Tomorrow is St. Patrick’s Day. Younger folks like to celebrate that particular holiday by drinking to excess while wearing cheap green t-shirts made in China. Not me. For the past few years, I have invited my 100% Irish Da over for a traditional Irish dinner. And, no, that isn’t a six pack with a boiled potato. And not corned beef and cabbage, either — my Da hates the stuff. Shepherd’s Pie FTW.
When you grow up Irish, you hear a lot of humor revolving around the Irish propensity to drink. Except my Dad never drank. Was that a bit of an anomoly in my Irish Catholic circles? Yep. He was fond of telling the story that his immigrant father told him, the only boy with four sisters (two of whom would become nuns). His father advised him that if he could abstain from alcohol until age 18, he would realize he never needed it. Given that my grandfather died when my Dad was 18, I am guessing that played a large role in why he never drank.
So, no, drinking green beer has never been a large part of my Irish heritage. And, let’s be honest, Ireland is not especially known for its cuisine. Blood sausage?! No thank you! But the Irish soda bread, yes, that has been a favorite. My aunt, Sr. Mary Cecile (some of you may remember her as St. Iphielya) was well regarded for her recipe, but ssshhhh, don’t tell anyone — especially my Irish relatives, but I always found it a bit dry.
The first time I invited my Dad over for St. Patrick’s Day, I used the Internet to find a recipe. That was a mistake. No good. Too dense, too dry, even my Da didn’t like it. The next year I smartened up and called my Aunt Eileen. With two sisters who went into the convent, she compensated by having thirteen (13!) of her own children. Now, that is a good Irish Catholic! Rest assured, Aunt Eileen shared her recipe and it is a winner. Bain sult as!
Aunt Eileen’s Irish Soda Bread
3 cups sifted all purpose flour
2/3 cup sugar
3 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon cream of tartar
1 teaspoon salt (I use less)
5 and 1/3 Tablespoon melted butter
1 and 1/2 cup raisins (you can use dark or golden, but I prefer golden)
Preheat oven to 350 degrees and grease iron skillet. Sift flour (already sifted) with dry ingredients — salt, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, and cream of tartar. Add butter (make sure it’s not hot!), egg, buttermilk, and raisins. Stir only to moisten. Turn into greased skillet (I like to double the recipe, so also use a deep dish pie plate). Bake for 40-45 minutes, until toothpick comes out clean.
That’s it! So easy and you will amaze and impress both the Irish and Irish-for-a-day folks you serve it to. A word of advice, don’t get cute and skimp on the sifting, though. That process makes the bread less dense in texture and taste lighter. I hope you enjoy it as much as my dear old Da.
Getting my Irish on at the Jewish grocer’s.At this stage, the dough is a sticky mess, but have no fear.Voila! Or, you know, the Irish version of voila, maybe something like, O’Ta Da!
May joy and peace surround you, contentment latch your door, and happiness be with you now and bless you evermore.
Happiest of St. Patrick’s Days to you from an Irish lass in Chicago!
Sometimes, on this here Internet, you find a fellow human that just gets it, gets you, and a kinship develops — sometimes one sided, sometimes mutual. When you’re really lucky, you develop a friendship with that person. And when you’re really, really lucky, you realize you live oh, just about 15 minutes away in city traffic.
Katy makes my life better. I read her words and I want to be better, you know? It’s hard to explain without gushing, so if I gush, indulge me, please.
On Monday, Katy posted this brilliance about winter and why she loves it and why she fears the spring, the lengthening days, the light. I read it and was immediately texting dear Katy telling her, “I get it, but I have the exact opposite affliction — I want to help you like you helped me this winter.”
Fangirl. Pffft.
See, I dread the winters. Dread them. I mostly find the holidays oppressive with the message to be HAPPY HAPPY and only feel JOY JOY. Ugh. I cope alright, cause I gots the coping skillz to pay the billz, but it’s pretty much with lots and lots of effort on my part. I do a secret happy dance for myself at the winter solstice, as even though it is the official beginning of my most dreaded season, every day I know, because science tells me so, that there will be a few more seconds of day light. Those seconds add up to minutes through January, and by February, those minutes morph into almost an hour of extra light.
In those dark days of winter, Katy pops up into my newsfeed on Facebook, waxing poetic about slushy snow and furry boots and feeling snug as a bug on a cold winter’s night, happily eating pie in her bed.
Chicago is on the tail end of a brutal winter. Brutal. Third snowiest on record. There were cold days and ice days and pneumonia days. Ugh. But there was Katy, lovely Katy, shining brighter than any June sun, extolling the virtue of this winter that was pummeling all around us. She was the tonic I needed.
