St. Patrick's Day Dinner

Okay, I am here to say that I have never had a traditional St. Patrick's Day dinner before. The tradition in our house has always been to have our green pancakes and scrambled eggs (which we will still be doing this year thank you very much). I have never really been much of a meat person and I will admit that cooked cabbage kind of scares me: but trying to stay in the spirit of my goal to try new recipes, and with St. Patrick's day just around the corner, I wanted to try a traditional St. Patty's meal.

The Menu:

Corned Beef and Cabbage

Irish Soda Bread

The corned beef was good as far as meat goes. I did have to eat each bite mixed in with my veggies instead of just eating it by itself, but it was decent. I would prefer to just have stew though. It doesn't really have a gravy or anything that it's in. You just cook it all day in a kind of brine so it's pretty much just eating stringy meat with boiled vegetables: and it's way to salty for me. I feel like a bloated fish today and like I have a 5 pound brick in my gut (that could just be the meat though, I'm not used to eating like that).

Lastly, the cabbage. It did leave kind of a weird smell in my house, kind of like you just entered a cheap apartment complex (come on, you know what I'm talking about) but once it was cooked it really didn't have much of a flavor. It was mixed with my other veggies, so I didn't mind it. 

Aaron's comment? "It's okay, but if this is how the Irish eat all of the time then that is just pretty bland and sad."

The bread was definitely a step up from the Corned Beef. I made it exactly how the recipe was because I wanted to taste it in it's traditional form: still, just okay. I would probably make this again, but with quite a few changes. First and foremost, I would leave out the caraway seeds. DID NOT LIKE. I would use whole-wheat flour (of course ;o), honey instead of sugar, and then instead of the caraway seeds I might add flax seed or for a more dessert type bread use cinnamon chips. That would be good.

Needless to say I will not be sharing my recipes at this time. I just didn't like either of these well enough to make them again or share. However, the bread definitely has potential, and I may play around with it a little bit. If I hit on something great, then I will share.

That was my culinary experimentation last night.