Saturday started out really well, with me getting out of bed at 7 am to begin the day’s task of baking many, many, many loaves of bread. Some of them turned out great, some of them were ugly but still edible, and still some of them were a complete waste of good ingredients.
The trick about baking bread – at least for little ol’ inexperienced me – is that I don’t know if the bread will be a success until the very end when it comes out of the oven. That’s usually after 12+ hours of preparation. And sometimes, that 12+ hours is a real kick in the head. I keep reminding myself what they say about Rome. The practice and experience that I am gaining in acting like Julia Child on Saturdays is surely going to pay off somewhere down the line. That is, if it doesn’t kill me first.
The fact of Saturday’s experience is this: I attempted SEVEN different loaves of bread, though not all of them actually came to fruition. And yes, I agree with what you are thinking right now – that I may be just a wee bit out of my ever-lovin’ mind. With five dough batches in various stages of production in my kitchen, and plans for two more waiting in the wings, I discovered that I was out of molasses. (Molasses that I wouldn’t even get to use, but that is so totally beside the point now.) At 2pm I announced to my husband that I was going to run to Kroger for molasses and would be right back. His response stopped me dead in my tracks.
“Hey, would you pick up some bread while you’re there?”
“Are you kidding me? Are you freaking kidding me??!! Do you realize that I have five loaves rising right now? We will have bread, I promise!”
He looked annoyed. “Yeah, but we won’t have it in the next hour, and I want a sandwich.”
“You HAVE to eat that sandwich TODAY?!?!?!”
“I’m hungry. I can’t wait until midnight when your bread is done baking!” (While I am perfectly willing to let myself sound like the Kitchen Gestapo, it is not my intention to make the hubster sound like an ass. We were both ultimately annoyed with each other at this particular point in the day. Over bread, of all things.)
I had to admit to myself that he was likely experiencing the “water, water everywhere” phenomenon, and I was offering no solutions for him. But if he was as hungry as he said he was, and moody to boot, then any reasoning I might attempt – given my defensiveness – was only going to erupt in argument. I was at least smart enough to just shut up and buy the damn bread.
At Kroger I stood in a self-checkout line with my molasses and bread, behind two people who were self-checking their entire week’s worth of groceries. Every other line was 10 people deep, and I cursed myself for needing to come to the grocery store not just on a Saturday, but an hour before The Saints’ playoff game was to begin. I am entirely convinced 90% of the people in Kroger at that moment were buying snacks for the game.
Good freaking grief, Charlie Brown!! Sometimes I can be a real blockhead.
Several hours later, I cornered Dom over some laundry and announced that “we need to talk!” I hashed out my reasons for turning our kitchen into a bakery, as no sane ingredient-oblivious person would subject herself to this form of torture for the privilege of baking AND buying bread on the same day.
“I mean, really, honey, do you WANT to eat bread preserved with a chemical derived from lighter fluid? Really? You want that in your body? In your kids’ bodies?????”
He blinked at me while I continued my rant and then admitted he had no clue what I was talking about. I swear, I almost summoned the kids downstairs to explain it to him for me. I realize now that somewhere in the midst of educating myself, my kids, my mom and you that I managed to leave Dom out of the loop on all this. I now know that I need to mute the TV, secure his undivided attention, and speak ManSpeak to him in lieu of expecting him to open up his web browser and read all my thoughts. (Although, I am kind of an open book here…)
So, lessons learned. Now he gets why I’m “taking away all the good food,” and I get his desire for a sandwich at a most inconvenient time. As with all things, we eventually ended up on the same page.
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