Irish Dinner

We'd invited two couples over for dinner last Friday night, just a few days after my return from my visit to North Carolina. I hadn't given the menu a thought before I left and so I needed to be decisive and find something simple to serve. Since St. Patricks' Day had been just a few days earlier I decided to serve corned beef and cabbage with boiled potatoes and steamed carrots. It was simple, seasonally timely, low effort, and relatively fool proof. Responses to the e-mail I'd sent out in the very wee hours of Wednesday morning revealing the menu were very favorable ranging from "Yum!" to "Great! I'd intended to have that this year but haven't yet." Guests volunteered to bring beer and homemade Irish soda bread to round out the meal.

Thursday afternoon rolled around and I lazily was going to put off my grocery shopping until Friday morning. I am glad I thought otherwise and went sooner. I went to my local Nob Hill and could find no corned beef brisket, vacuum packed in brine, anywhere in the meat department. I rang the buzzer above the counter and talked to the butcher. I said that I thought corned beef was a year round item and not seasonal. He said that usually, yes. But this year, Livermore had had a run on corned beef. He'd even called the competitor stores, Lucky and Safeway, to get some for his customers but had been unsuccessful. I was bummed but glad I had not waited until the last minute.

Not to be defeated, I went home and Googled how to make corned beef. I mean, how hard can it be to soak a brisket or other cut of beef in pickling juices of some kind. The first recipe I pulled up stated "Be sure the cut of beef is fully submerged". Check. I can do that. I have lots of big pots. Then it continued "After 10 days..." What? "After 10 days...? " I was in trouble. I talked to Frank and prepared to search the grocery stores in the neighboring towns for this now rare commodity called corned beef.

But first I thought to phone our local warehouse store Costco. I said to Frank, "I may have to buy half a cow's worth to get it but I will find some corned beef." The phone in the meat department rang and rang and no one answered. "Probably they got tired of calls inquiring about the availability of corned beef," I muttered irritably to myself. I just picked up my car keys and drove there to find out in person. Fortunately Costco had many, many packages of corned beef. Run on corned beef in Livermore, my a**! I was able to buy a very nice package just over 4½ lb and did not have to cart home and store half a cow's worth of meat. Whew! I turned my efforts toward one of my favorite parts about dinner parties – tablescaping.

I chose green placemats and dishes that in my mind depicted a typical Irish countryside. This is a set we'd used many years ago as our everyday dishes. For the flatware, I picked a gold set we'd bought at Macy's in the early years of our marriage since I fell in love with it. A few of the holly leaves on the handles have escaped over the years but I felt the gold color fit in with that elusive treasure the leprechauns guard. So what if the leaves were not botanically accurate for the holiday. 

Here is my symbolic pot of gold at the end of the rainbow at each place setting. The "pot" contained gold foil wrapped Rolos, Lindt's truffles, Werther's originals, and Reese's Peanut Butter Cup miniatures. My local craft store had the sheer rainbow ribbon that I snipped into six 12" lengths.

The lace edged napkins are my homage to Irish lace. The napkin rings are geese, which fit in with the Irish Rovers song.

I got Your green alligators and long-neck geese, 

Some humpty backed camels and some chimpanzees, 

Some cats and rats and elephants,  but Lord I'm so forlorn. 

I just can't see no unicorns.

I picked up a bunch of green silk flowers to distribute among the place settings. The pink tinge in them reminds me of heather, which is associated with Ireland as well as Scotland. In fact there is even a pub called the Irish Heather.

After adding a few green apples, candles, and some green stripe ribbon, all that was missing was the food. Thanks to Costco that was no longer missing. But I was so busy getting it out on the table that I forgot to take pictures of it!

We shared a good meal with our friends and after dinner we watched Idiotest – see post for March 21, 2015 for an example. Then we listened to some amusing songs by The Four Bitchin' Babes – hear Oh No at this YouTube link.  We gathered around the kitchen nook table and played the game of Tsuro. Whoops, we slipped out of the Irish culture character. But one of our guests was able to read all the Japanese characters on the box for the rest of us. So we had a bit of Japanese good fortune mixed in with our Irish luck.