Luck o' the Irish Cereal Treats

It's time for St. Patrick's Day and we had our annual corned beef and cabbage dinner with the neighbors over the weekend. We saw this twist on the Rice Krispie treat all over the Internet and thought they'd be perfect for the kids. We were right. N, who is 5, surely loved them, but (shhh!), so did we.

Luck o' the Irish Cereal Treats

Ingredients:

cooking spray

5 tablespoons butter

1 10-oz. bag large marshmallows

5 cups Lucky Charms cereal

1 8-oz. bag white chocolate chips

3-4 drops green food coloring

Coat a 13x9-inch pan with cooking spray. In a large pot, melt butter over medium heat. Add marshmallows and stir with silicone spoon or spatula until melted. Stir in cereal until everything is mixed together. Press into prepared pan with wax paper and allow to cool. Melt chocolate chips over low heat in a small saucepan or in the microwave. Add food coloring and spread chocolate over the treats. Cut and serve.

Here are a few more St. Patrick's Day Ideas:

Guinness-Glazed Chicken Wings

Chef Lise's Irish Stew

Beef and Stout Pot Pie

Irish Onion Soup

Meyer Lemon Bars

Irish Onion Soup for St. Patrick's Day

Of course you've heard of French Onion Soup. However, this is St. Patrick's Day weekend, and we needed something Irish. In the end, we found inspiration from an Italian - Michael Chiarello - with his Guinness and Onion Soup with Irish Cheddar Crouton. Confused yet?

To bring as an appetizer to C's family's annual St. Patrick's Day Irish Dinner of corned beef and cabbage, we toyed with the Food Network recipe and ended up with an Irish Onion Soup that was a big hit. What sets it apart from the French style soup is the pleasantly bitter, slightly sour taste imparted to the broth by the dark stout. Not to mention the sharp cheddar cheese melting over the bread on top. 

M's corned beef was amazingly tender and everyone ate their fill. Although we were nearly stuffed from all that good food, we managed to fit in one of L's Irish-Italian cookies (are we sensing a theme?) as well as one of M's clever shamrock treats made from pretzels, Rolos and M&Ms. So cute!!!

Happy St. Patrick's Day, everyone!

Irish Onion Soup

(slightly adapted from here)

Ingredients:

1 tablespoon olive oil

3 tablespoons Kerrygold Irish Butter (divided)

5 cloves minced garlic

8 cups (about 5 medium-sized) thinly sliced white onions

kosher salt

2 teaspoons granulated sugar

1 tablespoon fresh thyme

1/4 cup champagne vinegar

1 12-ounce bottle Guinness stout

1 package (17.6-ounces) College Inn Bold Beef Stock

1 package (32 ounces) College Inn Fat Free and Lower Sodium Beef Broth

12 slices slightly stale baguette

12 pieces Kerrygold Reserve Cheddar

Heat oil and 1 tablespoon of butter in a soup pot over high heat. Add garlic and onions and stir to coat. Season with salt and sugar and cook over high heat for 5-7 minutes, stirring often. Add 1 tablespoon of butter and reduce heat to medium. Cook another 15 minutes, stirring often, until onions are golden brown. Stir in thyme and vinegar and allow to cook 3-4 minutes, stirring often. Add beer and return heat to high. Bring to a boil and cook until amount of beer is reduced by half. Then add the stock and the broth. Bring to a simmer and cook another 15 minutes. Butter the baguette slices with the remaining tablespoon of butter and broil until light brown. Top each slice with a piece of cheddar and return to the broiler; broil until cheddar melts. Float a cheddary baguette slice in each bowl of soup. 

Some Menu Ideas for St. Patrick's Day

St. Patrick's Day is a week away, and we are looking over past recipes we've done to inspire ideas for our upcoming annual Irish Dinner with neighbors D and J and their kids. Here they are, for your inspiration as well.

Chef Lise's Irish Stew, recipe here, is a long-time favorite, not just for St. Patrick's Day, but all of stew season.

It's easy to get into the spirit with a little bit of green food coloring! 

Add it to frosting for "Irish" cupcakes. No corned beef necessary.

Add it to your favorite light beer, then layer that with Guinness to make a "Black & Green," (instead of a Black & Tan). 

