Brian Boru and "Dark Shadows"

My mom and I went to Brian Boru's for dinner today, an Irish restaurant sporting a welcoming wood-paneled interior and traditional Irish fare that gave me the hankering to watch John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara in The Quiet Man again. The restaurant is owned by the same company that runs Galway Bay in downtown Annapolis (check out my post), and both places offer gluten free menus.

The cottage pie was hearty and filling, and the casserole dish was much bigger than it looks in the picture! I could only eat about half of it, since I was already getting full from soup and from my Molly Malone's Mussels!


Their Irish Whiskey and Tomato Soup is not your grandma's tomato soup...
unless your grandma is a feisty Irish lady who loves dumping beer in her fresh tomato and onion soup.

Speaking of beer, I tried Bard's Tale Beer and loved it. It's a mellow-tasting, gluten-free beer, and with a name like that (Shakespeare and all that), who wouldn't love it? The only other gluten-free beer I've ever had is Red Bridge, which is good, but the flavor is not as good and refreshing as Bard's (that's right - now I have had two different brands of beer in my entire life. Living with celiac spru and staying faithful to a gluten free diet is a challenge, but totally worth staying healthy and feeling strong.)

Anyhoo, I snuck the bottle out afterwards, since I want to start saving bottles and burning tapers in them for an Italian motif. My aunt warned me that this would create a bit of a "Dark Shadows" aura (she was the "Dark Shadows" guru back in the 70s), especially if I used tapers of various colors to create multi-colored layers of melted wax. Actually, I do like Dark Shadows, as a delightfully silly Gothic melodrama, with great lighting and moodiness. And with an Irish beer bottle in the mix, my bottle-and-candle motif will be all the more eclectic!

Wow, that was a digression.