Fruit and Nut Irish Soda Bread and some Updates!

First and Foremost....

Did you see that I have a new article for TASTE? Read about my love for (and the history of) the beautiful continental breakfast. I'm so pleased to have gotten a chance to write for them again after writing about the Pittsburgh-area tradition of the cookie table last year.

And now the blog post!

I've slowed down a bit these last few months. I'm taking my time to read, spend time with the dogs. I gave up meat 2 weeks ago, but it's not dogmatic - it's practice. And in the meantime, I'm planning a redesign for the blog, adding more features and getting organized. More on that in a couple weeks.

I like to think I'm organized. I'd like to think I'm a planner. I write things down and follow-up to emails. But when it comes to the cupboards, the pantry, I close the doors and forget about it until the next time I bake. That's why this recipe is so great - you can use up any extra dried ingredients you have lying around. Fold it around dough. Bake it in a warm oven. And snack all weekend for St. Patrick's Day.

Fruit and Nut Irish Soda Bread

Ingredients:

• 2 cups AP flour
• 2 cups whole wheat flour
• 1 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 2 TB cocoa powder
• 6 TB salted butter, melted
• 1 egg
• 3/4 cup plain yogurt
• 1 cup whole milk
• 2 TB molasses
• 1 1/2 cup nuts and dried fruit of your choice

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 425*F and prepare a sheet pan with parchment paper or a SIlpat
2. Sift together flours, salt, soda, and cocoa
3. In a separate bowl, whisk together butter, egg, yogurt, and molasses
4. Create a well in the center of your dry ingredients
5. Slowly pour in your wet ingredients. Slowly stir your mixture as you go
6. Your dough may be a little dry, if you are in a higher elevation or depending on your wheat flour, so add a little more milk until dough is shaggy
7. Turn out onto a floured work surface
8. Flatten out with the heel of your hand, pour in your choices of nuts and fruit and knead into the dough 
9. Continue knead a few times until a more solid ball forms
10. Place on your prepared pan
11. Score top with an X
12. Bake for 45-50 minutes or until crust is browned and bread is puffed
13. Allow to cool before serving

Holiday Baking Continued: Goat Cheese-Stuffed Wheat Buns!

Nolan, my sister, her husband, and I are taking a trip to New York tomorrow. It's a bus trip, 10 hours riding on a coach bus for the sake for 8 hours in the city. We're going because we used to do this when we were younger. We're doing this to reignite some old traditions that will, most likely, never fit into the mold of our lives now; but, god damnit if we don't try.

But this week, I've done a lot of baking. A lot of testing. A lot of trying to make the house warm with the oven on. A lot of convincing myself to keep moving forward, a direction I've always considered to be the better of the the two options available. And, to keep this post as short as possible so I can finish packing, here is a recipe I made this week. Goat cheese-stuffed buns, made with wheat and studded with walnuts. A little bit of the warmest flavors I could find in the fridge to stave off the cold from coming too close to our kitchen.

Goat Cheese-Stuffed Wheat Buns

Ingredients:

• ½ cup whole milk
• ½ cup water
• 4 tablespoons unsalted butter
• 1 packet of Red Star platinum yeast
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 egg + 1 white, both room temperature (use extra yolk for egg wash, see directions below)
• 2 TB honey
• 1 ½ cup whole wheat flour
• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 8 ounces goat cheese (I used Vermont Creamery’s Coupole, but any goat cheese will do)
• Walnuts, if desired

Directions:

