Sláinte!

The time has come for corned beef and cabbage and all things green. But while the rest search for their inner nutty Irishman, this little leprechaun went on the hunt for an Irish pub that serves real Irish food.

Admittedly the Irish are not known for their fine cuisine. This must be why most of the local pubs I found, while they can pour a decent Guinness, don’t actually serve any legitimate Irish food. Adding the words “Celtic” or “emerald” to the name of a dish in order to make it Irish works just as well as adding green food coloring to a Budweiser.

Hunger, determination and the desire to not have to cook this week took us to Molly Darcy’s Irish Pub in Danbury. With any luck, at the end of a long drive we would find that pot of gold.

Ok, enough of the St. Patty’s Day clichés, let’s get down to it.

One thing Molly’s has is room, and lots of it. With two floors, a racetrack bar, stage, game room with pool table and foosball, patio and back bar, all in addition to the dining areas, there is enough space for everyone to find their own cozy corner. Miles of hardwood and possibly hundreds of old signs and photos remind every guest in every little nook that yes, you are indeed in a pub.

At our table, the overhead lamp flickered brighter and dimmer throughout the meal. While this was surely due to a bad connection with that particular circuit, we have it on authority from a true Irishman that this was actually an authentic touch, no matter how unintentional.

According to Adam’s coworker Paul, a Cork native, the electricity is rather unreliable throughout the country and one can never be sure when the lights will go out. We simply chalked it up to the antics of a mischievous gnome.

An Irish coffee with made-to-order whipped cream helped to ward off the chill of a rainy night while I skimmed the menu, skipping over American-sounding burgers and salads until I found what we had come for.

Adam picked the traditional lamb stew and I opted for a proper fry-up. For starters we ordered the whiskey wings, glazed with a sweet and tangy Tullamore Dew sauce. Maybe not the most traditional choice, I know, but they were made with Irish whiskey and I can never really say no to chicken wings.

Our appetizer arrived surprisingly fast and after the first bite it was apparent why. The wings were stone cold. Obviously made by mistake and left to die in the window, sadly they would have been delicious otherwise. The meat was juicy and fell easily from the bones and the sauce had just the right amount of zip to tingle your lips.

Thankfully our entrees were served piping hot; steam still rose from the bowl of thick stew when it arrived at the table.

Large chunks of potato and carrot along with tender pieces of lamb and lots of sage and parley made this savory stew a hearty meal.


I think it is safe to say that Adam liked it.


My Irish breakfast was also a meal to be conquered. Two fried eggs with bangers (large Irish sausages), rashers (like a cross between ham and bacon, sliced thick and grilled), black and white pudding, chips, grilled tomato, baked beans and toast, it was truly a smorgasbord of meat that shamed my former vegetarian ways.



The beans, an English addition to the traditional Irish fry-up, tasted too much of tomato sauce for my liking and the chips had most likely started the day frozen, but I still had plenty on my plate to keep me busy.

For those of you who don’t know what black pudding is, it’s a sausage made by cooking pig or cow blood until it is thick enough to congeal when it is cooled. The blood is then mixed with various fillers such as meat, fat, suet, and grain, typically barley or oatmeal. White pudding is the same as black, although sans blood and therefore the deep red color.

The puddings were served sliced and fried until lightly crisp and were actually quite tasty for being such a gross concept. Even Adam was pleasantly surprised, if not a little hesitant.

The rasher, however, with a deliciously smoky flavor, turned out to be my favorite foreign meat.

While glancing over the dessert menu I asked our waiter, who also seemed to be the bartender for our dinning area, if they carried John Powers Irish Whiskey. The following exchange occurred:

“We do have Powers.

”Great. I'll take a snifter.”

“A what?”

“A snifter.”

“A stifter?”

“No, Powers, neat, in a snifter.”

(Pause) “A what?”

*sigh*


After dropping off our dessert, a red velvet cake with a creamy cheese frosting, and conferring with a few coworkers as to what exactly it was that the crazy lady over at table 14 had asked for, the waiter thankfully delivered my drink exactly as I had ordered it.

When reading the menu description of the red velvet cake, (admittedly not an Irish selection either but we just wanted a little something sweet) I assumed the frosting involved cream cheese. A few startling bites revealed not a sweet cream flavor as we had expected, but a pungent, sharp, cheddar-like taste instead. Although not necessarily bad, the cake would have been much improved if a little more sweetness had been added to tone down this shocking quality.

All in all at least we can say we tried blood pudding and we lived to tell the tale. Next St. Patty’s Day, however, I might just stay closer to home, have a corned beef sandwich and call it a day.

May those that love us, love us.
And those that don’t love us,
May God turn their hearts.
And if he doesn’t turn their hearts,
May he turn their ankles,
So we’ll know them by their limping.

Sugaring Season

March is maple sugar season in New England and beyond so what better way to spend a sunny, springy day than with a drive up north to Gould’s Maple Sugarhouse in Shelburne, Massachusetts

It’s a quiet day on the Mohawk Trail and the air around the farmhouse is crisp and faintly sweet as the smoke from the boiler rises into the morning sunshine. Gould’s, in the maple business for six generations, is usually mobbed during peak sugaring season with families sampling soft-serve maple ice cream and maple sugar candies. Today, however, we lucked out and were able to get a sun-drenched table with a beautiful view of the mountains beyond as soon as we walked into the upstairs restaurant.

