I've now made Irish soda bread several times, and while I have no idea how great it is by Irish standards, by my family's standards, it's delicious. But it's definitely better when you use the buttermilk you get from churning butter instead of the thicker, creamy cultured stuff in the jug at the supermarket. Whatever that stuff is, it's not buttermilk. The bread comes out okay, but...just okay. Having made it both ways, I kid you not--there's a difference. So I guess we get soda bread just twice a month, since that's how often I churn butter, and it only yields enough buttermilk for one loaf of soda bread and a tiny bit left to put in pancake mix in the morning.
My daughter commented last week that our pantry looks empty compared to how it used to look. She's right. I recently reorganized it, and there's a lot less of certain things, such as commercially produced cans of food. There are more bags of beans, some flour, jams and jellies the Huz and I processed...things like that. But a lot less of the ready-made food that the kids were wont to eat for their lunches. I can't remember when we last had a can of Campbell's soup. We've been making all our own soup for weeks or even months now. It's mostly bean soup, but there is also the occasional treat, like the carrot soup I made last night after digging up a few of the carrots out in the garden. It's the perfect root cellar. When the ground's frozen solid, you can't get them out without great damage to trowel and carrot. But when it hovers just around the freezing point or a little above, then the earth loosens its grip and you can tease the carrots out. Last night I got a big fat orange one I didn't know was there--it hadn't much top left, but the root was pretty hefty. That and the larger of the white ones I dug last time made the soup. I watered it down some and then added more onion, garlic and dill to flavor it, and ended up with just enough soup for each person to have two bowls. Needless to say, the soup did not last the night, so today, everyone was hungry again with no ready-made food available. And I haven't had time to make any bread but the soda bread, so I need to bake regular whole-wheat bread tonight.
It's hard to look into the fridge and not see much food there. But we had a bit of stew meat thawed out in the meat drawer, and a few smaller carrots left over from my garden foraging the day before, so again I turned to my Irish cookbook. There's a stew recipe that you make from stew meat chunks and carrot chunks, and it fit perfectly the materials I had available. I had one onion left, since I haven't been anywhere to buy onions over the past couple of weeks, but that and some garlic went into the stew. And then we needed a can of Guinness. A can of Guinness! Not something we happened to have sitting around--like my homemade meatloaf, they don't tend to hang around in the house long on the rare occasions we have them. But there was some other kind of beer that hadn't been gotten into for months--not quite what was wanted, but reasonable. So we used it in the recipe in place of the Guinness. It'll probably be great. Anyway, once again we're about to have a feast made from almost nothing. Oh, and I do have a small crock pot of beans cooking, so we can make more of those burritos we liked.
When I look at that near-empty fridge, I have to remember that there's actually more food than it looks like--it's just that we have to cook almost everything from scratch now, so there's fewer of the ready-made things that we used to take for granted. And it might also be that the from-scratch food is so much more delicious that it's just getting decimated where before, leftovers used to sit for a week or more. Now they get eaten up within a couple of days. Just a couple of days in the life of a family on a tight budget and a couple of kids on growth spurts.
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