When Irish Eyes Are Crying
I absolutely love St. Patrick's Day! My maternal great-great grandparents were from Cork Co., Ireland, and even though their children were all subsequently born in Canada, I still feel a close connection to our Irish ancestry.
I try to do traditional Irish dishes to celebrate the day, and for the last three years my tradition has been to go to the library and check out the same cookbook--Real Irish Food by David Bowers. This year I settled on doing a chicken and ham pie, and for dessert a Battenburg cake in the colors of the Irish flag.
I had settled on the menu on Sat., March 16, and was out until late that night gathering ingredients. I went to bed very excited, and planned to start work on it the moment I came home from church the next day.
I was so proud of my recipe choices and everything sounded so delicious. I wondered if my ancestors had ever eaten anything like it. I imagined the plating to be dramatically beautiful, and there would be a rainbow shooting out of my oven, possibly a leprechaun or two to chase away from the finished results, and I would sing "Danny Boy" the entire time. It would be a St. Patrick's Day miracle ...
Then the next day came.
It started off to be a pretty good day. My little family went to church, and I sang a solo special that turned out better than it ever had in practice. It was a beautiful day and we stopped by to see my parents, and then blissfully headed home so I could start my Irish feast.
But on the way home we ended up with an aggressive tailgater who would not go around no matter what we did. I finally stopped in the road, got out of my vehicle and insisted he go around, to which his only reply was to call me terrible names and refuse to do so. I had to coax my husband back into the car after he got out and was yelling at the kid (it was some smart-mouthed, punk kid). We finally pulled ourselves together, got back into the car and pulled into the nearest driveway, and the little devil stopped in road and wouldn't go. He wanted us to get back on the road so he could follow us!
So I turned the car around and found another way home (we also made a short visit to the police to report the little punk).
Still rattled by the event, once home I began work on my Irish meal.
The chicken and ham pie was nothing more than a bechamel sauce lightly flavored with sauteed onions, shredded chicken, ham, and peas, simmered until thickened (the recipe called for leeks, and though I know the Irish love their leeks, I discovered years ago they are just not my thing). Then the mixture was poured into a 9" baking dish and topped with a disc of puff pastry. It should have been the simplest thing in the world.
It should have been, but it wasn't.
I started my bechamel in a pan that I discovered quickly was not big enough for all my ingredients, so I brought the sauce to a boil and thickened it WITHOUT the meat being added. I piled the meat into the pie pan and poured the thickened sauce over the top. I didn't see any reason why this would be a bad thing.
However, it was, because the precooked ham cubes I had purchased were more watery than expected, and they thinned out my lovely thick sauce during the pie's time in the oven. Creating a very soupy mess.
When I started work on the top crust, I realized that I had put the puff pastry sheets in the refrigerator over night instead of the freezer. In my mind, it was still cold so it should have puffed up as expected. But it didn't. The picture above was taken when it first came out of the oven. Once I cut into it I discovered that it was not quite cooked, so back into the even it went.
I kept it in there as long as I could without burning it, and it just would not bake properly. So even though it looked nice coming out of the oven (thanks to the egg wash) it did not flake up much at all, was chewy, and soggy.
Upon investigation as to what cold have gone wrong, I discovered that I should have placee it in the freezer again for a bit to get it cold enough to puff.
It was a big disappointment, especially since the only reason I chose the pie was to eat the crust.
My husband happily ate it, but my daughter and I both were less than impressed. So, I moved on to dessert.
I bake quite often, so I was confident there was no way I could mess up a cake. This confidence once again proved to be my downfall.
I failed to have all my ingredients at room temperature (which is SO important when baking cakes) and my batter was just wrong from the get-go. So by the time I mixed food coloring in half of it, I was so far off in the weeds I couldn't recover. The batter was far too thick. I almost want to blame it on Bowers' recipe, but I think the real blame was me rushing it and not thinking the process through.
Then, I was suppose to cover the whole thing in marzipan that had been colored orange. Well, it turns out almond paste and marzipan are not the same thing (at 10 p.m. the night before, I reasoned out that they had to be the same). A quick Google search also resulted in me taking bad advice, and I tried to add powdered sugar to the paste in order to turn it into marzipan, which just ended up in a nightmarish, breadcrumb like substance that was impossible to work with, and tasted like what you would imagine a certain child's crafting compound would taste like.
So there I was, still mad at some little punk with a driver's license, still sad about a poorly executed dinner, and doing my best to try to stick on this pasty glob of something onto my dense, flavorless cake.
No rainbows. No leprechauns. No St. Patrick's Day miracle.
My husband took one bite and said the words I had been most dreading, but absolutely expected: "It takes like Play-dough."
I was disheartened and felt like the day was a complete and total failure.
BUT, a phone conversation with my dad helped to put things in perspective.
He reminded me that if you really study Irish, Scottish, and some English cookbooks/recipes, you will find many common threads with Southern American cooking. For instance, the Irish have a dish called Champ, that is nothing more than mashed potatoes. Scones are nothing more than a good old southern biscuit. Even the chicken and ham pie was just a variation of our classic chicken pot pie.
Immigrants and ancestors brought us those lovely dishes. So I need not feel bad about an off day of baking. I eat like an Irishman almost every day.
