8 Alcohol-Absorbing Recipes to Help You Survive St. Patrick’s Day

A little bit of planning (and some carefully planned cooking projects), and you might even survive until Monday. Don’t worry; you can thank me later.

1. Corned Beef Hash
“Have a great corned beef hash just once in your life, and you’ll find yourself forever chasing the experience, a journey that ultimately ends when you find yourself eating the canned stuff at three in the morning in a diner in New Jersey. Our version has little in common with the mushy pink canned stuff; instead, big chunks of shredded corned beef and actually recognizable vegetables make for a great way to use up the leftovers from a boiled dinner, and make a great light supper for Springtime.”

2. Our Favorite Beef Stew
“It’s hearty, satisfying, and will make your kitchen smell fantastic for days. Make it once, and you won’t need a recipe again.”

3. Basque Lamb Soup
“Make it yourself and Basque in its glory. Sorry. No, I’m not sorry.”

4. Brown Ale and Cheddar Soup
“Save this supper for a night where your only major obligation is to continue the basic intake of oxygen and the expulsion of carbon dioxide from your bloated lungs and maybe, just maybe, to make sure “Teen Mom 2″ is set to be DVR’d. Anything more involved than that may be entirely too ambitious.”

5. Champ and Bangers
“I have about as much fondness for green beer as I do for getting punched in the mouth by a belligerent Southie, so for us, St. Patrick’s Day has traditionally been more about a quiet pint of Guinness and some traditional cooking, than it has been about wearing a novelty kilt and throwing up in a city trash can in broad daylight.”

6. Yankee Pot Roast
“There’s something immensely reassuring about taking big, cheap, tough cuts of meat, and, whether through slowly smoking or in this case, through braising, turning them into the moistest, most flavorful, most tender roasts ever to fall apart under the lightest pressure from a dinner fork.”

7. Irish Corned Beef and Cabbage
“Once you have settled on the idea that the days of drinking pale green tinted beer until you lose vision in your right eye and wake up with a bloody nose are probably behind you, the biggest remaining component of a St. Patrick’s Day celebration is the food. This year, we tackled a traditional corned beef and cabbage, or a “boiled dinner,” as it is called in New England. To me, a boiled dinner is really just a necessary stop along the path from “not eating anything” to “eating leftover corned beef hash with runny eggs,” where eating a few pieces of boiled cabbage is a necessary part of the process. To make it more interesting, I decided to corn my own beef; a process of pickling a flat cut of beef brisket in a salt water and brown sugar brine for a few days before cooking. It’s a great way to annoy your significant other, since the wet curing process takes 7-8 days and renders much of the refrigerator unusable, since most of the space normally reserved for things like vegetables is instead taken up by a five or six pound slab of slowly greying beef.”

8. Black Magic Chocolate Cake
“Nothing complicated or fancy, just damn fine cake that keeps the kids off the street. And I support that. I wanted to frost it with minty-ness, because mint chocolate chip is my favorite ice cream, a classic combination endorsed by me, the Girl Scouts of America, Keibler Elves, Andes Candies, and many other illustrious organizations.”

BONUS! Irish Car Bomb Cupcakes
“I‘ve never been much of a “novelty” drinker; that is, I will choose a glass of whiskey with a cube of ice over some mixologist’s overwrought ginger-infused absinthe concoction any day. Because I went to college, though, where $40,000 in student loans taught me mostly how to open a beer bottle with a cigarette lighter, I make an exception for the “Irish Car Bomb.” It’s a staple among crowds of rookie drinkers: Drop a shot glass filled with equal parts Irish whiskey and Baileys Irish Cream into a pint glass filled 3/4 of the way with Guinness draught beer. When the liquor hits the beer, all hell breaks loose, the drink immediately begins to overflow, curdle and explode, and you tilt the whole mess back in a few big gulps, the foamy mixture of beer and booze sliding easily (and quickly!) down your throat and directly onto your liver.”

Tagged as: st. patrick's day

About the Author: Malcolm Bedell

My first memories of cooking start in Maine at six years old, when I wore a yellow rainslicker to avoid getting spattered by the bacon I was frying in a skillet. My interest in both Mexican cooking and recreating classic New England dishes from scratch developed while living in Mexico, on a steady diet of pork and habanero peppers. You can see more of my writing and photography online on Serious Eats, the Huffington Post, BlogHer, and Foodista, as well as in print for Downeast, Indulge, and Cigar Snob magazines.