Meatless Monday: The Meatless St. Patrick’s Day Challenge

’Tis the day for wearing of the green and eating Irish food. That means Corned Beef and Cabbage for many who are Irish or Irish for the day.

What’s a vegetarian or a diehard Meatless Monday observer to do? There are options — some traditional, some not.

You could try Corned Beef and Cabbage using a meat alternative; here’s one using seitan. [I can see the eyes rolling.] Seitan is fake meat made of wheat. It’s not for everyone, especially those on a gluten-free diet, and is quite pricey. If you try it once and like everything about it except the price tag, you might want to check out this recipe for DIY seitan on Isa Chandra’s Post Punk Kitchen site. 

You could forgo “meat,” real or fake, and get your Irish fix by indulging in Colcannon, a dish of boiled potatoes and greens, as I did last year. The dish is traditionally made with cabbage, but I understand kale works, too.

For more green dish ideas, check out Martha Stewart’s 28 recipes for kale in slideshow format, many, but not all, of which are meatless. [Martha's gorgeous site is well worth a visit; she has slide shows for other winter produce as well.]

You could make some Irish soda bread.  [I have not had such good luck with this.]  Or you could buy a loaf. The ingredients in soda bread are pretty inexpensive, and it should be easy to find loaves for sale today, flecked with raisins and caraway seeds, and slightly sweet. Even the priciest loaf is not too big a splurge. I'm going to take this route.

My rather heavy loaf of Irish Soda Bread

However you decide to celebrate…

…Happy Monday! Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

Have a great week!

On Mondays I often blog on food, food issues, or gardening in support of Meatless Monday, one of several programs developed in the Healthy Monday project, founded in 2003 in association with Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Communications. Meatless Monday’s goal is “to help reduce meat consumption 15% in order to improve personal health and the health of our planet.”