Food & Drink

Celebrate the Season with a Berry Salad

It’s strawberry season in Ireland, especially in County Wicklow, where the luscious berries are grown in great number at places like Green’s Berry Farm in Gorey.

Delicious in shortcakes, jams, and quick beads, of course, but for a change of pace toss them in a salad with cheese and nuts and top it with honey-mustard vinaigrette, creamy poppy seed or blue cheese dressing.

Buy your favorite salad greens loose or in convenient 10-ounce bags; add baby spinach and arugula, if you like.

STRAWBERRY-BLUEBERRY SALAD WITH HONEY-MUSTARD VINAIGRETTE

SERVES 4

For the salad

  • Mixed lettuce, spinach, arugula
  • 1 cup whole strawberries
  • 1 cup sliced strawberries
  • 1/2 cup blueberries
  • 1/2 cup pine nuts
  • 1/2 red onion, sliced (optional)
  • Crumbled blue cheese (optional)

For the vinaigrette

  • 2 teaspoons Dijon mustard
  • 2 teaspoons honey
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
  • 1/4 teaspoon almond extract
  • 1/4 teaspoon salt
  • 1/8 teaspoon white pepper
  • 1/2 cup canola oil
  • 1/4 cup white balsamic vinegar
  • Freshly ground black pepper
  1. Make salad. Combine mixed greens, strawberries, blueberries, pine nuts, onion (if using), and blue cheese (if using) in a large bowl.
  2. Make vinaigrette. In a small bowl, whisk together mustard, honey, vanilla and almond extracts, salt and pepper. Slowly whisk in oil until blended; whisk in vinegar.
  3. Pour dressing over salad; toss gently. Arrange on salad places, sprinkle with pepper, and serve.

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Music

Pandemic Put the Kibosh on his Band’s Jobs, But John Byrne Gains New Fan Appreciation Online

Play it, and they will come, if only online.

For John Byrne, a Dublin-born crooner, fan appreciation is pivotal, especially when grappling with a pandemic.

Since suspending all concert venues of his eponymously-named band in March, follower outpouring for his regular Facebook “quarantunes” concerts has been the ultimate covid antidote.

“I have lost track of the amount of cards and notes of support I’ve gotten. I’m moved beyond belief by them – I don’t know what we did to deserve it,” enthuses Byrne, a Philadelphia resident. “I’ve done multiple shows on Facebook Live and the fans have been wonderful. People have tuned in, shared them, supported them, and used them to connect with fellow admirers all over the country and even the world.”

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Genealogy, News

Who’s Your Granny: The Modern Way to Research

 

I don’t think it’s overstating things to assert that the pursuit of genealogy has been revolutionized over the past two decades. I first started delving into my family history in the mid 1990s, when a friend brought me with her to the Mercer Museum’s Spruance Library, where the Bucks County Historical Society maintained their archives.

Armed with a notebook and several sharpened pencils, I spent an afternoon immersed in dusty old published family histories and census records that involved searching indexes and battling a microfilm reader. It was glorious. And also daunting.

Fast forward about 10 years, and I was still visiting historical societies and courthouses whenever I got the chance, but I was also blissfully accessing census records at 3 a.m. from the comfort of my home via my computer and courtesy of Ancestry.com. No longer was I limited by an archive’s hours or the soundex version of a census index. I learned how to become creative in my keyword searches, and to work around the names of ancestors being mistranscribed.

These days, as I continue researching not just my own ancestors but also the families of other people, I utilize every online resource I can find. Some of them, like FamilySearch and Irish Genealogy, are free and invaluable. Others, such as Ancestry and Newspapers are subscription databases that I find equally invaluable and worth the price.

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Music

Pandemic Inspires Jamison Fiddler Alice Marie to Push the Bounds of Creativity

If you see Jamison Celtic Rock fiddler Alice Marie busking outside a Target, don’t surprised.

She’s half-serious about it, but for most Irish musicians who lost a lot of work in March and afterward, she’s doing whatever she can to keep body and soul together.

March is Christmas for Irish musicians in the area. It’s when they earn a significant amount of money. The coronavirus pandemic put an end to that.

It was no different for Alice Marie, who also makes a living as a jazz violinist and singer, and whatever else requires the talents of a gifted string player.

“I was on tour with Jamison in Florida, she recalls. “Then our tour was cut short and we had to come back due to Covid-19. So we came back and we were able to get a gig together at Currans Tacony, and that was our last show. It was a big night, and after that, we were pretty much quarantined. Our last major activity was in March. I had at least 20 shows canceled in March, so that was crazy.”

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How to Be Irish in Philly

How to Be Irish in Philly This Week (Quarantine Edition)

We’ve got a ways before we can return to the way things were, but for now, many of our favorite musicians are coming up with some socially distanced accommodations.

Up to this point, you’ve only been able to hear them through their Facebook concerts. And some, like Seamus Kelleher, have been doing concerts from their back porch or in parking lots.

But if you’re jonesing for the tunes of your favorite musicians in person, you’ll have to wait till the end of the week.

However, there is one Facebook concert (among the many lately) that you’ll definitely want to catch.

You can listen to Jamison Celtic Rock on Saturday—the full band, for the first time in weeks—streaming live on their Facebook page. They’ll be set up the requisite six feet apart, streaming live from a condo in North Wildwood, and they’ll play your favorite tunes and make you think about better times. The show starts at 5 p.m.

