St. Paddy's

My lack of a camera (I have this theory that mine is broken, but have yet to actually replace the batteries and check to be sure) prevents these little updates from being as interesting as they should, but oh well. Monday night was the second meeting of the Dirty Apron Kitchen Club, the cooking club that my friends and I have, er, cooked up. I insisted that we had to have corned beef for St. Patrick's Day, and boy, did we. Dan spent the afternoon (he was off work, having used his floating holiday to celebrate his Irishness) boiling the corned beef to awesome levels of tender flakiness. I got home slightly early in time to frost Guinness chocolate cupcakes (with green sprinkles!) and mix up some soda bread muffins with dill. The menu in the end was as you'd expect: corned beef, cabbage, carrots and red potatoes, soda bread muffins, and for our one friend who is pescatarian for Lent, seared salmon with caper-raisin butter on top. (So good!) The meal was accompanied by lots of Guinness and a few Irish Car Bombs, and someone was thoughtful enough to bring Irish music, so we had a pretty great time. For fourteen people including all the booze it was only about $7 a person, proving once again that cooking for yourself is a great idea. I also had the opportunity to put my food processor to work. I'd never actually used it before despite borrowing it from my parents more than a year ago! (Don' worry, though, Becca used it once.) It's remarkably easy to use and clean up after, and I'm feeling the cooking urge after all the baking and blending I did.

Generally speaking cooking seems to be in vogue as of late. My friends and I have started a "brunch club" cooking brunch on weekends. We've only met three times, and I missed the second time because I was in LA, but we've had great success. The first time we just had scrambled eggs (omelets were a bust) with tater tots (Laurel's request), bacon, and English muffins with jam. The second time I went (third time total) we made really tasty French toast, and one of our friends also made an onion, tomato and cheese tart as well as a sort of caprese salad with avocados. In addition to that Justin and I have been cooking dinner more frequently on weekends, which is really soothing to me. I miss cooking so much! Saturday we made steak, with chimichurri, mashed potatoes and a wilted spinach-and-grape-tomato side dish. I am craving that spinach dish all over again... it was surprisingly good given sometimes spinach can be kind of dusty and strange tasting when cooked.

Now back to ogling recipes at work...