Gentlemen - Start Your Ovens

When the going gets tough;

The tough bake stuff.

During the recent cold snap we had the wood stove operating most of the day every day.  It actually does a reasonably good job of heating the west half of the house and sending heat up the stairwell to take the chill out of the second floor.  Nevertheless, as a consequence of thermostat placement the east side of the house (laundry, powder room and kitchen) remains moderately cooler.

When that happens more often than not we wear fleece and ignore it.  Otherwise, a partial solution is either to do laundry on that day and/or come-up with an excuse to use the kitchen gas range as the operation of the appliances serve to impart some additional heat to the space they occupy.

It's not a huge deal and even though in its 22nd year the house is becoming slightly more "leaky" in keeping the cold out and the heat in; the natural passive solar advantages of old-school farmhouse architecture including lots of tall windows to capture sunny winter daylight when Old Sol is low on the horizon really does work.  Don't let anybody tell you that settlers hundreds of years ago were witless about maximizing solar power in the winter and shade in the summer.  But I digress.

About the baking, I located the last of the Irish soda bread mix (imported from the land of my forebears) in the pantry and decided to bake a loaf.  Mainly for breakfast with a steaming cuppa joe on a cold winter morning.  I amped-it-up with some added cane sugar and a double fistful of dried cranberries (reconstituted).  This was the last of the Irish bread mixes and the last of the cranberries from the pantry imparting a satisfying feeling of inventory turnover.

Anyway,  a good use of a cold and sunny winter day.  And the results were pretty tasty.

Didn't last to the end of the week....