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.

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.

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.