What’s St. Patty’s Day Soup? Corned beef and cabbage, of course. Oh sure, there are lots of candidates for Irish Soup: Potato Leek, Mulligatawny, Mutton Broth…even Beef with Barley, which I just made a few weeks ago. But I really like corned beef and cabbage, and am determined to get my St. Patty’s day fix. It may come out more stew than soup, but if we’re lucky it will be good enough to overlook that little detail.

As with a lot of soups, the key is staging the ingredients so that they’re all done perfectly when the soup is finished.

On the other hand…

About the day before making this soup I started having serious doubts.

Sure, I love corned beef, potatoes and cabbage, especially with some mustard and a cold beer. But as a soup? How do you put mustard on soup?

What I could do is make a boiled dinner with all the fixins and then use the stock and leftover corned beef to make split pea soup with. That actually sounded like a great idea, except that I had a bunch of potatoes and carrots I didn’t know what else to do with. So I stuck to the plan.

It’s not bad, exactly, it’s just nothing to write home about. So to speak.

I did make the boiled dinner, which came off perfectly. Lean tender corned beef, fine potatoes, perfect carrots, cabbage not too mushy, dark mustard, and a Bass Ale. A Killian’s would have been more fitting, but I was luck to find anything in the fridge. We just don’t go through a lot of beer.

So, yeah…that part worked out pretty well.

After we each had several helpings I took some fingerling potatoes and chopped them into spoonsized pieces, then threw them into the stock with a few carrots, cut likewise. I cubed the remainder of the corned beef and added that in too (except for a sandwich worth I liberated from the cutting board) and let it simmer for fifteen minutes or so…but while there was nothing wrong with it, it just wasn’t doing that much for me.

The stock is plenty flavorful, but at the end of the day, it’s just corned beef and potatoes in a broth. That didn’t seem very interesting, so I took the leftover potatoes, carrots and cabbage that I’d been planning on adding in later and ran them through the hand blender. Yes, I look for excuses to use the hand blender.

In this case, perhaps I looked too hard.

The result was a fairly thick soup with a flavor that’s not quite any of the ingredients, but all of them at once. Much as I like boiled cabbage (at least once a year) I’m not sure that’s a good thing.

On the other hand, it’s not bad.

In fact with some Irish Soda Bread and a glass of beer (or two) it could be OK. But it definitely needs the soda bread to balance it. In fact, that sounds pretty good…and I know just where to pick some up.

In the end, we’ll have to see how folks like it, but next St. Patty’s Day I’m making split pea and calling it green.

I’m not sure the luck of the Irish was with me on this one, but Happy St. Patty’s Day to you all…

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Adapted from: Cooks.com: CORNED BEEF AND CABBAGE SOUP