Full Moon Dinner!

I love food!! There is nothing quite like a delicious dinner after a day of hard work and a long bus ride across town.

That's right, a bus ride! With no Spelt mobile I am now taking the bus home from my parents after having their car on the weekend. In a lot of ways my life has become very scheduled since January 1st. All my time is set out on the schedule and it is almost like when we had the bakery and every day was accounted for.

Maybe it's a little odd to feel that I am scheduled only 9 days into the New Year, but that is how I feel and I kinda like it. I like having a schedule and knowing what my routine is and at the same time I like to shake things up and have some excitement.

One of the things that we have done is to write a weekly menu plan. Now that is ORGANIZED!!!! And completely delicious!!! Tonight, after a day taking care of administration work for my parents, an appointment with a client, some shopping and a bus ride across town, I came home to find the love of my life making a beautiful chicken fried rice with the rice I made this morning and the leftover from the roast chicken that we had last night. But that was NOT dinner, that's for tomorrow's lunch.

Dinner was one of my favourite meals and when I first went wheat free I missed it terribly. Tonight's dinner was a beautiful club house sandwich made with three pieces of my home made white Spelt bread. I like mine to have two pieces of toast buttered with tomato slices and nitrate free bacon and fresh cracked pepper. Then the middle slice is covered in mayonnaise for the next part of the sandwich with either turkey or chicken and lettuce and the third slice tops it all off. The hard part is trying to eat it.

It was well worth the difficulties of holding it together and I feel like I had the best dinner ever!

I have always found that a routine allows me to be in the present and being present and aware of what I am doing makes the food that I am lucky enough to have that much more enjoyable. So, the next time you sit down to a Club House Sandwich I hope that it brings you as much pleasure as it did for me today, the full moon of January 2012.

Enjoy!!!

French bread

As someone who reacts to wheat and being the spelt baker, every time I travel I take my flour and ingredients with me to make spelt bread.

In 2008, Christine and I went to France. I took our organic spelt flour from the bakery as well as a few other key ingredients to make bread while we were away. As much as I love eating all sorts of other foods. 2 weeks without bread is just too long for me and so usually when I travel I bake bread. Maybe it's just loving baking as much as I do, I can't quite imagine spending two weeks without making a loaf or 600.

When we were in the North of France staying with Christine's family, I baked a large loaf of bread in the convection oven at her parents place in the photo above. I made a sponge one day with yeast and then made the bread in a similar way to Janet's Country Bread that we sell at the Spelt Bakery. And yes, that bread is named after me.

I was so amazed by the flavour and texture of the bread. It was different than what I usually have in Vancouver, but it was exactly the same ingredients EXCEPT for the water. Finally I figured it out. The reason that bread is different in France compared to North America is the water. It was the only difference.


Having made bread for as many years as I have, I can tell by texture what a dough should be like to make a good loaf of bread. At the most recent workshop on bread and buns, I was able to show people the texture that the dough should be and everyone was amazed at the height of their bread. I also showed them how to correct a dough if it is too stiff or too soft.

I made a beautiful dough in France, soft and pliable. I baked it the way I would here in Vancouver and I ended up with a loaf of bread with a nice hard chewy crust and a porous crumb on the inside. The picture above was the loaf that I ended up with.

That was a fantastic trip of a lifetime, family, adventure and a great loaf of bread.
That is what I call living the high life.