Prefer to re-purpose an old standby for the holiday? Color up some powdered sugar to decorate an everyday dessert with shamrocks, as we did with our lemon bars.

How about cooking with Guinness? Try our Guinness Glazed Chicken Wings, the perfect accompaniment to your Irish-style beverage.

Overdid the celebrating? Another delicious soup is our Sweet Potato and Kale. This one has all the right colors for St. Patrick's Day, but is also really really healthy, so you can feel better about having that extra brew or two. Bonus? St. Patrick's Day is a Monday, so if you are doing Meatless Monday, you're all set with this one!

Tune in next week to see what we come up for St. Patty's 2014!

Meyer Lemon Bars (Secret Recipe Club)

It's Secret Recipe Club reveal day once again and we were assigned Life's Simple Pleasures, a beautiful blog that is completely overflowing with recipes for bars, breads, cakes, cookies, pies, tarts, and snacks, as well as a few savory dishes. We scrolled our way down the recipe list trying hard to decide what to make. It wasn't easy! Should we try to make challah bread? How about a fallen souffle chocolate torte - doesn't that sound amazing?!?!? Or candied bacon chocolate chip cookies? Um, yum!!! All of these are most assuredly on our to-do list. 

What forced our final decision for this month, though, was that we have made two batches of Meyer lemon curd in the last couple of weeks and we have been looking for something way with which to use it when we spotted LSP's lemon bars. They looked so lovely and reminded us so much of sunshine and springtime that we just had to go with them. 

We made them to take to our neighbors' St. Patrick's Day dinner so we gave them a little Irish twist by tinting some powdered sugar green with green food coloring and making shamrock decorations on them. Chris finnagled a cookie cutter/aluminum foil thingie to make that work. He's a good problem solver!

Although we didn't use the lemon topping part of the recipe (since we used our lemon curd instead), the crust was to die for. Flaky, tender and buttery indeed. They were sunny bites of citrus heaven. Now if spring would just get here already, we'd be all set!

Meyer Lemon Bars

recipe from Life's Simple Pleasures

Ingredients:

2 cups unsalted butter, softened

4 cups all purpose flour

1 cup powdered sugar

1/2 teaspoon salt

2 teaspoons grated lemon zest

1/2 cup Meyer lemon curd

additional powdered sugar for garnish
green food coloring (if desired)

In a medium bowl, cream together the butter and powdered sugar. Add salt, lemon zest and flour; mix only until combined and crumbly. Spread dough evenly in a 12x18-inch sheet pan. Using a piece of wax paper, press down down as flat as possible. Refrigerate dough for 30 minutes. Heat oven to 350 and bake crust for 20 minutes or until golden brown. Set aside to cool. Spread lemon curd evenly over crust and return to oven. Bake additional 15 minutes. Dust with powdered sugar and refrigerate 1 hour to set. Cut and serve.

Guinness Glazed Chicken Wings for St. Patrick's Day

We are heading out to our neighbors' house for our annual St. Patty's Day corned beef and cabbage dinner. Our part of dinner consists of the appetizer and the dessert, so we have today's post as well as tomorrow's post all set and ready to go. Read on!

Today, we bring you the appetizer: Guinness Glazed Chicken Wings. These little lovelies get their flavor from a mix of root vegetables and a can of Guinness, Ireland's popular dark stout. Reducing this gravy-of-sorts turns it into a nice glaze to brush on the wings right before broiling and serving. 

The rest of the meal was equally delish. Corned beef with cabbage, carrots, turnips and potatoes, with roasted vegetables, and mashers. Our ancestors would be proud!  (Check out the photos below!) 

And, of course, tune in tomorrow to find out what we had for dessert.

