Book Review: Irish Pub Cooking

Book Review: Irish Pub Cooking

How should I write a book review for this cookbook?  Should I comment on the writing style, or the editorial remarks which invariably accompany each recipe?  Of course not.  I - or rather, we - grabbed the book and headed into the kitchen to try out some of the recipes.  The food will tell if this book deserves a spot in our library of cookbooks.  

I bought Irish Pub Cooking a couple of years ago, thinking it would be neat to try some Irish cooking, and then promptly forgot about it.  This past January I saw it on the bookshelf and started looking for alternatives to corned beef and cabbage for dinner on St. Patrick's Day.    

The subtitle for Irish Pub Cooking urges the reader to "Pull up a stool, sup a pint, and tuck into some delicious pub food."  What follows is a collection of real food rather than the snacks offered at the typical American bar and grill franchise.  There are no hot wings, sliders or quesadillas featured in this book.

The book has four chapters: one on appetizers, then entrées, followed by a chapter covering vegetables and sides, and the last on desserts and drinks.  We did not try any appetizer recipes for a couple of reasons.  One is that a lot of them contain seafood, and shellfish allergies run in our family.  Another reason is that these recipes would not have been sufficient for feeding the whole family.  Still, a lot of these recipes look very good.  There are recipes for soups, sandwiches, and things called 'tartlets' which look like they should be filled with fruit rather than fish or meat.  At some point I shall revisit this book to try their split pea soup.  The last time I made split pea soup for the family, they swore I just threw a bunch of baby food into a pot and heated it up.  

The Entrées chapter is where I found my alternative to corned beef and cabbage.  Of course, they include a recipe for that traditional dish, and it looks quite good.  But I found something which looked even more intriguing: Beef in Stout with Herb Dumplings.  

Beef.  

Beer.

Dumplings.  

Somewhere Homer Simpson is drooling.

This recipe consists of beef dusted with flour and seasonings, and then stewed with stout and vegetables.  We bought some Guinness Stout for this.  The dumplings were made with something which I had never used before: suet.  Suet is fat from beef; in particular, the fat which is found near the kidneys.  It has a high melting point, which means that it will melt out of the dumplings after the flour has started to set up.  The result is that the dumplings will have little air pockets in them after the suet melts and runs out.  I called around to a few specialty stores trying to locate suet, and even searched the internet for alternatives.  I ended up  calling some friends who moved here from England to see if they could help me find some suet.  Finally, as a last try, I called the butcher counter at the local Albertsons.  

"How many pounds do you want?" he said.  Pounds.  

So we got suet.  In retrospect, we probably got beef fat from some other part of the cow, but it still worked as well.  One of the hardest things to do was shred it.

Did I mention that I was scheduled to be on call on St. Patrick's Day?  All of the work of preparing the meal fell on the shoulders of Carolyn.  God bless her.  Of course, the children helped a lot as well.  

Here is the picture of the 'Beef in Stout with Herb Dumplings' from the book:

Here is our picture.  We made a lot more to feed our family and guests.  Carolyn would use less parsley in the future; that is what gave the dumplings - and everything else - the greenish color:

This dish was very filling.

The next chapter covered vegetables and sides. We only tried a couple of the bread recipes rather than the vegetables.  We like to eat bread, especially homemade bread.

Here is a picture from the book of the Irish Soda Bread:

I like this recipe for its simplicity. We could mix the ingredients in a few minutes in a bowl, roll it out on a floured surface, and stick it in the oven right away.  This was a good one for our youngest children to make.

The other bread featured was Oatmeal and Potato Bread.  That was awesome. I made it with some baked potatoes which I mashed up with a fork. Carolyn made it another time where she used leftover mashed potatoes. Like everything touched by her, Carolyn's oatmeal and potato bread was a lot better than mine. 

