I am supposed to be writing a manuscript, not baking rye crumble bars. No more rye crumble bars no more rye crumble bars no more rye crumble bars no more rye crumble bars no more rye crumble bars.

When I found out that I was pregnant, I asked my publisher to extend my deadline, which was supposed to be March 1. I wasn’t sure how ill I would feel, but I’d heard plenty of pregnant lady horror stories, and I thought it was best to plan for the worst. Happily, I wasn’t very ill, but I was very unproductive. I was very, very tired. One morning, when the alarm was going off and I showed no signs of movement, Brandon checked to make sure I was still breathing.

I am pleased to report that I am no longer that tired. I am less pleased to report that I will be living at my desk for several weeks to come. But I’m also sort of excited about it. After a year of feeling like I was mostly writing around the story, alternating between panic and elation and panic and elation and desperately needing a beer, I feel like I’m finally inside of it. I can see the story differently in here, and I’m finding a lot that I didn’t know about: details, ideas, explanations, a number of stupid jokes (which will hopefully improve before publication). This, to me, is the best part of the job: the way that the act of writing often shows me, for the first time, what was there all along. I could say a lot more about that, but all I really should say is THANK YOU, UNIVERSE, FOR SAVING ME, and then get back to work.

You, however, can bake some rye crumble bars. The recipe for these comes from Kim Boyce’s terrific Good to the Grain, and I stumbled upon it last week, at the end of a good day, while looking for a way to use up some rye flour I had bought. I’d bought the flour for a different recipe, a recipe that I wound up not liking, and I don’t know how things go in your house, but in mine, rye flour will not disappear of its own accord. So I got out Kim Boyce’s book, because it’s yet to fail me, and boom, the streak continues.

This recipe might look a little daunting, time-wise, because it consists of three parts: the shortbread crust, the crumble topping, and, in between, the jam. I didn’t have a lot of time to spend in the kitchen, so I took Boyce’s advice and made mine over the course of a couple of days, as the moments presented themselves, and stashed the components in the fridge until I was ready to assemble the whole thing. Basically, you make a quick shortbread dough from a mixture of rye flour and all-purpose, and then you press that evenly into a pan. (I did a notably crappy job of this, because I was rushing to make a phone date with my mother, and my pressed-out dough wound up looking less like a pastry crust and more like a gently rolling sand dune. But it came out fine.) You bake the crust until it’s firm, and then you spread jam – you slather jam, actually; you’re using quite a lot – over the crust. Then you top the jam with a crumble made from oats, both flours, two types of sugar, and melted butter, and you slide the pan back into the oven.

Judging by the ingredients, I knew that the bars would be tasty, but the result was even better than I could have expected. I tend to think of rye in the context of rye bread with caraway seeds, which have a strong, sour flavor; I forget how subtle and sweet the flour itself is. It’s nutty, almost malty. I like rye bread, but rye crumble bars have nothing to do with it. Anything with a shortbread base and a crumble topping is bound to taste good, unless you fill the space in between with wood putty, but it’s the sweet, toasty rye flour that makes this recipe, and the way the sweet, toasty rye flour tastes with butter. I filled my crumble bars with a homemade mirabelle plum jam that a friend sent us last spring, and while I doubt it gets any better than that, I’m also eager to try a batch with apricot jam, or maybe strawberry. But there’s work to do first.