Meals to Help You Recover From St. Patrick's Day

Get on the road to recovery with grilled vegetables, no-alcohol                             cocktails, and restorative broths.

Now that St. Patrick's Day is behind us, it's time to spend the weekend eating and drinking right. Don't get it twisted, though—that doesn't mean things have to be boring.

FRIDAY COCKTAILS: GO LIGHT AND BUBBLY

You spent Thursday night drinking pints of stouts, so go easy during cocktail hour with this light, refreshing option. Shrubs—a vinegar-based syrup—are a quick way to add sweetness and acid to any cocktail. This one calls for tangy rhubarb and gets a slight kick from fresh ginger. Want a non-alcoholic version? Just skip the gin.

SATURDAY BREAKFAST: TRANSFORM YOUR LEFTOVERS

Put that St. Patrick's Day corned beef to work and make hash for brunch. For optimal enjoyment, make sure the meat and potatoes get extra crispy before topping with a poached egg.*

SATURDAY DINNER: MAKE A RESTORATIVE BROTH

There's no problem a huge bowl of rich, deeply flavored broth can't solve. This one combines beef broth with a host of spices, aromatics, and noodles for a perfect between-seasons bowl

SUNDAY BRUNCH: GIVE QUICHE AN UPGRADE

No one gets excited about quiche. That is until you blow all your friend's minds by making it with a hash-brown crust.

SUNDAY SUPPER: BREAK OUT THE GRILL...FOR SALAD

It's as good a time as any to test drive the grill. Keep it easy with a grilled salad that's combined with jasmine rice, a mess of fresh herbs, and a tangy fish-sauce vinaigrette.

How to Make Ice Cream Bread, But Better

The Internet's crazy about a cake-like bread made with melted ice cream. So we put it through the Epi Test Kitchen and made it even better.

Ice cream bread is a seemingly-simple, two-ingredient recipe that I discovered by going down the dark hole of the Internet, where I found it nestled among three-ingredient cheesecakes, banana-egg pancakes, and cookie-stuffed cookies. Much like dump cake, ice cream bread seems to have risen to popularity thanks to the promise of ease: you simply mix melted vanilla ice cream and self-rising flour, pour it into a pan, and bake.

In theory, it should work. Vanilla ice cream contains eggs and sugar, and self-rising flour includes all-purpose flour, salt, and baking powder, which gives you a recipe for a very basic quick bread. And when I made the first batch, it did, in fact, work. But the resulting bread was flat, dense, and flavorless.

I wanted to make it better. But I also wanted to keep the spirit of the recipe in tact—it had to be easy, and, naturally, it had to involve ice cream. So I brought the recipe for ice cream bread into the Epi Test Kitchen, where it was tested, and tested, and—finally—improved.

TEST ONE: FLAVOR SWAP

First, I swapped out the plain vanilla ice cream (classic, but boring) for flavor-packed butter pecan ice cream, which added notes of caramel as well as crunch from the pecans. Those flavors got me thinking of banana bread, and the more I thought about it, the more bananas made sense: they would add moisture and sweetness that the ice cream bread desperately needed. But when I made a batch of the bread with four mashed bananas (the same amount used in Our Favorite Banana Bread), the result was way too wet and gooey.

TEST TWO: ADJUST THE BANANA

Four bananas didn't work, so for round two I tried out just two bananas. That loaf was much too dry. Feeling like I had come down with a serious case of Goldilocks syndrome, I finally settled on three bananas.

TEST THREE: FIGURE OUT THE FLOUR

I had a moist banana bread now, but I still felt the texture could be better. So I started adjusting the amount of flour in the recipe. Three more loaves went into the oven: one with 1 cup of flour, one with 1 1/4 cups of flour, and one with 1 1/2 cups of flour. Texturally, the loaf with 1 1/2 cups of flour was the best, with a a pretty doomed top and a tender crumb. But the loaf with 1 1/4 cups of flour tasted better—that extra 1/4 cup of flour in the other loaf absorbed too much of the banana's sweetness. Which meant it was time to think about sugar.

TEST FOUR: ADD A LITTLE SUGAR

You'd think that three bananas would provide a good punch of sweetness, but no matter how ripe the bananas were, the bread lacked the level of sweetness that something called ice cream bread should have. So in went a 1/4 cup sugar, and voila! Ice cream bread—albeit with a couple more ingredients—that the Internet's going to want to make again.     

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