Butter. Cheese. Cream. These are the reasons I’m not a vegan.

I once tried to be a vegan. I started on a Monday. I gave it my best shot. By Friday I was eating pizza. I just can’t live without my cheese. Or butter. Or cream.

When I was an exchange student in Denmark back in the 90s, my host brother would bring freshly made butter home from the cheese factory where he worked. That was the best butter I’d ever eaten.  

I recently discovered the next best thing: Kerrygold butter. It now shares a buttery place in my heart right there with that Danish butter—thick, creamy, salty, slightly sweet (must be the clover!,) and soft against my tongue.

You can imagine my joy when I attended Food Blog Camp back in January, and it was tastily sponsored by Kerrygold. We campers vied to take the best butter photo in the hopes of winning a richly filled basket of butters and cheeses from the sponsor.

Over the course of five short days, many sticks of butter were unwrapped, spread, and eaten—all for the sake of photography, of course. Bite after bite, we became a little more addicted. Kerrygold makes incredible butter!

In addition to making my camp experience memorable, Kerrygold is a stand-up company. They never use preservatives, hormones, or unnatural additives. That’s important to me.

As St. Patrick’s Day draws near, I thought it would be nice to celebrate all things Irish. My husband celebrates his Irish heritage every March with Guinness ale and a Reuben sandwich. His mom will make corned beef and cabbage and soda bread.

Since marrying him, I have learned to love some of my husband’s Irish foods. As a vegetarian, I don’t eat many of the aforementioned classics. But I have been perfecting my vegetarian version of the Reuben. Mostly, it’s just a sauerkraut and Swiss cheese sandwich. But in my opinion, those are the best parts!

What Irish foods do you enjoy making to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day? Do you have any great vegetarian spins on the classics?

In celebration of St. Patrick’s Day, and of Kerrygold’s sustainable dairy practices, I’m holding a recipe contest. Over the next three weeks, I invite you to submit Irish-inspired vegetarian recipes containing Kerrygold Butter or their Dubliner cheddar cheese. (And hello!--they now have a version of their Dubliner that's loaded with Irish stout!) 

I’ll randomly select one winner and one runner-up. The winner will receive a prize package gift basket of Kerrygold butter and cheeses and the James Beard best cookbook of the year for 2010, The Country Cooking of Ireland by Colman Andrews. Estimated value of the prize package is $350.

The runner-up and the winner will both have their recipes announced on my blog with a link to their original post. Or, if you don’t have a blog, I’ll post your recipe on my site.

1)      Create an Irish-inspired vegetarian recipe using Kerrygold Butter and/or Dubliner Cheese.

2)      If you’re posting the recipe on your blog, you must tag your post using “Irish-Inspired Vegetarian Recipe Contest,” and leave the link in the comments section of this story, below. If you don’t have a blog and want to be part of the contest, you can post your full recipe in the comments section of this story, below.

3)      All entries must be submitted by Friday, March 11 at noon.

4)      Winners will be announced on my blog the week of March 13.

5)      The winner of the prize package must have a U.S.-based mailing address where the package can be shipped. No out of country addresses are acceptable.

Disclosure: As part of our Food Blog Camp butter battle, Kerrygold threw down a challenge: the first 10 campers to submit a recipe contest idea that they liked would receive a small stipend to administer said contest—plus Kerrygold provides the goodie bag to the winner. As you can see, I was among those who won the challenge!

Now, let’s see who will win that butter and cheese-filled basket! Let the contest begin!