Serving a modest breakfast and lunch, Gould’s of course encourages that you douse everything with homemade maple syrup.

Crispy corn fritters and a Belgian waffle topped with ice cream were a great way to start to a lazy day with nothing to do and no where to be.

Our Neighbors to the North

The winter Olympics may be over, but we haven’t forgotten about our curling, hockey dominating, Dudley Do-Right neighbors to the North just yet. That’s right, Canada ay was the focus of our latest feast of the week.

Aside from maple syrup and Canadian bacon, however, what would be considered your typical Canadian fare? To find out, I consulted my Québécois-turned-New Englander friend Tracy who graciously, and with the help of her grandmother, provided the food for this week’s Canadian grub fest.

First up was a rural Quebec original, first concocted in the 1950s. Today many restaurants and food chains throughout the country offer their own versions of the greasy, calorically rich dish known as poutine.


Also called disco fries in the Northern U.S., poutine consists of French fries topped with cheese curds, typically Frommage Beaucronne, and a light chicken or veal gravy.

Originally considered “low-food” by urban French-Canadians, poutine is now jokingly thought of by some to be the national food of Canada.

Next we savored another Quebec creation, tourtière. A meat pie typically made with beef, pork and veal and often enjoyed around the holidays, tourtière is another one of those dishes that varies greatly depending seasonal ingredients and individual family traditions.


Both the three-meat pie, which had a hint of cinnamon, and the saucy cheese fries were instant hits with Mr. Meat and Potatoes (go figure) and although I couldn’t help but feel a little sinful, I went back for a second helping of tourtière before polishing off the rest of the poutine.

For dessert we sipped a 2007 Jackson Triggs Vidal Icewine, since Canada is the world’s largest producer of Icewine after all. Golden hued with honeyed fruit flavors and a silky finish, after a heavy meal it was all the dessert we needed.

This week Canada takes home a gold medal for deliciousness, but where my waistline is concerned, they come in dead last.

Conch and the Littlest Tortilla

An old school pal of mine, and we’re going back to middle school/high school days here, recently came back from a two-year stint in Honduras with the Peace Corps. The first thing I wanted to know about her experience, of course, was how was the food?

Surprisingly nothing to write home about, chum Jeni explained, although she did find she had a few favorites.

This week, since it happens to coincide with her leap-day birthday, our traveling kitchen took us on a journey to Central America in search of some tasty Honduran food.

According to Jeni, one of her top picks was the Honduran fried chicken. Think, crispy and absolutely addictive, it was a mystery to her just what made it so darn good. Marinated in a curry blend, among other spices, and tossed in corn flour, the chicken is usually fried in shortening. Sounds good to me, although Jeni insists there must have been some other magical ingredient that made this fried chicken completely irresistible.

Another of Jeni’s favorites was the baleadas, one of the most popular foods in Honduras. Originating in the town of La Ceiba, a simple baleada is a thick flour tortilla spread with mashed red silk beans and topped with Latin soured cream and salty cheese and folded in half. Baleadas might also be filled with scrambled eggs, meat, avocado and plantains, although the ones that Jeni filled up on contained pickled jalapeños and onions.

On the other end of the spectrum, Jeni found nances, a regional fruit that looks like a yellow cranberry, to be “totally gross” and also did not much care for mondongo, or tripe. Used in soups that were themselves quite tasty, Jeni found the mondongo had a “vile texture” that she did not at all enjoy.

With these tips in mind, and after some investigating of my own, I planned a light and simple Honduran menu of conch ceviche and pork baleadas on homemade tortillas.


Popular in Latin and Central America, I was surprised to actually find conch at a local seafood market. After watching a video about how to de-shell and clean our little sea snail buddies, we found that most of the work had already been done for us. Although at first the conches hardly looked appetizing, once we had trimmed off the skin, they looked less like slimy aliens.

Diced and tossed with red pepper, bell pepper, onion, lots of fresh cilantro and lime juice, we refrigerated the conch for a few hours to allow the citric acid to break down the meat proteins.

Once the ceviche had properly marinated, I got to work on hand making the tortillas. Seeing as masa dough is so easy to make (just add water), I opted for corn tortillas instead of flour.

Although I’ve seen it done a dozen times, making tortillas by hand is not as easy as it looks. No matter what I did, I could not form a tortilla much bigger than my hand. After much frustration and hungry tummy rumblings, I decided to just stick with cooking the world’s smallest tortillas.

Once they were warmed all the way through, we filled our mini-tillas with black refried beans, ground seasoned pork, chipotle cheddar cheese and fresh avocado.

Since baleadas are such a flexible dish, open to many creative interpretations, I find they’re hard not to like. Each one you have can be different from the last. Unfortunately for Adam, however, he apparently has never liked the baleadas staple mashed beans.

The ceviche was light and refreshing with firm and crisp textures working as well together as the lime zip and red pepper kick. I liked heaping it on top of the thick, warm, if not pitifully small tortillas.

I can always tell when Adam likes a dish, if it’s gone before anyone else has had a chance to raise a fork, that’s a pretty good indication. Conversely, when he has a post-meal snack it’s usually a sign that he didn’t like something. Well Jeni, evident by the evening trip out for a candy bar, I guess Adam is with you on this one, not much to write home about.