St. Paddy's day Bento
In celebration of St. Patrick's day I got a nice reminder from Recipezaar chock full of good ideas. I picked my favorites and put together this week's bento. Everyone seemed to really enjoy the bento, "I totally cleaned my plate. err... box" so my eye for recipes must have been pretty good.
We begin with our main course: Guinness corned beef with cabbage. What kind of St. Patrick's day would it be if you didn't have corned beef and cabbage. It just can't be done any other way. Someone posted up a Guinness mustard sauce that I could resist trying, it sounded a little weird but it worked really well with the corned beef. The sauce consisted of Guinness paired with 3 types of mustard and some brown sugar. The brown sugar really cut the sauce from being too "beery".
Next we have a Irish Dublin Prawn Cocktail. I'm not sure what is so irish about this dish, but it was a good excuse to take advantage of the special they had running at the grocery store so I took it. The shrimp is prepared with a bit of seasoning and vinegar in the boiling mix. The key feature here is the sauce. I've never encountered a cream based cocktail sauce, it was kind of mellow and dumbed down the catsup which, to me, made the horseradish come out really bold. I happen to like that so it's a winner in my book.
We finish things off with a starchy side dish of a Carrot and Parsnip Mash. I opted out of making Champ because I needed something a little healthier. This was a simple little dish, I only modified the butter content as the whole recipe had 1/2 a stick of butter (I went with 2 tbsp). It was a little sweet and gave this box a healthy contingent of vegetable servings.Happy St. Paddy's day!
Box Contents:
- Corned beef and cabbage served with Guinness mustard
- Shrimp with Irish Dublin coctail sauce
- Carrot and Parsnip Mash
Comments
Guess that is what makes it "Irish"!
Thanks for visiting!
This looks fab--thanks for adding me to your blogroll, btw!
Anyhow here's what I put in this time around and it was good!
1 tsp coriander seed
1 tsp of yellow mustard seeds
1/2 tsp of cinnamon
1/4 tsp ground cloves
1/2 tsp all spice
1/2 tsp black pepper
1 tsp of kosher salt
1 bay leaf
5 cloves of garlic smashed (not chopped)
1 onion
2 bottle of Guiness draught (depend on how big your crockpot is)
put it in the slow cooker and waited a very impatient 3.5 hours and worked on the rest of my bento.
Thanks for dropping by!
They don't tend to eat much beef over there - lots of lamb (and I don't like lamb chops) and pork (as in bacon, boiling bacon and boiling ribs). Corned beef evolved when the Irish immigrants could not find the 'boiling bacon' in the US.
Thanks for the food history, and of course thanks for coming by.