St. Patrick’s Day and the urge to cook

The approach of St. Patrick’s Day fills me with an urge to cook Irish dishes—perhaps that Guiness stew I saw on the TODAY show this morning or maybe colcannon, which has always interested me. I saw a recipe today for colcannon made with kale, with the comment that you can substitute cabbage. Heresy! Colcannon is a dish of mashed tatties and cabbage; kale is the interloper, and I for one hope it’s days are numbered. Unless it’s very young and tiny leaves, I am not a kale fan—and I’m not sure even then.

Colcannon makes me think of kalpudding—best described as meatloaf with carmelized cabbage. It’s a Scandinavian dish, not Irish, but the recipe stares at me every time I look at my file of recipes I want to try. I doubt anyone here would try it. Sometimes I yearn for the days when my kids were all at home every night and were pretty much a captive audience for my cooking experiments. I need a new audience.

Mystery author Keenen Powell wrote a blog about the Irish breakfast she fixes for her family every year—it began with blood sausage. I’d forego that. I dutifully tried blood pudding when I was in Scotland, and while it was not objectionable, it wasn’t that good either. I asked our B&B host what the point was, and he opined it probably had to do with using every part of the animal. No, thanks.

But the rest of the breakfast sounded wonderful, if heavy enough to be a hearty supper: rasher (thick slice of bacon or ham, fried), fried new potatoes (skin on because that’s where the flavor is), scrambled eggs, sautéed tomatoes, and what we in Texas call northern or sweet beans. I could maybe get some in our family compound to eat the rasher, eggs, and potatoes, but they’d protest at the tomatoes and claim beans were not breakfast food. I may put a little lox in scrambled eggs and call it Irish breakfast.

I’ve invited some old and valued friends to join me tomorrow night. I wanted to fix them an Irish supper, but this is the wife’s first venture out as she recuperates from extensive surgery, so the man said he thought just wine with snacks. I’ll do a platter with smoked salmon, cream cheese, vegetables, and some baguette slices. Foiled again in my longing to cook Irish, but the salmon is a tip of the hat to Irish food.

St. Patrick’s Day is the birthday of my baby-child, the youngest of my four—note I didn’t say which birthday. It’s not a decade-changer but she has moved into that range where women get a little touchy about their age. I’ll cook a birthday dinner for her Sunday. She asked what I wanted to cook, but was scornful when I suggested corned beef and cabbage. “You know I don’t like either of those things!” I told her the real question was what she wanted and gave her several choices, and she chose Norwegian hamburgers, a recipe from my oldest child’s Norwegian mother-in-law. These are delicious, and we all love them and thank Torhild for introducing us to them, but it’s an odd choice for a half-Hispanic child born on St. Patrick’s Day.

Green beer, anyone?