Maple Spelt Banana Bread

Every week I do most of my grocery shopping at the Herttoniemen Ruokapiiri just down the road.  They have a small selection of carefully chosen items:  fruit; produce: lettuce, herbs, cucumber, onions, potatoes, root vegetables, etc; fresh bread from Coquus; fresh pasta from The Pasta Factory; organic meats: beef, lamb, chicken, as well as the occasional option to buy moose meat – or beef bones for your beef broth or your dog.  They source organic cheese, yogurt and raw milk locally; buy whole grains and flours from Finnish farmers; and offer canned smoked fish, tall jars of tomato puree, whole grain pasta, healthy cereals, juice made from Finnish berries, and their very own sauerkraut made from cabbage grown at the Herttoniemen Osuuskunta.  They have organic eggs, and then they have something else I’ve grown to love:  “Tuplamunat” or double eggs – eggs that have two yolks instead of one, and are absolutely perfect for making creamy quiche or chocolate pudding.  There is always something to delight and make me smile.

I love the place.  The volunteers always greet me with a friendly hello and let me know what’s fresh or new or just plain amazing.  The food is fresh and of high quality.  We eat much, much better because the quality of the products is excellent, and my grocery shopping is simplified because I don’t have to circle the big aisles of processed crap that I find in the large grocery stores in order to get what I really want.  Occasionally I still need to stop by one of the larger chains for toilet paper and the like, but mostly, everything I need can be found in that little corner shop.

Check out this short video clip from their website to get a sense of the spirit of it:

Herttoniemen ruokapiiri

It’s open on Tuesdays from 16:00 – 19:00 and on Fridays from 16:00 – 18:00.  In the summer, they arrange a farmer’s market in the parking lot across the street, and invite the local farmers to come on in and sell their goods directly to the public.  If you live in the area and haven’t visited yet – what are you waiting for?  I highly recommend it.  Note:  nobody is paying me to praise it – I simply have full admiration and respect for the concept, and enjoy it so much that I want to share the good things in life!

Morning coffee with Maple Spelt Banana Bread

Every week, for some reason, I buy bananas.  And every week, they look so good, I end up buying a few more than we actually need.  At some point, I always end up with a couple of bananas that are well beyond the stage where you’d want to peel back the skin and eat them fresh:  their skin is deep yellow, heavily speckled with black, and the fruit inside is soft with a high amount of natural sugars.  They are much too sweet to be served over cereal or oatmeal or yogurt, and I often peel and slice them and toss them into the freezer to be added to smoothies instead.

But there is an even more delicious option that most of you already know:  Banana Bread.

Packed full of seeds, sultanas and whole grains

Banana bread can actually be pretty unhealthy – made with bleached white flour & too much white sugar, and I wanted to make something a bit more nutritious and tasty than that.

So today, Saturday morning, bright and early, I pulled a large bowl out of the cupboard, tossed in and smashed 3 very ripe bananas, and started making banana bread.  Spelt flour and spelt flakes from the Herttoniemi ruokapiiri stood in as the substitute for the flours, and maple syrup replaced the sugar, but I used 1/2 cup rather than one cup.  I added ground flaxseed tossed in sunflower seeds and sultanas as well.  It took less than 10 minutes to get the ingredients mixed together and into the oven – an efficient little project.

The bread baked as we did our morning clean up and projects, and by the time its warm, enticing fragrance began to fill the house, we were more than ready for a coffee break and a slice of the delicious bread.  The result was a satisfying loaf with a lovely grainy chewiness from the spelt flakes and sunflower seeds, and a pleasant sweetness from the maple syrup balanced by the lemon juice.

Perfect.

Ethiopa Yirgacheffe in the French Press goes nicely with this bread

This is what good weekends are made of:  a slow start, a sweet treat baking slowly in a hot oven, a glance out the window across the horizon of a world waking both from the slumber of sleep and of winter – a moment to think about how good life really is, when we have the luxury to sit back, even for a moment, and dream over a slice of something as simple, basic and wholesome as fresh banana bread.

Happy Weekend, my friends!

Maple Spelt Banana Bread

Preheat oven to 175°C/350°F.  Lightly oil a bread pan and line the bottom with a strip of parchment paper.

1 1/4 cup whole-grain spelt flour (can substitute 1/2 whole wheat and half regular wheat flour)
1/2 cup spelt flakes (can substitute oatmeal)
3 tablespoons ground flaxseed
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup maple syrup
1 egg
1/4 cup olive oil
3 very ripe bananas, peeled and mashed
juice of 1/2 lemon, about 3 tablespoons
1/2 cup sunflower seeds
1/2 golden sultanas

Add all ingredients to a large bowl.  Stir together with a spatula or wooden spoon until well combined.  Pour the batter into your prepared loaf pan and bake for 50 – 60 minutes (oven temps and pan sizes vary, and the starting temperature of your ingredients will also have an impact) until the top is a deep golden brown and a toothpick inserted comes out clean.

