Honeyed Words: Pizza for St. Patrick

Pizza for St. Patrick · 15 March 2007

I’m taking a break from The Onion Girl to get into the spirit of the season. A bit late to start Lent you say? Not so, I’m just in time for St. Patrick’s Day, the one day smack in the middle of the Lenten season in which certain branches of the church condone the setting aside all your promises of sacrifice for a good old fashioned feast day.

Like many other holidays, St. Patrick’s Day has engulfed an entire month’s worth of retail focus. I’ve been seeing sparkly green and gold decorations in stores (and successfully dodging them) since the day after Valentine’s Day. I managed to almost forget about this holiday until, to my dismay, my boyfriend pointed out that St. Patrick’s Day could be an entire day dedicated not to the arrival of Catholicism to Ireland (via the man of the hour himself) but to beer, specifically to Guinness. How could I say no to Guinness?

Now, as you may know, drinking on an empty stomach is a bad idea, even if you are part Irish (unfortunately my Irish part seems to be the nose or the toe or something that doesn’t help me much with alcohol consumption). In order to get some good padding down before the imbibing, I devised a fool proof strategy to make sure I ate enough before the beer started flowing, namely bring my own food (I never claimed the plan was rocket science).

Yes; there will be eating of cheese.

Picture of Cheese

I wanted to break out of the traditional corned beef and cabbage rut (especially as I’ll be cooking for at least one vegetarian) but still wanted to maintain the spirit of the holiday. The problem I ran into is that classic Irish food revolves around mashed potatoes (for which I wasn’t in the mood for after eating the faux mashed potatoes all week) and boiled meat (yep, meat still doesn’t work for vegetarians). After a moment’s thought, it struck me. What goes best with beer? Pizza of course. What can you put on pizza? Anything. What are the Irish famous for today (besides drinking)? Potatoes. Why not potato pizza? Although not a staple of St. Patrick’s time (neither was corned beef, or even potatoes) the modern Irish have adopted pizza. I’m sure that quite a few of them will be biting into a good pie while they swig their Guinness this weekend.

I haven’t quite decided on the recipe to use. I’m probably going to end up making two difference types of potato pizza, one with a mashed potato base and lots of textural vegetables and one that is mostly sliced potatoes and cheese.

I did already select some of the cheese that I’m going to use, the ones pictured above and below. I’ll be the first to admit I bought them in part because of the cute labeling. Who could resist such vibrant pastoral packaging? If I didn’t love cheese so much, I might be hard pressed to actually open them up.

Picture of Cheese