Vacation from Vegan

I’ll never eat another shepherd’s pie. Certainly not one as memorably delicious as the one I had at Searsons, a pub in Dublin. My trip is over and so is my meaty vacation. I could have stayed vegan while there but I would have missed some legendary meat and fish dishes, not to mention the cheese, yogurt and butter. 

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The bar man said “good choice!” when I ordered the shepherd’s pie. It was. I sat at the bar of the beautiful old pub and enjoyed a half pint of Guinness. It didn’t take long. It was huge. It must have contained the whole little lamb, ground up and cooked in herbs and nested inside mashed potatoes with some peas and carrots and gravy, then topped with potatoes and cheese and baked brown and drizzled with more gravy and served with chips (fries) and more gravy in a little pitcher. And a lettuce leaf.

The waitress wrapped what I couldn’t finish in an elaborate set of inverted bowls and about twenty layers of plastic. She also gave me a container of gravy to go. I ate that shepherd’s pie for another entire day. Generous shepherd, that he was.

Other meaty temptations are the breakfast sausage rolls and other like baked pastry deliciousness - perfect savory bites of meat and minces that smell even better than bacon because they are like the best of bacon together with fresh baked buttery pastry. They are obviously handmade, each a little different. They sit poised in a special heated case, shiny and beckoning, like jewelry only not at all expensive.

The woman at the Dublin hotel coffee shop smiled and said “good choice!” when I ordered the sausage roll. It was. I had been eyeing a cold vegan wrap.