Stout and Cheddar Rarebit with Fried Eggs

Happy St Patrick's Day!  I don't know much of anything about Irish food, except that it involves potatoes, corned beef and cabbage.  And anything involving Guinness has to be Irish, right?  At least that was my thought process when I picked this recipe for dinner.  I briefly considered making short ribs braised in Guinness, but that just seemed so heavy.  So I went to Epicurious and searched recipes using Guinness and this was what I came up with.  Apparently a rarebit (or a Welsh rarebit) is toast topped with a sauce made of beer, mustard and cheese.  Who knew?

Anyway, I'm not sure how I felt about this dish.  Alex really liked this.  I love toast with fried eggs.  I love eggs benedict.  Bread with any sort of runny egg yolk is awesome.  That holds true for this dish.  And I really liked the pickled onions with watercress too.  They gave the dish a nice brightness and acidity.  Like the parsley salad most restaurants serve with bone marrow, they also served to cut through the richness of the dish.  Plus the pickled onions provided some sweetness.  The element that confused me was the sauce.  I'm not sure if I could taste the Guinness in the cheese sauce.  Nor could I really taste that the cheese was actually extra sharp white cheddar cheese.  It was savory and a little earthy.  Also as it started to cool down the sauce started to congeal a little.  I think the dish definitely needed a sauce.  But I have to admit that I like an old-fashioned hollandaise and eggs benedict better. 

Recipe after the jump!

Stout-Braised Short Ribs

These short ribs were the dish I originally intended to make on St. Patrick's Day.  But with everything conspiring against me, I tabled them for this weekend, when I would have more time to prep and braise them until they were fall off the bone tender.  Granted, these short ribs don't feel very seasonally appropriate seeing as it has been gorgeous outside all week, but what can you do?  And as there is really no way to lighten up a dish of braised short ribs without losing everything that makes them luscious and delightful, I didn't even bother trying.  Sometimes you just have to be a gluttonous carnivore, spring weather or no.  That's really all there is to it.  And then you have to remind yourself to eat salads for the next few days to make up for your indulgence, but that's another matter entirely.

I was a little worried that braising the short ribs only in Guinness would make them a little bitter, but went ahead with it anyway.  I considered adding some canned diced tomatoes (and their juice) to give the short ribs some sweetness and a little freshness and acidity, but decided that the whole point of braising the short ribs in stout was to really taste the stout.  I really wanted to pick up some Brooklyn Brewery Black Chocolate Stout, but as this was originally supposed to be an Irish dish for St. Paddy's, I decided to just stick with Guinness.

The sauce is a little bitter, but not overly so.  While it is a little bitter, you can still taste the heartiness of the beef and the sweetness of the vegetables in every bite of the sauce.  Overall, I feel like this recipe is missing something, but Alex really likes it.  I also thought that the short ribs weren't quite as tender as I would have hoped.  Perhaps our short ribs weren't as fatty as usual, but the silky smooth mouth feel was missing for me.  Instead the meat was a little "toothsome" to use a word from Top Chef.  When I want short ribs I don't want toothsome.  I want the meat to basically dissolve in my mouth.  The meat can't be mushy, but it should be silky and incredibly tender.  And you shouldn't need a knife at all.  These short ribs weren't as tender as I like, but Alex has this thing against ribs of any sort that fall off the bone so these were perfect for him.  We usually see eye-to-eye when it comes to food (although he tends to like things a little saltier and a little spicier than I do), but this time we will have to agree to disagree.

Recipe after the jump!

