Irish dinner recipes

Since I won't be making anything for St. Patrick's Day this year, I thought I'd share some recipes with you.

Soda Bread Recipe

4 cups all purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon sugar (you don't strictly need this)
2 cups buttermilk

Method:

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees. Lightly grease a baking sheet. Combine all the dry ingredients in a large bowl. I run a spoon or whisk through it to add some air because I am too cheap am too lazy don't have a sifter.

Add the buttermilk to form a sticky dough. You may need a little more milk, but I do fine with just two cups. Here's a tip: I often spray my hands with Pam before I scoop the dough out of the bowl. Place the dough on the sheet and shape into a round that's about as thick as your fist. With a sharp knife, cut a cross in the top of the dough.

Bake for about 30 minutes.

The bottom of the bread will have a hollow sound when tapped. If it isn't done, it won't sound hollow yet.

Cover the bread in a tea towel and lightly sprinkle water on the cloth to keep the bread moist. This is a daily bread, so you want to eat it the day you bake it.

Corned Beef in Guinness Recipe

This one is super easy. Take the corned beef out of the package. You can use the spices or don't use the spices. Put the corned beef in a crock pot with about 1/4 cup of brown sugar (you can use up to 1/2 cup). Pour (slowly) a can of Guinness over the beef and cook on high for 6 hours. If you use Guinness Extra Stout, you might want more brown sugar. Throw an onion in there if you like onion. You can do that anytime in the first four hours.

Cabbage Recipe

This is really easy, too. Chop up some cabbage. Heat Kerrygold Irish Butter in a skillet over medium heat. Don't let it get too hot or burn the butter. Throw the cabbage in the butter. Cover the skillet and stir every now and then. When the cabbage is cooked to your liking (test it for how crunchy you like or don't like it) and throw in some caraway seeds. Stir it up and serve.

Beannachtaí na Féile Pádraig oraibh.
St. Patrick's Day blessing upon you.
For a free lesson on St. Patrick's Day phrases in Irish Gaelic, visit Bitesize Irish Gaelic.

Eating well during my eat down

"I have such good news for you today," she said sarcastically.

Although I went to bed at a decent hour, I awoke early from a bad dream. I think I should be more awake than I am, but I feel sleep creeping dangerously closer and concentrating on work is difficult.

And so it's the perfect!time!to!blog!

What I have done all day (Ahem. It isn't even noon yet) to help me focus and stay awake is eat. I've eaten breakfast and lunch already. I'm not really hungry.

It must be true what they say about not getting enough sleep leading to obesity. I keep thinking it will help me wake up.

It doesn't.

For breakfast I had pancakes because I am tradition-bound and today is Shrove Tuesday. For lunch I had leftover oven-baked chicken and big, thick egg noodles with sweet corn from last summer.

I've been eating really well for a few weeks now because I'm hosting an eat-down at my house.

"Host" is such a strong word. I haven't invited anyone over or cleaned the house.

I just decided to clean out my freezer, but usually an eat-down is when I stay out of the grocery store and eat as much of what is in the house as I can stand. This is often accompanied by a sort out of the pantry. If it's expired, I toss it and if it isn't but I am not doing anything with it, it goes to the food pantry. I try hard to keep from throwing food away. I also try not to buy too much, but sometimes the canned goods and the freezer get away from me.

So cleaning out the freezer, which you know, takes time, turned into an eat down. Here's the current state of the fridge:

I may have cheated a little and not shown you the entire thing because I haven't cleaned it.

I've been too busy thawing, cooking and sorting to clean anything.

I often don't have very much food in the house these days. I look in the refrigerator and it looks OK, but there are three jars of jam and a carton of sour cream I had forgotten about and so it goes. It looks like more than it really is. I always sort of figure if I have a couple eggs, I won't starve to death.

[edit] You see the blank space to the left where the Swiss cheese is lounging all the live-long day? That's where the eggs belong. I just realized I don't have eggs. Can't make corn pudding. Does it count if I borrow eggs from a relative?

