Corned Beef For St. Patrick’s Day

While I have not had my ancestry checked, my understanding of it is that I have enough Irish blood to legitimately celebrate St. Patrick’s Day, but like many Americans, I would celebrate it anyway.

Interestingly, many of the traditions we celebrate with are not really from Ireland at all, such as eating corned beef and cabbage or drinking green beer which were both started in America.  Like Cinco De Mayo in Mexico, St. Patrick’s Day was a minor holiday until the Americans got a hold of it – a good reason to throw a party seems to be behind both celebrations in the USA.

Having said all of this, I really like corned beef and St. Patrick’s Day is a great reason to make sure we eat it at least once per year – it’s usually several times for us.  We’ve celebrated with various Irish meals over the years but it’s usually a meal of corned beef, cabbage, carrots, and potatoes all prepared in a slow cooker.

The problem with this meal has been that after we eat it, there is not enough meat left for our two favorites – Reuben sandwiches and corned beef hash, neither of which are Irish.  Be that as it may, I made a different plan for this year’s St. Paddy’s day meals – cook the corned beef the day before then make hash for breakfast and Reuben’s for supper and maybe have enough meat to do it again later.

After cooking, I removed the corned beef and allowed it to cool before dicing it small for the hash.  My original plan for the hash was to cook potatoes with the meat but I decided to save them for something else and use a partial bag of hash browns I discovered in the freezer.  This was my recipe.

1 Tbsp butter

½ cup onion, finely chopped

1 cup finely chopped, cooked corned beef

1 cup thawed hash browns

Salt and pepper

After cooking the hash, I topped it with a couple of fried eggs and mixed it all together for a delicious breakfast.

For supper, I sliced the corned beef fairly thin, piled it on some marble rye (rye bread was hard to find) with Tillamock Swiss cheese, good warmed up kraut from the local Amish, and homemade 1000 Island dressing then I buttered and grilled the sammies in a lidded skillet to get this.

The sandwiches were very good, as expected, and while the dishes were not Irish, I felt like we had celebrated St. Patrick’s Day well and I definitely enjoyed the food, however it took all of the meat but I think we may have another one in the freezer.

Photos can be enlarged by clicking on them and the blue words are links.

Have a great day and thanks for stopping by Almost Heaven South.

Larry

3/17/20 event date