Spices are important to cooking. If I’m honest, when I think about cooking, the addition of spice is really what makes cooking an art and not just burning hunks of meat and vegetable over flame.
Knowing where your spices come from is important. You wouldn’t believe how different Cinnamon from Vietnam is to Cinnamon from China. Knowing the different flavor profiles can allow you to be a better cook, and create exotically delicious baked goods.
Two of the best things about baby showers: teeny tiny adorable white fluffy baby socks and FOOD. I don’t know what it is about the socks. I just melt when I see them. Sure, onesies and bibs with tongue-in-cheek phrases are adorable, but they’ve got nothing on the socks. Just thinking about the teeny tiny feets that will go in those teeny tiny socks makes me squee like a 14 year old at a Justin Beiber concert.
Alright, y’all. After my last post about Irish Soda Bread, and it’s non-authentic-ness, (I doubt that’s a word, but roll with me), I decided I should really get into this and make the real stuff, the stuff you’d find on a family’s table in Ireland.
Luckily, I won that mahusive amount of cheese and butter from KerryGold a few months back. Included in that giveaway was The Country Cooking of Ireland by Colman Andrews. It’s a beautiful book, big enough and full of enough gorgeous photographs to grace a coffee table.
I’m going to admit something to you now: This post is having a total identity crisis. It seemed simple enough. It’s March (p.s. how the hell is it MARCH?), which means St. Patrick’s Day. It means lots of Irish themed food, like Irish Soda Bread, will start popping up in the grocery store, the blogs, and restaurants. And let’s face it: no one’s going to pass up an excuse to drink copious amounts of green beer and eat Guinness Stew.
These Mango Maple Muffins are an inspiration provided by my brother-in-law, Chris. He came to spend this Christmas with us. It was our first Christmas entirely at home, and it was more than wonderful to spend it with him.
Chris lives in London. And because he lives in London, we hardly ever see each other. We spent the entire holiday playing games (don’t get me started on the 3-day debate on whether it’s Rummi-cub or Rummi-CUBE.. for the record, I’m in the Rummi-Cube camp), eating chocolate and good food, and catching up. Pure heaven.