Here is a picture of Oatmeal and Potato Bread from the book:

All of these bread recipes were served with genuine Irish butter. Yum. There is another recipe for something called 'Barm Brack,' which looked a lot like the Scone my mother - and her grandmother - would make.  This is one I would like to try sometime soon:

The final chapter had a recipe for apple cake and one for cheesecake.  Carolyn made the Apple Cake because she loves me and knows how much I like apple anything. Besides, she already makes an excellent cheesecake. I don't particularly care for cheesecake, but I do love hers....

Apple Cake.  Here is a picture of my almost-finished piece of cake. It tasted so good, I bent the fork!

Here is a picture of the intact cake along with the page from the cookbook.  For those of you who are wondering what is in the bowl next to the cake, I believe it is fajita chicken that I was warming up. It just shows that no matter what our heritage is, we cannot escape the influence of our new home, Northern Mexico Texas.

I thought this was a picture of the oatmeal potato bread,but now I think it is actually one of our many wheat bread recipes. Whatever. We like bread. 

The book includes recipes for Irish Coffee and 'Black Velvet,' something made with Stout and white wine.  Since I recently won a HUGE bottle of Crown Royal whiskey, I shall have to try making Irish coffee with it.

So this book review degenerated into more of a photo fest than an essay.  That is fine, considering that the subject is food.  There were a lot of things I like about this book.  One is that the recipes are simple enough for an amateur like me.  Two is that every recipe produced something good to eat.  Third, it was another opportunity for my children and I to get into the kitchen and make something.  There is nothing better than tasting bread baked in your own oven, or a meal put together by our children.  This book is just another way to help our children learn about one of the most important life skills, cooking. 

Book Review: In Defense of Sanity: The Best Essays of G.K. Chesterton

Last Thursday I took a couple of our cars to a local garage to get their oil changed. I figured it was about time, as they were both 5,000 miles past the recommended service point.  It was shortly before lunchtime, and I drove one car to the garage while one of my sons followed a few minutes behind. He had to go on to his college classes which start in the afternoon.  I couldn't stand that kind of schedule. I like getting up early in the morning and getting my work done sooner rather than later. I am sure that influenced my selection of anesthesiology as a specialty. I also think that I am responding to my own father's habit of sleeping in.  While he was teaching as a college professor, he avoided early morning classes. I suspect that my children inherited the 'sleep in late' gene from my side of the family. It must skip a generation. 

I brought along a book called In Defense of Sanity, which is a compilation of essays by G.K. Chesterton.  The essays were selected by Dale Ahlquist, Joseph Pearce, and Aidan Mackey.  I have met Ahlquist and Pearce at home schooling conferences.  Ahlquist inspired me to look into reading more of Chesterton's works, and I joined the American Chesterton Society to immerse myself more into this writer's work.  Both Pearce and Ahlquist signed copies of their books which I had bought.  I am reminded that one should never say something flippant when an author asks what he should write when he autographs a book.  One of the books in my library is signed with the message to 'keep in touch,' while another states that I am a poor example of manhood.  Even serious writers have a sense of humor. 

I didn't think it would take long to change the oil in two cars, so I scanned the list of Chesterton's essays for one which would be short.  I like short essays, because I often don't get back to a book for a while, and by then I need to start from the beginning again.  This is especially true with Chesterton, because his writing seems to amble all over the place, and it requires a lot of concentration to follow his train of thought.  Add to this that there was a television blaring away in the waiting room.  

The television show was 'Family Feud,' where two families are pitted against each other.  They have to guess the results of survey questions posed to some nebulous cross sectional group of Americans.  All of the questions are loaded with innuendo, and today's question was no different.  How can one best humiliate a man?  By talking about his ....?  I wondered if there were children watching this show right now, and thought about how these competing families never seem to have minor children.  I also realized I was alone in the waiting room, so I hunted for the power switch on the television and shut it off.

Silence reigned.  It reminded me of a time, back when I was in the Air Force, and I took our dog to the base veterinary clinic.  I did not realize that we were not supposed to bring children - apparently a dog had mauled some child there in the past - so I showed up with several of my little creations in tow.  The television in that waiting room was broadcasting the Jerry Springer Show where nearly every word spoken by the guests had to be blanked out.  It was obvious that the persons were slinging around obscenities.  Everyone in the waiting room was watching this demonstration of bad manners; everyone, including my children and I.  I walked over and shut off the television, and then turned to the people staring at me in astonishment, announcing that I don't want my children watching that kind of garbage.  Our dog was suddenly the next animal called back for a checkup.

