Happy St. Patrick's Day!

No St. Patrick's Day can go by without having corned beef and cabbage.  But like we do with most recipes, we put our own twist on the classic meal.  With Justin's roots in Pittsburgh, and my brief year there, we both love Primanti Bros.'s sandwiches, so we used that to put our own spin on a NY Deli classic.  And to round out the meal, we did some baking; but not just any baking--we used some Paddy approved ingredients such as stout and bacon and made a chocolate bacon beer cake.

So let's start with the sandwich.  There wasn't much to it tonight.  We picked up a nice, crusty white loaf of rustic Italian bread, and cut some thick slices to toast up, and slathered on some whole grain mustard.  We warmed up some thickly sliced corned beef from the deli, and some leftover slices of mortadella.  Instead of the traditional coleslaw, we used our homemade sauerkraut for the cabbage component.  And for the potato component, we made some homemade fries, tossed in some rendered bacon fat.  Pile everything on the bread...meat, 'kraut, fries...smash!

It rivaled the real thing!

Now for the cake.  I'm usually not much of a baker, but since it involved bacon and beer, I figured I'd give it a shot.  We started by rendering down the bacon.  Once it was crispy, we poured off most of the fat, and then added in some Jameson, Boatswain chocolate stout (only $1.99 from Trader Joe's!), some maple syrup, and a bit of brown sugar to deglaze the pan and candy the bacon.  Once the liquid cooked down and resembled caramel, we poured it onto a silicone mat to cool.

Without cleaning the pan, we melted the butter and added a cup of the stout to start on our cake batter.  Once the butter was melted, we whisked in the cocoa powder.  In a separate bowl we beat together the sour cream and eggs, and then added those to the chocolate stout mixture.

Then we slowly mixed in the dry ingredients until everything was completely mixed together.  We poured half of the batter into a greased bundt pan, and then added in some of the candied bacon.

The rest of the batter was poured into the pan.  Before throwing it in the oven, I gave the pan a couple quick twists to make sure the batter was distributed evenly.  It went into the oven for about 45 minutes.

Once we turned the cake out onto a cooling rack, we let it cool while we made the maple glaze.  One of my Chirstmas presents that I forgot to mention here, was a subscription to Saveur, and the first issue I received was all about donuts, including about a dozen different glazes, including a maple glaze.  As always, we added our own twist though.

So into a pot went some heavy cream, powdered sugar, maple syrup and a dash of salt.  That was the original recipe.  But it wouldn't be St. Patrick's Day without some Bailey's Irish Cream.  So we put a bit of that into the glaze.  And since we used all of the chocolate stout for the cake, we added in a dash of Mothership Connection, a beer by Chocolate City Beer, here in DC.  It's a tasty Weizenbock that added a fruity sweetness to the glaze.

Once the cake cooled, we drizzled the glaze over the top, and added the rest of the candied bacon.

How good does that look?  The cake was light and fluffy, and tasted like a brownie, while the bacon added a little saltiness and cut the sweetness from the glaze.  We definitely took advantage of it being our cheat day, and hopefully Justin's housemates will eat the rest of the cake so we don't have to.  With corned beef, potatoes, and lots of beer it was a meal that could drive the snakes from Ireland, and drive some hungry people to the table!

Winner, Winner, Chicken Dinner!

I was really excited to pick up our meat share and see that we had chicken from Polyface Farms.  I've never had any of their meat, but I've been wanting to try it ever since I read about their farm in "The Omnivore's Dilemma".  If you haven't read it, it talks about that state of food these days, and how we eat.  I'd also highly recommend picking up the follow-up book, "In Defense of Food".  Back to Polyface...they operate their farm the way a farm should run...letting their cows graze freely, and rotating them through different pastures, using their manure for their plants and produce, letting their chickens roam freely and eat bugs and worms, like their supposed to, etc.  So you can understand my excitement when I saw 2 chicken thighs and legs in this week's share.

We thought ahead (for once), and using this recipe as inspiration, decided to marinate the chicken overnight in some garlic, rosemary, thyme, all spice, salt, pepper, and a little grapeseed oil.  Once everything was in the bag, we massaged the chicken a bit to make sure they were evenly coated with the spices.

Since we're going to sous vide the birds, we had to remove as much air from the bag as possible.  And since we don't have a vacuum sealer, Justin went the old school way and used a straw...being careful not to suck up any raw chicken juices.

Sadly, we don't have an immersion circulator (maybe next Christmas?), so we just warmed up a pot of water to about 135 degrees.  We don't have a thermometer either, so we went by feel...hot enough to cook the chicken, but cool enough that you can touch it.  We dropped the bag o' chicken in the water and let it cook.

It cooked for about an hour, so while that was cooking, we caught up on some shows we'd DVR'd.  But back to the task at hand...about 10 minutes before we took the chicken out of the hot tub, I got to work on the carrots.  Our share gave us some more purple carrots, so we decided to glaze them.

Into a pan, went some butter and brown sugar.  Once it was all melty, I tossed in the carrots so they were all nicely coated.  We added in a little five spice to cut some of the sweetness, and just let the carrots hang out while we finished off the chicken.  We finished off the carrots with some aged balsamic sea salt that Justin received in his Christmas stocking.

To get that nice, brown, crispy skin on the chicken, we put it skin side down into a pan with some melted butter.  We let it sear for 5 minutes on each side to finish it off.  We made sure to dump all the garlic, spices and juices from the bag into the pan as well, and Justin continued to baste the chicken while it seared.

Since we had some parsnip and turnip puree leftover from the other night, we it off with the chicken.  It turned out to be one of the prettiest dishes we've put together lately, and one of the tastiest.