The Feast of Saint Patrick

This post was supposed to go up on St. Patrick's Day, but we were too destroyed to finish it. No, not by copious amounts of Guinness, but by food coma.

St. Patrick's Day. The day when everybody is Irish. Dress in green day. Annoyingly pinch those who aren't wearing green day. Drink some green beer day. Or as we professional drinkers like to call it: Amateur night.

While my curmudgeonly side likes to deride the, well, amateurs who come out to drink tonight, I do like St. Paddy's. Alannah (as if you couldn't tell by the name) is partially of Irish stock. And the other side is Scottish, who according to my good Irish friend are merely Irish who couldn't swim. Add to that our ability to out-drink people twice our size, and you can see why despite all the douchebaggery, we'd like this holiday.

So imagine my delight coming home from work this commercialized-by-beer-distributors holiday to find Alannah taking on an entire hurling team's worth of Irish. Foods. She was even kind enough to take pictures of what she was doing, knowing I like to show off her stuff on the web.

I came up to the kitchen and saw her furiously whipping something up on the stove. It smelled cheesy. It smelled boozy. It was... Welsh?

Surprise number one: Welsh rarebit. Following the recipe perfected by Fergus Henderson. You know, that famous chef in London. Ok, so maybe none of this was Irish, but it's the same archipelago, right? Besides, ever since eating at St. John on our latest trip to London, I'd been jonesing for the very version of beer-and-Worcestershire-spiked cheese-on-toast perfected by Henderson. Paired with a glass of port, I was having myself a very happy evening.

She then led me up to the kitchen to help her with the next dish: Colcannon. Alannah first made this for me last St. Patrick's Day, when I learned a) that it's delicious and b) that I'd had it before as part of an airline meal under its English name, "Bubble & Squeak."

"Colcannon" sounds much more manly, like an Irish porn star with a thick mustache. The English name sounds like there's a mouse squished in it. Nomenclature aside, it's a hash of potatoes and cabbage, fried like a patty. Simple, but delicious. Of course, Alannah can't leave well enough alone, so she used red cabbage and savoy cabbage. She had me fry up bits of smoky bacon to add to the melange before it was fried, just to make sure it was customized enough to qualify for an episode of Pimp My Ride.

Speaking of customization, she put me to work on the next treat: Soda bread. Irish soda bread is a quickbread. In lieu of making a yeasty dough and proving it over the course of hours, you use baking soda as the leavening agent and bake it straight away. It's like an English scone or American biscuit, only it's often made in a huge round as opposed to little individual morsels. Again, Alannah couldn't leave it alone. Borrowing from my Iranian side, she asked me to put in a fistful of barberries, aka zereshk. Along with a fistful of caraway seeds and a fat pinch of sugar, this customization makes for the most flavorful soda bread, lovingly bastardized with Persian flair. I fear our kids will look like this soda bread.

While I was on boulanger duty, Alannah was doing a bit of kneading of her own, working on her magical pie crust. For she had spent much of the day preparing the filling for what would become a Guinness-brisket-trotter pie.

For the uninitiated, a trotter is a pig's foot. It's smelly. Kinda hairy. And doesn't particularly have much meat. In fact, in the wrong hands, it's downright disgusting. (Have you seen the film Precious? There's some pig foot up in that joint.) But, again, Alannah was plying me with food perfected by Fergus Henderson. And thus, she'd spent the afternoon on "trotter gear." She scrubbed clean the pig's foot, chopped up the aromatics, then drowned it all in port. Delicious tawny port.

How 'bout a pictorial spread?

Tawny port. As Alannah told me she did it: Some for the pig.
Some for the cook. Repeat.

The trotter and its aromatics. Alannah says,
"Trust me, you need all the aromatics you can get."

Starting the stew side of things.

The trotter concoction had to simmer for hours, letting loose all the collagen from the skin and connective tissue, and infusing it all with a rich, fatty, gelatinous property. In the end, there's not really any meat to use, but liquid richness.

In the meantime, she had also started a cast iron pot of a standard beef stew, using a nice fatty brisket. Brisket isn't easy to come by in France. We learned this when trying to make corned beef last year. Alannah had to overcome her language barrier to explain to the butcher that we wanted cow belly. Not pork belly. Not veal belly. Full grown moooooo. At least, that's how I imagine she explained it. This year, it was much easier, because the butcher had apparently remembered last year's exchange.

