unexpected crab sandwiches

A few weeks ago, Nigel Slater made a soda bread loaf, which he cooked in a cast iron casserole. We make lots of soda bread here, and it seemed like a good idea, so I gave it a try; but it was hopeless – you couldn’t turn it out to see if it was done, so I decided to just carry on using a baking tray as before.

On Saturday, I decided to bake a couple of Guinness soda breads; I scaled up the recipe carefully, but something went wrong, and even after adding a bit more flour, the mix felt very wet, so I bunged it in my huge and ancient Le Creuset and baked it in that.

Calamity – the inside was raw. Still we carved the ends of for Saturday night supper of bread, cheese and apple, and planned to surgically remove the remaining decent bits for toast for Sunday breakfast. However, the discovery of half a bag of cranberries in the fridge led to an outburst of fresh cranberry muffins instead, meaning the bread was left for Sunday supper.

Just as well, really. I opened a tin of tuna for the Tribe as a treat, only to discover once it was de-lidded that it was in fact crab; no idea what it was doing on the cat fud shelf.  Far too nice to give to the cats, we located the errant tuna and gave them that (it lasted about 3m 20s, I think), and put the crab in the fridge.

Then last evening, I mixed in some mayo, some lemon juice and some paprika with the crab, and we had it on the soda bread. It was really very nice indeed, not least because it was so unexpected.