If someone asks what to serve on St. Patrick’s Day, the answer will most likely be “corned beef and cabbage.”
Corning means curing or pickling the meat in a seasoned brine. The word refers to the “corns” or grains of kosher (or other coarse) salt that are mixed with water to make the brine. Typically, corned beef is made from brisket. The dish has many regional variations and seasonings.
Historical note: Irish immigrants adapted corned beef from their Jewish neighbors on New York’s Lower East Side as a cheaper alternative to Irish bacon. This led to the development of corned beef and cabbage, the now-traditional Irish-American dish. Smoking a corned beef, and adding extra spices, produces pastrami.
Our friends at Chocolates El Rey tweeted an idea that may sound odd, but actually is a tasty touch:
Grate bittersweet chocolate over red sauces: barbecue and pasta dishes, for example (hold the grated cheese). Beyond grating, chocolate provides richness in savory recipes: chocolate with meat and chocolate with chicken, for example.
Savory chocolate dishes go back a long way. Mole (pronounced MOE-leh) poblano, perhaps the most famous dish in Mexico, was created in the 16th century in Puebla, by nuns in the Convent of Santa Rosa in Puebla de los Angeles. The sauce has some 20 ingredients, including chocolate.
You can include chocolate in every meal. We’ve attended a few such dinners, and have salivated upon reading reports of others. Ideas include:
Appetizer: Cocoa-coated goat cheese rounds, caviar with grated white chocolate
Salad: Your favorite salad with cacao nibs (beets, goat cheese and carrots go well in this)
Beef in mole sauce in a taco shell. You can grate dark chocolate over it prior to serving. Photo courtesy of McCormick & Company. Get the recipe.
Main Course: Chicken in mole sauce (or chicken skewers with mole dipping sauce), hanger steak with a chocolate-infused gravy, chocolate-and-chile-marinated flank steak, any meat with a cocoa rub, cocoa-enhanced ravioli dough filled with butternut squash.
Cheese course: Cocoa-rolled goat cheese log (try the Capri chocolate goat log from Westfield Farms)
Dessert: Lots of options here!
Find a wealth of cooking-with-chocolate recipes at AllChocolate.com.
And check out the book, The Essence Of Chocolate: Cooking And Baking With Fine Chocolate, by John Scharffenberger and Robert Steinberg, founders of Scharffenberger Chocolate. Read our review of the book.
Melon liqueur creates a cocktail as green as the Emerald Isle. Photo courtesy Hornitos tequila.
Why drink inferior green beer on St. Patrick’s Day when you can have an emerald green cocktail instead? There’s no reason you have to limit St. Patrick’s Day libations to traditional celebratory drinks. Just stick to the green theme.
The Shamrocker cocktail, created by Hornitos tequila, is fun, fruity and as green as the Emerald Isle.
COCKTAIL RECIPE: THE SHAMROCKER
Ingredients Per Drink
1 part silver tequila
1 part melon liqueur
1/2 part triple sec or other orange liqueur
Splash of orange juice
Ice
Preparation
1. COMBINE the ingredients in cocktail shaker filled with ice. Shake and strain into a rocks glass.
2. GARNISH with an orange slice—or go edgy with shamrock-shaped microgreens.
Originally made in fluted molds, bundt cakes have, joyously, evolved beyond the simple “turban” design. There are dozens of fanciful shapes: a flower, a Christmas tree, a football stadium, a beehive and even a sand castle.
Given the ornate designs, the last thing you want is for cake to stick to the pan.
Instead of an oil spray to prevent sticking, try this technique, which uses bread crumbs to create a barrier between the cake and the pan:
Brush the pan with butter, then dust with fine dried bread crumbs instead of flour.
If your bread crumbs aren’t fine enough, pulse them in the food processor.
Briskly tap the pan several times with the palms of your hands to distribute the bread crumbs evenly; then turn the pan upside down over the sink to remove excess crumbs.
If you want to use flour, Wondra brand works the best to help define the details of the mold.
If you don’t have any other way to brew loose tea, usa a coffee filter. Tea filter bags from Finum.
The best tea in the world is not in a conventional tea bag. It’s loose tea.
Those who love fine tea have a variety of ways to brew loose tea. Our favorite is the luxurious Breville One-Touch Teamaker, which brews about a quart.
Our second favorite is the one (large) serving Aladdin Tea Infuser Mug, which has a nifty basket for tea (or tea bags). The basket flips down from the lid to infuse the tea. After the infusion is complete, it flips back up so the tea doesn’t continue to brew.
We also make frequent use of our Ingenuitea Teapot (we got ours from Adagio Tea, but other tea companies have their own versions), which brews 12 ounces of tea.
Both the Aladdin and the Adagio can go right into the microwave. No tea kettle or boiling water spout is needed: Just add the tea and tap water, and microwave for three minutes or so.
But what if you’ve been given loose tea and have none of these?
You can purchase tea filters—also called tea sachets or tea sacs. These are empty tea bags, waiting to be filled.
But you have to plan ahead and buy them. A solution is probably in your kitchen already: a coffee filter.
Although much thicker than tea bags, coffee filters do the job. Put loose tea in a coffee filter—one rounded teaspoon per eight-ounce cup—and tie it off with kitchen string or drape the filter over the top rim of the mug.
Another tip: “eight-ounce cup” refers to the total volume that a cup can hold. But you can’t fill a cup to the top of the rim without spilling when you try to drink it. So consider that an eight-ounce cup gives you six ounces of tea; more if you don’t add milk.
