It has come to this. I am now bringing bread ingredients to work. I’m making a rustic bread tonight and my biga sponge starter needs to stay in the fridge, but not too long, and then be out of the fridge, but not too long, before I make bread. This recipe for rustic bread requires almost 8 hours of process, not including the time for making the sponge and shuttling it to and from the fridge like an ER patient to the operating room. “Back in! No, take it up to radiology…no! Back in the OR!!”
I’ve decided on my trifecta of bread for tomorrow. I’ll make rustic ciabatta, Irish Soda Bread 2.0, and the Heavenly sandwich bread. These represent different styles of bread and techniques and are the tastiest and best looking. I have the same feeling in my stomach as I did during architecture school the day before a jury presentation. Often I would be hand-making a model, some precious thing of wood, foam core, and glue, and on the way to my jury with my model, I imagined tripping and falling on the model, crushing it in a not-so-funny Godzilla moment. Between my architecture studio and the school there was a trolley track and I sometimes wished, if my model didn’t come out well, that I would trip and drop the model on the tracks right in the path of a speeding trolley. I can imagine little better catharsis than to see a model get blown into splinters by a speeding train. Sadly, that never happened. So tomorrow, I hope not to drop my bread or accidentally step on it. But who knows, I’ll be down near the trolley tracks, so anything could happen.
I’ve finally learned that toddlers have emotions like light switches. Parents with 2- and 3-year olds slap their foreheads and say, “No duh!”, but I’m a slow learner. So when Baby Harbat has something taken away from her, say a beaded bracelet that she insists on chewing despite me asking her not to as I rush to get ready this morning, she bursts into tears. There’s no in-between whimper or shoulder-dropping disappointment, it’s just full-blown misery. Then the misery can transform to happiness when I give her a washcloth so she can lay it over Panda so he can go night-night. Then misery again when she is “helping” me put on my sock for the fourth time and I decide to just pull it on and move on to the shoe-wearing portion of the morning ritual. On, off. On, off. I may try this at work when I find the stapler empty of staples. Waaahhh!
As I went to post this blog, I found a nice surprise from Vox.
This little promo explains the extra hits I’ve been getting. Welcome, everyone, and try to imagine the smell of warm bread. Mmm…
Writer, architect, father, husband.
Love the title 🙂