TheMcWoods

My most fervent reader (hi Mom!) has berated me over the past few weeks over the lack of activity on my blog. Apparently my Dad checks it daily and has been rather disappointed over the past month. Sorry Dad!

There really hasn't been too much to report over the past few weeks really. Lee was on a 3-week course for work, which meant that he was actually working the same schedule as me (9-5)! It really was rather lovely just to be able to hang out at night together and to know that we would have three solid weekends where neither of us was at work. We didn't do anything really (sad, I know). We just spent time pottering around Worcester, reading the Sunday papers, getting a coffee...

Mom made sure to also remind me that is was St. Patrick's Day today and that I should be celebrating my roots.

This, of course, calls for some traditional Irish soda bread using a recipe Mom and I have been using for years. I wish I could say that it was a recipe handed down by my Irish grandfather. Nope. This is the recipe that I found way back in Brownies while researching traditional Irish food for a project. A quick google search revealed that the recipe is indeed rather traditional as it only uses four ingredients: flour, buttermilk, baking soda, and salt. Any further additions (albeit tasty) are blasphemous.



As a special treat for Lee, I also made some Irish stew. With meat! This is a rather big deal in our house as we have significantly reduced our meat consumption over the past year (thank you Mark Bittman and Michael Pollan).



And to wrap up this rather Irish post, here are some places that I plan to visit in a few month's time:

Bushmill's distillery

The Giant's causeway

The Carrick-a-Rede rope bridge

The Canadian invasion of Northern Ireland will commence in late May as my mom, dad, sister, aunt, uncle, and cousins descend on Belfast and surrounding areas to meet up with my grandfather's family. I visited almost ten years ago when I was travelling solo through the UK, but I'm really excited to go with my entire family. It will be nice to see other people who not only share our last name, but pasty white skin and large heads! :)