You Take the Cake!

Me, I’d rather have bread – and lots of it! There was a time when Katie was little that I made all of our bread. I enjoyed making it, we all enjoyed eating it, and, well, is the sort of thing that I assumed good mothers did. Regrettably, my hopes for garnering the MOTY award (mother of the year) for all this bread making were dashed when Katie came home from her first Daisy Scout meeting and informed that Abby’s mother served them peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and the jelly came out of a jar with a picture of a grape on it and the bread came sliced, right out of the bag!

At that time, I limited my lawyering to three days a week and on those days, I donned my suit, tied a bow at the neck of my button down shirt, slipped into my high heels, and left Katie at home with Mrs. Tallent. In my office I crafted wills for my clients, counseled them regarding financial uncertainties and tried to help them cope with the angst that comes with family bickering and disappointing children. The other two days, I pulled on a turtle neck and sweats, slipped into an old pair of running shoes and stayed home with my daughter. And on one of those days we made bread.

Kneading the bread took a while and also took muscle, as Katie was fond of observing. Standing on a stool beside me at the counter, she worked on a small mound of bread while I handled the larger portion. It was a great time to visit. Katie took seriously her responsibility for a large family of dolls and bears, many of whom were often in need of medical attention or simply coddling. Thankfully, as a result of her concern and ministrations, most had recovered sufficiently by afternoon to share in tea and toast, made with our freshly baked bread.

Occasionally one of those hot button topics such as “where babies came from” made its way into the conversation. When I offered an explanation equating the process of baby begetting to making bread, I was rewarded with a sideways look of skepticism. Even at three, she wasn’t about to buy into something that silly. Now that she is a fully fledged physician working at a Children’s hospital, I am prepared for the inevitable lecture on the ill effects visited upon children by parents who take the easy way out by talking nonsense to their offspring. (Yet another blow to the coveted MOTY award!)

Making bread is time consuming and that was part of the beauty of the project – we simply had to stay put and hang around home in order to cover all the steps. Mixing the ingredients, kneading the dough, letting it rise, then forming the loaves and waiting for them to rise and finally baking the bread could eat up half of the day. Having heard of someone who was getting his wife a bread maker for Christmas, Fred inquired if I thought I would like one. I scuttled that suggestion quickly and probably not very diplomatically. “No! No! I like all the fuss and bother of making bread and kneading the dough is the part I like the best!”

One day my friend and neighbor Maureen informed me that there was free swim every Thursday morning from 10:00 to 11:00 at the local indoor pool. Maureen was a teacher who like me was working part time while her son Michael was still at home. Of course, I thought that was a great idea. I had grown up swimming in the local lakes and a large irrigation canal (aka ‘the ditch’) located about a mile from our house. Besides, at this time I hadn’t yet thrown in the towel in my quest to be “mother of the year” and I was confident that taking kids swimming would garner me some points in that unspoken competition. The only problem was that Thursday was our bread making day, so we would have to get creative.

As it turned out, combining bread making and swimming was surprisingly easy. Once the bread was mixed up, kneaded and placed in a buttered bowl, we covered the bowl with plastic wrap and a towel and set it in the trunk of our red VW Dasher. The sunlight coming through the back window created a warm slightly steamy place without getting too hot. We picked up Michael and Maureen and drove to the pool. After swimming and showering, we returned to the car, punched the bread down, shaped it into loaves, covered them with a towel and drove to Big Tom’s for grilled cheese sandwiches and a lot of bragging about our aquatic accomplishments. By the time we got home, the kids were ready for a nap and the bread was ready to go into the oven.

Despite the fact that making bread has routinely been in the top ten of my yearly list of things I promise myself I will finally get around to, until quite recently, I hadn’t made bread on a regular basis for many years. In the meantime, I have devoted a great deal of time to finding the perfect bread to buy, sometimes travelling a great distance to check out a bakery that is rumored to be good. I have been a devotee ever since the new Great Harvest Bakery was opened on the west side of town, right next to Trader Joe’s.

All of this changed about two weeks ago, when my copy of Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day by Jeff Hertzberg, M.D. and Zoe Francois arrived in the mail. I didn’t stumble on to this recipe book on my own. Once again I have my friend Julie to thank, the same friend who shamed me into mitered corners. She raved about how much fun she was having making this bread and then how easy it was. Finally, she served me some and I was hooked! The bread was incredible – crusty and toothsome, just the way I liked it!

And even though the title sounds like one of those unlikely boasts that are so common to weight loss and exercise programs, in this case the claim is true. Getting this bread ready to bake takes no time at all. And while the bread is baking, the kitchen smells heavenly. Once it comes out of the oven, the sight of it on the cutting board transports me to another time and place. This technique which features very wet dough requires a few pieces of equipment - a baking stone and pizza peel are necessary for the baking process and plastic tubs with lids that are not air tight are needed for mixing and storing the dough. When I went on line to order the mixing and storing tubs, I realized that I had just become part of a bread making movement that had been going on for a number of years.

I started with the master recipe which the authors describe as an “. . . artisan free-form loaf called the French boule. . .” From there, I went on to try the roasted garlic and potato bread followed by the oatmeal bread. The first time around, I tried to follow the recipes to the letter. Following directions is pretty hard for me because I nearly always think that I have a better idea! I made up the oatmeal bread last week following the recipe, pretty much. I didn’t have wheat bran so I used some wheat germ in its place. It produced very tasty bread that was great toasted for breakfast. Remembering a favorite oatmeal bread from the past, this week I made up a batch substituting molasses for maple syrup and added some toasted sesame seeds. It was as good as I remembered. Not necessarily better than the recipe in the book but a tasty alternative. Yesterday I baked out three loaves of granola bread, to rave reviews.

So here I am, baking bread as if my very life depended on it, with none of the attendant fuss and bother that I once deemed essential to my enjoyment. Of course, in my former life it was necessary to scheme in order to justify staying at home; now that I am a full time homebody, with career ambitions culminating in a long walk with the dogs, I no longer need an excuse.

Recently my friend Steve told me that his dinner club hosted an evening where everyone brought what they would want for their last meal. I know exactly what mine would be -crusty bread, Havarti cheese, an apple, and a glass or two of red wine. Nothing hard about that decision. Of course, I now realize that if I don’t quit treating every meal as if it were my last, they may have to find a piano box to bury me in! In the meantime, I am doing my best to dispel the notion that man, or woman in this case, can’t live by bread alone. Give me Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day and I will give it my best shot!