Irish Soda Bread, Redux

Last year, in honor of St. Patrick's Day, I wrote about wholemeal Irish soda bread. (Read that post here.) It's a great thing, but making it demands you first acquire an imported wholemeal flour. I haven't found a mill in the US that produces European style flour, which seems odd. I bought mine online and was thrilled with the result. But spending more for shipping than the actual flour seemed too excessive to do twice. So this year I'm going back to the soda bread of my youth. It's scone-like with raisins and caraway seeds. You know the one...


Irish Soda Bread with Raisins and Caraway Seeds
Print recipe only here

Makes one 1# loaf (8-inches in diameter)

INGREDIENTS
2 cups flour
1 T plus 1 ½ t sugar (or 1.5 T)
1 ½ t baking powder
½ t salt
scant ½ t baking soda
3 T unsalted butter
1 egg
¾ cup buttermilk
1 ½ t caraway seeds
¾ cup raisins

METHOD
Preheat oven to 300°

Spray a 8 or 9-inch pie dish with canola spray and reserve.

In a Cuisinart (or bowl of stand mixer) combine dry ingredients and pulse to combine.

Add butter and process or mix until completely incorporated.

Crack egg into a separate large mixing bowl and whisk.

Add buttermilk and whisk to combine.

Add caraway seeds and raisins and stir to combine.

Pour dry ingredients over liquids. Using a large spoon or stiff spatula, combine with a few strokes until it just comes together into a ball.

Turn dough into prepared pie dish and bake for one hour.

Print the recipe for Wholemeal Irish Soda Bread here.

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Waters, Waters Everywhere

Is it me or is Alice everywhere these days? Not that there's anything wrong with her recent foray into politics (touché, JP!), but between the Kitchen Cabinet, the organic bailout and the op-ed on school lunch, she seems to have set aside her chef knives and picked up a pen (pen = mightier?).

I can relate to the knives for pen swap. So can chef, author and TV personality Anthony Bourdain. Only Bourdain picked up a megaphone AND pen. He had this to say about Alice Waters in an interview with DCist back in January:

“Alice Waters annoys the living shit out of me. We're all in the middle of a recession, like we're all going to start buying expensive organic food and running to the green market. There's something very Khmer Rouge about Alice Waters that has become unrealistic.”

Hmm. Bordain’s trouble with Waters stems from his estimation of her arrogance or naivete (and I do take his point about the recession and food costs). But the trouble with the Khmer Rouge was less their radical agrarian communism and more that they kept killing people. All I'm saying is that it's not a fair comparison, seeing as Alice Waters doesn't have blood - or pesticides - on her hands.


For more, follow the post and comment trail from The Internet Food Association.

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On Fecklessness and Jicama

Recent headlines suggest that as long as AK-47s remain legal and marijuana remains illegal* there’s gonna be serious trouble south of the border. Being a Blogger of Little Brain I cannot speak intelligently about how to solve this problem, but - hello?!? - it’s not a new one. Mexico has had powerful drug cartels (feeding Hollywood with an endless supply of storylines) forever. Seems we’re just taking notice now because the country finally has a President with a backbone. Of course he’s going to need a lot of cash to beef up enforcement of his War on Drugs. Which is why we should all eat more jicama. Hey, it’s a start. And with NAFTA up for renegotiation and the last US dollar already spoken for, it’s the least we can do. Plus, jicama is really good.

I was served jicama this way as an amuse bouche at a great restaurant in Washington DC (maybe Tim can comment on the name). I've loved jicama always but only use it in one recipe: Grilled Pesto Chicken Salad. Here I've trimmed it into batons, doused it with a spray of fresh squeezed lime juice and sprinkled it with a good chili powder (in this case, a medium heat chili powder). When you've got guests coming over for Carnitas or Tacos you should feed them this, plated individually. They will be very impressed.

* Eat Cheese or Die?
Calvin Trillen once took suggestions for making Wisconsin's license plate motto ("America's Dairyland") as flamboyantly patriotic as New Hampshire's ("Live Free or Die"). "Eat Cheese or Die" won. Too funny. Of course lawmakers in the nation's capital (their plate moto is "Taxation without Representation"), terrified by perils of listeria and concerned that cheese could kill a foodie, took legislative action to save us all.

I don't want to get the common American Libertarian all fired up but, really?!? Bicameral support for cheese legislation?? (Ok, ok. I don't know the ins and outs of how a bill becomes a law, but bicameral sounds awfully good here.) I just don't see how the case can be made that an unpasteurized cheese aged less than 60 days is illegal in the US and not an AK-47? Does the news that Walmart, the master of the supply chain, cannot keep up with the demand for ammo right now scare you? It should. More than listeria or taxation without representation.


For more info on Mexico's drug problem read an informed opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal: In Praise of Mexico's War on Drugs.

