I personally did not grow up eating Potato Farls, probably because around me, there was no such thing as leftover mashed potatoes. (I am still a mashed potato fiend, but I’ve managed to turn it down to a more respectable level.)
But when I am visiting family in Ireland, Potato Farls is one of the foods I am most excited to eat (along with Irish Brown Bread and the rest of the components of a beautiful Ulster Fry.)
Potato Farls is just mashed potatoes kneaded with some flour, butter, salt, and pepper, then fried up into tasty little pieces, making them the perfect recipe for the day after Thanksgiving!
I will be honest. I am partial to Irish Stew made with lamb. But Irish Stew made with beef is tasty in its own right! This Slow Cooker Irish Beef Stew is a flavorful, comforting dish perfect for colder rainy days too!
This recipe is very similar to my OG Irish Stew I shared over a decade (!) ago, with a few adjustments. Recipes like this Irish Beef Stew are perfect to make in your slow cooker (paid link), which helps develop the flavors of the dish while perfectly cooking the meat and vegetables.
Ingredients:
2 tablespoons unsalted butter, divided
3 onions, chopped
3 leeks, white and light green parts only, sliced into half moons
1 tablespoon dried thyme
1 tablespoon garlic powder
salt and pepper, to taste
5 lbs stew beef
5 carrots, peeled and chopped
1 parsnip, peeled and chopped
5 cups beef stock, divided
1 (15 oz) can Guinness
1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
3 tablespoons pearl barley
2 lbs baby red potatoes, cut into bite sized pieces
The weather has yet to turn cold (in fact, we just had a week-long heatwave!) but I’m already thinking about colder weather foods. One of my favorite comfort foods is traditional Irish Vegetable Soup.
Unlike a chunky vegetable soup commonly found in the US, Irish Vegetable Soup is a blended soup made of potatoes, leeks, carrots, and onions that feels creamy and comforting without any cream!
The absolute best way to enjoy an Irish Vegetable Soup is with some Irish Brown Bread, but because that’s somewhat difficult to come across in the US, I substituted in a loaf of Italian bread to sop up all that vegetable goodness.
I know it is quite late in the season for a soup recipe, but I made this Leek and Potato Soup recently and just had to share it. This is a fairly traditional Irish Leek and Potato Soup, but the simplicity means you can really make it your own with some tweaks if you wanted.
Leeks are in season late winter to early summer, so this soup is great for those slightly cooler days, or when you’re looking for something simple to make that is ultimate comfort food.
This recipe uses under 10 ingredients and can be made in under 30 minutes!
Ingredients:
4 tablespoons salted butter
1 yellow onion, chopped
3-4 leeks (depending on their size), sliced
1 pound Yukon gold potatoes, peeled and cut into cubes
In the 11 years I’ve been writing posts for this blog, I have never posted on Christmas Day!
This year, I decided to finally rectify that and bring a recipe for a Christmas Pudding. Plum Pudding is quite a misnomer (at least to us Americans) – it does not include any plums, and pudding is actually a cake, not a custard-like substance. The method of cooking the plum pudding was new to me too; you actually steam it on your stovetop rather than bake it!
This recipe for Irish Plum Pudding is adapted from a cookbook I have owned for a while (Christmas Flavors of Ireland– paid link), although, I have to admit, I think I royally Americanized the recipe into something different. So, here’s my American Not-Plum Bundt Cake!
Note: You’ll need a 6 cup bundt pan (paid link), and a pot large enough to fit the bundt pan inside (I used a large pot I use to make tomato sauce).
I know I’m a little late to the “whipped coffee” or Dalgona coffee trend, but I wanted to hold out for St. Patrick’s Day to make this awesome Whipped Irish Coffee!
Whipped coffee became quite the trend early in the pandemic. It’s made by whisking equal parts instant coffee granules, sugar, and hot water until it holds stiff peaks. You serve it on top of hot or warm milk, and then stir to combine, so adding whiskey to this lovely mix seemed like a no brainer to me.
