimentalkitchen.com/irish-cottage-pie/.