1. In a small saucepan, heat milk, water, and butter until butter is completely melted. Stir to combine and transfer to your stand mixer’s bowl. Let stand until temperature reaches 110*F
2. Add yeast and salt
3. Let stand for 10 minutes or until yeast is bubbling
4. While mixture is resting, sift together flours
5. Turn on stand mixer, fitted with a dough hook, and add your egg and honey
6. With mixer still on, add your flour mixture, about a ½ cup at a time, until a shaggy dough forms (depending on your wheat flour used and altitude, you may require just a little less flour than this recipe calls for)
7. Turn out onto a floured work surface and knead for about 6 minutes or until dough is springy to the touch
8. Place in an oiled bowl and let rest for one hour at room temperature
9. After your hour has elapsed, preheat oven to 400*F and grease a 9-inch pan thoroughly. Also, cut your goat cheese into 8 pieces or so
10. Punch dough down and divide into 8 or 9 pieces
11. Pat each piece of dough flat with the palms of your hands and place a piece of goat cheese in the center
12. Form a ball with the dough, leaving the goat cheese in the center
13. Place in your pan
14. Repeat with remaining dough
15. Now, whisk your extra yolk with a teaspoon of water to create your egg wash. Brush a bit on top of each dough ball
16. Press a walnut in the center of each ball, if desired, as well
17. Bake for 25 to 30 minutes, or until golden brown
18. Serve immediately for a melt, delicious warm bun. But, these can keep and be reheated for up to two days in an airtight container

Thank you to Red Star Yeast for sponsoring this post. I believe in using quality products when it comes to baking and I am always confident my dough will rise beautifully with Red Star! Check out the active dry yeast I used for this recipe and others on their website, follow them on instagram and like their Facebook!

And while you're at it...like my Facebook and Instagram too!

Blue Moon Beer Bread: A year at home

The last time that I drank beer regularly was for a quarter a cup in frat basements. Cold, damp and often leaving the white laces of my shoes tea-stained in spilled Natty Light. I drank from a red plastic cup that my boyfriend had been ashing his Pall Mall in; I didn't drink beer for three years after that. 

Somewhere down the line of being back in Pennsylvania, I began to drink a beer with my father. Once by the pool deck on the Fourth of July, then weekly at a local restaurant. For years, we didn't talk much; we racked it up to not a lot in common. But slowly I opened up to him and slowly he listened more than I thought he would. He likes Coors Light. I buy him two and I stuck with Blue Moon, which runs about $2 during Happy Hour in my hometown.

My mother started coming out with us. She always had a story to tell about a relative I thought had died a long time ago. If you stop talking about people in my family, it's because they either wronged you in some arbitrary way or they died a few years ago, going unnoticed by my adolescent caprice. We liked to order spaghetti with extra garlic. I always bought the drinks. She had what I was having and one summer my father had to drive us home, we were both so drunk from Happy Hour and hearing the news of my brother's wife's pregnancy.

I moved back out of my parents' place after a year there and I miss those weekly traditions. They had to cancel their trip out next Tuesday, afraid of a snowstorm and my dad can't see very well at night. I planned on making this bread for them, but I'll hold off a week until I know they're coming, to surprise them and let them know that I wasn't unhappy the year I spent with them, I just readjusted myself a little harder to the world I grew up in.

Blue Moon Beer Bread

Recipe adapted from here, though the ratios are similar to many others out there. I think this is possibly the easiest quick bread in the world. Make sure to try out other beers as well, but I would omit the orange, cinnamon, and use white instead of brown sugar. 

Ingredients:

• 3 cups flour
• 3 teaspoon baking soda
• 2 tablespoons cornstarch
• A pinch of cinnamon
• 1/4 cup dark brown sugar, packed
• 1 bottle Blue Moon
• 8 tablespoon unsalted butter, melted
• Orange or clementine, sliced for garnish

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 375*F and prepare a loaf pan with butter and parchment
2. Sift together flour, soda, cornstarch, cinnamon, and sugar
3. Create a well in the center of the dry ingredients with a wooden spoon
4. Pour your beer into the center of the well and stir
5. Add butter
6. Mix well and pour into your loaf pan
7. Top with slices of orange and bake for 1 hour
8. Remove and allow to cool before eating (you don't have to eat the oranges--they're just garnish!)

A Simple Bread for a Simple Life

The dogs always seem to want up before the sun. I'm not sure what it will be like when we get chickens, but I hope my sluggish eyes can keep up with their demands. The sun rises right over the white barn that sits at the edge of our neighbor's property and blinds us by 10 in the morning. The house needs curtains. We are not shut-ins, but we need our own form of privacy from the world, the elements, the mailman, and the buzzards that circle and circle and circle the roadside.

