Happy St. Patrick's Day with Irish Bacon, Cabbage, and Guinness desserts

Since a quarter of our HLFD team is Irish, we knew we wanted to celebrate St. Patrick's Day with more than just green beer.

So we managed to find some Irish bacon in NYC to make a more traditional Irish meal in addition to a couple of Guinness beer-based desserts.

Corned beef and cabbage is actually not an Irish meal, but one developed here in the U.S.  Instead, Irish bacon (which we bought in NYC at Zabar's) is eaten.  Also known as back bacon, it is leaner than American bacon and in Ireland, is traditionally boiled with potatoes and cabbage.

For our meal, we boiled some potatoes in a pot.  Then we diced some Irish bacon and seared them in a pan.  We added some green cabbage and some water to the bacon and cooked them until the cabbage was softened.  Lastly we added some chopped carrots.

In the end, we had a meal reflecting the Irish flag (green/cabbage, white/potatoes, and orange/carrots) with some pretty tasty bacon (which tasted like ham).

For a quick dessert, we made a Guinness Ice Cream Float.  We poured about 3/4 of the Guinness draught beer in a glass.  Then we added a large scoop of vanilla ice cream and topped it off with the rest of the beer.  Using the draught type made the float very creamy and the sweetness of the vanilla ice cream cut the bitterness of the beer.  

The float was dangerously easy to drink - as we drank it, it almost seemed like a root beer float.  Other ice cream flavors that would work well include coffee ice cream (Irish coffee float) and Bailey's ice cream (Irish car bomb float). 

And, if we had more time, we would have made our Guinness Chocolate Cupcakes.  Happy St. Patrick's Day and Luck of the Irish to you!