A Trip to the Emerald Isle

A Map of the British Isles
Photo Courtesy of Earthweek.com

Of all the islands in the world, there are two that have always captured my attention and imagination. Together, these two land-forms, Ireland and Great Britain, make up what are called the British Isles. Unfortunately, I have few ties to the Isles. However, my family does have a cousin who lives in Scotland, and I have the bragging rights of having a Scottish clan name as my middle name. The whole feel of the three nations is, for lack of better words, awesome. A lot of the food that is prepared in any of the countries has roots in simple, medieval, cook-what-you-have time periods. If you remember my first blog, I mentioned that I love thick gravies. It seems that many of the pies and stews from the pubs across England and Ireland are loaded to the brim with thick gravy, a plethora of vegetables, and most importantly… drum roll please… steeeeaaaak! You can NEVER go wrong with steak!

The Crown & Anchor British Pub in Monterey, CA
Photo Courtesy of The Crown & Anchor British Pub

With that oh-so-important fact in mind, I decided to tackle a pan-seared steak with a sauce made of Irish whiskey, mustard, and cream. Initially, my mom had bought me an Irish cookbook that specializes in country cooking as well as pub food. Just as a little side note, there is a restaurant in Monterey that really grew my interest in pub food. I had conveniently left the book thirty minutes to the north at my mom’s office, so I had to use a recipe from the internet. Anyway, we chose to have a side known as Irish potato casserole, which is basically hash browns and eggs mixed together and baked with cheese on top. The meal sounded easy, and since the potatoes just needed prepping before finishing in the oven, the steak seemed like it would be easy to make. The idea was to cook the steaks in a pan, take them out and sauté shallots in the remaining grease before adding whiskey, mustard, cream, and worcestershire sauce, bringing the whole thing to a boil and letting the liquid reduce to a saucy consistency.

As usual, everything didn’t go as planned. The side, which were the Irish potatoes, called for
two to three cups of shredded potatoes. I am not totally experienced with knowing how many potatoes comes out to two cups, so I used a carton of instant hash browns. Next time I will just do what the recipe says for an added health-factor. Any way, in order to feed our family of six, I needed to triple the recipe, and the carton provided about six-and-a-half cups. Blah blah blah, skipping ahead… I start the steaks, and when the potatoes are supposed to be done, my mom punches a hole in the top of the cheese, and it is still soupy, so we put it back in (just F.Y.I., we had to repeat this process a few more times).

The Whisky Sauce

After we took the steaks out of the pan, I went along with the recipe for the sauce. Put the shallots into some melted butter in the steak pan, add whiskey and scrape up the bottom of the pan, add cream and mustard, boil down to sauce. While I was looking at the pan, however, something didn’t seem right. I looked at the steaks on the plate, and then I looked at the pan, back at the steaks and thought, “Wow, there is a lot of sauce for such small steaks.” And then reality hit me like a baseball bat hits the ball… I had tripled the sauce recipe as well! So now, instead of having just enough sauce for six steaks, we had enough sauce to go swimming in!

Now came the eating part. I must admit that I was pretty excited about the dinner. But after eating it, I knew that I could have done a little better. The potatoes were WAY too salty, but the steaks were cooked ok, and the sauce actually tasted pretty good, although the mustard flavor was pretty strong. Unfortunately, since we had only three large steaks cut in half, we couldn’t exactly have leftovers, aside from the potatoes, but no one really jumped at that idea. So now we had a bunch of sauce remaining with nothing else to put it on. What do we do with leftover sauce and no more steak? We pack it up and use it again!

Moving on to “Whiskey-Cream sauce: Take 2”. I had looked in the book to see what I needed to add. That was when I noticed that the actual recipe didn’t even have mustard! On top of all that, my parents had drank the remaining Irish whiskey, leaving me with using some of their good bourbon. It was kinda funny watching them get a little sad while handing me the bottle. Bourbon is not the same as Irish whiskey, as it is usually darker, and when cooked, it gets very sweet, and I added quite a bit. Then after adding extra shallots, mushrooms, and cream, I put in the rest of the other sauce.

This time, we ate everything over noodles. When I put it on the plate, it all looked really good, and the sauce looked really appetizing! But, I’m sure you have heard the saying, “Don’t judge a book by its cover.” Little did I know that the saying would apply to cooking just as well as it does to books and people. My first impression was that I could maybe get through it, but as I got farther into the meal, it got more and more unbearable. The whiskey flavor was waaay too evident. And it wasn't an “oh, there is whiskey in this.” It was more like “How much whiskey did you put it this?!” I believe that it was the type of whiskey, but there are other things that I could have done or could have added, so I don’t think that this dinner got a fair shot.

There are two morals to this story is that you really need to get down. The first is that a checklist is a very important part of a recipe. Some of you might be thinking that a recipe is just that, and in some ways it is. But if you have one recipe that needs doubling and one that doesn’t, you MUST have some method at hand to help you remember. The second is that if you attempt a recipe that doesn’t turn out good, don’t give up on it after one try. I have on many occasions tried a recipe that I messed up on, often times more than once. Think of cooking as science experiments. You don’t see what happens after one time, but you run the test multiple times to see if the results are consistent. Give a recipe at least three to four tries before you make your verdict.

Cook Often!

Marc