Good morning, and Happy St. Patrick’s Day! For as long as I can remember, New York City has celebrated the holiday with corned beef and cabbage, green bagels and a River Shannon’s worth of viridian beer. Having traveled and eaten in Ireland over the years, including a maximally delicious trip just last month, I like to mark the day with a freshly baked loaf of crumbly Irish soda bread, spread thick with salty Irish butter.
I could happily make a meal of warm bread and good butter, but I realize that some people like to tackle more than one food group at a time. In such cases, David Tanis’s Irish stew would do wonderfully.
His minimalist take on the classic recipe relies on nothing more than nuggets of lamb with carrots, onions, potatoes and a single sprig of thyme, simmered in broth until everything but the thyme becomes meltingly tender. An uncluttered ingredient list shows each one at its best without distractions.
Featured Recipe
Irish Stew
As David writes, you can leave the broth thin and souplike (perfect for mopping up with bread, soda or otherwise), or thicken the sauce by adding a flour slurry or some barley, or by mashing up some of the potatoes already in the pot. Add roasted cabbage with lemon on the side, a slice of Yossy Arefi’s new fudgy chocolate Irish cream cake for dessert, a dram of Irish whiskey and sláinte! A bona fide St. Paddy’s Day dinner, no dyed beer or bagels needed.
You don’t have to be Irish to go green though. Dan Pelosi’s broccoli rabe pesto pasta is vivid-hued and deeply flavored, with a nutty, cheesy sauce made from blanched broccoli rabe. Save the leftover pesto for crostini, or dab it on a panful of roasted vegetables.
Salad is another great way to get your green on. Jerrelle Guy’s Parmesan-crusted salmon Caesar salad is the kind of hearty main-course salad that’s hard not to put on permanent rotation. To get maximum bang out of the easy Caesar dressing — which Jerrelle smartly makes from store-bought mayo and Asian fish sauce — she not only tosses the romaine with it, but also coats the salmon fillets with it to adhere the Parmesan shreds. That way, you get a snappy, frico-like crust after broiling your salmon.
Also sporting a crisp crust is Kay Chun’s chicken katsu. An ideal pairing of pounded chicken breasts and panko, these delicate cutlets have a golden exterior and juicy chicken within, served with a traditional clove- and ginger-scented tonkatsu sauce. To make this weeknight-friendly, Kay shallow-fries the cutlets instead of deep-frying, which means less waiting for the oil to heat. It makes cleanup easier, too — something to be grateful for any day of the week.
To read these and all the other thousands of spot-on recipes available at New York Times Cooking, you’ll want to subscribe (and thank you if you already do). For technical issues, send an email to cookingcare@nytimes.com; there’s someone there who can help. And I’m at hellomelissa@nytimes.com if you want to say hello.
That’s all for now. I’ll see you on Wednesday.
