Recipe: Irish Brown Bread

click on photos for potentially more info on Flickr

I've never posted a recipe before, but I need to get this one down before I forget it. A few weeks ago we tried out a new Irish gastropub for lunch. My potato leek soup came with the most delicious slice of bread I've ever eaten, as well as the yummiest, richest butter I'd tasted in a long time--Kerrygold. The menu said it was "Irish brown bread," so when I got home I searched for recipes online and found this one  from 101 Cookbooks. I also discovered that you can buy Kerrygold butter at Trader Joe's (effing right!), so I immediately went out and bought both salted (for eating) and unsalted (for cooking) Kerrygold butter.

We made a few modifications to the original recipe, our version listed below, and the end result wasn't as dense as the restaurant's, but it's still very good. This is a soda bread but what makes it "brown" is apparently the whole wheat flour. I have to say, I much prefer this type to the regular kind of soda bread.  The dense, wheaty, earthy bread with salty, creamy butter really hooked me, and I almost wish it was fall/winter again so I could have a slice of this with a cup of hot soup every night.

Ingredients:
2 - 2 1/4 cups buttermilk
2 ounces Kerrygold unsalted butter
1 large egg
3 cups whole wheat bread flour
1 cup unbleached white bread flour
pinch of salt
1 teaspoon baking soda

Directions
Melt the butter over low heat or in microwave. Pour into mixing bowl and beat in the egg, slowly adding the buttermilk and incorporate the ingredients fully. In a separate bowl, sift and mix the flour, salt, and baking soda. Slowly add dry ingredients to the butter mixture while mixing on low speed.

Original author's note: "If you are using a baking tin the mixture should be on the wetter side. If your dough is too dry, mix in small splashes of buttermilk until it is the right consistency." Note: This was the case for us, and that's why we added an extra half cup of buttermilk than what the original recipe called for.

Bake at 400F for 50 minutes.

Makes 1 standard loaf; we used 3 small loaf pans so we could freeze the extra.


[Author's note: I recommend eating this bread with Kerrygold butter spread generously on it. Over the last few months I have switched to soy butter for various reasons, including the fact that the regular butter I was buying started tasting gross to me, but I have come around again to dairy butter after tasting this magical stuff.]

Sowing Thoughts Today





                                                                          Source: Uploaded by user via Angela on Pinterest

I've been thinking about how to write this post all day. There are many thoughts in my head that I don't know how to organize so I'm going to just go stream-of-conscious today. I just got back from a long weekend in New Orleans visiting friends and eating, drinking, and being extremely merry. All that rich food, sun, and general excess have taken a small toll on my skin and body and I started a detox/liver cleanse this morning--no caffeine, alcohol, processed foods, sugar, junk food, or red meat for two weeks. I use soy butter, soy-yogurt, and soy milk anyway, so avoiding dairy won't be an issue (except for my sincere love of cheese). I'll mainly be eating lots of fruits and vegetables, whole grains, and legumes. I'm not sure if I'll eat chicken, fish, or eggs yet. We'll see how the first week goes. (I sort of just made this menu up from various cleansing articles and vegetarian/vegan meal plans that I collected).

Along the lines of this type of "clean" thinking, I started reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle on the plane ride home. I have read almost all of Barbara Kingsolver's ficition, and I have been on a long waiting list at the library for this one. I love the concept of trying to only eat what you can grow or obtain locally, but my first and immediate thought was there's no way I could ever do this. Like the author's daughter, I love fruit and like having access to it year-round, especially tomatoes and strawberries. But I also understand that big chain grocery store produce is not grown for flavor and tastes nothing like what you can grow in your own backyard, and sometimes--actually, most of the time--my store-bought tomatoes and strawberries go bad after a day or two. I'm at the part in the book where the author's daughter mentions that now that the family is in the middle of this project, she doesn't even think twice when she sees ripe strawberries for sale on the farmers' market truck--buy them up now while they're in season because you won't be able to get them for another year. Getting to this part of the book now is so appropriate because we just planted strawberry plants last week. We didn't have much luck growing them last year.  At the end of May we have strawberry festivals in Virginia. This year I'm not only going to grow my own, but I'm going to stock up on fresh, in-season strawberries, and freeze them so that I can have them year-round.

So thoughts of my garden, in-season-eating, and my cleansing diet were consuming me this morning when I turned on the news. As a former New Yorker who spent several years working in a building that overlooked the pit at Ground Zero, I am happy that bin Laden's death may bring comfort to those who lost loved ones on 9/11 and have been seeking some sort of closure or justice. It's a morbid sort of feeling, and it feels wrong to rejoice in someone's death, but it also sort of feels necessary (?). I'm not sure how to process my thoughts as I watch images of 9/11 and hear people getting emotional as they relive that day, and then see images of air raides and other violence. I actually want to cleanse my mind as I'm cleansing my body over the next two weeks. I'd like to try to keep negative thoughts out. I'm not sure yet how I'll even attempt that.

The other news bookend to this weekend was, of course, the royal wedding. I visited Windsor Castle a few years ago as part of a vacation in London, and I had one of the best meals of that trip in a pub right next to the castle. So I'm ending this post on a happy memory, and bringing it back to food.

Weekend in the Garden: Very Productive

weekend of 4/16

weekend of 4/23

What a great weekend! In addition to having a good weekend with friends, I also completed a lot of gardening tasks. I weeded about half the garden, plus I trimmed back the ivy and Japanese magnolia that had been bursting through the fence. It was long overdue, and Sunday was sunny and dry enough to get some of these tasks done. What a difference!

We planted giant yellow sunflower seeds in the big containers above. I also have some leftover Chianti sunflower seeds that I still need to plant. I plan to look for different varieties over the next couple of weeks to get some different colors in the garden. We plant so many vegetables, it's nice to have a few flowers around. The sunflowers also attract my favorite bugs, those little bumble lush bees.

I also added some acidic fertilizer to my hydrangea plants. The blooms are usually light to dark pink--and very pretty--but I would love to have some blue blooms. I've been adding this fertilizer for the past two springs, but no luck yet changing the pH balance of the soil to get blue flowers. Maybe I'll have better luck with the hydrangea in the container.

I also learned that my new neighbors (not the mint destroyer) have started their own vegetable garden this year. I'm very happy to have some company with this new hobby of mine.