Bread Week is shaping up (pun intended) to be a real challenge. So far I’ve got orders for 9 loaves of bread and 1 dozen rolls. Six of those are different varieties. But by far the most popular is the cranberry walnut brioche braid, with 4 orders. Tuesday and Wednesday the oven is going to be working nonstop, and I will have gone through over 2 dozen eggs and 2 pounds of butter just on the brioche. These are the times I wish I had the larger KitchenAid mixer, a separate fridge for retarding dough, and a much bigger bench. Oh, and an assistant and a baby sitter and an extra 12 hours in each day. But I have to keep reminding myself that this is my hobby. And I’m actually really looking forward to all these beautiful breads next week. As for Casa Soutowood, we may be ordering pizza or having PB&J for dinner those two nights.
Now onto something really important: sitting on the couch and watching TV. This is something we’ve been doing a lot after dinner recently, since we just upgraded our cable from 4 basic channels, 2 of which included static and home shopping, to roughly 14,000. We hadn’t planned on doing this, but a nice salesman came to our door a few weeks ago pitching a data/tv package that was really enticing. So we signed up for it and I called our current provider to cancel. The day before the switchover, the current company calls up and makes me an offer I couldn’t refuse. No, I didn’t wake up with a horse head in my bed. It was a lamprey head. (See? Isn’t it fun to say?) We accepted the offer which is a tripling of our internet speed, a ton of new channels, all for the same price we’re paying now. Which begs the question, “Couldn’t they have done that in the first place?” Of course the rejected suitor called up all hangdog and begging. It was pathetic, but I told him that it’s all about the bottom line. And in six months we’ll do this all over again and see who will give us the best detail.
[gasp] Wait. I just got it. Now I know what the popular girl in school feels like picking a prom date. EEEEEEEEEEEEEK! That’s right, underlings! FIGHT FOR MY AFFECTION! FIGHT, MONKEYS!
Okay, that’s out of my system. So we've ended up watching BBC America, DIY Network, and a whole host of new shows and channels we’ve been missing out on. And what do you think we ended up with, having hundreds of channels at our disposal? It was a show featuring Martha Stewart’s daughter sitting barefoot and cross-legged on the couch, a catty New Jersey gal pal on the other couch, with a mountain of muffins on a coffee table between them. And the show is the two of them watching clips of Martha Stewart’s show and bitching about it. Wow. What a fantastic show. The daughter should be doubly ashamed because not only is she solely riding on her mother’s coattails, but she’s doing it by breaking down her mother’s achievements. I watched horrified for a minute or two, then gagged, reeled, and staggered from the room. When I came back later, my wife told me that Martha apparently produced and bankrolled the show. Hey great, even worse! It’s like seeing a couple making out on a park bench, then the guy leans back and says, “I love you Mom.” Great God, I don’t want to know the family dynamics there, though it’s fairly obvious that a therapist could have a lifetime job working with those two.
Happy Friday!
Writer, architect, father, husband.