Cool in the pan for 5 minutes; remove and cool on a wire rack for another 10 minutes, then slice and serve warm or at room temperature.

Makes one loaf.

Golden Cherry Tomato, Spring Onion, Rucola and Bacon Fettucine

It’s official:  Spring has arrived.  Yes, I know that the Vernal Equinox happened weeks ago, but the calendar date has nothing to do with Spring in this part of the world.  But finally.

Finally – the snow has given way to the rain and crocuses and daffodils are popping there bright heads up to brighten an otherwise gray landscape.  Finally – the ice has given up its grip on the sea, and the waves are once again lapping up against the shoreline.  Finally – the temperatures are consistently on the plus side of things, and I’ve ditched all of my winter jackets, gloves, hats and sweaters to storage to make way for a new season of lighter, brighter outfits.

Spring flowers in Rauma

The days are getting longer, yes, and that means the food options are slowly beginning to increase:  Spring onions have found their way to grocery store shelves.  Cherry tomatoes, tasteless through the winter, are now coming back into full flavor, slowly but surely.  I saw the first market stand yesterday in the railway station – selling fresh strawberries from Italy and fresh peas from Spain, and though I have no intention of buying either at the moment, I couldn’t help but smile at another symbol that Winter has passed.

You’d think we’d have more time to cook as the days get longer – but no.  Our lives are busier than ever, and between work and working out, spending time with friends & family and keeping up with our hobbies, food often gets shifted into a tiny place in time where we want something amazing to eat, but our cupboards are as empty as our minds at the end of a long day, and we stumble home, hoping for a way to get something quick and easy on the table.

Daffodils spanning the river in Turku – before the ice met its demise

This is a dinner for just such a night.  Easy to make.  Looks like Spring on a plate.

Here’s how:  Stop by your local grocer.  Grab a package of fresh fettucine, a container of golden cherry tomatoes, a bundle of green onions, a bunch of rucola and a small package of bacon.  If you don’t have these staples already:  add garlic, olive oil, salt and pepper to your cart.

Drop your bags by the front door, kick your shoes off, wash your hands and get a pot of water boiling for the pasta.  Heat a frying pan over medium heat and as it warms up, begin.  This ought to take about 10-15 minutes from start to finish, depending on how fast you can chop.  Recipe is easily doubled if you are serving more guests.

Golden Cherry Tomato, Spring Onion, Bacon and Rucola Fettucine

300g fresh Fettucine
6 tablespoons olive oil

3 spring onions, chopped
1 garlic clove, minced
3 slices bacon, chopped into 1/2″ pieces
1/2 teaspoon salt (optional:  use Lemon Maldon Salt)
1/4 teaspoon fresh ground pepper
1 oz of fresh parmesan, grated
2 small handfuls of rucola, washed and dried

1.  Bring a pot of water to boil.

2.  Heat a frying pan over medium heat.  Pour in the olive oil and allow the oil to heat for about 30 seconds.  Add the spring onions, garlic, and bacon.  Cook, stirring occasionally, until the garlic and onions are tender and the bacon is cooked through, about 2 minutes.

3.  While the onion mixture cooks, give your cherry tomatoes a quick rinse and cut each one in half.  Add these to the pan and give it a quick stir. Add the salt and pepper and stir briefly to combine.

4. Once the tomatoes are in the pan, put the fettucine into the boiling water and set the timer for 5 minutes.  When the timer beeps, quickly drain the water from the pasta and remove the frying pan with the onion mixture from the heat.

5.  Pour the pasta into the frying pan and toss with a spoon to combine all ingredients.  Sprinkle the parmesan cheese over the mixture and toss again.  Divide the pasta onto two places and top each with a small handful of rucola.  Serve.

Serves 2 hungry people generously.

Honey Oatmeal Chocolate Chunk Raisin Cookies and Milk

Some days there is no better idea than to rise with the sun and start a batch of cookies almost immediately.  Today was one of those days.  I was up at 4:45 and raring to go, with a quiet house and an idea:   Honey Oatmeal Chocolate Chunk Raisin Cookies.

Now I won’t deny that I may have had one of those cookies somewhere around breakfast time, but before you judge, stand back a little and consider that these have nearly all of the components of your morning granola, only I’ve swapped the nuts for chocolate and the olive oil for butter.  I replaced all of the sugar with honey purchased locally and now I am anticipating dipping one of those gorgeous cookies into a glass of milk, because that’s just how things ought to be done, for the kid within us.

Chocolate Chunks.  Red, Yellow, Black Raisins.  Oatmeal.  Honey.  Oh my.

