Bars inspire baker's joy

Now that I'm a new mom, I'm beginning to understand the popularity of 30-minute meals.

The two hours my husband and I used to spend cooking dinner together now seems like an impossible luxury. As do the hours I used to spend baking, which is my true culinary love.

I found some wisdom for this new phase of my life in a cookbook I got for Christmas: "Two Chicks From The Sticks: Back Home Baking," by Jill Schwalbe Means and Jamie Greenland Gorey.

The authors are childhood friends from a small town in rural Iowa. Many of the book's recipes come from their mothers, aunts and neighbors, farmers' wives who are nothing but efficient in the kitchen. Their recipes offer to-the-point instructions, like a Midwesterner's economy of words.

The nugget of wisdom I garnered from this book is so obvious but had evaded me until now: Bar cookies are a busy mom's salvation. Spread the dough into a 9-by-13-inch baking dish or a jelly roll pan and cut your time in the kitchen by half or more.

With five children and a husband to feed, Gorey explains: "My mom could not sit there and roll out a thousand cookies or six pies."

A whole chapter of the cookbook is devoted to bar cookies, from peanut butter bars to raisin cream bars. Her mother's apple pie bars are an ingenious take on apple pie; a thin layer of spiced sliced apples between two layers of pastry.

Already, a few of their recipes seem bound to join my regular rotation. Over the holidays, I made chocolate oatmeal bars - an oatmeal cookie with a layer of chocolate fudge in the center. Those did not last long in a house full of relatives.

My sister-in-law made the monster cookie bars. Monster cookies, a peanut butter and oatmeal cookie studded with M&M's and chocolate chips, are a culinary tradition in my husband's family, but the recipe makes so much dough that baking them takes many hours.

I had steered clear because they take so long, and because my sister-in-law can be counted on to make them for family gatherings.

Now I have no excuse.

Thirty minutes to escape into the kitchen to bake seems like a dream.