St. Patrick's Day

Saint Patrick’s Day is a great time to try some new Irish foods! Little kids will love to dye foods green and older ones will have fun tasting foods that they may never have had before. I shared my mom’s Irish soda bread recipe last year (we make it together every year and it’s a lot of fun). Just click on the link on the right side of this article to get to the March 2009 archive. Another fun recipe to try is Colcannon. It is similar to what is known as “bubble and squeak” in England, a dish made from mashed potatoes and cabbage–you can also use kale in place of the cabbage if you like. Here’s an easy recipe:

Boil one pound of potatotes until they are soft, then mash them and season them with butter, milk, and salt as you normally would. In a seperate pot, boil the cabbage until it is no longer crunchy (you don’t want it to be too soggy though). Drain the cabbage and reserve it in a seperate bowl. Cook 2 or 3 slices of bacon in a large saucepan along with 1/4 to 1/2 of a small onion (chopped) and add the reserved cabbage.  Stir in the mashed potatoes and serve. Many old recipes also recommend using a pinch of mace to season the dish. Some people like to make a small indenation in each serving and fill it with melted butter.

If you have shamrock-shaped cookie cutters, they can be used as molds with this next recipe for Rice Krispy treats:

In a large saucepan, melt 1/4 cup of butter over low heat. Add one 10 oz. package of marshmallows and stir until they have completely melted. Add 3-4 drops of green food coloring and remove from heat. Stir in 6 cups of Rice Krispies cereal. You can press the Rice Krispies into a baking pan lined with wax paper and then cut them into squares, or you can wait for them to cool down a little and the mold them by pressing them into a cookie cutter and then letting them rest on a sheet of wax paper. This recipe is super-easy for little kids to help with, too!

Irish stews are also very popular on Saint Patrick’s Day. Irish people mainly raised sheep and grew root vegetables before migrating to America during the potato famine of the late 1840s and early 1850s. A common meal for people who did work like this was a stew made from lamb, potato, onion, and parsley. Since the recipe arrived in America, people have begun to using other types of meat and adding beer to the stews. Another traditional Irish recipe which has been “Americanized” is corned beef. Although many people think of this dish as Irish, the closest thing to it that is actually from Ireland is bacon and cabbage (cooked pork and cabbage simmered with herbs and garlic and served as kind of a stew). The use of corned beef began in New York City’s Lower East Side as a cheap alternative to pork–suggested to Irish immigrants by their Jewish neighbors. I hope that everyone enjoys these recipes and has a great Saint Patrick’s Day!