lpinkmountain - Cake flour is milled from soft wheat and is also bleached, which is one thing I avoid in flour (although King Arthur has a new unbleached cake flour available). Whole wheat pastry flour is also milled from soft wheat, but not so low in the protein as cake flour is. Using ALL cake flour (7.5-8.5% protein) would be a little too low in gluten for soda bread. I've seen soda bread recipes that use a portion of cake flour and all-purpose flour to lower the gluten level. Other flour choices would be Southern All-Purpose flours such as White Lily (which has always been the flour-of-choice for making biscuits for generations), Martha White, Gladiola, and Red Band. Yogurt is a good substitute for buttermilk because it is acid enough to react the soda in soda bread recipes, an acid ingredient is a MUST. Just give the yogurt a stir to liquefy it (which breaks up the curds), and you can add a little milk or water if you want to thin it a bit. In fact, yogurt (4.3-4.4 pH) is more acid than buttermilk 4.5-5.1 pH) - the lower the number the more acidic the food. Sour milk would also work, naturally soured or soured with lemon juice or vinegar. Powdered buttermilk is rather insipid, compared to commercial buttermilk. It just doesn't have that tangy flavor that is part of soda bread - BUT - if you want to use powdered buttermilk, you can use it to culture and make your own homemade buttermilk, and it will be nice and tangy like commercial buttermilk. How to: In a quart jar, place 1/2 c. buttermilk (commercial buttermilk or reconstituted buttermilk made from powdered buttermilk - according to package directions). Fill the remainder of the jar with regular milk. Stir well. Let stand in a warm place (at least 80°F - I place mine in the oven with the light on, as far from the light as possible). Leave the mixture until it clabbers - 12-18-hours. Stir when done and refrigerate. You can take a 1/2-cup of homemade buttermilk to culture your next (1-quart) batch of homemade buttermilk if you use it within two weeks. BTW - When making biscuits, once the liquid ingredients are added to the dry ingredients, keep mixing (by hand) to a bare minimum so you don't develop the gluten strands in the dough. I pat biscuit dough into a nice square with floured hands (no rolling pin) and then cut them into squares with a pizza cutter. When you cut biscuits into rounds, you have all that leftover dough which is balled up, patted out and cut again. Those biscuits are called "second cuts" and are generally more tough than first cuts because the gluten has been over-worked. So to save time and avoid second cuts, try cutting your biscuits into squares. -Grainlady

Nope, doesn't matter. I've used olive oil, canola oil, vegetable oil, corn oil, peanut oil. It's all fine. Mostly I pick up the decanter of olive oil on my counter and "glug" in what looks like a couple of tablespoons or whatever the recipe calls for, it's right there and it's easy. Annie

Well, we have more water than Mars! But if you look at pictures of our reservoirs and lakes, you could doubt it. ;) Is it definitive enough? Not completely. If you take the traditional religious view and only look within the traditional and rabbinical texts, then one would say, yes, that is the origin of the word as it is used in the American language. If you consider the scholarship outside of the texts (which is the tradition in my family over many generations--reverence for the texts as well as scholarly looks outside of them), given that for all our people have lost of our records over the centuries, we have a remarkable legacy of writings, and can date pretty well when and where the word "challah" first came into use for Shabbat bread, specifically the braid, then no. One can imagine that the Jewish women wanted to serve this lovely bread to their families for Shabbat, and rather than forbidding it, the rabbis codified it, imbued it with Jewish meaning, and decided it was challah with a ח, referring to the text, not Holla with a ה, since we don't recognize pagan gods. That has always been the way when cultures brush up against each other. Learning this has been a treasure for me. Instead of the challah being just one more thing we do, it makes a connection with a specific group and their generations before them, and I think it's very cool. As to Linda's daughter-in-law's family, I'm guessing "Holly", which is often heard, especially among older people, is a diminutive or a matter of phonetic drift rather than a reference to the goddess.

LOL, AnnT, I knew you'd approve. Mother says the raisins remind her of little dead bugs in there. (snicker) Some apricots might be really good, though, or some of your caramel sauce and I was thinking about raspberries. Sorry, LindaC. PM, now that sounds like dessert! I'm still passing mine off as breakfast. I think we'll always be on Weight Watchers, Elery keeps calling it a "lifestyle". He's lost 90 pounds and I think he's too thin, but he just won't give it up. Colleen, I'm thinking Amanda would love it, made with gluten free bread and coconut milk, I'm definitely going to have to do that. Martha, my bread never gets thrown away. Most times it becomes bread crumbs, but this is a much better use of challah, I think. Nancy, I've seen french toast and bread pudding made with pumpkin or banana bread, but never an unsweetened type. Now that's a lucky accident, you could call that "recipe development"! SheilaJoyce, I don't have that cookbook, but that sounds just like the bread pudding Grandma made, with vanilla and cinnamon and lots of custard. I always figured it was because us kids ate nearly all of the bread and didn't leave that much, so more eggs than bread. Mother is having some more of it right now with coffee, she says all her pills are easier to take with bites of bread pudding to help them down. Yeah, that's her story... Annie