Food Friday: St. Patrick's Day

No corned beef and cabbage at our house this year, mainly because I wasn't motivated to figure out where to buy it.  I could have been motivated if Peter seemed interested, but instead he told me he wanted bacon and eggs and Irish soda bread.  Easy enough, except in a country which hasn't yet figured out that bicarbonate of soda works as a leavening agent in addition to an antacid.  Luckily I had already thought this through.

A couple of months ago I went on a baking soda mission here.  I knew the American store sold it but, used to paying 50 cents a box, the markup was too much to take.  Then I checked a drugstore here and bicarbonate of soda was 3 Euros for a teeny tiny package.  So, on our last trip to the States we brought back the one box from the apartment.

The other ingredient I had to figure out was buttermilk, but I was pretty sure it's called karnemilk because I overheard a conversation between a flight attendant and a passenger once about a karnemilk mix up (the package is red, so Americans tend to think its whole milk).  At the Albert Heijn I verified my hunch with a worker by asking if it was "sour" and "kind of like yogurt."  He confirmed my suspicions.  I used the River Cottage recipe, and learned that after years of being a pretty good soda bread maker (it was always our go-to homemade bread in our tiny Greenwich Village kitchen) I learned that I wasn't scoring the bread deep enough.

The result was probably the most perfect (so perfect it deserved 2 pics) soda bread I ever made.  My family LOVED it.