I Have Clearly Taken Leave of my Senses

I was going to write something about this "Death of Irony" people have been talking about. Even one of the people writing to Roger Ebert has decided that irony and satire are no longer part of our vocabulary. But then I decided that my readers are people of common sense, and will no doubt realize that irony and satire have been around for millenia and will always have their place.

So instead, I'm going to talk about the mysterious urges that have taken me over today. Normally, I'm a preprocessed-food kind of person. Frozen microwave dinners are just about the amount of preparation I usually like. And even then, I don't always peel the plastic away from the brownie.

And yet, I've been doing actual cooking recently. I've mentioned the homemade mayonnaise. And the deviled eggs, which are threatening to become a running gag. But that doesn't really compare to the fact that I made bread today. And not with a bread machine, either. I went out and bought yeast and flour (two kinds of flour, in fact), and mixed them up along with a bunch of what we cooks call "ingredients", and before you knew it, there I was with three loaves of fresh-baked bread.

They're not as tall as they really ought to be, because the loaf pans I bought were a little bigger than the recipe calls for. And because I skimped on the second kneading, but that was kind of intentional. I was purposely going for some extra-dense bread, so that way it would feel more homemade, if that makes sense. I know you think I'm making that up, but I actually was a baker for a few months. Okay, it was at a Perkins, but I still worked with dough a lot, so I knew what I was doing. Really.

And what I was doing was pretty strenuous, because I don't have a mixer. I was surprised my whisk survived it, really, because near the end, when you've almost got dough, it's pretty hard to "whisk". In fact, it's pretty hard to "stir". But did that stop me? I invite you to look at the picture up there for your answer.

The bread is, of course, delicious. Admittedly, after going to all that work, I would have convinced myself that it was delicious no matter how it tasted, but it really is good. I made a tuna sandwich (because I also made some more mayonnaise today, apparently feeling that I hadn't gone to enough effort), and it was so great. If you're not jealous, you should be. Seriously, it was so good, that I've already finished one of the loaves. Yum!