Anyway, she went with brisket because she knew I love corned beef brisket, but simply didn't have three days to brine it and somehow manage to surprise me. And because it tastes good. No other meat has the texture of beef brisket. Stringy, striated, chewy, and unique to the cut.

When making a stew, it's good to brown the meat and vegetables before adding any liquid. In northern France, as with in the Isles, it's assumed that you'll do the browning with butter. Lots of it.

To quote Hugh Jackman in that horrible romantic comedy
with Meg Ryan, "Rich. Creamery. BUTTER."

We buy our butter and eggs in bulk from a dairy family at the local marché. First off because we go through a lot of it. When you bake as much as Alannah does, you need to buy in near industrial quantities. When you eat like I do, you want to be as far from industrial as possible, as much to stave off the early death from this sort of consumption, as well as because artisanal ingredients taste better. That and even the fanciest of packaged butters – even the one that every food blogger in France pimps and goes on about like a bleating goat – contains stabilizers and flavor-enhancing compounds you're not supposed to know about. So we buy huge hunks of butter by the kilo.

But I digress. The butter is important because it's also what makes the magical pie crust so damn magical. You know that scene in American Pie? You know which one. Yeah, well, Alannah's pie crust will make you want to recreate it.

So, back to the filling, eventually you do need to add liquid. In this case, the liquid is Guinness. Again, some for the stew, some for the cook. Note that his beer is, obviously, black. (Ok, it's a very deep brown, but even in Ireland, it goes by "the black stuff.") Green beer should never be consumed. Hell, beer in a green bottle is even a no-no by beer snob standards.

Anyway, the stew must also simmer for several hours to break down nicely. The trotter gear must then be drained so that the gelatinous substance that's left can be added to the stew to create the world's richest, booziest pie filling.

To be honest, it doesn't look very good. But it's a pie filling, for fuck's sake. It's going to be hidden by a crust of golden, buttery, flaky, delicious dough.

Guinness-brisket-trotter pie.
The richness will nearly kill you.

Once covered with a crust, a brief 20 minutes in the oven is all you need. It seems short after hours and hours of stewing, and the smell emanating from the kitchen is intoxicating and satisfying in and of itself. If you're feeling impatient, you can wait it out by having a Guinness.

Of course, such a dish must be enjoyed with yet another pint of the black stuff. (Or a Smithwick's if you can find it. No such luck this year in Paris.) The point isn't to get hammered, but to enjoy the richness and depth of meats cooked low-and-slow with the earthy, mild bitterness of a good beer. A good brew adds more dimension to a meal like this, and it's a reason the beer is in the stew to begin with.

But wait! There's more!

A proper holiday meal just isn't complete until dessert is served. Though I couldn't eat another bite, I always have room for Alannah's chocolate-stout cupcakes. Which are made with, you guessed it, Guinness.

Here's the thing: I hate cupcakes. I'm not sure it's because the whole cupcake trend was kicked off by the equally deplorable Sex & the City, or because something about the confection doesn't jibe with me. Maybe because they were (and in 4-years-behind-California-in-most-food-trends Paris, still are) trendy above all else, and utterly destroyed by all the people cashing in on the trend and producing fancified little chocolate or red velvet turds covered in buttercream. Read the only trashing review of the beloved Kara's Cupcakes in San Francisco, by yours truly. Then spread the gospel.

But Alannah's little cuppies are tha bomb. They're the first to sell out at every Paris charity sale she brings them to, and they're the first and only ones I've ever actually begged for. In fact, she refused to ever bake them for me until she knew I was the right guy.

They're that good. And even better with a little tawny port.

Happy amateur night to all.

Sweet Little Bunny

Eating rabbit can be problematic for people. To many, it's an adorable woodland creature deified in Disney movies and Looney Toons cartoons, and very often kept as a (copiously poop producing) pet. To others, it's a rodent, and as such probably carries disease and shouldn't be touched, let alone eaten.

