Living. Lovely. ~ Savor Slow Food

Enchant, stay beautiful and graceful, but do this, eat well.

Bring the same consideration to the preparation of your food

as you devote to your appearance.

Let your dinner be a poem, like your dress.

~Charles Pierre Monselet, French author (1825-1888), Letters to Emily

Did you

Savor Slow Food

this past week?

Tell me all about it. Pictures! Recipes! Do share!

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I was in bread mood. Really in a bread mood.

[Breadbaking is] one of those almost hypnotic businesses, like a dance from some ancient ceremony.

It leaves you filled with one of the world's sweetest smells...

there is no chiropractic treatment, no Yoga exercise, no hour of meditation in a music-throbbing chapel,

that will leave you emptier of bad thoughts than this homely ceremony of making bread.

~M.F.K. Fisher, The Art of Eating

I love bread in all forms.
French baguettes. Whole grain toast... buttered, of course. Corn bread.
Biscuits. Banana bread. Scones. Fresh tortillas. Focaccia. Croissants. Shall I go on?
Swedish Limpa (more about that in a couple days).
Orange Cardamom Bread with Cardamom butter (be still my beating heart...).

I had fresh cranberries on hand this week. My mouth was watering for Cranberry Orange Bread.
My dear mother brought me her Pillsbury's Bake Off Breads Cook Book she has used since first married (40 years ago!!).
I thumbed through the pages, remembering various breads she has baked for our family over the years.
I'm pitifully sentimental. I think the Cranberry Orange Bread tastes so much better,
just because I got to use Mom's bread cook book....

I always have helpers in the kitchen. Always. Luke and Leif refuse to miss out on the process. Levi joins us here and there.

I'm counting on the fact that the boys will be able to cook and bake on their own in a few years.... (We also made yeast bread this week, but I'll post about that in a day or two.

There is nothing more theraputic than kneeding bread, I tell ya!)

I made a couple batches. The loaves don't last long around here.

This is all that remained when I remembered I needed to get a picture:

Want the recipe? Voila!

Cranberry Orange Bread

4 cups unbleached white flour (I use 3 cups white, 1 cup whole wheat)
2 cups sugar
3 teaspoons baking powder
2 teaspoons salt
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 1/4 cup orange juice
2 Tablespoons grated orange peel
4 Tablespoons (or 1/4 cup) shortening (I use olive oil)
2 eggs
2 cups fresh or frozen cranberries, chopped or halved
(1 cup chopped nuts)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease two 9x5 loaf pans.
In a large mixing bowl, combine flour, sugar, baking powder, salt and soda. Stir to mix well.
Add orange juice, orange peel, shortening and egg to dry ingredients. Mix until well blended.
Stir in cranberries (and chopped nuts). Pour into loaf pans.
Bake for 55-65 minutes, until toothpick inserted in center comes out clean. Cool thoroughly.

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Next week's Living. Lovely. challenge:

Be Silly!!



Mix a little foolishness with your serious plans;

it's lovely to be silly at the right moment.

~Horace (Ancient Roman Poet. 65 BC-8 BC)