B E B E R E

The staff of a very busy life

Lately, have been so out of control busy, si debordée du travail that I've actually been forgetting to eat. Last week a friend of mine, worried about my keeping my strength up, showed up with a loaf of this along with a few other goodies:

Stick To Your Ribs Soda Bread

Ingredients:
5/4 cups milk
3 cups flour (God will like you better if you use
whole wheat flour.)
2 teaspoons NaCl
1 teaspoon NaHCO3

What you do with them (fyi, I typically double the
recipe. I have also quadrupled it. That’s
about the limit. Trebling the recipe does not work so
well for me. I seem to favor powers of 2,
but octupling the recipe seems to be impractical.):

oven @ 450 F

Put the ingredients in a bowl (I actually throw in the
dry ingredients first, but I listed the
ingredients that way because I like the 5-4-3-2-1
thing.).

Grease a pan or cookie sheet or something.

Mix evenly the ingredients in the bowl. I start the
mixing off with a spoon, then I switch to my
fingers, then my whole hand, gooshing it all up into a
stiff dough.

Put your dough on that thing I told you to grease. I
make 1 round loaf out of the amounts of ingredients I
gave.

Oven time 10 minutes.

Lower temperature to 350 F.

Oven time 35 minutes.

I slice the bread with a heavy, smooth-edged knife. I
refrigerate the loaf first.

My gift loaf was devoured in no time. It seems to go particularly well with goat cheese, homemade jam and a nice, dry white wine. I haven't tried making it yet. When I do, though, I'm going to see how well it freezes for just in case.