Photo courtesy of I Want a Dumpster Baby
I could not help but learn to appreciate what she saw, see the beauty in that relentless snow, feel the gratitude for an unexpected day of cancelled school and consider myself lucky that I had everything I needed right at home with no need to do anything other than appreciate the opportunity to be together.
When I would feel myself get pulled into the dark, which, yes, is easy for me to do from November through February, I would call Katy up in my thoughts and remember her words, her joy, her appreciation of beauty when others dwelled on the negative.
It’s all about perspective.
Katy and I both struggle. Those struggles are the trademark of our respective blogs, and I think, maybe, why we have some significant reader crossover. Katy’s honesty about her struggles are part of the reason I both adore and admire her.
While our struggles are different, we approach them similarly. Chin up, forward momentum, and bed pie as needed. No shame, feel the feelings fully, and bed pie as needed. Truth and gratitude and bed pie as needed. Ha!
Now that winter is lifting, despite the six inches of heavy white snow that fell last night in Chicago, I feel the lift of spring in the air. There is relief, palpable relief on my part, that another winter is almost in the books. Whew. I feel such gratitude to this Katy girl that helped me more than she can ever realize just by shining her light for others to see and bask in.
Thank you, Katy!
But now, though her words, I know that Katy is reaching a vulnerable time of year. The light I crave means something completely different for me than it does her. The fangirl in me hopes against hope that I can now carry the torch of optimism and glee that Katy carried so beautifully all winter and that guided me here, to the cusp of spring, intact, faking it until I actually made it.
The Spring light is amazing — clear, fresh, intense, vibrant, bright. The color of the sky is different in April and May than it is in January or July. The light and changing green on the trees is more brilliant on that first day you look up from your winter stupor and realize that, yes, those green things on the branches are leaves that have indeed returned.
Spring is a beautiful and profound and sacred return. It is confirmation that light and warmth follow cold and dark. Always. Spring is our annual reward and promise as human beings that things do, in fact, get better, even in nature. As a family who has buried one of our children, this promised and expected annual return to life and growth and hope is so very needed.
Long story short, if I am doing my mothering job properly, Mary Tyler Son will some day come to recognize and appreciate the glory of Spring himself. He will teach his own children to love the light, trust the warmth, and plant those bulbs. He will know that life is universal and that its cyclical nature is confirmation of something to be celebrated.
Katy and I are yin and yang, chocolate and peanut butter, Lucy and Ethel (and we all know who Lucy is in this equation) — all those things are pretty damn amazing on their own, but together — KAPOW, KABLAMMO, BINGO! Friendship is awesome.
Thank you, Katy, for buzzing around me all winter’s long, guiding me safely to the comfort of spring. Thank you for walking the path you walk (in heels, too, dammit) and inviting so many of us to walk it with you. Thank you for your sheer and powerful gratitude and dorkitude. Thank you for your wisdom and red lipstick. Thank you for your honesty and sincerity.
I love you, girl. More than you know. Probably more than is healthy, but shush, not in a weird way, but in a perfectly acceptable ‘grateful you are in my orbit’ kind of way.
Thanks for seeing me though this winter. I’ve got this torch now, come spring, just look for the light — it will be there.
I don’t know you, but was seated next to you yesterday afternoon at Trufano’s Vernon Park Tap — a Chicago institution. We arrived at 5:30. I saw you walk in just before us and thought to myself — “She’s cute — looks like a nice gal.” I honestly had that thought. Pffft.
It was not crowded, but getting there. We had timed it right. After a wait of just a few minutes we got seated. There were four of us — my husband, my five year old boy, myself, and our sleeping baby. We were coming off a late afternoon visit to the zoo and in a grand frame of mind. The sun was shining in Chicago, the snow melting, and today’s forecast started with the number 5. Woot Woot!
I was in a great mood.
As the hostess showed us to our table, I thought again, “There’s that cute gal,” as it was clear we would be sitting right next to you, but then I saw you roll your eyes, nudge your man’s elbow across the table, and say, “LOOK,” before nodding your head in our direction. Yes, I have eyes and I saw you. My initial thought was FU, cause we teach our kiddos how to behave in restaurants and I didn’t like the assumptions you were making.
You see, dear lady, I am a mom blogger. I spend lots of time on this here Internet in the mom world. I’ve read stories like this one before where rude strangers pop off at parents in places like airplanes and restaurants. I know it’s a thing on the Internet — just another way for people to bitch and moan and complain about folks different than themselves, so I’ve never really engaged this topic on my blog. I find it boring.
But there you were, in all your Lululemon glory, eating dinner with your husband or brother or cousin or boyfriend at a two top. And there we were, your family from hell, apparently, seated right next to you at the four top. Oddly, we were probably a lot like you — trying to grab an early dinner at a beloved neighborhood joint before going home and calling it a weekend.
