St. Patrick's Feast

Slow-cooked, beer-braised corned beef and vegetables.

Nothing says “Happy St. Paddy’s Day” like corned beef and cabbage. Except for maybe green beer. I did a test-run corned beef in the slow cooker last week and it was delicious — tender and salty with flavorful braised veggies. Trevor was so excited about it, we bought two more corned beef roasts when they went on sale. This St. Patrick’s Day, this is what we’ll be eating for dinner.

I love my slow cooker!

And the best part is the slow cooker does all the work, which is especially nice since I just got a job as an editor for a Web site. But working outside the home doesn’t mean we’ll be doing lots of fast food. We’re already getting good at making quick meals such as stir-frys. And with some night-before prep, the Crock Pot has been cooking up some really great roasts, chili and soups.

Persephone Farm potatoes and
onions with corned beef.

Actually the best part may be having leftovers for corned beef hash. We had a little trouble with the recipe from The Breakfast Book, but on the second try the next day the hash was crispy and not burned. It may have had something to do with the fact that we halved the recipe. I’m sure we’ll get around to perfecting the hash this weekend with our leftovers.

Links:

Slow Cooker Corned Beef

http://community.cookinglight.com/showthread.php?t=65440

Old World Ways

Deep inside me lives a grandmother from the Old Country. She comes out when I’m cooking. She doesn’t let me waste anything — a chicken carcass, gizzards, tops of leeks, wilted celery and carrot peels become rich stock. She reminds me when people had less, nothing could afford to be thrown out. So I mix in a tablespoon of rendered chicken fat from the stock with mashed potatoes and discover it produces the most flavorful potatoes ever! She also insists homemade is much better than store bought.

This week my inner grandmother is from Korea. She emerged when we received a surprise bounty from Persephone Farm: a burlap sack of potatoes along with more sacks of red onions, yellow onions and garlic — and several heads of cabbage, some leeks, a loaf of sweet bread, farm-fresh eggs and winter braising greens. I saw the lovely wrinkled leaves of the Napa cabbage and knew kimchi was in my immediate future.

I can vividly picture what this inner grandmother is like. Mrs. Kim carries a navy blue umbrella with lilac flowers printed on it. She’s tiny, but fierce. And refuses to eat the commercially prepared kimchi her sons’ wives try to serve her. She only eats her own kimchi that comes from a giant crock that once belonged to her grandmother. She once had the recipe on transparent, faded paper that since has disintegrated, but by now she knows the recipe by heart.

So at the urging of Mrs. Kim, I’m making kimchi — a salty, spicy, fermented condiment made from cabbage — for the first time. (With the rest of the cabbage, another inner grandmother from Italy will take over to make a cabbage, leek and sausage pasta dish — she looks a lot like Lidia Bastianich.)

I’m following the recipe from Canning for a New Generation. I hunted down Korean chile powder and daikon at Fubonn, a giant Asian grocery store nearby. After soaking the cabbage and daikon in brine overnight, I followed the directions and mixed up the anchovies, garlic, ginger and chile powder. Then I tossed it in with the drained cabbage. I now have two jars of kimchi-in-the-making sitting on my counter. After a week, it’ll be ready to eat. I’m already planning on making pork-and-kimchi dumpling, also from Canning for a New Generation. I think my inner Korean grandmother will approve.

Spring Forward

This Saturday was the first day of the 2010 Portland Farmers’ Market in the South Park Blocks. And the weather couldn’t have been more gorgeous. Trevor is back at the Persephone Farm stand and that means more fresh veggies for us. It is still a little early in the season, so all the Persephone greens were snapped up pretty quickly. But there were plenty of leeks and a few heads of cabbage, so I threw them in my market bag with a Lidia Bastianich recipe in mind: Whole Wheat Pasta with Sausage, Leeks and Fontina.

It’s a wonderfully flavorful vegetable-packed pasta dish. If you love pasta, but get tired of tomato sauce, give this a try. Leeks and shredded cabbage cook down to an almost silky texture. The sausage adds some heat and the whole-wheat pasta is really filling.

This recipe was published in Lidia’s Italian-American Kitchen and Cooking Light magazine. I’ve included the link to the Cooking Light version since it’s available. The recipe in her book calls for more olive oil and three links of sausage instead of one, and more cheese. I used the version in her cookbook and chose leaner turkey sausage instead of pork. Either way, the dish is delicious.

Links:

Whole Wheat Pasta with Sausage, Leeks and Fontina

http://find.myrecipes.com/recipes/recipefinder.dyn?action=displayRecipe&recipe_id=833349