Irish – cozy does it

Dear friends,

We woke to mild temperatures and a low-lying mist this morning, not so different from the ones that I remember from our past trips to Ireland. Today is St. Patrick’s Day, so it seems fitting that the weather should jog my memory of one of our favorite travel destinations. The clouds have lingered into the early afternoon and the Atlantic is molten steel, capped with cotton.

Feeling culinarily ambitious and craving hearty fare for later on, I headed out to the grocery store first thing this misty morning to pick up the ingredients I was missing for Guinness Beef Stew and Irish Brown Bread. The rich scent of simmering carrots, potatoes, onions, garlic, and beef mingle with that of Irish stout, red wine, stock, and thyme. The smells are starting to escape the seams of the Crock Pot lid in thin breaths in a successful effort to permeate the kitchen.

The brown bread’s baking in the oven, adding the sweet dryness of toasting flour into this afternoon’s scent medley. My hands feel soft from mixing and working the dough, something I haven’t done since we lived in Brooklyn. As I turned and folded the sticky dough on the floured counter, I thought of our old kitchen on Union Avenue and realized something. We’ve had our home in New Jersey for five years today.

When we lived in Brooklyn, I had maybe four meals that I would make on rotation, having limited cooking skills and even less patience for meal planning. Irish stew and brown bread was one of these meals and I’m sure we both grew tired of it toward the end of our time in New York. It feels nostalgic now, however, to make it here for the first time. It feels festive and like an appropriate meal to celebrate five years of living in this beautiful place together on this gray, March day.

While working in the kitchen earlier, I also couldn’t help but think of the improvements we’ve gained in our cooking skills over the past five years. We went from cooking tried and true recipes maybe once or twice a week to cooking from an expansive variety of options three to four times a week.

The kitchen has become a space for creativity in our home, for trying out new recipes and having them turn out more than half decent, most of the time at least. It’s a space for surprising ourselves, for building confidence, and for drinking red wine or a cold beer while stirring simmering concoctions in many pans and pots all going at the same time.

I enjoy the sensory experiences of cooking- the scents, the sounds, the colors. My favorite, however, is the warmth. There is the warmth of the stove burners as they glow red, the warmth of the preparing meal simmering away, and the warmth of the oven and it’s golden light as I open the door. Speaking of- the oven timer’s beeping which means the brown bread’s finished baking, so I’ll get back to this post in a moment.

The bread is golden and ugly and rugged, just how I remember it. 🙂

Speaking of ugly and rugged, I resumed my quest for Stephen King’s “Dark Tower” last week, digging in to Book V, The Wolves of the Calla, after a months-long break from the series. This one’s a continuation of King’s behemoth, western-style, adventure tale with his characteristic visceral descriptions and unparalleled creativity for the dark and disturbing. It’s far from cozy though, and I think today is a day to lean hard into cozy, so I’ll take a break from Roland and his ka-tet’s adventure in favor of one of my dad’s recommendations instead, P.G. Wodehouse’s Mulliner Nights.

Just a few minutes more until I can slice into the brown bread and see how I’ve done this time…

Upon post-slice review, I think I could have baked it for five minutes less, as it was a little more crumbly than I remember, but it will do just fine with a pat of Kerry Gold Irish Butter and a mugful of Oolong sips for now. At dinner later on is when it will really have a chance to shine, dunked in savory stew, soaking up all the hearty flavors to make for a delicious bite. Now, I’m craving that cozy reading escape before getting back to work on some fiction of my own.

I hope this post added a little warmth to your day, wherever you are. And to my friends and family who celebrate, wishing you all a very happy St. Patrick’s Day. I hope you have a festive evening whether it’s out at a pub, listening to Celtic music at home, or indulging in a hearty meal paired with an Irish stout, lager, ale, or whiskey. Thanks so much for reading. I hope you’re doing well. 🙂

Sláinte,

Beth

I met someone new today. Her name is Ella Brady. She lives in Dublin and frequents a restaurant called Quentins. We were unknowingly introduced by my Nana, back when I was fourteen and spending the summer with her and my Aunt Arlene down the shore, via her suggestion that I might enjoy the works of Maeve Binchy, an Irish author with a great descriptive talent for storytelling. Having tried a couple of pages of one of Ms. Binchy’s books back at fourteen, the title of which evades me now, I decided to occupy my reading time with other titles and authors instead. I slid the works of Maeve Binchy onto a bookshelf in the library in my head to be revisited another time.

Maeve Binchy and I met again in the ladies room at The Bank on College Green in Dublin when I was twenty-three and she was three years passed, a portrait of her hanging on the wall along with portraits of other female, Irish artists. Seeing the portrait tugged the ball chain pull to the light bulb over the bookshelf in my head and to my Nana’s suggestion from nine years earlier. On vacation and out to dinner celebrating the special occasion of Mike and my sixth anniversary of dating, the light bulb extinguished and I continued on with the evening, Maeve Binchy, an all but forgotten apparition haunting the library in my head.

We met again most recently on Friday morning when Mike and I spent an evening visiting with my parents at our extended family’s shore house a bit further down the New Jersey coast from where Mike and I now live. Having helped to manage the house’s fully-stacked, weekly rental schedule during this other-worldy summer, it was rewarding to get to enjoy the house for a night and to relax in the familiar space rather than feel stressed and pressed for time as we often do during five-hour rental “turnovers”.

We stayed in the room that was my Nana’s when she lived in the house, the room that she’d chosen to make her own space for years before she moved to an apartment in Pennsylvania. I’d not slept in the room since before she moved to New Jersey back in 2000, back when it was the original “Cousins’ Room” with two twin beds topped with crocheted, white coverlets – the floor blanketed in dusty rose carpeting.

Even after Nana moved from the house and slept in the “cozy room” downstairs during her visits, her room upstairs was designated for the parents and the West Coast family when they visited, and then for my cousins expecting children. On Thursday, after a summer of muscle, decision making, cleaning schedule communications, logging expenses, ordering and purchasing supplies, and initiating process improvements, I felt we deserved to sleep in Nana’s old room, the nicest room in the house. When Mike asked me on the second floor landing on Thursday night, “Cousins’ room?” I just replied, “Nana’s room.”

It is a strange thing to feel like you’ve grown up so significantly to the point of noticing it over the course of a summer, but I feel that is what has happened during this very strange summer. This is how I came to be comfortable and to feel deserving of sleeping in the best room in the house on Thursday. This is how I came to be reacquainted with Maeve Binchy when I woke up Friday and saw the dusty spine of Quentins resting on the bookshelf table under the center window in Nana’s room that morning.

I spoke with my Nana on Friday and let her know that I had found one of her Maeve Binchy books and let her know that I was going to read it. I told her it was called Quentins. She said, “You read it first and then I’ll read it.” Eager to have something to share with her, I took the book home and began to read it this morning. I met someone new today. Her name is Ella Brady. She lives in Dublin and frequents a restaurant called Quentins. Once I am acquainted with Ella’s story completely, I will send the book to my Nana, and she will meet her again too, and Ella will soon be a mutual friend or foe of ours; and to find out which, I’ll go back to reading the story.

Tag: Irish

March Postcard

We Keep Meeting