Somebody get this woman a bread box!

Spelt honey bread

Sometimes it's difficult to get out of one's head and, as a writer, I spend an inordinate amount of time playing around with all the muck, good or bad, that hangs out therein. Normally, that's not a problem--it's what I signed up for, after all. But I've been working through a rough couple of weeks, personally speaking. I lost two people who were very important to me. One was 92, the other 30. So I've been trying to keep my hands busy with something other than typing, which, for me, means baking.

Today I baked some spelt honey bread, taken from December's Food & Wine. Here's the recipe, in a nutshell:

Honey Spelt Bread

adapted from a recipe by Lionel Vatinet in Food & Wine

4 1/2 cups whole-wheat spelt flour, plus more for dusting
2 teaspoons sea salt
2 teaspoons of active dry yeast
1 3/4 cups of cool (70-degree) water
2 tablespoons honey

Basically, it's just a matter of kneading (just a minute or two in a stand mixer), rising, punching, folding and laying into a loaf pan, rising, dusting with flour, and baking at 450 for 35 minutes. Lee and I each ate a slice fresh from the oven with butter and jam.

Cranberry-Walnut Power Bars

We're always on the lookout for good portable snacks, especially something that can give us a little afternoon energy. Last month (in Food & Wine, I think), I spotted a recipe for cranberry-walnut power bars from Heidi Swanson. They were, as with a lot of things I've been cooking lately, extraordinarily simple. And they should be just as easy to manipulate next time we make them.

First came the dry ingredients. These included cranberries, toasted walnuts, oat bran, rolled oats, puffed Kashi cereal, and diced crystallized ginger. Next, I boiled brown rice syrup with vanilla. When the syrup was hot enough, I pulled it off the stovetop and poured it over the dry ingredients.

After stirring to incorporate everything, I pressed the mix into a greased 9" x 13" Pyrex pan. (If you try making your own power bars, make sure you press down hard at this step so you'll have firm, chewy bars that will hold together nicely.) They cooled for about 45 minutes. I cut the whole batch into about 16 bars and wrapped each individually in plastic wrap to keep them fresh. We stored the bars in some Tupperware and ate a few as snacks when we weren't sick from the flu.

I'm already planning to make these again, possibly with chocolate chips and soy nuts or dates and figs. I suspect you could make two half-size batches of dry ingredients and have two flavors of granola bars at the same time.

Butternut Squash Soup

In addition to cooking a lot more in the new year, we've also been reading more and more. A couple of weeks ago, on a flight to Maryland, we picked up Food & Wine, Gourmet, and Saveur (featuring the much-discussed Saveur 100).

Anyhow, in F&W, there was one article about locavores (folks who eat local food as exclusively as possible). I didn't know there was a name for that. Jenny and I pretty much always try to eat locally grown foods, and when that isn't possible we buy as much organic as possible (the one place we get tripped up is wine; Illinois wine is simply undrinkable). In the locavore article, there were a few recipes from a guy in Vermont, including one for butternut squash soup that sounded simple and delicious. And, really, it's just about the simplest soup I've made in a long time.

Just onions sautéed until soft and brown, then cubed squash simmered in stock for about 40 minutes (until soft). Then you blend the soup, whisk in a little heavy cream, and that's it. I sprinkled a little salt and freshly cracked pepper over top just before we served it.

The original recipe called for smoked cheddar and cooked apples over the soup, but we sliced them up on the side instead. I liked the snap of the fresh apple, and the soup had enough flavor that it didn't really need the added ingredients.

For dessert, we had a bread & chocolate 3400 Phinney bar from Theo Chocolate (a States-based organic and fair trade chocolate company). It had a wonderful blend of saltiness and creaminess and would nicely balance out the rosa pfeffer bar we ate last month.