Osso Buko - Irish Cuisine By Way of Preston Street

For this upcoming St. Patrick's Day, I've decided to make a dish from one of my favourite cookbooks, "The 4-Hour Chef ". It takes two Irish staples, lamb and carrots, combined with a savory Italian flavour. I'm sure there are some who would take offense at that combination, and hopefully, it's because the recipe doesn't use the traditional veal. If it's for another reason, tough. You're missing out on a great dish that practically impossible to mess up.


Ingredients

4 lamb shanks, about 340 g each
1 bag carrots
1 can whole San Marzano tomatoes
5 garlic cloves, or 10-15 g garlic powder
250 mL dry white wine (about a third of a bottle; try not to use anything too sweet)
30 mL extra-virgin olive oil
salt and pepper

1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (180°C). Thaw out the frozen lamb shanks, and peel and chop the carrots. Arrange the carrots in a pot, preferably a Dutch oven, and place the lamb shanks on top of them.
2. Open the can of tomatoes, and squish the tomatoes. Add them to the pot, then add the garlic. Drizzle everything with the olive oil, and pour enough of the wine to cover half to three-quarters of the meat - do not cover the meat completely, as you are braising the meat.
3. Season with salt and pepper. Cover the pot and cook for two hours.
4. Serve with either your favourite red wine or with a pint of Guinness.

St. Patrick's Day with Many Tasty Returns

Special guest blogger: my wife, and the baker of the Franklin household,  Xanklin73

If the way to someone's heart is through their stomach, wouldn't a sample of its special dishes tell you something about the country that it comes from? That was the question that Team Franklin decided to explore in our latest set of informal cooking challenges. Since we're not jetting off on any international culinary expeditions right now, we decided to use our kitchen as a backdrop and source all of our recipes on the Internet. Thinking less about making something "authentic" than making something that's just "fun", we launched into this with gusto last week.

Home cooking -- and especially baking -- have become huge stress-relievers for me lately. As a perfectionist-modern-feminist-turned-web-freelancer-slash-mommy-on-leave-from-her-office-job (you get the idea), there can be too much happening and too little time in which to handle everything. And spare time? Not a chance.  That said, home cooking has offered me an unexpectedly still oasis to creatively problem-solve while getting food on the plate for the people I care most about. It's the very ultimate in mutli-tasking, so I will call that a win. Spending time in my "oasis",  I've loved rediscovering vintage cookbooks that help me learn terms and techniques that used to be considered basic decades ago. And I love the challenge that comes from moving from one project to another and making the tools I have work for me.

Buoyed by such great programming like "Chopped" and "Top Chef", my husband and I have both discovered that we both really like expressing our creativity through cooking. We've discovered that it is infinitely more satisfying to try or improvise a new dish until we can do it well and make it our own than simply selecting the dish from a menu somewhere. And what better incentive to excel than to cook for people that you love?

Last week, I experimented with an eggless recipe for Parkin (a ginger cake or gingerbread from Northern England). My biggest discovery? Team Franklin really, really hates molasses. Though the recipe wasn't a favorite, I really loved the weight of history behind it -- origins of this dessert possibly stretching back into England's "Gunpowder Plot" of 1605 or even earlier into Viking times. A pretty impressive feat for what's essentially a one-bowl dessert. Here's a great Parkin recipe that serves up both the history and the "how-to" , similar to recipe I tried, this version includes one egg.  

In honour of St. Patrick's Day, we've tackled one Irish dish in the morning and planned another for supper. Irish Soda bread was bumped till next year in favour of something with a bit of sweetness. I found a wonderfully understated Irish tea cake recipe  that I baked that morning. I have no idea if it's authentically Irish but I still loved it. It's basically a simple butter cake sprinkled with confectioners sugar. We ate it while it was still warm from the oven, slightly more warm than our breakfast drinks .  What I liked most was that this recipe was not too sweet and presented with a nice delicate crumb. Once this cake made it to the plate, I found it difficult to stop eating -- especially after whipped cream and strawberries were added. 

With many tasty returns,

Mrs. Franklin