For the love of the Irish! Even though I never met my three long-gone Irish great-great-grandmothers, I like to imagine them making soda bread.

This year I am really into making bread. For this St Patrick’s Day, I made Irish soda bread.

Instead of the traditional method which uses only baking soda and buttermilk as leavening, I added yeast. Buttermilk adds acid which reacts with the soda to rise the bread. Some bakers add an egg also, to give it additional rise. This recipe adds a little sugar because the bread is studded with raisins, which makes it more of a tea-time rather than a breakfast loaf.

This recipe makes two loaves.

½ cup warm water (105-110 o F)
1 package instant yeast
6 cups of bread flour or half bread flour, half all-purpose flour
3 tbs plus 1 tsp sugar
1 tsp baking soda
1 ½ tsp kosher salt
4 oz cold butter cut into cubes
1 ½ cups warm buttermilk
1 ½ cup raisins

Heat the water to the required temperature, testing with a thermometer, or put a finger in and if it is a little warmer than your body temperature, it’s probably fine. Too low and the

When I was a child, I used to imagine the years of life as a ladder. Each rung represented a year, and in my imagination, the rungs had different colors.

Now I am at the top end of the ladder, and I can look down, and look back, and I have some advice.

1. This too will pass. These odd times of social distancing and the worldwide economic slowdown will be over eventually. I do not mean to minimize the pain of people who are ill and those who have lost loved ones, or the worry of those who’ve lost jobs. I’m just trying to put it in perspective.

2. Response to the pandemic may seem chaotic and spotty. But in fact, the world has never seen such swift, severe action in the face of a common enemy. That’s because, in other eras, communication was slower. The world has seen pandemics before, and they come to an end. We’ve become so used to healthy populations because of vaccinations and antibiotics we’ve forgotten the dread of disease. We’ve been so lucky.

3. Some of the things we have been forced to do in these weeks have benefits. We catch glimpses of