There are excellent French restaurants, Italian restaurants, Chinese, Greek, Thai, etc. restaurants. There are exceedingly few Irish restaurants. Pubs yes, restaurants, no. There is good reason for this. Family legend has it that Granny Mary, in her first years in "Amerikay," often prepared the traditional American Thanksgiving dinner. According to my father and his sister, you just don't understand Irish cooking until you've been served a boiled turkey. As a lad of about 13, I decided to whip up a desert treat for the family. Figured marble cake with vanilla icing would be just the ticket. In those days, most everything was made from scratch, but I thought I'd modernize things and bought cake mix from the grocery, one white cake, one devil's food cake and a package of Vanilla icing mix. I'd need 3 large bowls and a cake pan, and just add water. How hard could it be? The folks were out for the evening, and with my younger brother looking on, I mixed up the cakes and the icing in separate bowls and poured the white cake batter into the pan. I discovered that I had about 4 times more devil's food batter than I needed. Couldn't stand to waste it so I carefully poured 4 large dollops into the pan. It didn't mix, and I figured if I tried to swirl it the whole thing would turn a sort of diarrea brown, so I left it the way it was and popped it into the oven. After a while the cake was done and I turned to the icing which looked really thin. Seems I'd poured in way too much water. But I'm not so easily put off, and I put the stuff into a saucepan on the stove so I could boil off the excess water. (Clever!) It worked. When it got to the proper thickness, I smeared it onto the cake although it seemed to have changed color a bit. My brother wandered over and looked at the result. "You know what that looks like?" he asked. As my folks walked into the kitchen he said "It looks like four belly buttons covered with vaseline." Went down in family lore as "Jimmy's Notorious Navel Cake." And I swear, it didn't taste bad at all, as long as you kept your eyes shut.