We bought food in bulk before we moved in, things we thought we'd crave that weren't perishable. We have a sack of rice hidden in the back of the cupboard behind the dog food. Pasta sauce that doesn't look as appealing as it did on the store shelf. In the back of the cabinet, behind the clover honey and the tomato paste, I found a jar of kalamata olives that became the inspiration for this bread. 

While a quick bread is not my go-to, I love the ease and convenience of this Irish soda bread, cut into rolls and kneaded by hand. They are still delicate, crumbly, and can last for a couple days. Just long enough to enjoy for the weekend while watching the sun cast shadows on the house you own now.

Olive Irish Soda Rolls

Ingredients:

• 4 cup AP flour
• 1 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 teaspoon sea salt
• 4 TB cultured butter (or unsalted butter), cold
• 1 3/4 cup buttermilk
• 1 egg, room temperature, lightly beaten
• 1/4 cup chopped kalamata olives

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 375*F and grease a 12 inch cast iron skillet or casserole dish 
2. In a large mixing bowl, whisk together all dry ingredients
3. Using your hands, pinch your butter between your fingers into the dry mixture until fats are the size of peas
4. Create a well in the center of your ingredients and, using a wooden spoon, slowly stir in your buttermilk and egg
5. Turn out onto a floured work surface and knead until dough is springy (will be sticky at first)
6. Knead in olives
7. Cut into eights and roll into balls
8. Place into greased skillet and bake for 35 minutes or until golden brown

Cultured Butter Biscuits, for cold mornings and even colder nights

So far, this year is cold. My mother makes coffee for me before she goes to work or babysits my niece. This is the last week I'll be at my childhood home. And while it has been a year of change, it's been a year of stagnation. I couldn't grow in this house I grew up in. I spent dinners in the living room, my father with the TV too loud and my mother baby-talking one of her cats. It never felt like the days went by, but the sun would blink lazily in the summer and I spent the better part of autumn away from them. They asked too many questions and never the right ones and I am happy to move to my own place again within a week.

I guess it is part of being 25, picking up pieces of who you grew to be, knowing how threadbare I left things before moving away.

I changed in many ways and I am exactly the same in others. I still ask for pumpkin pie on my birthdays. I still wake up at 6 to see my mother off to work, where we talk about how little I care for my brother's life and how she never fully understood her older brother, Bill, herself. My parents gave me my great-grandmother's silver as a housewarming present and I thanked them by making breakfast when they both had the morning off this week. Inspired by a Bon Appetit recipe, we ate these biscuits with pumpkin butter my mother found in the fridge behind leftovers.

Cultured Butter Biscuits

This recipe is super easy and produces an amazingly flaky biscuit. I love Bon App's recipe and the video included really helps with the technique described below! 

Ingredients:

• 3 1/2 cup AP flour
• 2 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
• 2 TB white sugar
• 2 teaspoon salt
• 1/4 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 cup cultured butter, cold and cut into chunks (I, of course, use Vermont Creamery)
• 1 cup buttermilk, cold
• 1/2 stick unsalted butter, melted and cooled
• 1/4 cup clover honey
• Pinch of black pepper

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 450*F and prepare a baking sheet with parchment paper
2. In a large mixing bowl, sift together all dry ingredients until well-mixed
3. Next, add your cultured butter and, using your hands, rub the fats into the flour mixture 
4. Create a well with a wooden spoon and, while slowly stirring, add your buttermilk
5. Knead in bowl and then pat into a rectangle on a floured work surface
6. Roll out to about an inch in thickness, then cut into quartered squares
7. Stack these quarters, press down and roll out again into another inch-thick rectangle (this will help to create layers of butter that would otherwise be missed by simply rolling out the first time)
8. Cut into 12 biscuits
9. Place these biscuits on your prepared sheet and freeze for ten minutes
10. While biscuits are freezing, melt your unsalted butter and mix in your honey 
11. Remove biscuits from freezer, brush on butter mixture and top with a sprinkle of black pepper, and bake for 20 minutes or until golden brown