Irish Soda Bread -- It Doesn't Get Easier Than This

Do you want easy?  My Tuesdays with Dorie group decided to make the (appropriately timed) Irish Soda Bread this week--and frankly, for bread, it doesn't get much easier than this recipe.  Seriously--I've been making a different, but also easy--recipe for years.  This is even easier.  Four ingredients.  One bowl.  A bit of stirring and half a minute of kneading/shaping.  Wow.  Busy moms take note--this might just become the new favorite after-school snack.

Irish Scones

Irish soda bread is the usual accompaniment to a traditional St. Patrick's Day Feast.  We've served it for years.  Last year, though, I ran across a recipe for Irish scones, and I was hooked.  Irish scones are rather like buttermilk biscuits--only with eggs inside the batter and a bit of sugar on top.  They are best served warm, but they are also great cold the next day, so I always make a double batch.  They retain their moisture much better than biscuits, and the bit of sugar on top is a nice touch, especially for a holiday dinner.

Easy Italian Bread

As with so many other areas of life, America has a rich tradition when it comes to baking.  I think that this is because American culture draws upon the traditions of so many other cultures.  Here in America, we make everything from fluffy white Italian and French style breads to hearty rye breads from Germany and Eastern Europe.  We make bagels, bread sticks, and buns.  We do dumplings, tortillas, and pitas.  We make sweet breads and savory breads from all over the world.  The best breads, however, come from the home kitchen.

I learned to make bread as a teenager.  I wish that could romanticize that it was because of some deep human instinct or some other such nonsense.  The truth of the matter, though, was that I decided to learn to make bread because I had this empty spot on a goal sheet for a church youth program and "learn to make bread" seemed like the least obnoxious of the various options.  It was also the least expensive by far of any of the cooking options, which pleased my mother.  You can make a whole lot of different kinds of bread with just a handful of basic pantry ingredients.  Sure, you can make expensive bread--every category of cooking has its outliers.  The German bread that I worked on last year had several cups of seeds per batch.  That set us back a bit.  But as I said before, there are hundreds of recipes for bread that call on the baker to use just a few basic, inexpensive ingredients.