People have been asking — what do you do with all this bread you're baking?
To which, I have my own question: Have you seen my behind lately?
But the truth is, I don't eat all, or even a quarter, of my bread. Giving it away has been a sound strategy. And, I have a freezer full of brioche, waiting for the day when a handsome bread pudding recipe comes along.
When I made challah, however, I broke the rules.
The moment I set eyes on my braided loaf, I knew French toast was a must.
You would think that when a bunch of guys running a street food cart in one of the busiest neighborhoods in Manhattan get around to opening a restaurant, there wouldn’t be much of a wait for your food.
And yet there we were at Calexico Carne Asada in Brooklyn, mid-afternoon on a recent Friday, waiting for 10 minutes … 15 minutes … more, before our tacos and burrito finally surfaced.
We’re talking carne asada/pulled pork piled onto or wrapped up in tortillas, folks.
Assuming the meats have been prepped ahead of time, shouldn’t these be fairly easy to put together?
This moment, I had known it would come.
The one where I’m sitting on the floor of my smoke-filled apartment, staring at three rock-hard, blackened loaves and thinking, “I am a failure.”
Having never baked bread before, I’d known it was a little insane to sign up for the weekly Bread Baker’s Apprentice challenge, where a group of more than 200 amateur bakers around the world bake a bread every week from a recipe in Peter Reinhart’s bread-making bible.
But then my first attempt — bagels — had gone well. And in the ensuing weeks, decent versions of brioche and challah followed.
I started to get cocky — I even promised chef Simpson that I would bring my first stab at ciabatta to his July 4 party. There would be two Italians there — who better to judge the quality of my first Italian bread?
Of course, this was all before the alarming amounts of smoke, the smell of burnt cornmeal seeping into every cranny of my apartment and, eventually, the surfacing of three dark lumps of what could pass for coal but were actually my “ciabatta.”
I’ve often said that when life gives me lemons, I make lemon thumbprint cookies.
For years now, this Bon Appetit recipe has been a source of comfort and relaxation — the process is so easy that these cookies are truly therapeutic to bake.
I suppose my friends may know by now that these tend to appear when I’m under some stress. There’s no stress in the air this July 4 weekend, however. (Unless you count my mammoth struggles with baking ciabatta for the first time — more on that later.)
Just a desire to create sweets with somewhat festive hues — yellow, red and sort-of-purplish blue come close enough for me.
Hey, I wasn’t about to whip out the food coloring.
Slowly and carefully, Greg and I chewed, on the verge of both laughter and disgust as we tried to put a name to what it was we were tasting.
“It’s like a bad taco,” Greg said.
“Tequila or margaritas — regurgitated,” I said, thinking suddenly of a college night long, long ago.
It was actually vomit that we were sampling — vomit-flavored jelly beans, to be precise.
When we had passed a display of rather unappetizing-sounding new Jelly Belly flavors at the Fancy Food Show in New York City, we had known it was a silly gimmick but hadn’t been able to resist. And so we spent some unpleasant minutes with mouths full of centipede (which tasted like grass and earth), skunk spray (as billed) and canned dog food (think Chef Boyardee). (Canned dog food and centipede are new this year.)
Drawing the line at Baby Wipes, we decided to walk away while our tastebuds were still intact.
“I still taste Booger in my mouth,” Greg whispered as we slunk away.
Well, somewhat intact, I suppose.