BREAD AND CIRCUS

I made bread today.

Stunning news, right? “Local fat man enters kitchen, but first, some breaking news: Sun disappears behind western horizon; experts expect it to reappear in the east in approximately fourteen hours.”

Can I help it that I just can’t stomach that putrid supermarket bread/big bag of slightly crumbly air anymore? Especially at $3 a loaf?

This was my third attempt at baking bread in the past year or so. The first, right after Serena was born, yielded two big, succulent loaves of whole-wheat bread which was delicious, but completely unsliceable. The second was a cornmeal-bread recipe which might have been good, except it had cornmeal in it. If I wanted a mouthful of sand, I’d dig around under the big tree in the back yard. It took us three weeks to eat two loaves of the stuff.

Today was simple white bread. I needed exactly as much bread flour as I had left, which was the first and last optimistic sign. I finished kneading the dough and set it on the stove to rise at exactly the same moment Serena decided she needed to crawl on the kitchen floor. Which neither I nor her mother was willing to let her do, of course, since the floor had flour all over it.

So why not sweep and mop the floor right away, you ask? Because the bread still had to be shaped into loaves, a task which requires the application of yet more flour to the kitchen table and thus the application of yet more flour to the floor. Because no matter how careful you are, a flour particle weighs about as much as a hydrogen atom and has the same tendiencies towards ubiquity and chaos. Besides, Serena would have crawled on the floor for about ten seconds, then she would have been bored with the kitchen. So we opted to wait.

This is when the old, Adamic “forbidden fruit” tendency kicked in. Honestly, it amazes there are people out there who refuse to believe in original sin when the evidence in favor of its existence is so overwhelming.

So, for the next ninety minutes, we got to try to keep a cantankerous, curious fourteen-month-old with destructive tendencies out of a kitchen which represented, for her, the promised land, except Moses probably didn’t want to cross the Jordan as badly as Serena wanted to crawl amidst the flour puffs and dough bits on the kitchen floor.

Did I mention that my wife is due to give birth in the next seven days? Take it from me–don’t make bread in the same house as a pregnant woman who’s beyond the thirty-eighth week. In fact, don’t make noise in the same house as a pregnant woman who’s beyond the thirty-eighth week. Either way, it can only end badly.

The bread rose too much, because I couldn’t put it into the oven until the floor dried. It’s got a dense, doughy texture and a lightly sour flavor. In other words, it was worth it. Every last whine from the (currently) shortest person in the house, every rushed attempt to corral said short person, every moment of recrimination from a wife who certainly today wished that her husband had a more normal hobby.

That isn’t just my opinion. Serena couldn’t get the stuff into her mouth fast enough. I wonder if she, too, thought the bread worth the sacrifice.

Regardless, I think I’ll try making bread in the basement next time the urge strikes.