Doughnuts with Bacon

Turns out you CAN improve anything with bacon.

Bread basket

My bike got a new bread basket. I suppose it could carry other things too, but why would you want to?

Frisch-Gurken

I'm as big of a snob about pickles as I am about bread. I've long since given up on buying them at the local supermarket, but today we found some in a german deli we go to for lunch sometimes. The whole place smells very authentic and has a huge selection of meats and cheeses. It's not vegetarian friendly at all, the only salad being a fleisch-salat which my coworker has ordered before. Somewhere between fleischsalad and frisch-gurken, he now calls pickles fleisch gurken. No need to hit that last link for german speakers.

Building materials

I had an idea this morning. After finding a week old baguette in the kitchen I wondered if I could bake a more rectangular version of it and then intentionally kiln dry it to produce a bread two-by-four. Strength to weight ratio would be excellent. Then I remembered the houses we saw last week in Arizona made from paper pulp bricks. They had a certain springy feel but I don't see why I couldn't bake my own bread bricks which would be even lighter. I'd seal the whole edible deal of course with varnish; we all remember what happened to the gingerbread house; but all in all it seems possible. And I promise I wouldn't use frosting for mortar. How's that for sustainable?

Awareness

The bread shelf at the Italian Bakery was empty, but by now I know how the system works. I asked if she had any in the back, and she said she would go check. She returned with a good half dozen large loaves, not in a basket, but piled in her bare hands with 2 or 3 resting on her bosom. She set them down and dusted the flour off her sweater, then bagged one and rang me up. While I'm more used to wax paper, gloves, hairnets and tongs to provide that barrier between what I eat and who makes it for me, I found myself quite ok with it all. But I noticed that I noticed, and it made me think of small children who are not aware of things we have not taught them yet.

Chinese throwing stars

That's how I ordered it. She just smiled, but then again she always smiles, so it's hard to say if she even noticed my joke. We call her "the smiley one". She used to work for the french lady, who I just found out sold the place. No wonder she hasn't been around. I'm gonna miss her crooked smile. And her razzings. And her buns. Oh, wait, those are still on the menu.

Bread upgrade

This morning's breakfast was in a desperate need for an upgrade. I won't point out the obvious by indicating which toast I bought and which I made, but instead tell you where my bread snobbery comes from; it's my mother. It might be genetic. Once we were out to dinner and when her food arrived she opened up her purse and produced some mamica bread. She must have known the place had crappy bread and planned ahead. I thought it a bit tacky and was slightly embarrassed. I'm 37 now and finally understand. As we get older our tolerance for crap shrinks, and that includes tolerance for crappy bread. Kids, don't judge your parents!

Christoffel bier

While this isn't about bread per se, it's about it's close liquid cousin. This is a temporary post; just on here long enough to be picked up by my friend mrleedy. He keeps a beer review blog and invited me to guest blog for his beerblog.
This beer adheres to the strict Reinheitsgebot according to the ingredients listed on the front label, which is always a good start. The beer itself was a golden straw color and both malt and hops were well balanced. I was afraid it might be too hoppy since it is "dubble gehopft" but not the case. Overall it was a nice beer but nothing special. I bought it primarily for my namesake and this review was just an excuse to get to say "dubble gehopft".
On a slightly unrelated note, last night was the properly televised State of the Union Adress on TV. I watched it while enjoying a recommended Goose Island Winter Ale. It was a very inspirational speech. This might be my new favorite beer. I cant decide if the speech made my beer taste better or if my beer made the speech better, but either way I felt optimistic and encouraged.

Food I like to say (and eat)

This was a sandwich from a new butcher shop that opened recently. It's beef cheeks on a kaiser bun. We've been calling each other "beefcheeks" at work for years now, ever since we discovered it on a mexican taqueria's menu. The first time I ordered it was purely because I wanted to say "beefcheeks". There's a lot of food I order just because it's fun to say. So I've compiled a list of food fun to say; and remember some require more enthusiasm than others:

Beefcheeks
Bokchoi
Ciabatta
Compot
Falafel
Fleischsalad
Machaca
Monkeybread
Schnitzel
Spanakopita
and finally,
Zeppoli!

