STOVIES This is a traditional recipe for an ordinary everyday meal. It is quick and easy to make but it is also a tasty, nutritious and warming dish for winter. Ingredients 2 pounds of potatoes 2 large onions 8 ounces of roast beef margarine salt and pepper vegetable stock

Ideas: You can either buy roast beef from a butcher or buy beef and roast it yourself in the oven. If you do not eat beef, then I suppose lamb might be the best alternative meat. This dish would often be made to use up left over meat so you may not need to go out to buy meat specially. Just remember the recipe for some day when you have meat left over. Either use the water from boiling the previous day's vegetables as your vegetable stock, or prepare some by boiling vegetables in water for half an hour. You would do better to use fully grown potatoes rather than new baby potatoes since the new potatoes do not mash up easily, but any potatoes will do.

Method

Cut up the meat very finely, allowing it to break or tear into small pieces.

Peel the skin off the potatoes and cut them in pieces.

Bring the vegetable stock to boiling point and add the potatoes. If there is not enough stock to cover the potatoes, add some boiling water.

Boil for 20 minutes until the potatoes are soft.

While the potatoes are boiling, finely chop the onions and fry them gently in the margarine.

When the potatoes are soft, lift them out of the stock and mash them up with a potato masher or some other heavy tool but do not throw away the vegetable stock.

Mix together in a pan the mashed potato, fried onions and shredded roast beef.

Stir in the vegetable stock.

Heat the pan but remember to stir all the time or the mixture will stick to the base of the pan and burn.

When the mixture boils, turn down the heat and allow it to continue to boil gently.

Again, stir frequently or it will burn.

At first, the mixture will be thin and watery. Allow the mixture to continue to boil until it has a very thick consistency. When most of the extra water has boiled away you will have thick lumpy stovies, ready to eat.

Add salt and pepper to taste.

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