When I was a kid, we’d buy peanut butter in gallon-sized jars.  The jars, once empty, were perfect for storing an admirable quantity of cookies – usually chocolate chip.  I never liked raisins when I was young, and in that way I’ve not really grown up as I’d still generally prefer to skip them.   So though I liked the flavor of oatmeal cookies, I always felt compelled to pick out the raisins, which kind ruined the cookie, so they weren’t the ones I reached for.

And then one fine day at a cafe somewhere in Europe, there were Oatmeal Cookies with Chocolate Chunks and Raisins.  They looked delicious:  crisp around the edges, soft in the middle.  When I bit into one the chocolate sort of oozed into my mouth and then there was the chewy texture of the oatmeal and the raisin that had me grinning in gleeful surprise.

Maybe I’m thinking of cookies.  I’m definitely happy to be outside in the sun!

I’ve been itching to remake them ever since, but somehow years have gone by, and it wasn’t until I bought a jar of local honey this weekend during a Slow Food field trip to Kristinestad, Finland that they came to my mind again.

One of the two churches in this town of 7000 people

Kristinestad is a long haul from Helsinki – we rode a train for 3.5 hours to Seinäjoki, through the frozen, sunlit countryside, and then hopped in a taxi for a slightly bumpy 1.5 hour ride.  The honey was a surprise purchase from the taxi driver,  whose son & daughter-in-law are beekeepers.  We had plenty of time to discover this by the time we arrived in Kristenstad, a Swedish-speaking town formerly a shipping hub for transporting goods to and from Finland to places all over Europe, and now the supplier of most of Finland’s potatoes.

House owned by a ship captain.  Ship captains were among the elite and most wealthy during the boom.

Since it is currently still cold and snowy all over the country, we didn’t see many potatoes other than those that accompanied the dinner on the first night and lunch the following day.  I was hoping to meet producers in K-town – the people who actually grow the potatoes and crayfish, make the sausages & bread, etc, but unfortunately, not this time.  So I was extremely thrilled with my two jars of honey.

The town’s beautiful old wooden buildings and quaint feel have been well preserved.

Back to the cookies.  I decided today was the day to create the recipe for them.  I’ve read a lot about using alternatives to white sugar and white flour when cooking and baking.  White flour is something that has been easy to replace – in this recipe I used whole-grain spelt flour.  Sugar, on the other hand, is a bit of a mystery as I’m not always certain how a recipe will behave when a sugar alternative is used.  I had purchased two kinds of honey in Kristinestad:  one was the runny type and the other was the nearly solid form.  I decided to take the gamble that the latter would be a reasonable substitute for sugar, and to my great pleasure, the cookies turned out to be as delicious as hoped for.

These cookies will freeze well and I can imagine them as part of a phenomenal ice cream sandwich, with a reasonable sized slab of high-quality vanilla ice cream nestled between the layers.   Mmmmm.  Summer is coming.

Honey Oatmeal Chocolate Chunk Raisin Cookies and Milk

But for now, I’m sticking with a glass of milk for dunking a few, and freezing the rest to eat over Easter weekend.   Seriously.  So good.  Maybe not really a replacement for my morning granola, but certainly coming with me on the next hike.

Enjoy!

Honey Oatmeal Chocolate Chunk Raisin Cookies

Preheat oven to 350°F / 175°C.

1.  Prepare the following items first in separate small bowls:
3.5 cups old fashioned oats / 7 dl Iso Kaura Hiutaleetä
1 cup / 2 dl mixed golden, red and black raisins, chopped
300 g / 12 oz milk chocolate bar, roughly chopped

2.  In a small bowl combine with a fork:
1 + 3/4 cup / 3.5 dl whole-grain spelt flour
3/4 teaspoon baking soda
3/4 teaspoon baking powder
3/4 teaspoon salt

3.  In the bowl of a stand mixer or in a large bowl if you are using a hand mixer put:
16 oz (2 cups) / 230g butter, softened
1 cup / 2 dl firm honey

Beat the butter and honey together until well combined and the mixture looks light and fluffy.  Add:
2 eggs 
2 1/2 teaspoons vanilla

Beat again until eggs and vanilla are fully incorporated.  Add 1/3 of the flour mixture at a time until the it is fully incorporated.  Pour in the raisins, chocolate and oats and mix with until just combined.  I usually remove the mixing bowl from the mixer at this point and mix by hand with a spatula.

Place spoonfuls of the dough onto a parchment covered baking sheet, leaving room for them to spread. Bake 9-12 minutes until crisp around the edges and soft in the middle.  Remove from oven and allow them to rest for 5 minutes on the pan to firm up a bit.  Transfer to a wire rack and let them cool completely.

Makes about 48 cookies.