In honor of the fast approaching St. Patrick’s Day, here’s my recipe for corned beef and cabbage. I like to serve it in a bowl with some of the broth it’s cooked in, and with plenty of other vegetables added, especially root vegetables like carrots, turnips, parsnips, and potatoes. So it’s more like a corned beef and cabbage soup or stew. A Black and Tan (pale ale with Guinness Stout on top) makes a fine accompaniment.

I used a 4 lb. brisket of corned beef, which should serve about 4 people with leftovers.

Ingredients:

• 1 Corned beef brisket, about 4 lbs.
• 1 head of cabbage
• 2 medium onions
• 4-5 cloves of garlic
• 2-3 ribs of celery
• 2 medium-sized carrots
• 2 medium-sized parsnips (optional)
• 1 largish turnip (optional)
• 4 medium-large potatoes
• 2 tablespoons whole black peppercorns
• 1-2 Bay Leaves

Add the corned beef brisket to a large pot and fill with enough water to just cover the brisket. If the brisket came with a little pack of pickling spices, add them to the water along with the bay leaves, peppercorns, and coarsely chopped garlic. Bring the water to a boil, then turn down to a simmer. It’ll cook for about 3 hours total.

Wash and peel whatever combination of carrots, parsnips and turnips you’re adding and coarsely chop them up along with the onions and celery. Add these vegetables to the simmering water and corned beef after it’s been cooking for about 2 hours.

Peel the potatoes if you like and chop them into 1 or 2 inch chunks (I usually don’t peel the potatoes because I like the potato skins- I just wash the outside skin really well). Wash the cabbage head and remove the outside leaves. Cut the cabbage head into quarters and cut the stem out of the cabbage. Add the potatoes to the simmering water at about 2 1/2 hours of cooking time, and add the cabbage on top.

Let simmer for about another 1/2 hour until the potatoes are soft and the cabbage is well cooked. Remove the corned beef, cut slices against the grain and serve in a bowl with some of the broth and the vegetables. Enjoy!

Bonus: how to make the Black and Tan in the picture:

Start with a good Irish pale ale- I like Bass Ale for this. Fill a glass half full of pale ale. Then take a large spoon and hold it upside-down over the glass. Carefully and slowly pour Guinness Stout (the only real choice for the “black” part of the Black and Tan) over the spoon so it layers on top of the Pale Ale. Enjoy (responsibly)!

This is what I made for my wonderful wife Kristina and me for Valentine’s Day. Kristina had picked up some Filet Mignon and King Crab legs, which would have made a terrific meal with the steak and steamed crab legs, but I wanted to do something just a little more special. So I came up with this idea to top the steak with a crab sauce. The sauce is just a modified version of your basic French bechamel sauce (a roux with milk added), but with the crab and extra ingredients I added it turned out even better than I expected. Kristina agreed!

Normally I like to grill steak, as in the “Perfectly Grilled Filet Mignon” post, and I’m a year-round barbecuer…I don’t let cold temperatures stop me. But right now my kettle grill is buried in 3 feet of snow and ice, so I decided to cook the steaks indoors in my trusty cast-iron pan, as in my very first post, “Steak au Poivre“. Either method of cooking the steaks would be good for this recipe, but it is a little simpler logistics-wise to cook the steaks and make the sauce together on the same stove.

Ingredients:

Steaks

• 2 Filet Mignon cuts of steak
• Coarse sea salt or Kosher salt
• Coarse-ground black pepper
• 1 tablespoon of butter

Sauce

• 2 tablespoons butter
• 3-4 cloves or garlic
• 1 tablespoon flour
• 1 teaspoon leaves of fresh thyme (or 1/2 teaspoon dried thyme)
• 1 cup milk
• 1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese
• 1 tablespoon spicy brown mustard (optional?)
• Salt to taste
• Dash of cayenne pepper
• Crab from 2 lbs. of King Crab legs

Special Utensils

• Cast-iron skillet
• Meat thermometer

Serves 2

First, I got the most time-consuming part out of the way, separating the meat out of the King Crab legs. The King Crab meat really worked well with this recipe, but you could buy some fancy lump crab meat instead if you want to save time. I got probably about a pound of meat or a little less out of two pounds of crab legs, so if you use already cleaned crab meat use about a pound of it.

Now let’s prep the steaks. Pat them down with paper towels to get them as dry as possible, if need be. Add the coarse sea salt or kosher salt and the coarse-ground black pepper liberally to each side, as shown. By the way, the picture shows 4 filets– the two smaller ones were for the kids, who didn’t want and wouldn’t have appreciated the crab sauce. But if you wanted to make this recipe for 4, the amount of crab sauce in this recipe would probably be enough for 4 filets.

Now the sauce. This step you can either do before or during the time the steaks are cooking, depending on how good you are at multitasking. The steaks won’t take long, so you can make the sauce before the point of adding the crab meat, then cook the steaks, then gently reheat the sauce and add the crab meat when the finished steaks are resting. Or you can do the steaks and sauce at the same time and have it all come together at once if you’re a good juggler.

