My family has a corned beef dinner every year for St. Patrick’s Day. My mom went all out this year. She and I went on a culinary trip to Ireland in 2004. We visited lots of cookery schools and restaurants. My mom researched our menus and recipes from the trip to help plan our dinner.
The most impressive part of dinner was the breads that she made. One was an Irish soda herb bread. She just included chives but those were plenty. It’s so rare to have homemade bread. It was a white bread with bright green chives. She also made a whole wheat brown bread. It had a very hearty texture to it. She also bought a loaf of bread from the Great Harvest bakery. It was a Guinness and Gouda bread. I could taste the beer in the bread but with the bits of cheese in it, it was good. We had a pre-dinner cocktail of Powers Irish whiskey and 7up. The liquor store said that even though it’s not known here, Powers is the best selling whiskey in Ireland.
We had these different breads along with a spread of cheeses. We had an aged Irish white cheddar cheese, Blarney Castle cheese, Irish butter, and a tomato jam. The tomato jam was from Ballymaloe, a cooking school we visited. I wasn’t sure what to expect from it but it was really good. It was savory and a little vinegary. Surprisingly good!
For the main course, my mom made corned beef in the crock pot. It was a spicy corned beef so there were some hot red peppers floating around. She also put in baby carrots and fingerling potatoes to cook in the juices. I liked the spicy corned beef. It was different than what we’d had in previous years. I like to eat the beef with spicy mustard. It was accompanied nicely with some alcoholic cider for me and Irish beers for my family.
We finished off our fantastic dinner with some cupcakes that my mom picked up from Gigi’s. We had grasshopper cupcakes which have chocolate cake with a mint cream frosting. We also had chocolate covered cherry cupcakes which had chocolate cherry cake, cherry frosting and a chocolate drizzle.
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