Monday, March 18, 2019

St. Paddy's Day

Yesterday I let loose my Irish roots for St. Patrick's Day.  The Irish think that our reaction to this day is silly.  It's just a day in Ireland, where we have parades, green beer, green bagels, and more corned beef cooked on this day than any other day in the year.  Given that Irish-Americans aren't really a big deal these days, everybody is Irish on St. Patrick's Day (I remember Walt's brother's African-American roommate wearing a button saying "Kiss me, I'm Irish")

But I am Irish.  Irish and Scottish, so I feel vindicated in celebrating the day of this saint who lived in Ireland in ~400AD and who is credited with chasing the snakes out of the country, if there were any there to begin with.

I decided to go Irish by making Irish soda bread.  Whenever we visited Ireland, Walt's cousin Nora always made sure we had soda bread and, to tell the truth, I never liked it all that much, but the recipe I chose yesterday was pretty good.  It's supposed to have currants, which I was out of, but I used golden raisins, and it was a nice substitute.


For dinner, of course, we had corned beef.  I didn't cook cabbage because Walt doesn't really like it, but cooked carrots.

It was an Instant Pot recipe and supposed to cook in a little over an hour.  I didn't realize something had gone wrong with the setting until the cook time ended and it did not go into the keep warm mode.  I think I somehow brushed the wrong button when I was moving the pot and maybe it seared for 70 minutes.  I don't know.  Almost all the liquid (about 8 cups) was gone and the meat wasn't fully cooked.  I pressure cooked it for another 20 minutes and that did it.  Delicious.

We were just finishing up when Ned, Marta, Jeri and Phil arrived.  Jeri and Phil had flown in from Boston the day before and they spent yesterday recording at Timber Trout studios with other Lawsuit-type folks.

They hadn't had dinner, so I carved up the rest of the corned beef and they had that along with soda bread for dinner.

After dinner, Walt brought Jeri something Ned found when he moved a bookcase out of the big bedroom last week:


This is a goodbye message when Jeri left Holtzmuller Productions, a theatrical rental place in San Francisco (the circled message in the lower left was from Paul, who also worked there).  She was working there in 1989 and left -- I think -- when she moved to Boston to get a music degree from Berklee College of music (where she has been ever since!).  We never throw anything away in this house!

It is nice having Jeri and Phil here.  Phil is going to Oregon to visit his family tomorrow; Jeri will stay here and help Ned clear out the Atria apartment...and also we plan to visit my mother either today or tomorrow.  I'm anxious to see how she has adapted to Eldervilla in these past 2 weeks.


No comments: