Thursday, March 31, 2022

Corned Beef and Cabbage in a Slow Cooker @LucyBurdette


LUCY BURDETTEAs promised, I did make my corned beef and cabbage dish for St. Patrick’s Day. It turned out wonderfully, though as salty and fatty as it is, I still feel that once a year is enough for this dish. But you are welcome to make this any time of year. Or else save it for next March!

Ingredients




One large red onion

Three leeks

1 3.5 to 4 pound corned beef with seasoning packet

One bottle of Guinness beer

3 to 4 stalks celery with leaves

Seven or so carrots

10 to 12 small potatoes

One head green cabbage




I chose to make my dish in the slow cooker so I wouldn’t be fussing with it all day with company in the house. The whole dish took about eight hours cooking on low. I did roast the cabbage separately and then add it to the top of the cooker to steam at the end, because it wouldn’t fit!


Slice the red onion, dice the well cleaned leeks. Peel the carrots and celery and cut into 2 inch chunks. Wash and quarter the potatoes. Remove the outer leaves of the cabbage and cut it into quarters or eighths, leaving the core attached.


If you have a browning feature in your cooker, use it to brown both sides of the beef. Remove it from the pot.




Layer the sliced red onion and the chopped leeks on the bottom, and then return the beef to the pot. 



Then turn the setting to low, and add the beer, the spices, and cook for four hours. 





At that point, add the carrots and potatoes and celery. Cook for four more hours on low. When there are two hours remaining, add the cabbage if you can fit it, otherwise roast it in the oven at 400 for 40 minutes. Trim the fat off the beef and slice it thinly.




Serve with lots of spicy mustard, plus Irish soda bread and a green salad!


We also served black and tans, a combination of ale and Guinness. Here’s how you make it:






And here's a little snippet of what's shaping up to be the ending of Key West food critic mystery #13: 


Nine people at a dinner table on our deck definitely set a record for our houseboat. James and Frank had followed us home in another Uber, shed their winter coats, and brought over Miss Gloria’s two extra folding chairs. The corned beef and cabbage dinner that had been simmering all day was ample enough that if we’d had to tackle it alone, Nathan and I would have been eating leftovers for a month. I’d had enough time to whip up my killer Irish lemon pie, my mother and Sam were bringing salad and their freshly-baked Irish soda bread, and Nathan had stopped at Key West Cakes to pick up a dozen cookies cut in the shapes of shamrocks and leprechauns and sprinkled with bilious green sugar. No one would go hungry. It was so wonderful to have relatives whom I loved spending time with and who loved to cook and entertain. 




A DISH TO DIE FOR, #12 in the Key West food critic mystery series, will be out on August 9, but is now available for preorder wherever books are sold!

About A Dish to Die For:

Peace and quiet are hard to find in bustling Key West, so Hayley Snow, food critic for Key Zest magazine, is taking the afternoon off for a tranquil lunch with a friend outside of town. As they are enjoying the wild beach and the lunch, she realizes that her husband Nathan’s dog, Ziggy, has disappeared. She follows his barking, to find him furiously digging at a shallow grave with a man’s body in it. Davis Jager, a local birdwatcher, identifies him as GG Garcia, a rabble-rousing Key West local and developer. Garcia was famous for over-development on the fragile Keys, womanizing, and refusing to follow city rules—so it’s no wonder he had a few enemies.

 When Davis is attacked in the parking lot of a local restaurant after talking to Hayley and her dear friend, the octogenarian Miss Gloria, Hayley is slowly but surely drawn into the case. Hayley’s mother, Janet, has been hired to cater GG’s memorial service reception at the local Woman’s Club, using recipes from their vintage Key West cookbook—and Hayley and Miss Gloria sign on to work with her, hoping to cook up some clues by observing the mourners.

But the real clues appear when Hayley begins to study the old cookbook, as whispers of old secrets come to life, dragging the past into the present—with murderous results.

6 comments:

  1. Is the salt inherent in the corning process? Can it be reduced by soaking the beef before cooking?
    It's awfully tasty stuff to have to eat only once per year.

    "13.5 to 4 pound corned beef with seasoning packet" I think we need a space between the 1 and 3.5.

    "Remove the outer leaves of the cabbage and cut it into quarters or eights, leaving the route attached." Is the cabbage going on the road (route)?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Take another look! Recipe states "cut it into quarters or eighths, leaving the core attached."

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    2. I fixed after Libby's eagle eye spotted problems:)

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