Anyway, the sour cream turned out to be just fine. I love food that lasts forever.

A friend of mine accepted a challenge from a food web site to clean out freezers and she wondered if I would do it with her. As a matter of fact, I had decided to take some things out of the freezer that very same day. So I said yes and now I report to her every day or so what genius things I've created.

I removed some beef, a whole chicken and some sweet corn from last summer. I've used pork, a ribeye steak, meatballs, noodles and freshly squeezed-by-me lime juice. From the pantry, I've made the soup and will make corn pudding this week. I'm down to four cans of beets (who buys this stuff? not me), three cans of creamed corn and one can of sauerkraut.

The beef turned into soup, the chicken went into the oven and was devoured and the corn got eaten along the way. I put the beef into the crock pot. It was a roast of some sort, but really small. I added salsa and when I got home, I added a little more fresh homemade salsa, a can of red beans and a can of creamed corn. It was delicious. Some thinly cut shoulder steak went into the crock pot with teriyaki sauce. Later I added a can of cream of mushroom soup and some mushrooms. I had that over potatoes.


It sounded like a mixture that may go radioactive at the table, but the teriyaki sauce and cream of mushroom soup behaved remarkably well together.

The only thing that didn't turn out is a recipe for a green bean side dish. I substituted Vidalia onion salad dressing for milk and used one can instead of two cans of beans and some Cream of Whatever was involved and although I ate a little I threw the rest away.

That's our secret.

As you can see from the photo above, I have the cutest Crock Pot ever and I buy meat at Target. I wait like a vulture for the end of the day when the meat gets little stickers on them for $3 off and I [*[pounce]*] on it.

Then I throw it all in the freezer when I get home so it doesn't expire and kill me. Who loves herself?

Oh and hey? I bought a DOZEN packages of Wholly Guacamole for 50 cents each over the weekend. They also had to go directly into the freezer, but that stuff is so delicious that if you put a bowl out and leave the room, angels will visit and sing.

Try it. It's very good.

There are still homemade pork tenderloins to be served and currently sitting in the fridge looking foolish is a pound of ground beef. I haven't any idea what to do with it when it thaws. I'm trying to stay out of the store and am making do with what I have. The corn pudding needs milk, so I may relent and buy a quart because I'll be using up eggs and some bread that needs to go before I leave town on Saturday.

Oops. See previous [edit].

I need to use the pound of ground beef without purchasing anything. Meatloaf maybe?

I've also been sorting and organizing cupboards, closets, drawers and all other storage areas. I've been ruthless about throwing things into a pile for our church's garage sale this summer.

My house feels a thousand pounds lighter and I just love walking into my dirty newly organized home. Only, like I said, I'm leaving it for a couple weeks on Saturday.

A balanced diet is a cookie in each hand

I just got the voting results from the company-wide first ever cookie bake-off.

I tied for first place with Crispy Oatmeal Cookies from Heidi! Yay!

Never able to make the decision between the two cookies and completely booked for last night so I couldn’t make more of just one batch, I brought both of Sunday’s batches in this morning.

I made Homemade Oreos (pain in the back) and Oreo Cookie Cookies (thank goodness I have a KitchenAid). The Homemade Oreos don’t look or taste like Oreos, so the name stinks. I love the Oreo Cookie Cookies, but they got cracky since Sunday.

They’re still really yummy, but when you first bite into them, they shatter and crumbs fly. But then…they get a little chewy and they’re wonderful. It’s a chocolate chip cookie with crushed Oreos throughout.

Scrumptious!



Anyway, I couldn’t decide which to enter and that doesn’t bode well for my future as a contest cookie baker because I think the choice was actually pretty clear.

Surprise development: The HO (PITB) cookies improved upon storage.

The day I baked them, they were awful. They tasted like a Little Debbie snack cake only… if you like Little Debbie snack cakes, you would like those better than these cookies. On the day. Day-of-cookies, not so much.