Turkey Breasts with Leeks, Mushrooms and Colcannon Cakes

Basically, as a preface to this recipe, I am going to admit that yesterday practically NOTHING went my way.  Because of St. Paddy's day, the parade made it absolutely impossible to get around the city.  And when I went to the grocery store that afternoon to buy the last few things I needed for dinner, the first grocery store didn't have all-purpose flour.  Who doesn't have all-purpose flour?  They had all sorts of fancy cake, buckwheat, self-rising, and other gourmet flours, but no plain old all-purpose flour.  So it was on to grocery store number two.  And then while at the grocery store I looked at my watch and realized it was already after 4pm.  The stout-braised short ribs I had intended to cook needed to braise for at least 4 hours, after having been browned and getting the vegetables all prepped and sauteed.  So I realized that unless I wanted to eat at 10pm, I was going to have to come up with an Irish plan B.  So I called Alex in desperation and he went online and found some Irish recipes on the BBC website.  This turkey recipe won by default because I had all of the ingredients I needed, except for the turkey breasts.  Only the grocery store didn't have turkey breasts.  Crap.  So it was off to the butcher, who luckily for me, I knew had turkey breasts because I had walked by with the dog and seen them in the display case that morning.  Score.  By the way, I love my butcher.  The guys there are all super nice.  Moving on.

By that time it was 6pm.  So Alex and I ran home, printed out the recipe, and realized the recipe wanted me to use basically every pan and/or pot in the entire house, plus stove-top burners that I just don't have.  It wanted me to have like 5 pans going at one time.  Double crap.  But since we had everything all ready to go, I started figuring out how to modify the recipe to cut down on pans.  As it was, I used 1 large soup pot, 1 huge non-stick pan, 2 10-inch saute pans, and a cast iron skillet.  That doesn't even begin to take into account the number of cutting boards, knives, prep bowls, etc.  As I was prepping and then cooking (and imagining what a Herculean feat cleaning would be) all I could think was "this turkey had better be freaking awesome!"

And it was delicious.  In the future I might forgo the Colcannon cakes (which were also very tasty), but the turkey itself is a definite keeper.  The skin was golden brown and crispy, and it had amazing flavor once you drizzled some of the shallot white wine sauce over top.  As an aside, the recipe used up an amazing amount of butter (even though I cut down on the amounts it asked for dramatically).  And everything tastes better with butter!  So if you're not butter-shy, or afraid of some serious dish-washing after dinner, give this a try!  And even if you are terminally afraid of dish-washing, go ahead and just make the turkey and the sauce.  Which will only use up one cast iron pan (or other oven-safe pan), and will be well worth your trouble.  I promise.  Served with a nice salad and some fresh bread (and you don't even have to bake your own Irish soda bread like I did), it would be a wonderful meal.

Recipe after the jump!

White Irish Soda Bread

Happy (belated) St. Paddy's Day!  For dinner on St. Patrick's Day Alex requested a loaf of soda bread.  Since he rarely requests things, and since I was already planning on making an Irish (or Irish-inspired, you be the judge) meal for St. Patrick's, I figured why not.  I've never baked a loaf of bread before, but soda bread sounded easy enough.  Then we started looking at recipes and Alex started complaining that he didn't want any raisins or any caraway seeds in his soda bread.  Alex doesn't like anything in his baked goods - particularly not raisins.  And he hates caraway seeds.  Sometimes he is difficult.  Then again, he's mostly very appreciative of everything I cook (even the weird things), so I will give him a bye on this one.  Plus he is a very good sport about helping me cook up some of the weirder and more complicated recipes that I come across.  In my defense, he does come up with some pretty weird recipes on his own too.  And then he is fabulous about helping me clean up afterward.  Ok, so he's pretty great (raisin and nut discrimination notwithstanding).

This soda bread recipe is about as easy and simple as they get.  All you need is baking soda, flour, buttermilk, and salt.  That's it.  Oh and I brushed the outside of the loaf with a little melted butter as it was baking to give it that nice golden brown shiny crust, but that is certainly not required.  Some Irish soda bread recipes contain brown sugar, and other random ingredients, but if I was going plain, I wanted to go really plain.  I served the soda bread warm and slathered with some fresh sweet butter sprinkled with a little sea salt.  Yum.

Recipe after the jump!