Culinary Endeavors

Brrrr, it is a cold day!  The wind is gusting too much for a fire in our wood burning stove so we warmed up this evening with homemade soup and soda bread.  Both soup and bread were new recipes and both are keepers.  The soup is "Unstuffed Cabbage" soup and is, as its name implies, a tomato-based soup with meatballs and cabbage.  What I really liked is that the tomato soup part (never a favorite of mine) is quite mild and not the intense almost tomato paste flavor I think of with Campbell's soup.   Another fun part is the rice is inside the meatballs - quite neat, don't you think?  On the other hand this soup does need a bit more punch (and we didn't use enough cabbage).  Rarely having made stuffed cabbage, I will have to explore those recipes and see what else can be added to give the soup a little more flavor.

 

The soda bread while homemade came from a mix, I have to admit.  I didn't mind the very baking soda-flavored versions carried by the local grocery stores, but I thought it would be fun to try something different.  A week or two ago, I asked at the manager's "desk" if they were going to be getting any soda bread mixes in, and the answer was one of those maybe and maybe not types.  So I decided to order a mix from King Arthur Flour myself (I've had very positive results with some of their other mixes and packages arrive very quickly).  That's what I used this afternoon.

 

I chose to use a square pan instead of making the usual round loaf (it just seemed easier to put a square chunk on the plate with the soup bowl than the usual long oval slice) and used an old aluminum pan D discovered in his childhood home last fall.  Setting the timer for the minimum baking time I wandered off to continue my once-quarterly sorting, cleaning, oh-that's-where-that-is! tidy up of my sewing room.  When the timer went off and I opened the oven I was a bit concerned because the bread was much darker than the store made version.  However, when we had it with our soup we had to agree; the taste was terrific!  KAF's version is far less baking soda intense and is a darker, more dense bread with, we think, more flavor.

 

Our other culinary foray today, was one day late, but we started the brining of our point end brisket.  Not being Irish, we don't mind having our corned beef and cabbage on the 18th (the beef sits in the brine for 5 days).  And it gives us an extra day to look forward to it! 

 

It's a rather cabbagey month for us, but neither of us minds!