Irish coffee is actually traditionally enjoyed the opposite way… kind of. Whiskey, sugar, and coffee are stirred together and then topped with heavy cream, while this whipped Irish coffee has the milk on the bottom rather than on top (although with whipped coffee, you do stir the milk and coffee together before enjoying). This recipe is to make the whipped Irish coffee iced, but you can easily adapt it to use warmed milk instead. If you’re looking for another spin on an Irish coffee, I also have a recipe for a Frozen Clover Cocktail you might want to try.
Ingredients (makes 2 servings):
1/4 cup instant coffee granules (normal ground coffee won’t work!)
1/4 cup sugar (or brown sugar to make it a touch more of a traditional Irish coffee)
Since I returned from my honeymoon in Ireland a few weeks ago, I have been craving Irish Brown Bread like crazy. Served typically with breakfast, Irish brown bread is made with a coarse whole wheat flour, resulting in a hearty bread different than anything I can easily find here in the U.S.
The difference is really in the flour. To get the right consistency, you’d need to purchase a wholemeal flour, sometimes labeled as “Irish-Style,” which can be somewhat difficult to find (although it is available online.)
So when I was offered the chance to try out the Mockmill, a grain mill attachment for the KitchenAid Mixer, I jumped at the chance. I can make my OWN Irish-Style flour!
Besides my very specific reason for wanting to mill my own flour, there are a bunch of other benefits to using a grain mill. Grinding from whole wheat berries at home means that the bran and germ stay in your flour. A bunch of the “good stuff” is found in the bran and germ: fiber, vitamins, minerals, antioxidants. However, the germ is removed from commercial flour because it reduces its shelf life; the oil in germ can turn rancid, so home milled flour should be used in 1-2 weeks, or stored in the freezer.
The Mockmill, designed by Wolfgang Mock, is nicely compact. (As a city dweller, I very much appreciate this.) I love that it attaches right to my stand mixer; it’s really simple to set up and begin using right away.
source: Mockmill
You adjust the coarseness of the grind by twisting the front of the mill. The mill uses self-sharpening ceramic-bonded corundum grinding stones, which can produce a very fine flour if needed.
The Mockmill grinds flour directly into the mixing bowl, really convenient if you’re using it immediately like I am!
Cleaning the Mockmill is also a breeze; the mill can be separated easily and rinsed to clean any minimal residue left from milling.
Mockmill is offering I Can Cook That readers a really sweet deal, available until August 31:$80 off (that’s over 30% off!) two different package options through this link if you use the code icancookthat.
The packages come with everything you need to begin milling at home: the Mockmill Grain Milling Attachment for Stand Mixers, a variety of whole grain berries to get you started, plus “Flour Power” by Marleeta Basey, a comprehensive introduction to the benefits of home milling! Be sure to check them out here.
Note: the price listed is the original price. Add the code icancookthat at checkout to receive $80 off. The sets of books, grains, and Mockmills are being especially made for this promotion so delivery times may vary.
To test out the mill (and make me some oh so yummy brown bread,) I decided to start with a relatively simple version of Irish bread, a yeasted version from the Ballymaloe House in County Cork, Ireland. This version of their recipe comes from David Lebovitz, and is super easy to make.
Happy St. Patrick’s Day! I have already shared an Irish-themed main meal, bread, baked good, and sweet treat so I thought this time around a drink was in order, this Clover Cocktail!
Fine Wine & Good Spirits sent me this really yummy spin on an Irish coffee called the Clover Cocktail, which is frozen instead of hot.
Ingredients (makes 1 serving; multiply as needed):
Happy St. Patrick’s Day! One of my favorite memories growing up was my mom making Irish Soda bread during March. It is a fairly straightforward bread and is really quite easy.
The bread uses baking soda instead of yeast as its leavening agent. Irish Soda Bread is also made with buttermilk that reacts with the baking soda to make it rise. Soda bread is a mostly savory bread, but it usually has some kind of dried fruit in it (raisins, currants, etc) that add a bit of sweetness.
