Join twowildtides on the country challenge. Each week, we’re going to be heading to a new country (in spirit). Primarily, we’ll be cooking a meal from each country; but we’ll also be watching travel documentaries, reading travel blogs, and listening to music. During the global pandemic, travel is largely inaccessible. We want to reignite our wanderlust, satisfy our travel bug as much as we can, and learn some new things along the way. I have a feeling our bucket list will have a number of items added to it through this experience as well. We created a simple alphabetical spreadsheet with all the countries of the world, and each week we will draw a random number that corresponds with a country on the spreadsheet.
This weekend we are visiting a country that’s close to our hearts. Ireland is the source of much of Newfoundland culture. Our food, music, dance, landscape, hospitality, accent, and architecture all derive from elements of Irish culture. We’ve also inherited the Irish inclination for a good party. That’s why Ireland is at the very top of my travel to-do list.
It was not difficult to decide what meal to cook this weekend. We often cook up big scoffs for breakfast so we were dying for a good Irish breakfast. We turned up the Jigs and Reels (or at least the closest we could get on Spotify) and heated up the pans. A traditional Newfoundland breakfast consists of fried eggs, bologna, blood pudding, toast with jam, beans, fried onions and tomato, and toutons. An Irish breakfast, according to DiscoveringIreland.com, consists of sausage, bacon, black and white pudding, baked beans, eggs, mushrooms, tomato, toast with jam, boxty, tea, and orange juice.
Sadly, we couldn’t get our hands on any good black pudding in our Alberta town (we just ate the last of what we brought from home last week), so we stuck with bologna. We also didn’t have any mushrooms on hand. I wanted to incorporate more of Ireland’s traditional cuisine, so we decided to make their national dish to go with our breakfast: Colcannon Mash. We made our own scrambled eggs, fried up the bologna, heated the beans, spread partridgeberry jam on our toast, fried some tomatoes, and followed these recipes for boxty and colcannon mash.
Our breakfast turned out absolutely delicious. The Colcannon Mash and Boxty were super easy to make, so savoury and satisfying, and complimented our meal perfectly. We can imagine ourselves incorporating these elements into our regular Saturday or Sunday morning big breakfasts. It tasted just like home but with a hint of wanderlust.
Let us know what you think!