Easy Brown Bread and Soup in May

Yes. I know it’s May.  The second half of May no less but I can’t help it. I am a soup person. Unequivocally.  In the winter I could live off soup.  Buttered bread and soup for lunch on a cold snowy day?  Probably one of the things I would miss most if I moved somewhere with a better climate.  My kids love soup too.  Sometimes Emmett says to me, “Mama, I’m SO hungry. I want soup!” It sounds kind of funny but I know what he means.  He means he wants real food. Something savory, hearty and warm that will fill him up and make him feel good inside. I totally get it. I wonder if other kids like soup too. Is soup kid food the way animal crackers and mac ’n cheese are? Or is it just my kids? Do they like soup because I do? Because of genetics? Or because they see how soup makes me happy? I may never know.  Because I’m not yet ready to say goodbye to Saturdays spent with a big pot of soup on the stove and the prospect of leftovers for an easy weeknight dinner, I’m making chicken soup and brown bread today.  We’ve got the whole summer ahead of us to break out the grill.

It’s hard to believe I never tried brown bread, or even heard of it, before I met my husband. Back when we were dating, there were times when we would stay at my father-in-law Paddy’s house.  In the morning, Paddy and I would always be the first to wake up (by a significant margin) and he would make me breakfast and tell me stories about Ireland, his wife and his adventures in Belize and America after leaving Ireland. We would sit at the table, chatting and drinking tea, eating sausages, eggs, beans and warm brown bread long before my husband or his siblings made their way downstairs. Now that we have little ones, those leisurely breakfasts with Paddy have turned into chaotic dinners with kids running all over the place, but I love brown bread as much as ever and it always brings be back to those early mornings sipping tea at his table.    

I’m sure that if you do a quick internet search you can find a million recipes for brown bread, I have tried a few myself (the one I liked best was written in glaze on a ceramic platter that I saw in Paddy’s on the Square).  Today I am using a mix from the Irish Boutique so we can have warm, freshly baked brown bread while focusing mainly on preparing the soup.  Because sometimes just getting lunch on the table can be difficult enough, especially when you’re 9 months pregnant with two hungry offspring nipping at your toes.

For the bread, just add milk to the plastic ziptop bag with the mix in it and mix it around in the bag until no clumps remain. Perfect (messless) job for a kid!  It even comes with a baking tin.  No dishes to wash.  Because it’s so easy to make, you can almost always find the time to throw it together and slip it in the oven just before lunch.  That way, you can eat some fresh out of the oven. Any leftovers can stay out in a bag or bread bin for a few days or you can slice it and freeze for another time.

Below is one of my go-to soup recipes.  It’s simple, healthy, inexpensive to make, and the kids love to wake up from their naps and have a big bowl of soup waiting for them.

Chicken, Bean and Vegetable Soup

Serves my family of 4 at least a couple of times.

For the Soup

1 onion, diced

½ cup carrots, diced

½ cup celery, diced

3 cloves of garlic, minced

2 tablespoons olive oil or butter

3 cups kale, chopped

Chicken (I use whatever amount is leftover from making the chicken stock or in my fridge from another meal)

1 can chickpeas (I’m not sure that it matters whether or not you drain the liquid in the can, sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t)

2 bay leaves

4 cups of chicken stock* or broth

Parmesan rind (optional - throw one in if you have one lurking in the fridge somewhere)

Lemon juice from half of a lemon

Salt and pepper to taste

Garnishes

Pesto

Grated parmesan

Chopped herbs

Red pepper flakes

Hot sauce

Greek yogurt

More lemon juice

*If I’m organized enough, and have a chicken around, I start the night before by putting what’s left of a store-bought rotisserie chicken (we often eat one of these at some point during the week), a couple of bay leaves, a few sprigs of thyme, an onion, a carrot and a stalk or two of celery in a crockpot for about 12 hours. When it’s done I strain and defat the stock and pick all of the remaining chicken meat off the bones, reserving it for the soup.

When it’s time to make the soup, saute the onion, carrots and celery in butter or olive oil over medium to medium-low heat until they are soft and the onion is translucent, about 6 minutes. Add garlic and saute for 2 more minutes.    

Next, turn the heat up to medium-high and add the chicken stock.  Once the stock is boiling, turn the heat down to a simmer, add the bay leaves, parmesan rind (if using) a pinch of salt and chickpeas and cook for about 20 minutes. 

At this point, I use my immersion blender to puree some, but not all, of the vegetables and chickpeas. Blending up some of the veggies and chickpeas thickens the soup, and leaving the rest whole provides texture.  

After blending, add the chicken, season with salt and pepper and simmer for another 20 minutes.  Add the kale and simmer for another 10 minutes or so.  

