"st. patricks day" news and stories

St. Patrick's Day cooking is easy if you're a food-coloring addict. Green milk, green oatmeal, green butter, green cottage cheese -- these and everything else can be greened up with a few flicks of that little plastic jar. But what if you don't like using artificial stuff from little plastic jars? Then you need to turn to nature. Luckily, nature seems to favor the Irish: There are tons of healthy green-ifiers out there.

To make green mashed potatoes (that taste exactly the same as regular potatoes): Stir in half a cup of green peas that you've puréed with a tablespoon of milk. If you use frozen peas, they should be defrosted but don't need to be cooked.

Green bread crumbs for chicken: In a food processor, pulse 4 slices of toast with 1/2 cup chopped parsley until you've got, yes, green crumbs. Toss this mixture together with 4 ounces grated fresh Parmesan and 1 crushed garlic clove.

• Hmm... Is the secret to curing picky eating having family dinners 5 or more times a week?
• What's more appropriate for a St. Patty's Day dinner than a recipe from an Irish grandmother, born in Ireland on St. Patrick's Day? The meal: Swiss Chard and Potato Soup, Lamb Pot Pie and Irish Cream Cheesecake.
• Forte Bistro at Richmond and York in Toronto: Inconsistent cooking for the Bay Street types and ballet and opera lovers.
• Beppi Crosariol shares the rising world of Irish whisky love and how it might be connected to hard times and The Wire, as well as a talk with Jeff Arnett, master distiller of Jack Daniel's.
  
• Chef David Lee talks about the joys of teaching kids the world of food.
• Parsimony: How to make the most of your chicken, shrimp, eggs, stale bread, cakes and brownies, rice, cheese, vegetables and wine, as shared by Canadian chefs.

What better way to celebrate St. Patrick's Day than with a selection of artisanal Irish cheeses? My knowledge on Irish cheese was limited to cheddar until a trip last fall to Slow Food's cheese festival where I met Jeffa Gill, one of the early pioneers of Irish farmhouse cheese production. At the festival, she tasted out remarkable cheeses with an aroma of the Irish shore.

Durrus is a creamy milky Irish Tomme de Savoie produced with raw Freisian cow's milk. This soft-ripened washed-rind cheese was first made by Jeffa Gill in 1979. You can find Durrus at the Bedford Cheese Shop. Once you've got Durrus, pick out a succulent creamy Irish blue cheese - Cashel Blue or Crozier. Crozier is handmade by Jane and Louis Grubb from the milk of sheep raised locally in Tipperary, Ireland where they graze on rich limestone pastures. Check it out at Murray's Cheese.

After selecting your St. Patrick's Day curds, think about pairings. Murray's Cheese makes this process simple. On their website, you'll find a delicious array of Irish cheese and beer pairings put together by fellow cheese expert Chris Munsey.

Calling all translators. I ran across this photo on Tastespotting and had to share since it looks quite interesting, but because the original site il cavoletto di bruxelles is written in Italian I have no idea what it really says. I've gathered it is a fresh pea and mint soup of sorts, and a rough translation on Babel Fish has helped piece a little more together, but as for the rest I am completely stymied. Anyone care to share?

If nothing else, it would be perfect for St. Patrick's Day meal planning. Too bad we have to wait another eleven months for that!

Source

About five years ago my good friend Edward J. O'Halloran told me about Tayto, an Irish brand of crisps, or potato chips, as we call them here in the States. This was long before I attained my current status as an international junk-food maven. Since then I've noshed on treats ranging from downright fishy to bland beyond belief. Sadly I've never tried Tayto, or any other type of Irish crisps, for that matter. All of which brings me to the subject of this St. Patrick's Day dispatch: a survey of Tayto and some other crisps that I purchased in the Irish enclave of Woodside, Queens, yesterday. As a bona fide beer geek, I'm a wee bit ashamed to admit that this tasting was done with bottles of Guinness that did not have the famous widget; be advised your results may vary. Slàinte!!

Since they're so in line with my affinity for fishy flavored junk food, let's start with Tayto Prawn Cocktail Flavour Crisps. While there's nothing wrong with this crisp as far as tastiness and crunchiness, I detected not even the faintest hint of prawn. I suspect that in Ireland "Prawn Cocktail Flavour" has as much to do with seafood as "cheese food product" has to do with dairy farms on this side of the pond. This suspicion is borne out by the fact that on the ingredients, prawn cocktail flavor is composed of a dozen subingredients, including MSG and saccharin. It's a craveable crisp that goes well with the Guinness, but I can't help feeling that the folks at Tayto Castle let me down by not giving me my fix of fish flavor.

I never munch on pickled onions, save for when I'm drinking a Gibson, but I hear they're a renowned delicacy in the United Kingdom, so next up is Tayto Pickled Onion Flavour Crisps. These little guys are really quite good and they certainly taste like pickled onion. In fact, they're so addictive I'm struggling not to finish the whole bag! Now if only I had a Gibson to sip with them instead of this bloody Guinness. Or are cocktails and potato chips déclassé? The one down side of these crisps is that I now have quite the case of onion breath. That aside, Mr. Tayto and company have done right by the global snacking community.

I've just passed the halfway mark on my first bottle of Guinness and I'm eager to try yet another snack oddity from the folks at Tayto, Roast Chicken Flavor Crisps. Yeah, you heard right. Seems that Koreans aren't the only ones out there trying to make junk food taste like chicken. Tayto's stab at poultry-flavored potato chips doesn't taste terribly much like chicken either. This is the worst of the Tayto products I've tasted so far. Perhaps it's because what are supposed to be chicken-flavored crisps are described as suitable for vegetarians on the package. I'll stick to chicken cracklings.