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.

Birthday breakfast

Brenda bought me breakfast today. Usually on your birthday we have a tradition of getting what we call Special Birthday Lunch, where the birthday person decides on lunch that day and Carl pays for it. Quite often it's indian food. Not sure what I'm gonna pick yet. You also get a birthday card that usually has some photoshopped picture on it. That's usually my job.



Today I do feel special. I got a special breakfast and a special birthday lunch. Then I broke my fork in all my excitement.

Birthday card

Utensils

I'm so jealous that I don't come up with this stuff. Then I started wondering what I would do if I was stuck on an island with nothing but tools made of bread. Would I use them as tools, or eat them and do without?

Roast beef sammy

I'm not sure what conveys the scale of this sandwich better.

Job In

Accross:
17. Bready agreement?
32. Bready folk singing group?
42. Bready magic act?
60. Bready phrase after a double take?
We call them "jobs-in" at work when it's slow. It's a joint effort usually, and we use different colored pens on purpose. This one's from the Willamete Week; tomorrow there will be another one in the Tribune, and that one comes with the bonus Hokus Fokus by MrLeedy.

Bakery Cart

So Portland is known as P-town, Stumptown, Rose City and now to add to the list Cart Town would be appropriate. It's taken off in the last couple of years and now there are little food cart villages in empty parking lots everywhere serving anything from Mexican Food to Falafel. When I have nothing but time on my hands, I'm gonna do a bread cart; but it looks like someone beat me to it. It had an oven built right into the side of it. I talked to the owner and he said he drove it around the country last year baking his way around. Not the same way my friend did after college in a volksvagen bus full of hippie friends.



I got a apple turnover and a cookie. Both were so so, but nothing special. Plus he wasn't doing bread; which made me happy, because there's still time for me to plan my mobile bread baking operation. Watch out America, when I take my message to the streets, there will be converts, enlightenment, change and hope. It'll be awesome!

More on spreading butter

They buttered my toast to my liking.

Burnt toast

My toast was sliced so thin that it toasted through and through. There was no more soft and chewy inside, just two sides of crusty burnt-ness, one on each side.

Convergent series

Jeni and I were driving around this weekend; she was eating a sandwich in her usual fashion. Her bites decreasing in size as she approached the end of her sandwich. She does this all the time. I cracked a joke by asking her what the solution is to the convergent series:



I used to complain about having to learn math since it's not like it comes up in real life. I really need to stop with the math jokes.

Croatian Lunch

Our lunch was 1 1/2 hours late today. Nobody seemed to really mind that much. Expectations were high. We ran across this new bakery that delivers; a one man operation. He fell behind having spent his morning running around in the rain making deliveries. But it was worth the wait. I had half a calzone and half a burek - a meat pie; (the thing on the left). No store front, no restaurant, just some guy who loves to bake and make good food. A baker, his ovens, a blog and twitter; what more do you need? We'll give him a try again later.

Lunch envy

MrLeedy gave us all lunch envy with his home-made pizza, the dough of which was hand kneaded. I questioned him about it.

Thinnest crust

I have found the world's thinnest pizza crust. It was less than 1/8" thick. I'm not exaggerating. The pizza itself actually tasted pretty good, but for me it's all about the crust and I like a thick bready pie. I got it from a little market I stumbled upon on my Sunday joyride; it was a family run place with the kid answering the phone, while the mom dished up my slice and the dad rang me up. They looked middle eastern, Iranian perhaps, or maybe Indian. Being an immigrant myself I couldn't help but wonder how they were treated in this affluent white neighborhood in Lake Oswego. When people find out about my heritage they usually just ask if I'm any good at gymnastics. I guess I'm somewhat lucky that my skin color doesn't automatically put me in a minority category. I thanked the cashier for my pizza and expected a halfhearted, downtrodden "your welcome". Instead he responded: "I hope you like. We have best pizza inside the town." He wasn't downtrodden at all, he was proud and enthusiastic. I drove off eating my pizza feeling somewhat guilty.

Monkey Bread

Brenda pointed out the Monkey Bread in the case. I had to get it. Mostly because its fun to say "Monkey Bread". So I asked the french lady why its called Monkey Bread. She replied: "Only monkey would ask such question." Zing! She got me again!

Eat More Bread!

This was on the bag of store bought bread. I got all nostalgic; I remember this from the 80's. So there you have it, straight from the horse's mouth.

Bread bike

I thought it was a Dave's Killer Bread delivery bike. Turns out Dave was just advertising on the side of a sustainable delivery bike. But the idea of delivering bread locally by bike stuck; I'm gonna do it some day.

Leeetle Toasteses

I got used to slicing my own portions. I ran out of bread, so after next door's portion I'm still hungry.

