With the heavy rainfall today, our street looks more like a lake than anything else so the motivation to do some grocery shopping was greatly diminished. We needed bread for lunch and ingredients for our evening meal, but we ended up baking Irish soda bread and we might improvise something for dinner too. (Hurray for provisions)

The soda bread turned out to be a nice larp bread. It's very easy to make (if you have a dutch oven, which we have) because it does not need to rise before baking and it tastes good. The original recipe I used dictates two types of flour. We only had one (tarwebloem) and just used that. It worked out ok. It took some more oven time than the recipe states, but that is because our oven just s*cks. So, for future reference I'll post the recipe here:

Ingredients:

• 500 grams of flour (tarwebloem)
• 400 ml buttermilk (karnemelk)
• 1 teaspoon of salt
• 1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda (zuiveringszout, check your apothecary)

Preparation:

• Preheat the oven to 200 degrees Celsius
• Mix the dry ingredients in a bowl
• Make a little hole in the middle and pour in the buttermilk
• Stir with a spatula or spoon, or just knead it by hand into a sticky dough
• If it's too dry, add more buttermilk and if it's too wet add more flour. Too moist is better than too dry.
• Knead well, but not too long because then the bread would become tough
• Put on a baking tray or into a baking tin and flatten it a bit
• Cut in a cross on the top with a knife. About halfway down into the dough
• Put in the oven for about 45 to 60 minutes, but keep an eye on it to make sure it won't burn to a crisp
• When the crust is hard and an inserted skewer comes out clean again it's done. (When tapping the bottom of the bread it should sound hollow

It tastes great with lemon curd, jam or chocolate spread but cheese works well too.

Hmm... looking outside I see the rain pouring down once more. Just when there was a little part of the sidewalk visible again. We will survive without doing groceries but I want to go to a try out lessen jazz dance this evening. I hope it will be dry (enough) when I have to leave the house.