Last year for St. Patrick's Day, I made a big cheesy, meaty feast. This year, I had plans to make several Irish-inspired dishes, but then I got busy, and then there were Bravo reality shows on the DVR that needed watching and, well, you can see where this is going.

I did however manage to make a somewhat sorry Irish cheese fondue.

I had two varieties of high-quality Irish cheese – one an Irish cheddar and the other an aged Dubliner cheese. Both were delicious on their own. There was something slightly fruity about both of them, and I wish I would have just nibbled on them with some bread instead of turning them into this fondue.

For one thing, my fondue accompaniments were a little sad – a baguette and some frozen green beans, used primarily for their greenness and because I had no other more appropriate fondue vegetables – cauliflower, broccoli, red potatoes, asparagus. Any of those probably would have been better.

I made one major alteration to the fondue recipe. I didn't have any frozen apple juice concentrate and couldn't find it at the corner store, so I used some apple juice that I reduced on the stove instead. That probably changed the end result, which was pretty runny and slightly coagulated. The recipe called for a stout beer, such as Guiness, which seemed to overpower the cheese flavor entirely. The cheese itself didn't melt very well, perhaps because I used a combination instead of strictly cheddar.

It was OK with the bread, but it didn't stick to the beans at all. Perhaps I should have added some pureed white beans for that creamy consistency.