Bread guy's evil twin

Breadguy has an evil twin known as Grapeguy.

Brenda's breakfast

Brenda enjoying her "breadfast". Actually the witty term was coined by mrleedy at 8:03 am this morning.

texting

Someone's thinking of me...

Progress

I finished laying tile last night. Phew! Look how close to the edges I'm getting. I think I'm making progress.

Buttering

As a kid I developed this aversion to buttering my own bread. I don't know why, I just hated to do it. Some kids hate their food touching, or eat their food one at a time, but for me it was spreading butter or jam or what have you. My mother enabled this type of behaviour well into my teens by buttering my toast for me. As an adult I developed a coping technique by buttering as quickly and sloppily as possible, often resulting in big globs and always ignoring the corners.
These days it only comes up at Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner, usually in the form of heckling; my siblings asking me if I need help buttering my bread.



I spent this last weekend tiling my bathroom. Smearing mortar on the back of each tile is called "buttering". That's the official term. I did so, one tile at a time, a nice even coat, all the way to the edges. I hated every minute of it.

As the bread truck drove away...

Someone suggested I chase after it. I barely got a picture...

Toaster

We usually don't use the toaster at the same time, but today we did and the contrast amused me.

Guest Blog

I've been encouraging others to share their bread pictures with me, and I would gladly post them; so here's one of the first takers:



via mrleedy

Here's some delicious bread I had on vacation at Pianeta Ristorante in Truckee, CA.
The crust was crisp and crackery, but the inside was all soft, delicious bread. There was olive oil and balsamic on the table, but I served it up with some oil and salt. Fantastic. I said to L, "take a picture of this bread for me. I want to give it to Bread Guy for his blog!"
--
mrleedy

Zeppoli

Last Saturday was Zeppoli day at the Italian bakery. They only do this once a month and like to make a big deal about it. It was packed. I gave my order to the Italian looking fellow behind the counter, and said "zeppoli" with enthusiasm; the way you would say "forgetaboutit". He repeated it back to me with twice as much enthusiasm as if to show me who the real Italian was. Jeni gave them her approval by eating 4 or 5; I also had one.

Wandering eyes

The baker thought I already had breakfast this morning when all I asked for was a loaf of bread. He said I usually look around and can't decide what to get; while doing an impersonation of me that looked like a little kid in a candy store trying to decide what to buy with his one dollar. I haven't been feeling well lately. Even the baker noticed that I was missing my usual wandering eye.

Bread Torque

http://www.autoblog.com/gallery/asias-largest-race-car-made-from-bread

thanks to my friend mrleedy for the link.

Bread box

The bread box has been replaced by a platic bag with tiny little holes in it. The fresh loaf will loose moisture at a fairly constant rate. Leave it out in the open or in a paper bag and it will dry out in three days to the point of making it useful for pounding nails. Stick it in a plastic bag, and the trapped moisture will make the crust chewy and soggy. So how do you alow just enough moisture to escape to slow down the drying, without trapping it too much? A bread box. But for those with not much counter room, the perforated bag works almost as well. Then again, how big is a bread box anyway?

Mamica bread

Whenever I go to visit my mom, she always has a loaf of home made bread to send home with me. These are the last 2 slices. We call it mamica bread, which translates to mom bread. Everybody in my family knows what that is. Actually more literally it translates to "mommybread". She bakes half a dozen loaves at a time, and kneads the dough by hand in a giant bowl. I've borrowed this bowl on many occasions to try my hand at her bread recipe.

It's also great for spinning baby nieces in.

Photography

I'm a terrible photographer. Somehow though, I'm starting to think that it's impossible to take bad pictures of bready things.

I need a quarter acre

More bread math. I know how much you love it.
5.5 x 5.5 = 31 square feet
31 square feet x 365 = 11,315 sq. feet. (1/4 acre)

Almond & Chocolate Balls

Actually they're called "baci di dama" which is italian for lady kisses, but then again they taste better when you don't know the translation and simply call them by their sexy foreign name. Personally, I don't mind knowing what's in the food I eat, so almond chocolate balls it is.


The real reason I went to the bakery this morning, the previous rantings just on impulse.

Comparing bun sizes with my coworker...

Ok, so I cheated; mine's a actually a loaf of garlic and 3 cheese bread.

New record

We have a new record today. Six bucks for a loaf of bread.


and well worth it.

The beginning

This is where it started, the first place I discovered that sold good bread, many years ago.


I already had sandwich fixings at work, but my willpower was weak today.

Back to my anonymous ways

My breakfast came in this blank bag,


with this blank cup of coffee,


with it's blank cozy,


Bacon & bleu cheese & pear danish!