As I reached for my book, my gaze fell upon the magazines covering the coffee table in front of me.  There were automotive and news magazines, a conservative journal which blamed every problem in the world on the Catholic Church, and a collection of gossip magazines.  Right in the middle of the pile was a gossip magazine with a topless woman on the cover.  Her arm was strategically placed across her chest.  As I tossed it in the garbage, I thought about how one day this woman might have teenage daughters of her own, and how she will have to explain her behavior to them.  More likely she will be trying to keep them from making the same mistakes she made when she was young and attractive.  I thought about something mentioned in one of the few lectures on geriatric medicine which we had in medical school.  This was back in the 1980’s, and we were reminded that some of the elderly women we would be treating probably participated in the ‘flapper’ generation of the 1920’s.  We were advised that we might encounter diseases which seemed out of place in senior citizens.  But for now there I sat, in a room with all manner of temptation spread before me like a smorgasbord: cars I can’t afford, women I don’t want, and news I don’t care about.  I turned back to Chesterton.

First, I became aware of men talking in the garage.  I heard the workers calling out to one another as they went through their procedures on my cars.  I heard the manager talking to someone on the phone about a worker who must be chronically late.  I heard him mention that they will charge the employee ten dollars per day that he comes in late.  Ouch.  And lastly, I heard two workers discussing where they would buy lunch that day.  There was nothing glamorous or dramatic about these conversations, but it was a welcome respite after the noise coming out of the television.  It was refreshing to hear the ordinary speech of men going about the very honorable job of car care.

Finally I opened the book.  Three essays caught my interest at once.  One was on the Book of Job, another on the contents of Chesterton’s pockets, and the last was simply titled ‘A Piece of Chalk.’  I had heard about his essay on his pockets, and I wanted to read about Job because I recently experienced a new type of suffering, but decided to read about chalk instead.  I had read somewhere that Chesterton and a friend were once looking through the window of a store, and GKC had declared that of all the things on display,  a piece of lowly chalk was the most powerful thing of all there present.  I thought this was the essay; I was wrong.  

Chesterton begins his essay by procuring some chalk, after which he asked his landlady if she had any brown paper he could borrow.  Now, I don’t know how big Chesterton was at the time he wrote this essay (1909), but he was a large man, and must have been very intimidating to those who did not know him well.  I can only assume that the landlady fell into this category, as she eagerly supplied him with what he wanted.  He then went out into the countryside to draw pictures on the paper.  It struck me that Chesterton knew something about leisure which our present society has forgotten.  I don’t know of any person who just walked out one day to go drawing pictures on brown paper.  Certainly no adults would do this; we have too much other things to do.  Only my children would possibly go and do something as fun as walk around outside and draw pictures.  Even though our society is more advanced in so many ways, it appears as if we adults have forgotten how to take the time to play.  St. Augustine once said that “without work is is impossible to have fun.”  Perhaps too much of our work is just idling rather than pursuing a legitimate goal, and therefore we have burned up our free time - time we could spend coloring on brown paper.  We need to recapture that childlike innocence, that aspect of fun.

Anyway, Chesterton suddenly realizes that he forgot to bring along a piece of white chalk.  This would not be a problem if he were coloring on white paper, but it is a disaster when one’s canvas is brown.  He makes a good point about the color ‘white:’

“And one of the two or three defiant verities of the best religious morality, of real Christianity, for example, is exactly this same thing; the chief assertion of religious morality is that white is a colour.  Virtue is not the absence of vices or the avoidance of moral dangers; virtue is a vivid and separate thing, like pain or a particular smell.  Mercy does not mean not being cruel or sparing people revenge or punishment; it means a plain and positive thing like the sun, which one has either seen or not seen.  Chastity does not mean abstention from sexual wrong; it means something flaming, like Joan of Arc.  In a word, God paints in many colours, but He never paints so gorgeously, I had almost said so gaudily, as when He paints in white.”

