Sunday, March 22, 2009

St. Patrick's Day feast

I had been looking forward to our St. Patrick's Day dinner for a couple weeks before the holiday actually rolled around. Here is what we had on the menu:

Soda bread with golden raisins and caraway
Colcannon soup
Irish bangers and mash
Peas
gravy
Guinness

I took care of the bread and the soup in the morning. The bread is really the easiest thing I've ever baked. Even easier than those salted chocolate & cranberry cookies. Basically, all the wet ingredients get combined. All the dry ingredients get combined. Then add the wet to the dry. Then stir in the raisins and caraway. Pour the whole thing into a greased oven-safe skillet, and voila, 35 minutes later, delicious soda bread. No chopping, no dicing, no fussy directions to follow, just some simple measuring of basic ingredients. Easy peasy.

The soup is also easy if you cut a few prep corners like I did - ahem, thank you Trader Joe's for shredded cabbage and trimmed leeks. I first made colcannon last year for the Harcourt Pot-Luck-O-the-Irish lunch. It's also the only time I've made it until this year. It's a good soup - cabbage, onions, rendered bacon fat, potatoes, a dash of cream, chicken broth, and leeks.

The bangers we bought at Paisanos meat market. They carry all sorts of craft made sausages - bangers, Chorizo, Italian, venison, turkey, and more. Steve browned up the links and then used the drippings to make the gravy, which only improved a day later.

We had a really nice dinner both that night and the next. Hope all of you had something good too. Alas, no pictures. Sorry.

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