Three Beautiful Things 03-13-2023: Preparing Potted Chicken, Preparing Spring Cabbage, Irish Family Dinner at Christy's

 1. My first assignment for tonight's St. Patrick's Day Eve Eve Eve Eve dinner was to make a container of potted meat. An older way of storing, say, leftover chicken or fish or ham was to pound it with an equal amount of butter, season it with nutmeg or mace along with salt and pepper, top it with clarified butter and store it. The recipe Christ gave me updated this approach. I melted a stick of unsalted butter in a Dutch oven and added the meat of a small rotisserie chicken from Yoke's, stirred up the chicken so the butter covered it, and put the buttered chicken in our food processor along with allspice (a sub for mace) and salt and pepper. 

I ran the food processor for just about 10-15 seconds, I'd say, so that the paste I made was rough.

I put it in a container, topped it with three tablespoons of melted butter, refrigerated it, and later I put crackers in a bowl. The idea was to spread the potted chicken on a cracker. 

2. Christy also assigned me to fix a mess of spring cabbage, which I couldn't really do properly because we don't have Savoy cabbage in our stores, but I made a head of cabbage work along with chopped kale. 

All I had to do was melt butter in the Dutch oven, combine the kale and the butter, add a cup of water, and bring the water to a boil. Then I turned down the heat, put the lid on the Dutch oven, and cooked the kale until tender, about 7 minutes or so. Then I added the chopped cabbage, put the lid back on, and cooked it until tender, not mushy, and added salt. I left it to each person to pepper their own cabbage. 

3. Carol, Paul, Debbie, and I piled into Christy's refurnished, roomier living room for our St. Patrick's Eve Eve Eve Eve family dinner. Paul was in charge of cocktails and brought each of us a bottle of Guiness. We could drink it straight from the bottle or mix it with Carol's cranberry liqueur or with Prosecco.  These cocktail ideas, as well as every course of our dinner, came from David Bower's Real Irish Food, a cookbook of Christy's. 

I love stouts blended with other beers or ciders and thoroughly enjoyed my two glasses of Guiness blended with cranberry liqueur.

Christy made a Cottage Pie for the main dish and explained to us that a Cottage Pie uses ground beef and a Shepherd's Pie features ground lamb. 

The Cottage Pie was superb and my spring cabbage side dish and Carol's wheat soda bread complimented the pie. 

Christy made a terrific dessert, called Everyday Fruitcake. It's nothing like holiday fruitcake, and she served it with either an Irish coffee or a shot or so of Jameson's over ice. I was euphoric that Christy made Jameson's available and enjoyed the whiskey and the way it paired with the fruit cake. 

We had a lot to talk about tonight, including the upcoming NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament and Christy told us all about the Celebration of Life she attended for Joan Dorendorf, a celebration in Post Falls attended by numerous people connected to Kellogg, Idaho.