Blind stew for blind contour friday

We had a lovely Christmas break and had wonderful meals at so many friends and relatives. On Boxing Day we visited Robin’s mother and her husband Ralph. I was raving about my latest read, Nigel Slater’s book ‘Toast’ (an autobiography of his childhood and adolescence told through the food that he ate).
Ralph then told us a story that amused me. When he was a child in Ireland, strict Catholicism meant that no one dared to break the friday fasting rules which meant you couldn’t eat meat. He came from a large family with not much money and so on a friday his mother cooked what she called ‘blind stew’ which meant gathering up all the spare left over bits of food and vegetables and cooking them for few hours in a big pot with a couple of stock cubes. I asked Ralph what it tasted like – expecting some blarney about how it was cooked with love and that they were poor but happy, however his instant reply was ‘bloody awful!’