Ugly Bread

I'm not sure what the heck got into me yesterday, but I decided that I was going to make bread from scratch for the very first time ever. Out of all my cookbooks only one had a few recipes that did not require currant berries, orange peel, or freshly grated nutmeg. I followed along as best as I could. It seemed easy enough. The recipe called for some yeast, some water, a tablespoon of sugar and salt, and 3 1/2 to 4 1/2 cups of flour. Not the exact measurement I was looking for given the fact that when I bake, or follow a recipe for that matter, I am as Type A as they come. At least for the first time because how else will I know if I did it right, right? Well, a semi-rational person would probably start with 3 1/2 cups of flour and add more. Nah, not me. I went straight for the 4 1/2 cups. I reasoned that it must truly need all 4.5 cups of flour or else the recipe would have stopped at 3.5. (Oh. Okay. Sure.) What I got in the end was the ugliest bread I have ever seen.

It was impossible to mix, impossible to kneed, and was hardly the light and fluffy dough that I remembered as a kid, but it did expand at least half its size in 2 hours. I tossed it in the oven and presto! 35 minutes later I had one super-dense, lumpy, bread-looking clod. The outside heel wasn't too bad. It tasted like a hot fresh pretzel but that's probably because I used kosher salt and it didn't really mix in all that well. The rest was, well... it was so dense that my jaw ached after chewing a few bites. And I don't think it was cooked all the way through. Needless to say, I tossed it this morning and decided to try again except I used a slightly different recipe and only used 3.5 cups of flour and not an ounce more. I even basted the top with an egg white and water glaze. Attempt #2 turned out to be delightful and fluffy.

Bread try #2 tasted so much better but not quite as good as my Dad's bread. It's a strange thing. I can't tell you exactly how his bread tasted or even really describe it but I know that when I bit into this bread my memory taste buds said, "Good, but not quite right." I decided to drown their little voices out with a nice, steamy bowl of corn chowder.

On another note, I must have ran out of body lotion some time this week. For whatever reason, I take much warmer showers in the winter which over dries out my skin to the point of an irritating discomfort. I dug through all of my secret stashes for something that resembled lotion. Nothing, not even a single drop of body butter left over from the ghosts of Christmas past insight. I wasn't about to use my small, yet expensive bottle of Clinique facial moisturizing gel or my even tinier bottle of Mary Kay Satinhands hand cream to douse the fiery dry skin that was slowly spreading across my body. All I could find was a huge bottle of Clinique's Water Therapy Foot Smoothing Cream that my mother-in-law gave Alex a year ago for his heels. Desperate times call for desperate measures. So I generously lathered it all over myself and now smell like I jumped into a hot tub with my good friends, Burt's Bee's Peppermint Lip Balm and Vick's Vapor-rub. The dog keeps licking the air as he walks behind me. I haven't breathed this deeply in months.