Squeeze lemon juice into the soup, check seasoning again, garnish with whatever you like and serve.

“Paddy Melts”: Irish Breakfast in Sandwich Form

The men in my husband’s family love puns, good ones, bad ones, it doesn’t really matter.  As you can guess, this can take getting used to.  Actually, I’m pretty sure you never get used to it.  My husband is notorious for not only using bad puns whenever possible, but for taking things a step further and EXPLAINING them to anyone who will listen.  It might go something like this:

HIM: “Why should you never break up with a goalie?”

ME: “I don’t know. Why?”

HIM: “Because he’s a keeper.”

ME: Eyes rolling

HIM: “Get it?” 

ME:  Silence.  No matter what I say here, he will go on.

HIM: “He’s the goalie, the GOAL keeper!” (Proud)

ME: Yes. I got it. 

Even after more than a decade and 2 (almost 3) children together, there are some things about my dear husband that remain a mystery to me.  I guess that’s a good thing – though I’m still not sold on the puns.  Nevertheless, today I made a punny breakfast in the form of Irish Breakfast Sandwiches: Irish cheddar, breakfast sausages and eggs between two pieces of buttered brown bread heated up in a pan until the bread is crisp and the cheese is melted.  Served with baked beans, they make the perfect hand-held version of an Irish breakfast.  Delicious whether you like the name or not.  

Breakfast “Paddy” Melts

Ingredients (from the Irish Boutique)

Serves 4

3-5 tablespoons room temperature  Kerrygold Irish butter (I use salted butter)

8 pieces Brown bread – homemade or store bought. 

1 cup Irish Cheddar, grated

4 Irish breakfast sausages, I’m using Winston’s.  They are SO good.

4 eggs

2 tablespoons milk (whole or 2%, half and half also works)

Salt and pepper to taste

1 can Heinz baked beans

Worcestershire, HP or hot sauce to taste

Cook the sausages.  The sausages can be cooked over medium high heat in a sauté pan for about 10 minutes or until you slice into one and no pink remains. If you have a meat thermometer, 165F is what you are looking for here. I like to cook mine in a cast iron under the broiler for easy clean up.

This is what they look like after 10 minutes under the broiler.

Cook the eggs.  Beat the eggs and milk together and add salt and pepper to taste.  Heat a non-stick skillet over medium high heat and add 2 tablespoons of the butter until it becomes foamy. Add the eggs and scramble.  I take mine out of the pan when they are fluffy but still moist as they will be cooked a little bit more in the sandwiches.

Heat the beans.  Heat your baked beans in a saucepan or the microwave. My kids ate the last of our beans last night, as my son says "I'm a beanie boy!" So no beans for us today. Next time.

Once the sausages and eggs are cooked, set them aside and use the remaining butter to butter each piece of brown bread on one side.  Top the other side of the brown bread with about 1/8 cup of grated cheese. Now, cut your sausages in half horizontally and cut each of those pieces in half again so you have four nice little pieces of sausages that fit your bread. Place sausage pieces on top of half of the pieces of bread and top of each of the remaining pieces of bread with an equal portion of eggs.

At this point you should have butter, bread, cheese, sausage on four halves and butter, bread, cheese, eggs on four halves.

Heat your non-stick skillet over medium heat until pan is quite hot. Place sausage topped bread pieces butter side down in the hot skillet and egg topped pieces, butter side up on top.  Gently press sandwiches together with a spatula.  After a couple of minutes, turn the heat down to medium low and cover the pan.  Cook for two more minutes.  Uncover the pan and turn the heat back up to medium.  Use a spatula to press down gently on the sandwiches again just before flipping to cook on the other side. After a couple more minutes, turn the heat down to medium low again and place a lid on the pan. Cook for two more minutes, remove the lid, check the sandwiches for crisp bread and melty cheese.  If they look done, remove from the pan.

Cut in half and serve with beans, Worcestershire, HP, or hot sauce.

Cook the Book: My Irish Table by Cathal Armstrong

Have you seen this book? It’s gorgeous. Page after page of delicious looking Irish food, the food of the author Cathal Armstrong’s childhood.  The book also includes some Irish inspired recipes from Armstrong’s restaurant in the Washington D.C. area, Restaurant Eve.  Delicious Irish food?  Yes! Don’t get me started on this one. Ireland is a country with amazing natural resources when it comes to food. When I think of Ireland, I think of Irish butter and cheese, grass fed meats, fresh produce and seafood plucked straight from the sea.  I believe that Irish food is having its moment and will continue to do so as the popularity of fussy food wanes in favor of rustic, sustainable, ingredient driven dishes that we all love to eat.