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Music

Pausing to Refresh During the Pandemic, and Baking Up Some Creative Alternatives

Shannon Lambert-Ryan bustles about her home kitchen, her fixings for Finnish ribbon cookies—including a huge bag of Heckers flour—at the ready. The mixing bowl sits upon a table at just the right height for her tow-headed toddler son, Liam—which for some, might seem a recipe for disaster.

Not so. Welcome to Lambert-Ryan’s periodic Facebook show, one of a series called “Baking with Babies.”

Video camera duly focused in on the action, Liam helps out enthusiastically. Guided by Lambert-Ryan’s hand, he scoops a cup of flour into the bowl. “1-2-3,” he says.

He seems inordinately interested in adding vanilla, which the recipe calls for, but not yet. With a wee one’s level of patience, he holds and shakes a bottle kept in his little kitchen, waiting for the opportunity to add it.

At one point, he “cracks” some toy eggs from his kitchen into the mixture. A little later on, he scoops up some dough with his little fingers and helps Lambert-Ryan squish it unceremoniously onto the baking sheet.

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Food & Drink

Your Remote All-American Memorial Day Dessert

Memorial Day is going to be very different this year. It’ll be a while before we can picnic in large groups, due to the coronavirus pandemic—Philadelphia and environs continuing to be a red zone.

By all means, remember what the holiday stands for, but also celebrate within your own cozy little household.

To help you along, we have a recipe for a rich pound cake that you absolutely should add to the menu. Grand Marnier and citrus are the perfect aromatics to flavor it and olive oil makes it moist and delicious. It’s a perfect recipe for summer entertaining, especially when you serve it with mascarpone crème and seasonal berries.

Feel free to share this delicious recipe with your friends and family … and Happy Memorial Day.

OLIVE OIL CAKE WITH MASCARPONE CRÈME

SERVES 8

For the mascarpone crème

  • 1 (8 ounces) container mascarpone, chilled
  • 1/2 cup heavy cream
  • 1/3 cup confectioners’ sugar
  • 1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract

For the cake

  • 1 1/3 cups extra-virgin olive oil
  • 2 tablespoons grated orange zest
  • 2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour, sifted
  • 1 3/4 cups sugar
  • 1 1/2 teaspoons kosher salt
  • 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
  • 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
  • 1 1/4 cups milk
  • 3 large eggs
  • 1/4 cup freshly squeezed orange juice
  • 1/4 cup Grand Marnier
  • Fresh berries, for serving

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Music, People

Seamus Kelleher: Singing a New Song, and the Message is Hope

Hope, optimism and resilience can be rare commodities in the age of coronavirus.

You might not expect any of the above from an Irish musician whose last booking came just three days before St. Patrick’s Day.

Like so many Irish musicians, Seamus Kelleher—a Galway-born virtuoso guitarist-singer-songwriter and alum of the celebrated band Blackthorn—lost work when the pandemic triggered state-mandated shutdowns at all the pubs, taverns and clubs where musicians typically find work during St. Patrick’s month.

“I did the Green Parrot in Newtown, Bucks County, on the 14th of March,” Kelleher recalls. “That was the last. It was an afternoon show. And it was surreal because at that stage there wasn’t a definite decision made to close everything down. It was just drip, drip, drip. But the owner and staff could tell. There was a real sense of impending doom. It was a very strange gig, and we just barely made the best of it, as we always do, but there was the sense that things could be changing, and that was very sobering for me.”

Right up until that day, Kelleher had been extremely busy. In fact, he explains, he was on target to have the best year of his solo career. In January, he embarked on a cross-country tour that included Colorado, Indiana and Kansas City. After that, he finished a 23-day tour of Florida before returning to Philadelphia for March madness. “I had 200 shows on the books, all across the country,” he says. To then only get halfway through March before everything closed down, he says, “was like having the rug pulled out from under me … but I wasn’t alone.”

Other local Irish musicians have regular jobs—assuming they still have them—and music is a sideline. For about 15 years, that was the case with Kelleher, who was employed as a speech writer in the corporate world, penning addresses for the presidents of Lincoln Financial and Drexel University, among others. But for the past five years, Kelleher has been committed to music full-time. But now, as a musician with no conventional day job, losing work had an impact. He continues to perform “porch concerts” live to Facebook, and they’ve been helpful, but Kelleher has been unexpectedly fortunate in another way.

During the past five years, Kelleher has devoted roughly two-thirds of his time purely to the performance of music, a lifelong passion dating back to the days when he was opening for the likes of Thin Lizzy. The remaining third of his career he devotes to motivational speaking. And he has quite the inspirational story to tell.

“I suffer from depression and anxiety and I’m a recovering alcoholic,” Kelleher explains, matter-of-factly. “So my motivational speech really talks about my journey. I incorporate some music into it, but the idea is to give hope for those who struggle with mental health and addiction. I also talk about suicide prevention. That’s a big, big part of what I talk about. I’ve been doing that the past three years, doing more and more of it.”

On March 22, Kelleher received a call out of the blue from Texas A&M College of Medicine. “I had spoken there a few times,” he says. “The last time was two years ago. And they asked me if I would talk to faculty and staff because a lot of their people were just starting to really stress out—as you can imagine. So I did a Zoom meeting for several hundred of their faculty and staff, and some of the students. Then, I did a few more meetings for them. After that, they asked me whether I would consider teaching a two-week class for the med students on mental wellness because the topic that I talked about was mental health in times of crisis.”

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