international meal | ireland and england

Back in March, I was thinking of cooking a meal to commemorate St. Patrick's Day. Problem was that I find corned beef and cabbage revolting.

I was reading St. Patrick's Day menus on Epicurious, when an article caught my attention: A Modern St. Patrick's Day Dinner with Cathal Armstrong. Cathal Armstrong is the Irish chef and co-owner of Restaurant Eve - one of the best restaurants in the DC area. The challenge of making some of his recipes at home intrigued me, so I decided that our St. Patrick's Day feast would be our international meal of the month. Chef Armstrong's menu was built around a recipe for lamb shoulder, and I thought that was too large a meat for two people, so I found a recipe for Beef and Guinness Pies instead. I'm not sure that it's necessarily an authentic Irish recipe, but hey, it has Guinness in it, so I'm happy to call it Irish.

If I had my druthers, I would've made Chocolate Guinness Goodness (another recipe that you dump a beer in and call "Irish") for dessert, but Larry doesn't like chocolate pudding. So I stuck with Bakewell Tart (or is it actually a Bakewell Pudding?), as suggested in the Epicurious article. Bakewell Tart hails from Derbyshire, England, so our international meal was focused on a region rather than a single country.

On the menu:

• Beef and Guinness Pies
• Roasted Cauliflower with Cheddar Cheese Sauce
• Brown Butter Soda Bread
• Bakewell Tart 

We did not end up eating our St. Patrick's Day feast on St. Patrick's Day. In fact, we did not even it eat in March - it had to wait until April 3rd, since Larry was traveling again. And it was good. The Beef and Guinness Pies were the star of the meal and looked totally impressive with their puff pastry lids (I used store-bought frozen puff pastry instead of making puff pastry from scratch as called for in the recipe, and it was totally delicious and much easier).

I typically find Irish Soda Bread to be dry, crumbly, and boring. I liked this recipe because it was a savory bread - it used rosemary instead of currants (which are way too close to raisins, and therefore gross in my opinion!). The bread was fine out of the oven (nothing spectacular though), but by the next day it was crumbly. I guess I'm just not a fan of soda bread.

As for the Bakewell Tart - I've never had Bakewell Tart before, so I have nothing to compare it to.  I didn't even know what Bakewell Tart was supposed to look like. Here's what mine looked like:

I ended up using a recipe from Smitten Kitchen in lieu of the Epicurious one because Chef Armstrong's recipe included the mind-boggling instruction to wrap the pastry dough around 4 sticks of butter...and I prefer to choose recipes that won't kill me on the spot. Also, his recipe did not use almonds, which I understand is the traditional/defining ingredient in Bakewell Tart. I expected/hoped that the almond filling would be custard-like after it was cooked, but it was cake-y. (Perhaps Chef Armstrong's recipe would've been more custardy?) Hmm. Again, it was good (we liked it best warm from the oven), but I probably wouldn't make it again.