My mom’s version has caraway seeds in it that add a little bit of an anise flavor to it (caraway seeds are typically found in rye bread) and I just love it. I wanted to make this with currants but couldn’t find any, so I used raisins. Feel free to substitute golden raisins or currants.
I am Irish, on my father’s side. So, more appropriately, I’m Irish American (among other things). Even more specifically, I am Irish Philadelphian. (Yes, I may have made that phrase up. But there are a bunch of us so I think the phrase should exist.)
Now I’m sure you were very interested in what my heritage is, but there is a reason I’m telling you this. Philadelphia has this… candy? dessert? … we will go with “treat”… called an Irish Potato.
It’s cream cheese, powdered sugar, vanilla extract, and coconut rolled into a little ball and coated in cinnamon. So it ends up looking kind of like a potato, hence the name.
A super cute potato, that is
I’m under the impression this treat is essentially a Philadelphia-only thing. Friends from New York and D.C. both look at me like I’m crazy when I bring these up. But they are delicious and an integral part of every St. Patrick’s Day for me, so I needed to share them!
With St. Patrick’s Day fast approaching I have been thinking back to my trip to Ireland quite a bit. I had such a great time that I wanted to relive a little piece of it, through food of course! I was chosen to be a part of Foodbuzz’s 24×24 for March so I thought it was the perfect opportunity to make some Irish treats. I invited my Dad, boyfriend and Aunt who all came on the trip with me to Ireland as well as my grandpa, who grew up in Enniskillen, County Fermanagh in Northern Ireland, and my mom, who didn’t get to do the trip with us. I honestly was a bit nervous about this undertaking, I didn’t want to disappoint my grandpa or mess up a traditional meal!
We began with a mini traditional Irish breakfast for an appetizer. An Irish breakfast consists of black and white pudding, bangers (sausage), rashers (bacon), a fried egg, baked beans, and a fried tomato. Because this was just an appetizer, I used quail eggs instead of traditional eggs. I found the black and white pudding, bangers and rashers on foodireland.com, a great website for Irish food products.
A traditional Irish breakfast is quite the meal. In my grandfather’s words “you should eat a good breakfast, because you don’t know when you’ll eat again.” My appetizer version still included all parts of an Irish breakfast in much smaller portions. I personally am not a fan of black pudding or bangers, but I love the rest of an Irish breakfast and was so happy to have this as an appetizer.
The main course was a beef stew. I used my Irish stew recipe I made last year, but substituted beef instead of lamb and omitted the peas.
The Guinness adds such a nice flavor to this stew. I suggest making this ahead of time and freezing it. Stew always tastes better when the broth has had time to thicken.
I also made some Brown Soda Bread to eat with the Irish breakfast and the stew. Soda bread contains flour, baking soda, baking powder, sugar, butter and buttermilk. My version also had raisins and caraway seeds for extra flavor.
Soda bread is traditionally served with Irish butter and/or jam (I’m a fan of black currant jam, yum!)
We were pretty darn full from the stew and Irish breakfast but there was still dessert to be had. I went off of the traditional for dessert, making a Black and Tan brownie based off of a Cooking Light recipe, but made them in a 9×9 pan and cooked them for 45 minutes. I also cut them into huge pieces, making 9 total.
They were served with a scoop of ice cream and some Irish coffee and tea. The phrase Black and Tan comes from the nickname given to English soldiers that came to Ireland to suppress the 1916 Easter Rising, which eventually became the name of a half Guinness and half Bass beer in America. Black and Tans really aren’t popular in Ireland, but they still make a cute idea for a brownie! (I decided these yummy brownies needed their own post. Check it out here)
My family seemed to really enjoy the meal. The Irish breakfast was a big hit but I think the Irish soda bread was the real star of the night. My grandpa even requested to take some home with him. I am glad we were given the chance to sit down, enjoy some Irish food, and talk about Ireland again. Now, to plan our next trip over there…