I also adore Cathal Armstrong.  No, I don’t know him, but I feel like I do. He reminds me of my father-in-law, Paddy, in many ways.  One of so many Irish immigrants who has laid down roots on the other side of the Atlantic.  Like my father and mother-in-law, Cathal and his wife Meshelle (Filipina, just like my mother-in-law) built their business from scratch and made it successful through hard work and unwavering belief in their vision.  Like Paddy, Cathal is a very civic minded individual as demonstrated by his dedication to the sustainable food movement and his creation of Chefs as Parents™ (www.chefsasparents.com) a not-for-profit company that partners with the Alexandria public school system to improve the school lunch system.  Among many similarities, the one that strikes me the most is something that Armstrong, Paddy and so many of our customers at the Irish Boutique and Paddy’s on the Square have in common.  It is the way that they maintain their Irish identity, instill a love of all things Irish in their families and salute their home country even as they make America their permanent home.  They serve as shining examples of how to be both Irish and American.

Choosing a single recipe from this book was SO hard.  Honestly, I cannot wait to cook through the entire thing: Irish Stew, Dublin Coddle, President Obama Stew (Chicken Casserole), Shepherd’s Pie, Marrowfat Peas, Piccalilli, Tomato Jam, Apple Pie – I could go on. I chose ‘Cashel Blue and Toasted Pecan Terrine with Frisée and Apple Jam’ because we’re having friends over who we haven’t seen in ages, including two new babies (yay!) and I want to set out some food that we can graze on while we catch up and get the BBQ going. With six adults and five little ones, I think that it’s nice to do something that feels a little bit special with the appetizers, since we’ll be doing burgers and feeding-chasing-cleaning up after little ones during dinner. I’m serving this with a selection of other cheeses and meats and skipping the frisée, only because including it would necessitate forks (less forks, more hands free for holding babies!).

This recipe embodies my favorite aspects of Irish food. It’s simple; made up of only a few quality ingredients, and yet it feels elevated enough to serve to guests.

Cashel Blue and Toasted Pecan Terrine with Frisée and Apple Jam

Terrine

1 cup coarsely chopped pecans

1 pound Cashel Blue cheese, crumbled

Jam

2 small apples, such as Bramley, Ida Red, Granny Smith, or Pink Lady, peeled, cored, and coarsely chopped

1/2 cup sugar

1/2 cup honey

1/2 cup freshly squeezed lemon juice

Salad

6 ounces (about 8 cups) frisée

2 tablespoons finely minced shallot

2 teaspoons extra-virgin olive oil

1/4 teaspoon kosher salt

Toast the pecans: Preheat the oven to 300°F. Line a 9-inch loaf pan with plastic wrap, leaving a generous overlap. Spread the pecans on a pie pan and lightly toast them in the oven for 10 minutes, then allow them to cool.

Make the terrine: Combine the cheese and pecans in a large bowl and pack the mixture firmly into the loaf pan. Fold the overlapping plastic wrap over to cover completely and refrigerate overnight or for up to 3 days.

I halved the terrine recipe because I bought a few other cheese to serve as well. 

This little container worked perfectly for the amounts of Cashel and pecans I had. At this point I packed the mixture in very firmly, first with my hands and then with a spoon. 

Make the jam: Combine the apples, sugar, honey, and lemon juice in a saucepan and cook over medium-high heat until the apples are syrupy, about 5 minutes. Lower the heat to medium and continue cooking for another 10 minutes, stirring often, until the apples are completely soft and caramelized. Remove from the heat and mash the apples into jam with the back of a fork. Let cool.

I used one Pink Lady and one Fuji apple and substituted agave for the honey.  Did you know that babies aren't supposed to eat honey?  I didn't. Not until I had one. Babies are cagey little creatures known to love apples and jam so I'm not taking any chances.

This is what mine looked like once I had cooked it down as instructed in the recipe. 

Jammy! I left it pretty chunky because that's how I like things but you could mash it more.

Present the dish: Unmold the terrine and cut it into 12 half-inch slices. Gently separate the frisée leaves and put them in a small bowl. Add the shallot, olive oil, and salt and toss to mix. For each serving, center a slice of terrine on a dinner plate and place a small mound of salad and a dollop of apple jam next to it. 

As you can see, I did not present the dish as instructed above but I can see how it would make a beautiful composed first course.  I'll have to store that one away under 'simple-fancy-good dinner party ideas'. 

I may have packed it in the mold too aggressively because I had a hard time getting it out.  Once I managed to unmold it, the terrine held together quite well.  You really must eat it with the apple jam.  It's sort of magic how ingredients that complement each other can equal more than the sum of their parts.