This could easily explain why I love St. Patrick's Day so much.
Now, if you will excuse me, I have more food to play with.
I try to do traditional Irish dishes to celebrate the day, and for the last three years my tradition has been to go to the library and check out the same cookbook--Real Irish Food by David Bowers. This year I settled on doing a chicken and ham pie, and for dessert a Battenburg cake in the colors of the Irish flag.
I had settled on the menu on Sat., March 16, and was out until late that night gathering ingredients. I went to bed very excited, and planned to start work on it the moment I came home from church the next day.
I was so proud of my recipe choices and everything sounded so delicious. I wondered if my ancestors had ever eaten anything like it. I imagined the plating to be dramatically beautiful, and there would be a rainbow shooting out of my oven, possibly a leprechaun or two to chase away from the finished results, and I would sing "Danny Boy" the entire time. It would be a St. Patrick's Day miracle ...
Then the next day came.
It started off to be a pretty good day. My little family went to church, and I sang a solo special that turned out better than it ever had in practice. It was a beautiful day and we stopped by to see my parents, and then blissfully headed home so I could start my Irish feast.
But on the way home we ended up with an aggressive tailgater who would not go around no matter what we did. I finally stopped in the road, got out of my vehicle and insisted he go around, to which his only reply was to call me terrible names and refuse to do so. I had to coax my husband back into the car after he got out and was yelling at the kid (it was some smart-mouthed, punk kid). We finally pulled ourselves together, got back into the car and pulled into the nearest driveway, and the little devil stopped in road and wouldn't go. He wanted us to get back on the road so he could follow us!
So I turned the car around and found another way home (we also made a short visit to the police to report the little punk).
Still rattled by the event, once home I began work on my Irish meal.
The chicken and ham pie was nothing more than a bechamel sauce lightly flavored with sauteed onions, shredded chicken, ham, and peas, simmered until thickened (the recipe called for leeks, and though I know the Irish love their leeks, I discovered years ago they are just not my thing). Then the mixture was poured into a 9" baking dish and topped with a disc of puff pastry. It should have been the simplest thing in the world.
It should have been, but it wasn't.
I started my bechamel in a pan that I discovered quickly was not big enough for all my ingredients, so I brought the sauce to a boil and thickened it WITHOUT the meat being added. I piled the meat into the pie pan and poured the thickened sauce over the top. I didn't see any reason why this would be a bad thing.
However, it was, because the precooked ham cubes I had purchased were more watery than expected, and they thinned out my lovely thick sauce during the pie's time in the oven. Creating a very soupy mess.
When I started work on the top crust, I realized that I had put the puff pastry sheets in the refrigerator over night instead of the freezer. In my mind, it was still cold so it should have puffed up as expected. But it didn't. The picture above was taken when it first came out of the oven. Once I cut into it I discovered that it was not quite cooked, so back into the even it went.
I kept it in there as long as I could without burning it, and it just would not bake properly. So even though it looked nice coming out of the oven (thanks to the egg wash) it did not flake up much at all, was chewy, and soggy.
Upon investigation as to what cold have gone wrong, I discovered that I should have placee it in the freezer again for a bit to get it cold enough to puff.
It was a big disappointment, especially since the only reason I chose the pie was to eat the crust.
My husband happily ate it, but my daughter and I both were less than impressed. So, I moved on to dessert.
I bake quite often, so I was confident there was no way I could mess up a cake. This confidence once again proved to be my downfall.
I failed to have all my ingredients at room temperature (which is SO important when baking cakes) and my batter was just wrong from the get-go. So by the time I mixed food coloring in half of it, I was so far off in the weeds I couldn't recover. The batter was far too thick. I almost want to blame it on Bowers' recipe, but I think the real blame was me rushing it and not thinking the process through.
Then, I was suppose to cover the whole thing in marzipan that had been colored orange. Well, it turns out almond paste and marzipan are not the same thing (at 10 p.m. the night before, I reasoned out that they had to be the same). A quick Google search also resulted in me taking bad advice, and I tried to add powdered sugar to the paste in order to turn it into marzipan, which just ended up in a nightmarish, breadcrumb like substance that was impossible to work with, and tasted like what you would imagine a certain child's crafting compound would taste like.
So there I was, still mad at some little punk with a driver's license, still sad about a poorly executed dinner, and doing my best to try to stick on this pasty glob of something onto my dense, flavorless cake.
No rainbows. No leprechauns. No St. Patrick's Day miracle.
My husband took one bite and said the words I had been most dreading, but absolutely expected: "It takes like Play-dough."
I was disheartened and felt like the day was a complete and total failure.
BUT, a phone conversation with my dad helped to put things in perspective.
He reminded me that if you really study Irish, Scottish, and some English cookbooks/recipes, you will find many common threads with Southern American cooking. For instance, the Irish have a dish called Champ, that is nothing more than mashed potatoes. Scones are nothing more than a good old southern biscuit. Even the chicken and ham pie was just a variation of our classic chicken pot pie.
Immigrants and ancestors brought us those lovely dishes. So I need not feel bad about an off day of baking. I eat like an Irishman almost every day.
This could easily explain why I love St. Patrick's Day so much.
Now, if you will excuse me, I have more food to play with.
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