My problem with rabbit... is that it's insanely hard to bone. Or is that de-bone? (And you would've thought boning is the least difficult thing for us...) Granted, it was my first time, so it was messy, bloody, and a bit frustrating. But I eventually got my half-rabbit into nice, boneless chunks, leaving the legs intact, because really, without a visual identifier to know that your dinner is rabbit, you might think it was veal or turkey.

Which brings us to the choice of cooking style. As our first bunny, figuring out what the hell to do with it was half the battle. Roasting or braising it seemed so missionary... so vanilla. With the weather having turned from the "Paris in the Springtime" of musical fame to nearly bone-chilling wind and rain, a blanquette seemed in order. No, that's not a pun. A blanquette is a stew in a creamy white sauce, generally made with veal, and excellent for warming up when something nasty blows in from the North Atlantic.

Not actually being big on blanquette - for something that looks so rich, it's often very bland - we opted for a little sweetness, in the form of vanilla. (Just when we were trying to avoid "vanilla...") It may sound odd, but after having a Tahitian-inspired shark steak in vanilla sauce recently, it seemed like a brilliant idea.

And boy, was it. After stewing with onions and sand carrots on top of the stove and then in the oven in cast iron, the rabbit meat and legs were tender and moist... The vanilla blanquette sauce (made with butter, milk, and egg yolk) was poured in the pot and mixed in about 10 minutes before serving. Regretfully, the sauce curdled a tiny bit during the few minutes of broiling (to brown the legs), but it didn't affect the finger-lickin'-goodness of the taste.


Going with the sweet theme, we had cardoon 'n prune salad on the side. Sliced cardoon blanched in saltwater and lemon juice was mixed with an orange vinaigrette, basil, and slivers of prune. Served chilled and topped with a bit of orange zest. The whole looks-like-celery-but-tastes-like-artichoke trick of the cardoon went hand-in-lucky-severed-paw with the mindfuck of vanilla flavored rabbit.

It was like a Miracle Fruit party, without the Miracle Fruit.

We Did It All for the Gnocchi

There's nothing quite as warming on a winter night as when Alannah works a big, hard piece of meat until it gives out and goes totally soft, left to swim in its juices until sopped up...

We're talking of course, about tough stewing beef - combined with aromatics and wine and cooked for hours and hours in a cast-iron pot. The anticipation for such a dish can be maddening... What's a couple to do while they're waiting seemingly forever for their daube de boeuf to be ready?

Make gnocchi, of course.

As expected for anyone's first time, it was pretty messy... but surprisingly not very painful. A little mashing, a lot of kneading, and about a thousand attempts to roll the "little pillows" off the back of a fork to get it just so.

At the end, a beautiful, chocolate brown daube over tender, handmade gnocchi.

Behind the Scenes
Making a beef daube is easy. Take hunks of the cheapest stewing meat you can find, and sautée it in a Dutch oven or cast iron pot with diced aromatics like onion, carrots and celery. Once they've got a good sheen to them and the meat is browned on the outside, dump in a bottle of dry red wine. You can go cheap here, too, but as a rule, don't go any cheaper than what you'd take to one of your Craigslist casual encounters dates. (i.e. nothing less than $4 or €3 a bottle) The secret: Throw in a square or two of dark chocolate. But no more, unless you want your meat to taste like Chocolate Salty Balls. Then slide the pot into a medium-high oven and let it stew for hours - don't pull out!

Gnocchi - like an Italian woman -is a bit more involved and needs a lot of attention. Boil and mash some potatoes. Prepare a large mixing bowl with some flour and an egg. Add your mashed potatoes and work into a dough. Keep working it until its consistent and has a pasta dough-like consistency. If necessary, sprinkle in more flour as you go along. Once you think you're done (you're probably not!), take balls of the dough and roll them out into long rods, no more than 3/4" or 2cm in diameter. With a sharp knife, slice off little cylinders - about the size of gnocchi. If you ask a guy, they should be about 6" in length. A girl will tell you more accurately that it's less than an inch. Roll the little cylinders along the tines of the back of a fork to get the little ridges that gnocchi - for some reason - is supposed to have. (Told you it's complicated!) Then lay on a dish or tray with lots of flour sprinkled around so they don't stick together, until it's time to give them a very quick boil, just before serving.