I agree with him, up to a point.  Certainly virtue is not solely the absence of evil, but is the presence of good.  I doubt anyone is going to get to Heaven simply because he avoided sin.  But when an evil is avoided, or removed, other good things can appear.  In my own case, shutting off the television - and tossing a magazine in the garbage - made it  possible to listen to the sounds of men at work, and to read an essay uninterrupted, and to recall how white chalk is often all around us.  We might even be sitting on it.

Stations of the Cross

There is a beautiful Catholic Church in downtown San Antonio right along the Riverwalk. For several years, we were parishioners there.  It was founded by German immigrants, and it is known as St. Joseph Catholic Church.  We had an opportunity to visit San Antonio last Fall, and we stopped in to make a brief visit with Our Lord.  I took the opportunity to take some pictures as well.

Here is a view from the back of the sanctuary.  The painting had been redone in the late 1990's, and it still looked wonderful.

Here is another view:

The Stations of the Cross are also beautiful.  My photographs here don't do them justice.  But poor photography or writing never kept me from blogging, so here we go.  I offer these for your meditation during Lent.

I like how the Stations are in German as well as English.

The First Station:

Jesus is condemned to death:

The Second Station:

Jesus carries His Cross:

The Third Station:

Jesus falls the first time:

The Fourth Station:

Jesus meets His afflicted Mother:

The Fifth Station:

Simon helps Jesus carry the Cross:

The Sixth Station:

Veronica wipes the face of Jesus:

The Seventh Station:

Jesus falls the second time:

The Eighth Station:

Jesus consoles the women of Jerusalem:

The Ninth Station:

Jesus falls the third time:

The Tenth Station:

Jesus is stripped of His garments:

The Eleventh Station:

Jesus is nailed to the Cross:

The Twelfth Station:

Jesus dies upon the Cross:

The Thirteenth Station:

Jesus is taken from the Cross:

The Fourteenth Station:

Jesus is laid in the sepulchre:

The altar is truly one of the most beautiful parts of the church.

Long after its founding, a department store called Joski's bought the land around the church.  They tried to buy the church land as well, but they were rebuffed.  So they built the store around the church and rectory, leaving a small parking lot for parishioners.  You can see the church in the center of the picture below:

Here is a zoomed in picture of the church.  

After this Joski's opened, folks started to refer to the church as 'St. Joski's' rather than St. Joseph.  Now Joski's is gone, and another store owns the buildings which surround our former parish.  I hope that St. Joseph remains for many years to come, for visitors of San Antonio and for the people who have attended the church for their whole lives.  Hopefully St. Joseph will never experience 'wreckovation' either.

Aerial photographs were actually taken from the Tower of the Americas.

A Poetry Moment

I was reminded of this poem as I sampled a bit of Bohemian Black Lager made at Shiner Brewery if Shiner, Texas:


High and Low, by James H. Cousins


He stumbled home from Clifden fair
With drunken song, and cheeks aglow.
Yet there was something in his air
That told of kingship long ago.
I sighed -- and inly cried
With grief that one so high should fall so low.

But he snatched a flower and sniffed its scent,
And waved it toward the sunset sky.
Some old sweet rapture through him went
And kindled in his bloodshot eye.
I turned -- and inly burned
With joy that one so low should rise so high.



-- James H. Cousins

Prost! Für meine Freunden!

What Was I Thinking Here?

I was looking for a bit of misplaced writing when I searched through the 'Draft' list of the blog and came across this unnamed entry.  It consists of four pictures.  One is of the Albino character from the movie 'The Princess Bride.'  The next is of Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan, followed by two copies of the same picture of President Obama watching basketball.

What was I thinking about when I started this blog entry?

I wish I knew.




...but then again, maybe I do know.

Another Reason to Write with a Fountain Pen

Instead of filling your pen with ink, you could fill it with your favorite beverage. Let me know how it works out.

