Midnight in the Kitchen. Irish Brown Bread , White Bread, Scones.

The suitcases sit open, ready for the adventure that awaits, but now Goppolini curls up in one nightly, until its time to fill them up.

The excitement and the terror, it turns out, are not opposites. They live side by side, sometimes in the very same breath.

The lists keep growing no matter how many things I tick off. The Irishman is already in Tullamore, already home, overseeing the renovations at Cedar House, waiting to make the call that says it is go time for Goppolini and me. I’m here, in this kitchen I have loved, figuring out the next chapter one day at a time.

When the noise gets too loud, I cook. When I need to find my footing, I bake.

The other night I baked three things at once.

By the time I was finished, there was a loaf of Crunchy Brown Bread, a loaf of white sesame bread, and a batch of blueberry and strawberry scones. A true midnight bake. Miles was thoroughly unimpressed by all of it and went back to his big blue bowl, keeping one eye on me as he always does.

The scones came out first, warm and fragrant from the berries and oh so tempting. Next came the sesame white bread, yeasty and toasty from the sesame seeds. The brown bread came out last, the toasted pumpkin and sesame seeds filling the apartment with the cozy smell of freshly baked bread . I set it on the wire rack to cool and stood there in the quiet kitchen thinking about Cedar House.

Last year was when the brown bread obsession began, I had been baking my own version here in San Francisco, mixing flours and and grains late at night, figuring it out as I went.

But on my last trip to Ireland, everything changed.

The Irishman's sister, the Good Doctor, gave me a copy of her Ballymaloe Cookery School recipe for Crunchy Brown Bread. I tucked it into my suitcase alongside a bag of Macroom flour, (a traditional, extra-coarse, stone-ground wholewheat flour produced at Macroom Oatmeal Mills in County Cork, Ireland), a gift from the Good Doctor, for the journey back to San Francisco.

The bread she baked with that flour was extraordinary. Hearty, nutty, and deeply, unmistakably Irish. The first bite took me straight back to my childhood and Danish rugbrød, a dense, dark sourdough loaf packed with grains and seeds that I grew up eating with nothing more than butter, or better still, butter with gravlax and mustard sauce.

Some tastes live in your body long before you know why.

Macroom flour, I quickly discovered, is not available in America. After much searching, I found King Arthur Baking’s Irish-style flour. I was hopeful that the flour would be similar to Macroom, but it was softer and not nearly as course as the Stoneground flour, but it did have some depth to it. So with a few additional ingredient tweaks to the recipe I am sure it would work.

More sesame seeds. Pumpkin seeds scattered on the top and mixed inside. Maple syrup instead of treacle because that was what I had in the pantry. Turns out, it all works beautifully.

One day very soon, the late night bakes will take place in Cedar House, with the Irishman and Goppolini by my side, in the kitchen we built together.

That thought keeps me company long after midnight, while the kitchen fills with the smell of toasted seeds and warm bread.

One loaf leads to another, just as one chapter leads to the next.

The pantry is getting lighter. The boxes are getting fuller. And somewhere along the canal in Tullamore, Cedar House is waiting…

Bia maith leat. Bon Appétit. Spis godt.