A more ephemeral creation

Inspired by the menus of the Steampunk Cookery blog, for St. Patrick's day yesterday I decided to do a steampunk-style holiday meal: a made-from-scratch meal incorporating a number of different cultural culinary traditions into a Victorian-style course plan.

St. Patrick's Day is very much an immigrant holiday. Though celebrated in Ireland, there it's a literal holy day. In the U.S., it marks an entire day celebrating an immigrant culture that was once rejected. It celebrates through the unthinking use of really terrible stereotypes, mind you, and consequently bothers me, but I honor the spirit of it, at least.

M loves corned beef (which is multicultural in itself; it's a traditionally Jewish dish adopted as a bacon replacement), but we're waiting for it to go on sale as we do with most holiday foods, so I prepared the following:

I quartered, boiled and mashed with butter five pounds of small russet potatoes. Mashed potatoes are remarkably easy if you don't mind the skin; actually (cocktail party fact), a diet of milk and potatoes with the skin on provides all the nutrients necessary for human subsistence, the same as a diet of rice and beans.

Then, I made Swedish-style baked cardamom meatballs with a couple of Italian-style additions: torn fresh basil and extra garlic. These bake for thirty minutes, then are covered in sauce and baked for twenty more; I replaced the traditional sweet-savory brown gravy with a sauce inspired by the traditional Middle Eastern garlic-yogurt dressing for dishes like Turkish cacik. My version used thinned sour cream, garlic, paprika and some red pepper flakes.

I served the baked sauce and meatballs with sliced onions over a bed of the mashed potatoes. This was accented by a spinach, romaine and homegrown kale salad tossed in honey mustard dressing, plus my homemade wheat bread with butter (about which more next week). We replaced the traditional beer-or-whiskey with a pear cider.

The meal was a huge success, the five pounds (99 cents) of russet potatoes and one pound ($1.96) of ground beef yielded easily enough for four to six (we love our leftovers!), and I spent an hour concocting the recipes from five different online sources. They are now taking a proud place in my recipe box -- another old tradition that I am wholeheartedly adopting as my own.