The 'Two-Dollar Pistol' of Fountain Pens

First let me show you what a two dollar pistol is:




 I first heard about one of these pistols in a short story by Kurt Vonnegut. The main character was declared 'hotter than a two dollar pistol' by an admirer.  During the Second World War, these pistols apparently cost about $2.00 to manufacture, and with the lack of any sort of comfort amenities like grips or insulation I could see how this pistol could get really hot in a hurry.  I can only imagine how painful shooting one of these would be.  Recoil in a smaller caliber/smaller size pistol can be bad; I am sure the recoil from a .45 cal. bullet must be even worse.

There is a fountain pen I have which applies the same principles of economy, expendability and practicality that are found in the Liberator Pistol.  It the Petit1 mini fountain pen, made by Pilot.  It is really cheap and yet writes extremely well, and cost me only $3.80.  It has a fine nib and comes with one ink cartridge.  It is a proprietary ink cartridge, so one must either buy refills or - this is what I did - fill it up with your own ink.  Some folks on YouTube show ways to use the body of the pen as the ink reservoir, but I don't recommend that.

Here is a picture of it:

It has a stainless steel nib, and the ink travels from the reservoir through a small channel filled with a strand of absorbent material that looks like felt.  I know this from watching a video review of this pen; whenever I take things apart they never come back together properly.  I limited myself to adding new ink to the pen.

Here it is next to a quarter to give you some perspective of size.  I don't have big hands; at least not long fingers.  So I can comfortably write without putting the cap on the end of the pen.  By the way, putting the cap on the end of the pen when one writes is known as 'posting' for some reason.  This pen cap actually sits very securely when it is posted, so someone with a larger hand could manage it.

Here it is with the cap off.  I did notice that there was some condensation on the inside of the cap.  Perhaps this is present with every pen and I only can see it because the cap is clear.  It doesn't interfere with the working of the pen.  Of course, whenever I drop a fountain pen, ink ends up in the cap, and usually makes a mess on my fingers, but I don't mind......

Here you can see a sample of my bad handwriting.  The fine nib makes for what I would consider fine writing; this is important when I am writing on medical records.  The ink in it is Noodlers Ink Bernanke Blue.  I bought the pen from JetPens.com.

In summary, this is a nice little pen for writing anywhere.  It is versatile and portable, and writes well for a while even when upside down (occasionally I write things holding the chart up against the wall, and it still works).  The ink flow is smooth with some scratching, but I have never had it burp out a blob of ink on the paper.  The other nice thing is that I would not cry too much if I lost it or stepped on it.

Write Garbage!  Illustration by Jules Feiffer

Return to Clear Creek Monastery - March, 2012

It had been two years since we visited Clear Creek Monastery, or Our Lady of Clear Creek Abbey.  Every year our local home school group would travel up to Oklahoma and spend a weekend doing manual labor for the monks.  The history of the place is described very well on their website, and I recommend it to the two people who bother to read this post.  While you are reading it, you may come across the name John Senior, a University of Kansas teacher who had some part in helping some of these monks find their religious vocations.  Mr. Senior is is an example of how one man can change things for the better.  We need more men like this nowadays....

Here is a link for all the older posts about Clear Creek Monastery.  They are out of order, for some reason, and as you scroll down the posts become less relevant......

Here is the cathedral.  When we were last here, only the lower chapel existed.  That is the area below the white line of bricks.  It will one day be the crypt chapel.  The first time we visited the monastery, it was as cold as a walk in freezer.  It is nice to see that the construction is progressing nicely.  There will be more pictures later.

Here are Augustine and Benedict, two of the three boys who went with me.  I couldn't find a picture with Nathaniel.  It's too bad, because one picture of the three boys would heighten the contrast between my blood and Carolyn's blood.  Note that Gus is wearing long pants and a coat, while Benedict is sporting some cool shorts and a T-shirt.  I was dressed more like Gus, because is was cold and rainy.  I think it actually snowed a little that day - when it wasn't raining.  Nathaniel was dressed like Ben.

