Irish Soda Bread

In honor of St. Patrick’s Day, we usually cook corned beef, cabbage, potatoes and my favorite:  Irish Soda Bread.

I enjoy eating the Irish Soda Bread with a thick slathering of salted butter.  I use to serve it with Irish cultured butter like Kerrygold.  In our town we are able to get fresh dairy delivery weekly, which includes butter.  Now I use Calder Dairy salted butter.

I rarely use graham flour and right before St. Patty’s Day, I buy a package of it and get excited that I’m going to make the Irish soda bread.  This is a simple recipe—no embellishments.  We are NOT Irish, I didn’t grow up eating special Irish meals so I don’t know how authentic this is but I find it tasty.

            3 cups all-purpose flour, plus more for dusting

            1 cup whole-wheat graham flour

            1 tablespoon coarse salt

            1 teaspoon baking soda

            1 teaspoon baking powder

            4 tablespoons cold unsalted butter, cut into small pieces

            1 2/3 cups buttermilk

Mix all dry ingredients together and cut the butter into the flour mixture.  I start off with a pastry cutter and then I move to smashing the pieces into small bits.  Add the buttermilk all at once and combine.  The dough is sticky in certain sections and dry and crumbly in other parts.  Do the best job incorporating it all together.  Make a dome / round loaf shape and place on baking sheet. 

Cut a deep “X” on the top of the dome.  Bake at 350-degrees F for 80-mins.

I did two loaves instead of one because the mixture wouldn’t stick together.  I baked it for 50-minutes.

It’s hard to stop from just picking the crust off and eating that…but we don’t want to just take all the best parts for ourselves., especially since we were having guests to enjoy beer and dinner with us.

Pi Day, 3.14

Today is 3.14—it’s Pi day… so in celebration we ate some pies.  The kids and I enjoyed a deep-dish pizza pie for an after-school treat at our local pizzeria.  This is after I huffed and puffed while making an attempt at jogging and while they rode their bicycles.  I may have omitted that I’m training to RUN a 5K.  It’s because for most people running a 5K doesn’t really require training.  Embarrassingly, I cannot  run even 1-mile.  I need to start somewhere…so there it is.  That’s something I’m awful at doing yet I'm still doing it.

Back to what I am good at…baking…

Couldn’t finish Pi-Day without a homemade fruit pie.  I made an apple crumb pie. 

I do believe that pie making is a labor of love.  While the ingredients are humble—flour, butter, sugar (for the crust) and fruit that is simply sweeten, putting it all together is a feat!  I typically make the crust recipe that comes from American Test Kitchen.  My mother-in-law laughs because there’s vodka in it and I keep a bottle of cheap vodka in the freezer just for my pie crusts.

In addition to pie making and eating, we need to get working on the wheatgrass baskets for our egg coloring party.  Yearly we host a small gathering of young children (friends of my son or daughter) to dye-color and decorate boiled eggs.  We provide about a dozen eggs per child; the dyes; stickers, tattoos, magic crayons.  They get to take home a basket of real wheatgrass with their beautifully decorated eggs.

Here’s a photo of the materials for the wheatgrass Easter/Spring baskets.  The baskets are from the dollar store.  I’m hoping they can withstand the weight of the topsoil.  This is a bag of wheat berries.  You can also get them in the bulk section of most health food stores.  I didn’t take a picture of the plastic bags I use to line the baskets before the topsoil goes in.  I typically cut open half-gallon storage bags.

The wheat berries need to soak overnight.  Don’t let them soak over 24-hours or else they will start to smell bad and become unusable for the Easter/Spring baskets.

In the next several days, you will see the seeds transform to luscious greenery!  I hope you’ll do this project at home too.