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- Subscribe - Contact Us - Rate Card - Place an Ad Valley&State Backpage O&E Sports Archives Classifieds Faith&Beliefs Obituaries Revels March 16, 2004 Stout foods on St. Patty's Day By Joan Cirillo The Associated Press PORTLAND - Corned beef and cabbage, prepare to cede some space on the bill of fare. This St. Patrick's Day make room for an expanded menu of traditional dishes flavored with one of Ireland's favorite drinks, stout, the strong, bittersweet dark beer, and with Irish white cheese. Consider a stout-enhanced shepherd's pie, topped with potatoes whipped with the slightly sweet Cheddar-style cheese. Or how about putting an Irish spin on tender baby meatballs by serving them smothered in a creamy stout sauce alongside potatoes? Forgo plain boiled potatoes. Make up a bowl of champ, Ireland's national mashed potato whipped with scallions and parsley and served with a well of melted butter. Do like the Irish and drag a forkful of potatoes in the butter before they melt in your mouth. For dessert, dig into a rich chocolate stout cake, sweetened with a chocolate, sugar and stout sauce, and covered with a creamy ganache glaze made of semisweet chocolate melted in heavy whipping cream. This is comfort food of a high order. But it's everyday fare at Kells Irish Restaurant and Pub, and the passion of executive chef Ethan Light, 33, and his sous chef, his 63-year-old mother, Carol Light. Housed in a multistoried, 1889 National Historic Register cast-iron building in Old Town Portland, the restaurant and adjoining streets come alive St. Patrick's Day week for a six-day festival of Irish food, music and culture. "We're told it's the biggest St. Patrick's Day celebration in the Pacific Northwest," said Lucille McAleese, who opened the restaurant with her husband, Gerard, 14 years ago, and worked as pastry chef at the outset. The restaurant is one of three the family owns on the West Coast. Gerard McAleese's parents brought their five children to Vancouver, B.C., from war-torn Belfast in the 1970's and launched the flagship Kells at Pike Place Market in Seattle 20 years ago. Several years ago, another brother opened the third Kells in San Francisco's financial district. All three restaurants sponsor St. Patrick's Day festivities, but the Portland celebration, with some 10,000 attendees, is the largest, said McAleese. "Comfort food is the first thing that comes to people's minds when they think of Irish food," said Lucille McAleese. She sat in one of the wooden booths against the brick walls of the historic, high-ceilinged pub, talking about Irish cuisine and several of the menu items, spread on bright green plates before her. "Beyond corned beef and cabbage, I would say people think of stews, and fish and chips, and baked goods," said McAleese who visits Ireland at least once a year with her husband and their two teenage sons. Americans may think corned beef and cabbage is Irish but in the homeland it's not a common food, she said, adding that the Irish eat a lot of lamb and fish. Both brown and white soda bread are ever-present, she said. Chef Light, an Illinois native who stepped in as executive chef of Kells the year after he graduated from Western Culinary Institute here in 1998, thinks of Irish food as "back-route cooking, old-school cooking just like grandma used to do." He learned to cook from his mother, a chef for nearly four decades in the Midwest. Several years ago, she retired but occasionally flew to Portland to help on Kells' catering events. Three years ago, she and Ethan's father moved to Portland and she came out of retirement to join him in the kitchen. The young chef said he recently traveled to Ireland, visited the famous Ballymaloe Cooking School in County Cork and "went to every restaurant and pub starting in Dublin and ending in Belfast." Light learned that Kells' food was right in line with the country's cuisine, from the bangers (sausage) and Ulster champ to the sausage rolls and McAleese family's Belfast lamb stew. But he added more oysters to the menu and white pepper at the table (which didn't go over) to reflect Irish customs. The chef likes to cook with stout to enhance the flavors of his recipes. Of cooking with the strong, dark beer, he warns: "Easy does it. A little goes a long way. Practice makes perfect." In fact, the practice of stout cooking is not uncommon, based on an Internet search which uncovered several recipes for stout cakes, stews, marinades, mustard and even stout ice cream. "It adds a lot of depth," said Andrew Murphy, the Oregon distribution manager for Guinness, a popular brand of stout. He recommends reserving the stronger "extra" stout for hearty meat stews, and generally cooking with the milder "draught" stout. Murphy knows chefs who pour a cup and a half of stout into beef stock to enhance French onion soup or add stout to stews, in particular oyster stew. At home, he favors deglazing a pan for meats with stout, or sauteing mushrooms in butter, garlic and fresh rosemary and a small amount of stout. Carol Light was happy to find that stout enhanced and deepened the flavor of her German mother's chocolate cake recipe. Experimentation led her to add a stout and cocoa mixture to her mother's cake batter and then soak the cooked cake with a sweet chocolate stout sauce before topping it with ganache. 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