Heat up the two tablespoons of butter in a small saucepan at medium heat (hey, we’re actually using a saucepan to make a real sauce). Add the garlic, which has been very finely minced, and the thyme. When the garlic just starts to soften up, start adding the tablespoon of flour, a little at a time, stirring, until you get a nice pasty consistency, and stir until it just turns a sand-brown color. While making the roux, heat the cup of milk, either on the stove or in the microwave, then add it a little at a time while still stirring, always stirring, until you have a nice smooth sauce. Then add the grated Parmesan, again a little at a time until it’s mixed in nicely. Now add the tablespoon of spicy brown mustard if you wish. The sauce tasted really good at this point without mustard, but I thought it needed a little something extra, so I decided to add it. Another option would’ve been to add a little horseradish– I have a feeling that would’ve been even better, but sadly I had none on hand at the time. But the mustard was good. The dash of cayenne gave the sauce an extra bite. Add the crab to the sauce right before putting the meal together, and gently fold the crab meat into the sauce instead of mixing– we want to preserve the chunky lumps of delicious crab coated in the sauce, not break it up.

To cook the steaks, heat up your trusty cast-iron skillet on high heat, and melt the butter. Preheat your oven at 350 degrees. When the skillet is good and hot, put the steaks on and cook for a few minutes on each side, cooking to a nice dark-brown sear but not burning. When the steaks are nice and seared on each side, put them on a cookie sheet or similar, insert a meat thermometer in the biggest steak, and put in the oven until the steaks reach exactly 125 degrees for medium-rare (or 140 for medium, but as I’ve said before, I think anything over medium-rare is a crime against steak).

Let the steaks rest for 10 minutes or so, then top with the crab sauce. Serve with your vegetables of choice– I served these with some broccoli and a nice side of smashed garlic potatoes, which I’ll feature in another post one day. Enjoy!

This has been a pretty tough winter so far, here in Michigan… lots of snow; high temps struggling but often failing to get into double digits; low temps dropping below zero. Right this minute– Sunday, 3:30 pm, it’s 12 degrees out, with snow that’s been steadily falling all day long. So this is the perfect day to get a fire going and make some good old-fashioned cold-weather comfort food: beef stew, pretty much like mom used to make.

Ingredients:

• 1 to 1 1/2 lbs. stewing beef
• 4-5 carrots
• 3-4 ribs celery
• 1 large or 2 medium onions
• 4-5 cloves of garlic
• 4 large or 6-8 small potatoes
• 1 red pepper (optional)
• 3 tablespoons flour
• 2 tablespoons butter or vegetable oil
• Splash of red wine
• About 2 pints beef stock
• Black pepper to taste
• 1/2 teaspoon thyme
• 1/2 teaspoon oregano
• 2 bay leaves
• 1-2 Tablespoons Worcestershire sauce

Serves 4

Cut up your stewing beef into bite-sized chunks– around 1″ to 1 1/2″ cubes. Stewing beef is generally a cheaper cut that would be too tough cooked like a steak, but is perfect slow-cooked in a stew until it’s tender. Chuck steak is good for this. If you want to save a little time you can often find pre-cut meat labeled “stewing beef” at the store.

Cut the vegetables up. Dice the onions and mince the garlic into small pieces, but the rest of the veggies like carrots and celery, the more visible veggies, can be cut into more chunky pieces. I added a red pepper because I like the flavor, plus it adds some more vitamins to the stew, but I made this an optional ingredient because it wasn’t in mom’s stew.

Your chunks of beef need to be completely dry so they can be seared, so blot them down with some paper towel if you need to. This is important, because we want to brown the meat for flavor– not steam it.

Add the butter or oil to a large pot (big enough for the whole stew– this is one of those nice easy one-pot meals). Turn the heat on high. When it’s sizzling, add the meat, and give it a few minutes to get nice and browned on each side before turning each piece over to brown the whole surface of each piece.When the meat is browned, remove it and pour out any excess grease from the meat, leaving just a little bit. Add the chopped up vegetables and cook while stirring until the onions start to soften up a little.

Now add a nice generous splash of red wine and stir up the brown stuff on the bottom of the pan from the seared meat. Cook long enough to let the wine reduce some and cook off the alcohol (our kids are going to be eating the stew too). Add the beef stock, put the beef back in, and add all the seasonings at this point and bring to a simmer. Cook on a very slow simmer for 2-3 hours.

While the stew is simmering, wash and scrub the outside of the potatoes. Peel the potatoes if you want, but I leave the skins on because it adds more fiber, and I like the taste of potato skins (plus, it’s one less thing to do!). Cut the potatoes into bite-size pieces, about the same size as the beef. Add the potatoes in the last 1/2 hour of the cooking time– they don’t take too long. Stick a fork in a sample potato piece to see if it’s done.

When the potatoes are ready, mix the 3 tablespoons of flour with an equal amount of water, adding the water slowly, and constantly stirring to make sure you get a smooth paste without any lumps of dry flour. It should have the consistency of pancake batter. Slowly add the flour-water paste to the beef stew while stirring the stew until it thickens up just to a gravy-like consistency. Heat and stir a little longer to make sure the flour is well-mixed in with the stew and the consistency is right (add a little water if it gets too thick), and it’s ready.

Serving suggestion– serve with a nice chunk of crusty French-style bread to help mop up the “gravy”, preferably in front of a nice roaring fire if you have one. Enjoy!