Mold

I ate moldy bread yesterday. I didn't even notice and my coworkers forgot to mention it until I ate half a slice already. Then when I got home J says to me: "Here eat this and tell me if it tastes funny." I eat the piece of salami and yes it does taste funny. "Oh good, I just ate a bunch" she says, "and wanted to make sure that if it's poisonous we die together". Well it's now the next day and nothing. No pain; no nausea; nothing; I feel just fine. Isn't it amazing how well adapted our bodies are at coping with all the bad stuff we put in them? Tomorrow I'm gonna try some drugs I haven't tried yet. jk lol :)

Future Breadguy

We were on family vacation last weekend and my little nephew Peter spent a good number or his awake hours walking around with a piece of bread in hand. He gnawed at it slowly and contently and refused offers of other foods despite many attempts. He knows what he likes. He's currently being groomed by my younger brother and his wife, and already he's showing great promise and a natural talent. It's comforting to know that there will be someone there to continue spreading the word even after I'm gone.



He would break a piece of mamica bread off and eat it with his other hand. What bread etiquette!

on distance

My car odometer rolled over 250,000 miles this weekend. How do they build them these days to go that far on all original parts without any major maintenance? I could have gone around the world over 10 times if they had roads to cross the oceans.
One quarter million miles is how far the moon is from earth. I remember when Yuri Gagarin first went into orbit. I think it took Buzz Aldrin days to get to the moon traveling at over 3000 miles per hour.
I bought a French baguette at Freddy's today. I measured it; about 2' long. It would take roughly 660 milion baguettes end to end to bridge the earth-moon gap. I think I've eaten that many already. On a slightly more tangible note, the cost of this great bread bridge to the moon would be approximately .07% of what we've spent already on the "war on terror" in Iraq; based on the 99¢ I spent per loaf. I really don't mean to come off as having an agenda, I just mean to quantify.

Schatzie Bread

Schatzie brought in a loaf of her delicious Christmas coffee bread. It was even more delicious than I remember last year's. All three of us agreed this morning. We didn't even have real butter, but the large tub-o-butter-like-spread I produced provided roughly the same lubrication, and the two slices we each had slid right down. We had to stop ourselves and save some for the rest of the crew who don't have the privilege of getting here before 8 am.

on density

She couldn't eat the whole thing. Got about 1/2 way through. Fell for the old size trick. Surely they must measure their ingredients, so the only thing added was more air. It had the same amount of stuff in it, it just took up more space. Kinda like our universe. Then I got to thinking that the average density of all of earth is actually pretty dense compared to the average density of our solar system, which is mostly empty space. Kind of like Brenda's spinach bun. And the average density of our whole galaxy is even less, and so on, untill if you were to consider the density of the entire universe it approaches 0. And in order for that to be possible, the size of the universe has to be infinite. But we don't like that. So scientists have been arguing for quite some time now on wether the universe is expanding, contracting and heading for another big bang, or is in a steady state. The steady state theory has been discarded quite a while back, but it's actually the one I like best. I don't really understand the big bang theory anyway; I'm not a scientist. I do know that the farther an object is away from us in the universe, the faster it moves away from us. And that's how it should be. Just like the chocolate chips in a cookie as it rises in the oven, or the sesame seeds on top of the bun as it's growing as it's baking. But all astrophysicists prefer another analogy. Raisin bread! It's always raisin bread. And how the raisins move farther away from each other, all of them simultaneously, as it bakes. How can something move away from everything else but never get closer to anything else? That's how. Like rising raisin bread.

Two heels

I went to have some bread and found two bags in the bread drawer. Each one had one heel in it. No problem. I ate them both. But then I got a little sad because there was no one to tell that there's starving children in Africa.