It’s a really, really odd and unnerving feeling to know that your mere presence, or, let’s be honest, the presence of your children, causes a stranger annoyance and distress. Enough annoyance and distress that it’s visible and not hidden from you. I whispered to my husband, “Oops, looks like we annoyed the couple there,” posted a quick update on the FB, too, as I felt like I was caught in an Internet phenomenon and where better to address that than the Internet?
Here is the happily sleeping baby that was so annoying to the couple behind him.
Then, I moved on. Took the movie’s advice and “Let it Go.”
We ordered our food, kept our five year old occupied, as he was hungry and, yes, a little cranky. The drinks and salads arrived. Trufano’s is old school, so we treated our son to a kiddie cocktail and split our iceberg lettuce salad three ways. Our boy went back and forth two or three times between his seat and my lap. He was occupied, though, and not loud or bothersome. These days, knowing that his time on my lap will be over soon enough, I enjoy those moments. He knew that when the food arrived his place was back at his own seat.
The baby kept sleeping.
You snickered when I took a photo of my son’s kiddie cocktail. Yep, I saw and heard that, too. Whatever, I thought. Kiddie cocktails are awesome and bubbly and I had just deleted like 200 photos from my phone that afternoon, so was feeling antsy to be able to use the camera again with the extra storage freed up.
I mean, COME ON — just look at that bubbly goodness!
Like my son, I was hungry and really looking forward to eating. Again — this meal felt celebratory. Life is good right now and I don’t take that for granted. It felt really, really nice to sit in a restaurant surrounded by my three boys. This meal out was unexpected, but really appreciated. Trufano’s is such a joint, full of atmosphere and families and hustle and bustle, that it was just great to be out after the longest of winters.
Our food arrived with cheers from my son. Hooray! I snapped another photo, because my plate looked awesome and I wanted to save the moment and yes, it’s a thing now for folks to snap photos of food before they eat it. That annoyed you, too, and merited more eye rolls, another nudge to your partner, and the head nod accompanied by the mouthed, “Oh God.”
Wow. Did it bother you, I wondered, that I took a photo of my food? Wow — really? I marveled at how problem free your life must be if a stranger seated at the next table pushing a button on her phone caused you such distress.
You were ticking me off and it was harder to ignore you at this point.
Not a moment later, our baby let out a squawk. Yes, a loud squawk. He woke up in an unfamiliar place and squawked. Six month old babies do that. As I picked him up, I heard your loud, “OH GOD,” with more eye rolling and elbow nudging of your dinner mate. That sort of did it for me. I looked at you and said, “Don’t worry, it’s going to be okay.” I think my meaning was totally lost on you. You smiled back at me warmly like I was an idiot and you had no idea why I was addressing you.
I was addressing you, dear lady, because you were rude and judgemental throughout our thirty minutes of sitting four feet away from you and I had had just about enough. When a baby cries and before his mama can even pick him up to walk away you loudly proclaim, “OH GOD,” well, gal, you got some issues.
Trufano’s is a family joint. This is no Alinea. This is a family run business in a residential neighborhood. There were no less than six babies in car seats that I saw, at least a dozen toddlers through tweens. Much of the menu is offered family style and it was 5:30 on a Sunday afternoon. Sheesh. If a family with a baby is not able to eat at that kind of restaurant at that time of day, well, then, banish us all for the 18 years until our kids are raised and out of the house.
You might like that.
I left the table with my baby because I didn’t want to disturb those around me. When you go out to eat at a restaurant, as I always tell my son, no one wants to hear crying and misbehaving. Restaurants are special, because you are eating in community with others. That means if our kids are causing a disturbance, we act as responsible parents and leave the room, so as not to disturb. That’s just what we do. That means, also, that you don’t obviously communicate to the family sitting next to you that you find their mere presence a nuisance. I wish it were as easy to teach you as it is my son about those important lessons in civility and community.
In the end, I didn’t come back to the table. I really didn’t want to see you again. I will enjoy the food for lunch today. Baby and I were happily welcomed at an empty spot at the bar in the next room and folks around us actually enjoyed him and oohed and aahed over him, asking after his name and pinching his formidable cheeks. You know, like most folks respond to a baby in a family restaurant.
The offending food photo. It will make a good lunch today!
I don’t know your story and after I hit publish on this post, I’ll forget about you, dear lady. But honestly? I feel badly for you. You must be sad and that must suck. Here’s to a brighter future for you, full of quiet and solitude. Oh, and my guess is that whole yoga thing is not working for you, so it’s sort of pointless to invest in the Lululemon gear.
Namaste, dear lady. Namaste.
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Mary Tyler Mom 