Cooking Mei's Way: Jim's Onion Cheddar Irish Soda Bread

Happy St. Patrick's Day! 
I'm Mei Wei and I love cooking! This year for St. Patrick's Day my mom chose a new kind of Irish soda bread called Jim's Cheddar Onion Soda Bread  from Allrecipes.com to have for our dinner. And I want to show you how to make it!

Ingredients. There is NO baking soda in this recipe!

Ingredients

• 4 cups bread flour, plus more for dusting
• 1 1/2 teaspoons salt
• 1 tablespoon baking powder
• 6 tablespoons butter, softened
• 1 1/4 cups buttermilk
• 2 tablespoons confectioners' sugar
• 3/4 cup finely chopped onion
• 3/4 cup shredded Cheddar cheese (we used Kerrygold Irish Cheddar)

Directions 

Preheat oven to 450 degrees. Use a Pampered Chef baking stone or if you don't have one, you can use a cookie sheet with parchment paper or lightly greased.

You will need a sifter and a  large bowl. Next you combine the flour, salt and baking powder. 
 

Measure the flour. Level with a knife.

Be careful when you grate the cheese.

Use a pastry blender to add the butter. Then mix in the buttermilk. The dough should feel dry but not really, really dry or sticky. Kids, if you're helping your Mommy or Daddy make this, hand it over to them now because it's very stiff and extremely hard to mix. 

Add a little more buttermilk to make it soft but not sticky.

  Dump the dough on the counter without making a mess! Now make a well in the center of the dough and mix in the onions and the cheese. Mix it very GENTLY  "as if you're handling eggs" (as my grandmother says) because if you don't the bread will be dense and hard to eat.

Dump the dough and work it on the counter.

Divide the dough in half (kids can do this too). Next make them into ball shapes and gently pat them down until they are approximately 2 inches thick. Now you can place them on the pan and dust them with flour.

Handle like they have eggs in them: very gently.

 Bake about 30 minutes until they are golden brown. Let them cool on a rack for a few minutes. 

 

This is what they look like when they come out.

Cut it with a bread knife. It smells great!

The onion and cheese kept it moist on the inside but the outside was crusty. Eat it when it's warm. We had it with soup and then we had it toasted for breakfast! Yummy!!!

Don't wait until next St. Patrick's Day. Make some now!

Nature Note: Peepers at Last!!

It's all done with that very stretchy throat.

I realized only this last week that I had not heard spring peepers yet!! I usually hear them as early as mid-February and yet not a "peep" so far. But tonight, when letting Mr. Bingley in, I rejoiced at the chorus of little Hallelujahs coming from the neighbor's pond.

Have you ever seen 
a cuter amphibian?

Can't say what delayed them.  I don't think it was a lack of noticing on my part because with that pond close-at-hand you don't really have to try. Our bathroom faces that direction as does the back door so there's plenty of opportunity. 

Anyway, breakthrough.

   This observation does fly in the face of a study of changing animal habits attributed to global warming though.  

I was just reading the other night---in that bathroom---from the March 2011 edition of "Birdscope", a publication of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, that long-kept nature journals by "citizen scientists" (normal people like you who don't get paid, they just like doing it) have pointed to a trend across many species of animals of ever-earlier spring habits such as migration, mating, and even peeping. Maybe my peepers are radical non-conforming peepers.

Here is a quickie fact page by The Department of Natural Resources on "pseudacris crucifer" that could help your child's (or your) nature notebook. Note the "false cross" on the back. See? A basic knowledge of Latin does pay off. I also like how this site describes the sound of many peepers peeping together like "sleighbells!" (Though at this time of the year I don't want anything to remind me of winter.)

No wonder they're hard to find.

Of course the really amazing thing about these little guys---and it is just the guys---is that peeping. I mean, look at the size of him and then consider that he can be heard so far away. That pond I've been talking about is a good hundred yards--close but not THAT close-- and I hear them clearly, even if just a few are calling.

Here's a more in-depth site that also has .wav recordings of their singing.

In the six years I've lived at this house I've never seen one and if you do, please tell me about it and how you did it. 'Cuz whenever I try to get close enough, they all go silent.  Drives me crazy. 

In the meantime, I'm ready to sleep with the window open to be "sung" to sleep!

How about you? Got Peepers?