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And the Winner is...

....catherinelisa who correctly chose cake #7 - an almond cake with Amarena cherries and mascarpone mousse filling. It is finished with a white chocolate band and white chocolate corneli on top. This cake was made in early June 2000, and was one of the first cakes I photographed. Well, that's partly true; I have older photos of wedding cakes but I didn't want to use those here. Congratualtions, CL!

Thanks, everyone, for playing and for all the birthday wishes. And I didn't even have to throw Pinch a party at Chuck E. Cheese like Andy suggested! But I like the mental image of Pinch cracked out on complex carbohydrates, scampering around the arcade, and having a birthday meltdown when Señor Cheese didn't make his promised appearance.

The cakewalk down memory lane was fun for me - remembering the people they were made for in Telluride and Chicago. Pinch has certainly helped recover some of the lost love for layered cakes. But the celebration is over - it's back to cooking that sensible food we love so much. Next up: jicama!

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Celebrating Pinch's First Birthday with a Cakewalk

1. Chocolate Layer Birthday Cake

Before Pinch made its debut one year ago today I was in a funky place with my cooking skills. I wasn't using them in a manner that was satisfying. Since my training was almost exclusively in the pastry kitchen I found myself spreading a lot of sugar, butter and white flour love (death?) and not nearly enough about the healthier foods I served at home. It wasn’t a dramatic Lady Macbeth moment with me racked with guilt over the butter on my hands, but it was close. “What, will these hands ne'er be clean?”

2. Classic Yellow Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting and Coconut

3. Chocolate Layer Cake with Strawberries and Whipped Cream

A year has passed and the exercise of blogging about the foods I love and writing recipes for the meals I serve has rekindled my appreciation for the skills I amassed in the sweet kitchen. In celebration of Pinch’s first birthday, twelve birthday/celebration cakes are pictured. Since knowledge and cake are meant to be shared, the first commenter to correctly guess the oldest cake wins a chocolate torte from the Pinch kitchen. And yes, I will ship outside of Chicago. :)

4. Chocolate Layer Cake with Strawberries and Whipped Cream and Chocolate Frosting

5. Banana Cake with Whipped Cream

Getting to write and think about the things in our kitchens and markets that make life simpler and more healthy has been its own reward. It pleases me to no end to be a resource for healthy, family friendly meals and the occasional celebration cake. Thanks so much for reading this past year.

6. Mocha Layer Cake

7. Almond Amarena Cake with Mascarpone Mousse

8. Classic Yellow Cake with Chocolate Frosting

9. Banana Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting

10. Chocolate Cake with Blackberries and Cream

11. Baby Shower Cake: Sponge Cake layered with Mascarpone Mousse and Amarena Cherries

12. Flourless Chocolate Torte -- Could be yours!

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On the Importance of Toasting Your Tortillas

Mariana taught me this. In addition to being the person who tipped me off to Pete's Market in Pilsen, she showed me the proper way to prep a corn tortilla. It does not involve a pan - just the open flame of your gas range. Sorry to ye of the electric stove.

For starters, it absolutely helps if you have great tortillas on hand. I don't get to Pilsen that often but found a great tortilla at Whole Foods:

Anyway, your basic corn tortilla out of the package looks like this:

I you get them fresh, they're delicious as it. But trust me, they're even better if you toast them - even the Pilsen ones. To toast, just set your burner to a medium flame a pop a tortilla directly on top:

Flip after a minute or two, or once the tortilla puckers a bit. Just stay close by and keep checking. You want them to char a bit, just so. The end result looks like this:


We pretty much always have corn tortillas in the fridge, using them alternately for breakfast (with eggs), lunch (with tuna) or at dinner carnitas, or for soft tacos). I'm not certain that they're completely gluten free, but they provide a nice respite from wheat. Also: yum.

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On Lousiana Hot Sauce

I didn't know about Louisiana Hot Sauce.

I knew about Trappey's Louisiana Hot Sauce, which Mary hooked me on back at Cafe Nola. On a few occasions, between the breakfast and lunch rush, she would make me an over-easy egg sprinkled with some chopped fresh parsley and doused with Trappey's. The colors were enough to make it a beautiful thing, but the Trappey's! Oh the Trappey's!

For some reason I cannot find Trappey's in Chicago. It's one of the condiments I stock up on when we're in Seattle (go figure). We just finished our last bottle and don't have a trip to Seattle in the offing, so I took a chance on this sauce above. It rocks. Has everything Trappey's had, plus it's in my hand and on my eggs. Also, this stuff is a bit thicker and the color is deeper. I really like it.

If you don't know about Louisiana Hot Sauce, don't sweat it. It's definetly hotter than Trappey's, but it shouldn't make you sweat. about this hot sauce should make you sweat. It's a happy addition to the hot sauce section of my pantry.

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