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.”

Meatless Monday: Going Irish without Corned Beef

With St. Patrick’s Day coming up on Sunday, produce bins are overflowing with potatoes, leeks, and cabbages, all on sale for the best price of the season. Staples of Irish cuisine, many will find their way into steaming pots of Corned Beef and Cabbage.

There are however, plenty of other options for celebrating this most Irish of holidays, even if you wish to forgo the meat.

Colcannon, for instance. A lesser known mainstay of Irish cooking, Colcannon is a hearty dish, in which boiled potatoes are mashed with cabbage or kale along with milk and copious amounts of butter. There are several variations, some of which include Irish bacon. 

I chose to try a Colcannon recipe posted in this week’s Elm City Market flyer. As suggested, I substituted 2 large parsnips (also on sale and grown in Massachusetts) for 2 of the potatoes. The cabbages were nice and firm this week (and on sale) so they won out over kale. 

The Elm City recipe would seem to be inspired by this one I found online at Simply Recipes.

NOTES: 

• Elm City substituted 2 leeks for the green onions.
• 3 cups of chopped cabbage is the yield from 1/2 of a medium cabbage after the outer leaves are removed.
• I chopped both the cabbage and the leeks in the food processor, and added the leeks after the cabbage had cooked for just 2 minutes; I cooked the vegetables in butter for a total of 5 minutes. 

The result? A festively light green dish with an absolutely delicious taste. IMHO, the parsnips imparted the perfect little kick. 

I opted not to add any additional butter to the mounds of Colcannon we ate last night. But the more I read about this dish, the more a lake of butter seems to be the authentically Irish way. When I heat up the leftovers, I do believe we will indulge.

Have a great week. Happy St. Patrick’s Day!         

I often blog on food or food issues on Monday 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.”