Adventures in Cooking

A Loaf of Bread

Yesterday I baked bread. It isn’t hard to do. It mostly consists of waiting around between a series of small tasks. Since I work from home, it’s really a matter of setting a kitchen timer and periodically nipping over from the office to the house to attend to the next stage.

I have temporary custody of my mom’s KitchenAid mixer and it makes the whole process incredibly easy — that and a terrific recipe for whole-wheat bread from the March/April issue of Cook’s Illustrated magazine. (Thanks to my brother-in-law for the gift subscription to CI a couple of years ago. It has changed my life.) I used to have a bread machine, which made things even easier, but it didn’t do as good a job of kneading as the KitchenAid.

Funny, although I love baking bread and eating freshly baked homemade bread, I rarely buy or eat it from a store. My ultimate goal with taking up bread baking again now is to re-create the fabulous “Zuricher Loaf” you can get in any Swiss-German bakery. My dad was on a similar quest when I was a kid and frequently served up his latest efforts for Sunday breakfast. He had a knack for breadmaking and the taste of a warm slice of his bread with butter melting on top is a favorite childhood memory. He didn’t write down his recipes, unfortunately.

I’ve searched my collection of Swiss cookbooks and the internet for the exact combination of ingredients in a Zuricher Loaf, but to no avail. My next step is to work my way, one-by-one, through the recipes in a book I have on European breads. It’s a tough job but someone’s got to do it.

Philosophy, Poems, Quotes, Spring

Spring comes

Spring comes
The grass grows
By itself

When I was growing up, one of my mom’s friends made little notes that were posted inside cabinet doors in our kitchen. The Zen-like poem above was one of them. It was accompanied by a little watercolor sketch of a tuft of grass.

Another of the notes read: “Stop worrying! It’s bad for your blood pressure!” which is just another way of saying the same thing. I don’t remember when these notes first appeared, but they became part of the kitchen landscape, along with the yellowing recipe cards tacked up inside the cabinet door where the baking supplies were stored.

Today spring comes. Nothing we did brought it; nothing we could do could stop it. Outside the scene is much the same as yesterday — a cold wind blowing a few dried leaves across the yard. But I know the warmth is coming.

Family, Switzerland

Luck o’ the Swiss

It’s St. Patrick’s Day. None of us here are Irish — as far we know, although Cammy’s full name is Cammy O’Rose so that might mean something.

Oddly enough for me, I am wearing green today. It wasn’t intentional. I always resented the pressure to wear green on March 17th when I was in school. I wonder if my high school had an unusually high percentage of Irish descendants.

Dave is not letting his lack of Irish ancestry get in the way of a good celebration and will be playing with the Gully Boys at Firestone’s this evening. They’ll be playing things like “Danny Boy” and “Cockles and Mussels,” as well as Grateful Dead songs and some originals.

Let me live in a house by the side of the road and be a friend to man