I’m cooking Irish Stew for dinner tonight.  Marty loves this though he has annoyed me before by suggesting that it’s an easy option for dinner.  The problem lies with the word “easy”.  It’s true that there are no advanced cooking techniques required but it just took me an hour and half to get it to the stage where everything is in the stew pot.  In about another hour and a half it will be ready to eat.  That’s not my idea of an easy dinner.

Yesterday evening I got out one of my new knitting books, Victorian Lace Today, as I was keen to try out some of the beautiful patterns it contains.  I decided to start with something marked as an “intermediate” pattern.  After about two hours I decided that it was too difficult and I would start with something marked “easy”.  I have knit expert patterns before and I have also knit lace before so I was surprised that I was having such difficultly.  But then the word easy doesn’t really tell me very much.

The lace I’m knitting, just like the food, doesn’t contain advanced techniques.  It does, however, involve concentration and precision.  If every stitch needs to be perfect is the pattern really easy?  And when I say it doesn’t contain advanced techniques I suppose that depends on who you ask.  I know quite a few knitters who wouldn’t have a clue how to knit the lace as it involves stitches that are not taught to beginners and you have to know how to read a lace chart.

There is a cliche that says that says, “it’s easy when you know how”, but I’m not convinced.  Even a task that is easy can become difficult if you have to repeat many times.  As for the stew maybe it is an easy option for Marty.  All he needs to do is eat it once it’s finished and given how good it smells at the minute that shouldn’t be too difficult.

Marty and I thought it would be fun to try to make a traditional Northern Irish breakfast.  We wanted this to contain soda farls, potato bread, and back bacon.

Potato bread is quite easy to make and it’s not difficult to buy potatoes, butter, and flour in Tokyo.  Potatoes are also sold here in threes and fours; the perfect amount for making bread.

Potato Bread

Making soda bread was more difficult.  One of the main ingredients is buttermilk, which we can’t buy in Tokyo.  There are a variety of substitutes for this and today we used milk soured with lemon juice.

Most of the bacon sold here is the American streaky bacon.  I don’t really like this and wanted to get back bacon.  I ordered this from the meat guy.  The bacon was the least successful part of breakfast.  Not because the meat was bad it’s just that it didn’t taste like Irish bacon.  We joked that we missed the food colouring that makes Irish bacon look pinker.  I think we actually expected it to be smoked or maple cured.

Saturday Brunch

It took much longer to make than it would in Belfast.  It was a fun way to spend the morning even though we made too much food.  Maybe, when I lived in Belfast, I could have eaten it all but here I didn’t manage to eat half of it.

I’m supposed to limit my intake of goitrogenic foods – one of these being strawberries.  But it’s Christmas Eve and I wanted to eat strawberries and drink a glass of champagne.  Since I won’t be eating strawberries that often, Marty bought me the very expensive ones they sell in Japan for Christmas. They are the most amazing strawberries I have ever tasted.  They are huge and full of flavour and nothing like the small watery things they call strawberries in Northern Ireland.

Japanese Gift Strawberries

Today is the national holiday that celebrates the Emperor’s Birthday.  As it’s the start of our Christmas break we thought it would be fun to order some Christmas food from KFC.  We didn’t get our order in on time for the Roast Chicken Barrel but we did manage to get premium chicken breasts filled with a strange white, vegetable and shrimp sauce.  I wasn’t sure about the sauce at first but it was actually quite nice.

Christmas Dinner KFC Style

A couple of weeks ago one of my friends sent me a thank you gift that contained packets of Maltesers.  Since moving to Japan I have started to crave these little chocolate honeycomb balls.  Marty also loves Maltesers so they disappeared much too quickly.

Not surprisingly Maltesers aren’t the only thing I miss eating in Japan.  As a Christmas treat I ordered us some food from one of the online British food stores.  It’s expensive to do this, because of the postage costs, but I really wanted a traditional Christmas pudding, cake, and mince pies. In my last order I decided to get some Maltesers.  I must not have been paying enough attention at the time because I made a bit of a mistake.  Today I received 16 boxes of Maltesers. Anyone fancy a game of Malteser Jenga?

Maltesers Stacked on the Table

Over the next few weeks we are expecting to have friends over for dinner.  I have been trying to think of dishes to cook that are Irish but that don’t require an oven.  Food is one of the few things I can talk about in Japanese but I am never sure what to tell people when they ask about food from Ireland.  What are our traditional dishes?

I have seen recipes for corn beef and cabbage – but really I have never eaten that anywhere but America.  And I don’t believe that adding Guinness or Baileys to a recipe makes it authentically Irish either.  The other problem is that I’m from the North of Ireland so have never eaten Dublin Coddle or Boxty (actually I had to look both these up when I first came across them as I had no idea what they were).

Potatoes are a key ingredient in Irish cooking but I don’t like champ or colcannon.  I do like Irish stew and potato soup and potato bread but I need a bit more variety than this as I don’t think we can have potatoes for all the courses.

I do wonder though how much the diet of Northern Irish people has changed from the traditional meal of meat and potatoes.  I rarely cooked potatoes when I lived there.  I was much more likely to cook Chinese, Italian or Mexican food.  Every other restaurant is a Chinese restaurant and Indian food it also really popular.  It’s actually difficult to find anywhere in Belfast that serves food that could be called traditionally Irish or British.

I am seriously considering cooking chicken tikka masala as my main dish.  Jamie Oliver’s recipe for this is really good and it is one of the most popular foods in the U.K. It may even have been created in the U.K.  I just don’t think that my Japanese friends will  be expecting spicy food served with rice but they are much more likely to come across that in Belfast than they are Dublin Lawyer or Dublin Coddle.

When I had the flu I wanted to eat something other than toast at lunch time. I liked the idea of having a large pot of home made chicken soup but I wasn’t well enough to make it. As a compromise Marty went out and bought me tins of Campbell’s soup. Growing up I always preferred Heinz’s soups. Campbell’s soups are concentrated and I find the concept of adding water to canned soup a little odd. (I’m not sure why I think this since water is one of the main ingredients of every home made soup that I make).

I was thrilled that one of the flavours he bought was tomato. I love tomato soup. The labels on the back of the can had mostly been covered with a new Japanese label. But one thing wasn’t. It stated “contains 2 x the Lycopene of a fresh tomato”. Is that really a good thing? I have no idea what lycopene is (even though I spent three years studying biochemistry). Marty didn’t know either but decided that it would be cool if it was something that helped turn you into a wolf…

I had a look on Wikipedia and discovered that processed tomatoes are a better source of lycopene than fresh ones:

Lycopene in tomato paste is four times more bioavailable than in fresh tomatoes. This is because lycopene is so insoluble in water and is so tightly bound to vegetable fiber. Thus processed tomato products such as pasteurized tomato juice, soup, sauce, and ketchup contain the highest concentrations of bioavailable lycopene.