Here is another picture for those who don't believe the picture above.  The guest house is in the background.  No, that is not where we stayed.  The guest house is just where you meet up with the porter or the monk known as the Guestmaster.  Either of them will get you a room at some of their cabins(like where we stayed), or in the monastery itself.  For men considering a religious vocation, they can arrange to spend some time living the monastic life.  For a glimpse of life as a monk, I strongly recommend reading the Rule of St. Benedict.  I reviewed it briefly here.

I went into the crypt chapel to look around.  It was dark, with only the candle lit by the Tabernacle.  Light streamed in through the windows behind the side altars.  Imagine a chapel with about eight side chapels.  When Low Mass is said first thing in the morning, priests are celebrating Mass almost all around the congregation.  In addition to the side chapels, there are main two altars - one behind the other.  This is the farthest back side chapel on the left side looking toward the main altar.

I ventured to use the flash on my iPhone to give a little more detail to the picture:

At that moment I realized that the organ music I could hear was from another new addition.  The monks had an organ, and one of the brothers was practicing.  I took a brief video of the chapel so you could hear the music:

Hopefully you could appreciate the side chapels. On the right hand side my iPhone picked up the votive candles.  The organ music reminded me of the kind of music one hears in movies whenever the plot takes the characters to a church.  It seems as if someone is always noodling with the keyboard in church.

Now, on to the outside.  The upper part of the cathedral was not complete.  They had a stone cutter working on the elaborate sculpted figures which were over the main doors.  This stone cutter was transforming what was a piece of rock into figures.  That was cool.  Here are a couple pictures:

And another.........

Here is the interior of the church.  I suspect that by now, almost a year later, that it is complete.  This is the view from the altar, with the main door in the background.  Here you can appreciate the layout of the Benedictine chapel.  The congregation occupies the pews farthest from the camera.  There is a space, where I suspect a Communion Rail will be positioned.  Closer in are the seats occupied by the monks when they come together for prayers of the Divine Office.

Here are some of the folks in our group, with Father Guestmaster showing us around the church.  Note that the roof is not complete.

Here is one of the covered walkways on the outside of the church.  I thought the light and shadow contrast was kind of cool.

Of course we did more than just tour the facilities and eat the monastery food.  We also had some work to do.  In the past, we have cleared brush and put up fences to keep the animals in their assigned pastures.  This year we got to do a bit of both.  Most of our work was with fences, but on Saturday afternoon we got to all act like little boys again and start fires!  We lit up huge piles of brush which had been sitting for at least a year, so they were ready to burn.  Our main job was to stamp out any embers which landed on the ground.  There was hardly a breeze.  The brother who was supervising us taught me something that may one day be good to know.  I thought it would be best to light the fire on the 'upwind' side of the pile so that it would burn faster.  Brother Joseph pointed out that if he did that, even a light breeze would fan the fire too much.  By the time it reached the 'downwind' side, the flames might be high enough to light some of the surrounding tree tops.  That could lead to an even greater fire.  Instead, a fire lit on the 'downwind' side had to slowly work its way upwind to consume all the brush.

Here are some fire shots:

At last, I include some pictures of the chapel crypt with the lights on.  If you compare these shots with some of my earlier blog entries, you will see how they really improved the chapel.  It is no longer as cold as a freezer.

This was the first time we had ever been to Clear Creek during the month of March.  It was warmer than going in February, but that brought some new problems.  The biggest one for me was dealing with ticks.  I don't like ticks, and I know people who got Lyme disease and are still suffering from the complications of the disease.  Even though I don't like the cold, I would rather deal with being a bit uncomfortable than have to pick little arthropods off myself or someone else.

I look forward to going back to Clear Creek and see how the construction has progressed.  That is not the only reason, though.  I find the monks to be an inspiration as well as a source of strength and consolation for me.  It is edifying for me to see these men forsaking all to spend their lives - sacrificing their lives - in continuous 'ora et labora' for the greater glory of God.  It is also reassuring to know that they are praying for my soul - and yours as well - now and at the hour of death.

Write garbage!