A Morsel of St. Patty's Day

First off, Happy St. Patrick's Day!  Or...as Paul says..Happy St. Paddy's Day.  I tried to tell him it is Patty like Patrick - but he assured me it is Paddy as is Pádraig.  Touché!

I don't remember if we wrote about it on here or not, but last year we tried to go authentic Irish with soda bread and brisket.  The soda bread (recipe compliments of Mary Vaca!) was great.  The brisket was pretty good - but probably still the most expensive piece of meat we've ever bought.

So this year we are taking a slightly different angle.  We're saving the soda bread for the weekend when we'll be home.  And we're skipping the brisket, hoping that the Irish pub we're going to tonight has good Irish food.  If not, we'll go to a different butcher and have brisket with our soda bread this weekend.

Instead - I made a few Irish-esque treats for work.  First, to be culturally sensitive to our Muslim colleagues who don't drink, I made shamrock sugar cookies with green frosting.  They were delicious!  Although, like other attempts to be culturally sensitive, I found that many (not all) of the Muslim colleagues preferred the second treat:  mini-chocolate Guinness (stout) cupcakes with Bailey's Irish cream frosting.  Delicious little bite-size treats! 

Finally - the best of all...a Chocolate Guinness Stout Cupcake (full-sized) with Bailey's Irish Cream Frosting and....drum roll.....a Chocolate Whiskey Ganache filling!  Hmm!  I think there are enough calories in this to count for a weekend's worth of treats!  The top picture was sent from my phone to let my friend know to come grab one.  And then I forgot to take a picture until I was half-way done with mine.  Oops.

I used to wonder why my roommate made treats to give away at work and now I know....first, if you keep them at home (which we've done with 2 cakes now) you start to notice that your stomach doesn't feel so flat in the morning.  :(  But more importantly - you should see the looks on people's faces when they try them!  The big surprise in these treats (to me) was the reaction to the cookies.  Three or four colleagues said they were only going to break off a small piece...and then came back for the rest of their cookie.  Another three colleagues asked for the recipe!  Another said I should be selling these cookies!  Another said it was the best cookie they'd had..."when is the next holiday!?!" 

Maybe 25% of what they said is just them trying to make me feel good...but I can tell when you are just trying to make me feel good and when you really do like my food. 

If I may pat myself on the back for a moment - I made the cookie cutter from scratch!  And I didn't even slice open any fingers in the process.  Also - the cookies really did taste like those ones you buy at the store that have the powder on the bottom and are super super soft and thick.  And...do you see the swirls in the frosting on the cupcakes?  Finally got that right!  But...so you know that I don't think I'm all that and a box chocolates...it took me three tries to get the right shape for the cookie cutter...and one batch of frosting just slithered its way off the cupcake...and the cookies probably should have been thicker.  (Ha!  No one even touched the box of thin mints on my desk - do you think that means I can have them all!?)

The answer to when the next holiday is?  Tomorrow!  It's Purim!

On Saturday we headed north to Mt. Gilboa which lies right on the border of northern Palestine and Israel.  Paul and I, and Dave and Emily set off at the crack of noon in search of Shirsh Zallouh, also known as Ferula hermonis Boiss…wild mushrooms!

A group from the Embassy went about 3 weeks ago.  We hoped to mimic their trip, simply put:  find and collect mushrooms, sauté them with onions, and enjoy with a great bottle of wine.

This is what we were looking for...not what we found.

The mission was….............a complete failure. 

We got to the site (or what we thought was the site – Mistake #1) at about 130pm.  We were all hungry so we had our gourmet picnic lunch before the hunt.  (It was delicious and a lot of fun.  We had roasted red pepper tapenade, caramelized onions, Jerusalem bread, goat cheese, fresh dates and a bottle of Spanish rioja!)  The guide said to take a basket (like little red riding hood) to put the mushrooms in so the dirt and spores fall back to the ground.  Well we aren’t professionals or anything like that – so Dave carried a reusable grocery bag and Paul has a glow-in-the-dark pumpkin bucket.  Haha.  We spread out and searched the field, all four of us staring at our feet looking for fennel.  Yes, fennel.  Wild fennel.  (These mushrooms grow ONLY at the base of wild fennel plants.)  Mistake #2 – you shouldn’t be looking down for wild fennel.  It is about 5 feet high with bright yellow buds on top and wispy leaves all around.  You can’t miss it.  So if we didn’t see it in the field in the first 5 seconds we should have moved on.  It was like the hunting for sunshine in a cave.

We decided to drive a little further up the road and 5 minutes away Emily spotted a fennel plant (and remembered what they looked like.  The rest of us were basing our search on a google image displayed on a BlackBerry with no concept of scale.).  We quickly parked the car and ran into the field with renewed spirits!  No mushrooms.  This was the last weekend of the season and the Bedouins had probably already been through to collect these mushrooms close to the road…so we pressed onwards into the field.

Israel is usually very brown and dry and dead – but this is winter, or the rainy season, so things are as green as they get right now.  The fields were knee high with random weeds and grasses, some of them prickly, but despite this challenge (and my fear of snakes or other small creatures crawling in the grass where I wouldn’t see them) we persevered.  Emily and Dave and I found an orange tree and – happy to have some fruit to show for our 2 hours of efforts – we picked 6 or 7 oranges.  Mistake #3 – you should try one before you pick the next 6.  There are more varieties than we see in the grocery store and this isn’t Florida.  These were sour like lemons with really tough peels and lots of strings and seeds.

Anyway…no mushrooms in this field so we pressed on to a hill covered in fennel.  Rewind – the fennel in this field was only as tall as the other brush, so you couldn’t see it until you were on top of it.  So we press on.  To conquer this hill which we are sure will have mushrooms, we split up and scour the base of every fennel plant we can. 

Nada.  Nilch.  We are losers.  In my mind, the Bedouins won.  As we turn to leave, giving up our hopes of wild mushrooms, Paul yells out “I found one!”  (So it wasn’t a failure?!)  No…still a failure.  The mushroom was big…and slimy and wilting and full of little bugs. 

Okay…on a more positive note.  The mushroom part was a failure, but we had a great lunch!  It was a lot of fun and now we know where to go and what to look for next year.  And we know that we have to go at the beginning of the season.  The best part – as we were leaving it was close to sunset (but not yet dinner time) and a friend had told us of this great restaurant which happened to be right across the street from our little field.  We thought we’d try it out. 

We walked into this cute cabin with low ceilings and wood all around (which is odd for Israel given the general lack of trees.  Most construction is done with cement.).  After about 10 minutes they seated us outside on the patio, overlooking the valley.  Before they served the food, the sun set.  Beautiful!  The waiter put down a large placemat on our wood table and in English it explained how they use local food that is in season and try to let the flavors of the food shine (not covering them up with sweeteners or sauces) – perfect!  Despite not finding mushrooms, it was a very fun day filled with delicious rich food!  I can’t wait until next year when we can do it again…AND find mushrooms!