Delicious Irish Food, Spring too!

03/08/2008

Well the March holidays are piling up on each other like eager kids on a spring day, trying to get out the door to play. St Patrick’s Day, the first day of spring, and Easter are all in the same week. Celebrate with us!

News & Events

Spring ahead!

Don’t forget to set your clocks this Sunday. Marczyk Fine Foods will be open 2 hours later until 8pm, starting this Sunday. Our summer hours, yippee!

Open Easter Sunday, 10am-3pm.

Save the dates:

Thursday, April 10: Pete will be talking about pork, and pigs, at the Belmar Mixed Taste event. We’ll bring bacon snacks and sausages, go to www.belmarlab.org for info.

Saturday, April 12: A fundraising wine tasting for Teller Elementary at the Tears McFarlane House. We donate a percentage of our sales to Teller, come out and pick up some cases at a great price for a great cause.

Look for invites in the winestore.

Friday April 18th and Saturday, April 19th: Come celebrate our 6th year anniversary at Marczyk Fine Foods! Friday will kick off the first burger night for 2008, and Saturday will be vendor tastings, the introduction of our new spring meals-to-go, new t-shirts, and other fun.

Did you know that corned beef and cabbage is actually a New England tradition, adopted by the Irish-Americans?

The typical Irish St Patrick’s Day Dinner featured bacon and cabbage as the boiled dinner, or lamb stew.

From the Butcher Block:

Niman Ranch corned beef brisket makes your boiled dinner easy and delicious. And it makes the best corned beef hash on the planet, with a fresh farm egg…that will take the edge off the previous evenings Irish Whiskey shots. If you want to try brining your own with the March Bon Appetit recipe, we’ll have Niman brisket, just waiting for its briny bath!

Speaking of brining, Jimmy is bringing in Niman Ranch fresh hams for Easter. Also the Marczyk exclusive skin-on Scandinavian pork loin: imagine a juicy pork loin, with a layer of flavorful fat, then a vein of moist pork, topped with a crust of crisp pork cracklings. Cooking directions included.

Coming for Easter: Niman Ranch spiral ½ hams, petites, and boneless, all made from free range pigs: raised with care, antibiotic and hormone free.

We’ll tell you more about our Easter offerings, including beautiful lamb dinner ideas, Lake Champlain Chocolate bunnies, and more, closer to the date.

Special Irish Cheeses

You can’t have a proper Irish evening without a hearty beer and authentic cheeses from Ireland. (Hopefully it will be raining, or even sleeting, to get us in that foggy windswept mood).

Coolea: This cow's milk cheese is made in the Irish hills of County Cork by a Dutch couple. The presence of wild Irish herbs in the grazing fields gives Coolea a richer, fruitier flavor than Dutch Gouda. Aged for over six months, is piquant with a delicious, fresh aftertaste.

Cashel Blue: Ireland's Beechmount Farm makes this superb blue cheese. Cashel Blue, made in the rolling hills of Tipperary, is a young, somewhat mild and extra creamy cheese that, unlike other blues, is not too salty. It is a fabulous alternative to Gorgonzola or Stilton.

Cahill’s Porter: One of our best selling speciality cheeses, Cahill’s Porter is made with a base of tangy Irish cheddar mixed with dark Porter beer. Take this to your party, it always gets noticed!

Fresh Fish Fridays

Marczyk’s get fresh fish daily. As the weather warms, it’s nice to take a break from meat (as good as ours is) and lighten up with fish. In the case now:

• Two kinds of fresh sole
• Dry-pack scallops
• Beautiful ruby red King salmon, smoke it for St Patrick’s dinner!

What's Fresh Now?

A sure sign of spring, sweet sugar snap peas are in!

An Irish holiday calls for potatoes, and we’re proud to carry organic Colorado potatoes! We have russet, red, fingerling, and Yukon Gold. Potatoes with a high starch content, like russets, bake well and yield light and fluffy mashed potatoes. Those with a low starch content, like red-skinned potatoes, hold their shape after cooking, and are great for making potato salads and scalloped potatoes. Here’s a handy chart of the best potatoes for:

• Baking: Russet potato
• Potato salads, gratins, and scalloped potatoes: Yellow Finn potato, new potato, red-skinned potato, white round potato.
• Mashing: Russet potato, Yukon gold.
• Soups and chowders: Yukon gold potato, Yellow Finn potato, red-skinned potato.
• Pan-frying: Red-skinned potatoes, white round potatoes, new potatoes, and fingerling potatoes
• French fries: Russet potato
• Roasting: New potatoes
• Steaming: New potatoes, Yukon Gold
• Potato pancakes: Russet potato, Yukon Gold

Buying locally has always been part of our ethos here at Marczyk’s, and we are proud to report that we have several Colorado grown items, here in the dead of winter:

All of our organic potatoes; Hazel Dell mushrooms; red, white, and yellow onions; and the mini sweet peppers are all from Colorado farmers. Thank you for shopping with us!

New New New

The famous, the one and only Guanciale! Niman Ranch Guanciale is made from pork jowls in the Italian tradition. Unsmoked, salted and cured, its flavor is stronger than other cured pork, but the texture is softer. This will make your pasta sauces really stand out! Pete made a carbonara with this, wow. $11.99/lb.

Recipe

Here's a really good Irish Soda Bread recipe from online chef Linda Larsen. Quick and easy, the sour cream and buttermilk make the bread very tender and moist. This bread also goes by the enchanting name Spotted Dog.

Ingredients:

• 1/2 cup sugar
• 4 cups flour
• 2 tsp. baking powder
• 1 tsp. baking soda
• 3/4 tsp. salt
• 3 cups raisins or currents
• 1 Tbsp. caraway seeds
• 2 eggs, lightly beaten
• 1-1/4 cups buttermilk
• 1 cup sour cream

Preparation:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease a 9" round cake pan with solid shortening and set aside.

In a large mixing bowl, combine flour (reserving 1 tablespoon), sugar, baking powder, baking soda, salt, raisins and caraway seeds. In a small bowl, combine eggs, buttermilk and sour cream and beat until smooth. Stir the liquid mixture into flour mixture just until flour is moistened. Knead dough in bowl about 10 to 12 times. The dough will be sticky.

Place the dough in the prepared pan, pat down. Cut a 4 x ¾ " deep slash in the top of the bread and dust with reserved flour. Bake in a preheated 350 degree oven for 65 to 75 minutes; remove from pan and place on wire rack to cool.

Eat warm with homemade butter. No you don’t need a butter churn and big arms, you need a blender and about ½ an hour. Here’s how: Take 2 Cups heavy cream, like our Wholesome Dairy Whipping Cream, and ¼ t. salt if you like.

Pour cream into a food processor or blender. You can use a KitchenAid with a paddle, make sure you have plastic to cover the top or you’ll spray liquid all over your kitchen. Process for 10 minutes, or until the cream separates into butter and liquid. Strain off the liquid (actually buttermilk). Season to taste with salt if you like. Press butter into a small bowl with the back of a spoon to further remove liquid, or pick it up with your hands and squeeze the liquid out.

Pete, Paul, Barbara, and the staff of Marczyk Fine Foods and Marczyk Fine Wines thank you for your business!