St Patrick Day

Saint Patrick Day (Irish: Lá Fhéile Pádraig (The Festival of Patrick); Ulster-Scots: Saunt Petherick’s Day) is a cultural and religious holiday celebrated on 17 March in Dublin, Ireland. The tradition came about at the instigation of the Irish Protestant organisation The Knights of St. Patrick. The inaugural parade took place on 17 March 1783. In what has been described as an act of cultural re-orientation the British established a new focus of ritual and spectacle in the figure of St. Patrick, a pre-reformation saint who appealed to both the Roman Catholic and Irish Protestant traditions in Ireland (Cullen, 1997, p.67) Guarding the inaugural procession were the mainly Protestant Volunteers who were charged with keeping order on the streets and at the service in the Protestant St. Patrick’s Cathedral. The subsequent celebrations took place in two venues: on 17 March in the ballroom (which the Lord Lieutenant Earl Temple II had renamed after St Patrick) of Dublin Castle, the ancient seat of British power in Ireland, in the old part of the city, and, on the 18 March, at the Rotunda, a site closely associated with the Volunteers leaders Lord Charlemont and the second Duke of Leinster (Dublin 1745-1922 Hospitals, Spectacle & Vice by G. A Boyd p95/6). It supposedly commemorates Saint Patrick (c. AD 387–461), the most commonly recognised of the patron saints of Ireland, and the arrival of Christianity in Ireland. It is observed by the Catholic Church, the Anglican Communion (especially the Church of Ireland), the Eastern Orthodox Church and Lutheran Church. Saint Patrick’s Day was made an official feast day in the early seventeenth century, and has gradually become a secular celebration of Irish culture in general.

The day is generally characterised by the attendance of church services, wearing of green attire and the lifting of Lenten restrictions on eating and drinking alcohol, which is often proscribed during the rest of the season.

Saint Patrick’s Day is a public holiday in the Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland, Newfoundland and Labrador and in Montserrat. It is also widely celebrated by the Irish diaspora, especially in places such as Great Britain, Canada, the United States, Argentina, Australia, and New Zealand, among others. Today, St. Patrick’s Day is probably the most widely celebrated saint’s day in the world.

To help you with ideas for your St. Patrick’s Day party, here are a few recipes you may enjoy.

Ginormous Blackberry Pie Pancakes

Seriously, these are the fattest pancakes ever!

Ingredients:
1 cup blackberries
2/3 cup flour
4 tablespoons rolled oats
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1-1/3 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
2 tablespoons sugar
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
2/3 cup milk

Directions:
1. Combine dry ingredients in a bowl, then add wet. Mix, but don’t overmix. Cook on an oiled (or sprayed) pan, on low-medium, flipping each pancake once.Top with syrup, powdered sugar.

2. Or you could even boil some more blackberries (with a bit of sugar, if you wish), and smash them, to make a compote.
Shamrock Fried Eggs
Here’s a fun breakfast for St. Patrick’s Day.
A few days ago, I saw a photo posted on Facebook where someone fried eggs inside of some beautiful, colourful red and yellow peppers. That gave me the idea to fry up eggs in green peppers shaped like clovers.
When you go to the market, look at the base of the peppers and pick out the ones with four humps to resemble a lucky four-leaf clover.
Depending on the size of the peppers and the eggs, the egg white might ooze over or under the edges while frying, but you can clean up the final presentation before serving.

Shamrock Fried Eggs

• 1 green bell pepper
• 4 eggs
• 1 T. butter
• Mrs. Dash seasoning
• salt

Slice the peppers into rings.
Melt butter in a frying pan over medium-high heat.
Place the pepper rings in the pan and flip once.
Crack an egg inside each pepper ring.
Season with Mrs. Dash and salt.
Cover with a lid and cook until the yolk reaches your desired doneness.
Remove from the pan, clean edges, plate and serve.

Tapas for Sweet Heat Challenge

Tapas is the collective name for small, delicious mouthfuls of something savoury, served with a chilled white wine, beer or sherry. It comes from tapa, the Spanish word for lid – specifically, the lid created by th slice of bread that an innkeeper would place on top of a customer’s wine glass to keep out the flies and dust between sips. Then the Andalucians decided to blanace a morsel fo something tasty on top of the bread to nibble on.

I’m hosting this month’s Sweet Heat Challenge for Lyndsay at Vanilla Clouds and Lemon Drops and I have chosen Tapas as the theme. That means that the Tapas for the challenge has to include chilli in some form or other.

I decided to make my tapas into a meal, I added the sweetcorn after realising how meat based I had made my choice of dishes!

So, working from the front left in a clockwise direction: Chickpeas with Chorizo, Sweetcorn Bites roasted in butter, meatballs in Pepper and Tomato Salsa, Lamb Skewers with lemon and chilli.

My entry for Sweet Heat is Pepper and Tomato Salsa which was totally delicious and really lifted the basic readymade meatballs that I bought in the supermarket.

Pepper and Tomato Salsa
2 tbsp olive oil
4 large cloves of garlic
2 large red peppers, deseeded and chopped
2 tins chopped tomatoes
2 strips of orange rind
pinch of chilli pepper flakes
salt and pepper

Heat the olive oil in a flameproof casserole dish. Add the garlic and peppers and cook for 10 minutes over a medium heat, stirring occasionally until the peppers are just soft. Add the tomatoes, orange rind and chilli pepper flakes, season to taste.

Simmer the sauce for about 45 minutes until the sauce thickens. Use a stick blender or liquidiser to puree the sauce.

I used readymade meatballs, I put them in an oven proof dish and cooked them in a hot oven (200C) for about 30 minutes until they were browned. Add to the sauce after it has been pureed, leave to absorb some of the flavour for an hour of so and reheat gently.

Serve the Meatballs warm, not hot. Would be good with couscous, rice, mash or chunks of crusty bread.
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