Still happy with the Oreo Cookie Cookies, I got home from work on Monday and I ate a HO (PITB) to see if I could make the decision and I was surprised that they tasted so different. The chocolate cookie wafer I had so painstakingly patted into existence hunched over the counter for hours with wet fingertips had taken on a little sparkly ‘snap’ without exploding into a million pieces. It was snappy and soft at the same time. The filling, which at first tasted like crap cheap Little Debbie knock-offs from the Dollar Store had become subtle and tasty.

I knew enough to know I had a decision to make. I also knew enough to know I needed someone to make the decision for me.

I was too close to the action.

I had fallen in love with my cookies. The toil! The labor! The struggle!

Tuesday night, co-worker and competitor John had written on Facebook that his cookies weren’t turning out. I formulated my plan.

This morning, dragging all the cookies into the office, I saw John. He was right near the entrance, which was good because I was in no mood to have to hunt him down. I said, “To my office!” even though I saw he was leaving for a client location.

In my office, I forced him to eat one of each cookie.

He said there wasn’t much of a choice – it was the sandwich cookie all the way and since I had already made up my mind that he was going to make the decision, that’s the one I put out.

He voted for my HO (PITB) cookies, too. Well, sure. He had some stock invested now.

After the contest, he sent me an email that said, "You're welcome. Just saying, you needed that vote." Then he followed it up saying 'Sabotage!'

Co-workers. Bah.



For the most part and in the midst of cookie fever, I didn’t do much of anything all day here at work. Why is that? I hear you asking.

I’ll tell you why.



Because Heidi, my tied cookie baking co-worker, was hovering and harassing people at the cookie display table, which was right outside my office door. I would pop up and tell her Stop canvassing at the polling station! Stop buying votes! Don’t stuff the ballot box!

When the vote count was in, I was called into someone’s office with Heidi. An account manager asked why we were being told before others and I said to him as I made my way that most likely it was a tie and they wanted to see the fight break out.

It was a tie. We high-fived, disappointing everyone in the office about the fight.

Word travels fast, you know.

On a similar note, did I ever tell you that in a random sort of conversation one day my boss said that in a fight between me and Heidi he was pretty sure Heidi would win?

I think he's right on that one, so I high-fived her and in my typically gracious manner, full of sportsmanlike conduct and all of the good cheer and happy manners I possess, I said,

“Thank goodness you didn’t win first place alone. You’d be unbearable the rest of the week.”

It was awesome! We joked around and smiled. Then we realized the glory had passed rather quickly. There was no prize, no ribbon, no accolades, no trip to Disney World, no cheering crowd, no speech from the Queen of England and no phone call from the President, so we went back to our offices and back to work.

Whatever.

Also, in yesterday’s breaking news, I won the local library’s Love Your Library contest and guess what I won?

A dozen cookies.

Cheese recipe from tonight's dinner

I made dinner for the grandchildren tonight and created something I think is pretty yummy, plus the recipe enters me in a contest for cheese at Biggest Diabetic Loser.

1 frozen hamburger patty
2 baked potatoes
Shredded mozzarella cheese
Barbeque sauce
salt & pepper

Slice the baked potatoes in half longwise and with a spoon, scoop out the insides and set both the insides and the skins aside. Fry the hamburger in a skillet and when it is done, remove them from the skillet and use the spatula to cut it into chunks. Into the hot skillet with the grease from the burger, add the potato insides and let them fry until they are brown. Place the skins in skillet as well, cut side down and let them get warm. Take out the skins and fill them with the scooped out, fried potatoes. Add some of the hamburger chunks and top with mozzarella cheese and barbeque sauce. Salt and pepper to taste. You could place them under the broiler for about 2 minutes, if you'd like.

They were yummy. The kids loved the "hamburger nuggets" I made from taking frozen hamburger patties and cutting them into six big nugget-sized pieces. The nuggets were dipped in bbq sauce and ketchup. Big hit!

We're babysitting my stepdaughter's children each weeknight this week. It's tiring, but fun.

I took the afternoon off today and walked 10 miles in preparation for the half marathon coming up, so I am really pretty tired. Having a 4-year-old and a 2-year-old in the house is exhausting!

Is it bedtime yet?