Bread

Lately I’ve been baking bread. Margaret Atwood wrote a short story about bread. There was another story by an author, I can’t remember about bread…a child was hit by a car and a lonely baker called about a birthday cake. I never was a very good student, which is why I can’t tell you the name nor the author, but I digress. Bread and meat were always the two things I was afraid of cooking. Bread involved too much chemistry. You have to wait for it to rise, deal with yeast, living bacteria, so on and so forth, but now I find baking bread cathartic. Kneading it is like rubbing out my frustrations. I put on my ipod and close my eyes as I knead dough. The past two loaves have started out as sticky. I’ve had to caress them from globs into orbs of dough. I don’t mind the work and the manipulation. Baking bread gives me something constructive to do with my time. I seem to have a lot of time on my hands, so I fill them with bread dough. I’ve baked herb bread. Last week I made a rounded loaf of rosemary bread. Rosemary is non existent in Botswana so I pilfered some Rosemary off of a responsible volunteer who brought some from home. I remember rosemary bread from the farmer’s market in Culver City. I used to buy round and overpriced loaf of rosemary bread and it was delicious. My version is good too, although not as good as the baker’s at the farmers market’s. My oven isn’t very good, so my bread is always half crispy on one side and chewy on the other, but all around tasty. Rosemary bread tastes like perfume and when I cut it, it the crispy side cracks open with a wisp of wet steam. If anything, I find it amazing that I can do so many things with plain flour. I’ve never bought more that one bag of flour a year. A couple years ago when I started making zucchini bread, which is more of a cake, I began buying whole wheat flour and bran, but other than that, I only used flour for that one recipe. I gradually expanded to molasses bread which is still cake like although not as sweet. Lately, I’ve used flour as the foundation upon which most of my meals are based. I’ve made pasta from scratch. I make multiple loaves of bread a week. Three at the least. I divide the recipe by three to make smaller batches, and I always have fresh bread on hand. I’ve made cream based soups that call for tablespoon of flour. Before I knew it, my one kg bag of white flour was gone. I bough at larger one this time. Warm spongy bread. Today I bought a bag of cream of tartar. I plan on trying my hand at biscuits once I devour this final loaf of rosemary bread.

The point:
I forgot my point, but hey it was fun reading right? You all know I'm long winded.