This year it was my turn to do St. Patty’s Day. Since I am the only one in my family who can cook and my mom was at work the entire day I had to do the dinner for 15 entirely by myself. But I was up for the challenge.
My mom and I had borrowed her bosses Restaurant Depot card and got a chance to go over the weekend where we came across two huge boxes of corned beef. Not sure how large they were we bought two. We later realized it was way to much meat. This is one of the two.
I ended up cutting it one in half and we still had left overs, and now about a dozen pounds of raw corned beef.
Thankfully we have plenty of pots left over from the restaurant, along with six gas burners, so finding space to cook all the food was no problem. After cooking for almost 6 hours the above behemoth turned into this.
Delicious cooked corned beef.
Paired with the obvious cabbage and potatoes.
A lovely completed plate.
Prior to the main course I made appetizers.
During the power outage I discovered a container of frozen clam stuffing which now had to be eaten. Usually we put the stuffing into clam shells, which I did for some, but always one to challenge the normal I put the rest inside mushrooms.
Seafood and fungi! Yum!
For the other appetizer I not only made something I have never made before but something I only had for the first time this summer; escargot! Another discovery at the Restaurant Depot. We bought them with no idea of what to do with them. But we dug a recipe out and called up my uncle to figure out how to cook them and it worked!
For missing a few ingredients, not having the right containers to cook them in, and trying to cut a restaurant scale recipe into a fifth they turned out great. A tad bit salty, should have used unsalted butter in hindsight. But they were great and loved by most, those that would try them, and I ended up eating to many appetizers, taking up room for corned beef and cabbage.
My first solo massive dinner was a great success. I was amazed I didn’t fuck it up. I cannot think of even one mistake I made. Look at that I’m getting better.
