St. Patrick's Week

Since St. Patty's day falls on a Wednesday this year, we'll be busy at church, and unable to manage a big meal. So instead, we invited friends over for dinner tonight, and cooked up a traditional American St. Patty's Day feast.



The prep actually started last week. Corned beef needs to be cured for several days. I used Michael Ruhlman's recipe from his book "Charcuterie". It starts with assembling a pickling spice mixture...

...and then combining it with the rest of the brine ingredients, including pink salt (sodium nitrite). I was able to get the pink salt from a local butcher.

I trimmed up a five-pound hunk of brisket...

...and placed it in the chilled brine, and into the fridge for five days.


The real cooking started yesterday. I knew that I wouldn't have time today to cook the brisket for three hours, so I did most of the cooking yesterday, and finished it up today after work. Yesterday I took the brisket out of the brine and rinsed it off, then simmered it for 2.5 hours in a mixture of water, allspice and pepper. The curing process is what gives cooked corned beef that wonderful red color.

This afternoon, I retrieved the cooked corn beef from the fridge, and added the vegetables, following the corned beef and cabbage recipe from Alton Brown. (I chose not to use his recipe for curing corned beef, because it calls for salt petre, instead of pink salt...a rather outdated process. Pink salt is much easier to find, and takes half the time to cure the meat.)


I don't know that I've ever had corned beef and cabbage before, but I'm definitely a fan now. The meat is tender and flavorful, and because the vegetables are cooked in the liquid that the beef simmered in for hours, they pick up tons of flavor. Good stuff.

I also baked a loaf of Irish Soda Bread flavored with caraway seeds. This was the only item from the meal that I'd done before (minus the caraway). Soda bread is quick and easy to make. It contains no yeast, so it requires no rising time, and can be baked immediately. Darn near foolproof.



Finally, for dessert, I used Ruhlman's basic custard ratio to make a Bailey's Irish Cream brulee. I could describe the texture (like buttah), or the flavor, the aroma. I could tell you about the snap of the caramelized sugar top, as the spoon breaks through. But I think I'll just say this again "Bailey's Irish Cream brulee." 'Nuf said.



It was a night of firsts...cooking dishes for the first time...TRYING dishes for the first time. And since we had someone new join us for dinner, we got to go over "why is Ben taking photos of the food" again. But my favorite part of the evening was seeing the kids gobble up things they've never tried before. Fun stuff. Sadly, no corned beef leftovers (but don't tell anyone, I saved some of the cured meat to make pastrami in a few days).