Guinness Glazed Chicken Wings

adapted from this recipe at Little Shamrocks

Ingredients:

2 tablespoons olive oil

1/2 medium onion, diced

3 cloves garlic, minced

kosher salt

freshly ground black pepper

2 pounds chicken wings, butchered into blades and drums

1-inch piece of fresh ginger, peeled and quartered

1 carrot, peeled and quartered

1 parsnip, peeled and quartered

1 teaspoon dried thyme leaves

1 can Guinness Stout

In a large skillet, heat oil over medium heat. Add onion and garlic and sweat for 2-3 minutes. Remove onion and garlic with a slotted spoon. Season wings with salt and pepper. Add chicken wings to the pan and cook, about 5 minutes each side, until nicely browned. Return onion and garlic to the pan and add ginger, carrot, parsnip and thyme. Pour Guinness into the pan and bring to a boil over high heat. Cover and reduce heat to low; simmer for 30 minutes, until chicken is cooked through. Remove chicken wings from the pan and place on a baking sheet. Strain the sauce through a fine-mesh sieve; discard vegetables. Pour sauce into a small saucepan and boil over high heat until reduced by half. When ready to serve, heat broiler on low. Brush wings with glaze and broil for 5-6 minutes; turn, baste and broil other side 4-5 minutes. Eat with a freshly poured Guinness to wash them down - Slainte!

Chef Lise's Irish Stew, or, Happy St. Patrick's Day!

We were just talking about green things, and here it is, St. Patrick's Day 2011. Our chef/friend Lise was on Good Morning Connecticut last weekend demonstrating how to make her Irish Stew, and since it looked so easy and sounded so delicious, we decided to make it for our annual Irish-themed dinner with our neighbors D and J. It's a nice tradition, actually - they make corned beef and cabbage, we make something else (neither corned beef nor cabbage are "Amy-approved"), and we have ourselves a feast to honor the patron saint of the Emerald Isle. As we tend to do, we made a few changes to Lise's recipe (with her blessing!), but followed the directions she provided in the t.v. segment which you can watch here. And guess what? As expected, the stew was both very easy and very delicious.

Boiled vegetables

D and J's corned beef and cabbage dinner

Instead of "black-n-tans," we have "black-n-greens":

Harp with green food coloring topped with Guinness

 

Ingredients:

note: per Chef's suggestion, we used Smithwick's Ale instead of the more bitter-tasting Guinness

1 tablespoon olive oil

2 pounds lamb shoulder chops, trimmed from the bone and cut into bite sized pieces

salt and pepper to taste

1 medium onion

2 carrots, peeled and cut into large chunks

2 parsnips, peeled and cut into large chunks

1 celery root, peeled and cut into large chunks

4 cups beef broth

1 bottle Irish ale (see note)

6-8 small potatoes, quartered (we used red, purple and yellow)

1 cup coarsely chopped leeks

1 bundle fresh thyme

freshly cut celery microgreens  or parsley for garnish

(celery microgreens pictured right, more on that in a post coming soon)

Plug in a 6-quart crockpot and turn it to high. Place trimmed lamb bones in crockpot (if you have any) to flavor the stew. In a cast iron pan, heat oil over medium heat. Season lamb pieces and cook in two batches, stirring gently, until evenly browned. Remove from pan to crockpot. Add all remaining ingredients except garnish to crockpot. Cover and cook on high for 3 to 3 1/2 hours. Remove bones and thyme bundle from crockpot and serve stew in large bowls with a pretty garnish, some crusty bread and a bottle of Irish ale to with. Erin go bragh! 

Chef Lise Jaeger Shares Irish Stew on Good Morning Connecticut

Chef Lise Jaeger shares Irish Stew: wtnh.com

Our good friend Chef Lise Jaeger was on Good Morning Connecticut on WTNH Saturday morning. Amy knows, because she had the honor of going along to assist. Bright and early Saturday morning, the two of them set off to the studio with coolers and bags full of ingredients and cookware (plus some finished stew for show, it being television and all). First they got Lise ready in the green room (which, to Amy's surprise, was actually green -  sort of a nice, calming, minty green). Then they proceeded into the studio to set up. Everyone in the crew was very nice and allowed Amy to watch the segment from a few feet away in the studio and even to take a few photos! Lise did  a great job and seemed like a natural on camera. The stew was exceptionally tasty and very easy to make, especially after Lise walks you through it in the video. And even though Lise didn't get a chance to mention them, the scones were amazing. Check out the video above and the recipes here.

P.S. Lise shared her recipe for Butternut Peanut Bisque with us in January, so check that recipe out while you're at it.