I am on a diet again. I am really good when I set my mind to it. Problem is that the minute I even start to fit into that pair of pants I have stowed somewhere back in the closet, I celebrate with a never ending conga line of delicious food that I had so diligently resisted for months and months.
So, in truth, I am pretty good at starting a diet, but I stink at staying on a diet. And take a note, kiddies, it gets harder as you get older.
So with my increasing girth, the achy joints, sagging jowls, elevating blood sugar and the specter of mortality staring me in the face, I have dusted off the old diet book that was recommended to me many years ago by my dour doctor and joined the losing team.
The diet book on my shelf is basically a Frenchman’s version of the Atkin’s plan: nix the carbs and loose the pounds. One slight deviation from the late, great Doctor Atkins prescription is whole wheat bread, a carbohydrate, is allowed for breakfast. Not your basic grocery store whole wheat, mind you, my book insists on purely whole wheat flour, with out a speck of enriched white flour. After scouring the ingredient labels in every grocery store in the county, I decided I was going to have to dust off my old bread pans and bake my own.
When I was a kid, I got into making bread. I think that probably one of the neighborhood hippy chicks had made a fresh loaf and I was attracted to the enticing allure of both. My sense memory alarm clangs loudly with the taste of that first oven fresh chunk, slathered with butter in a once familiar, fragrant kitchen. After that first taste, I was hooked. With my soon-to-be lifelong instant-gratification issues blaring loudly, it was just a matter of minutes before the family kitchen was a flurry of flying flour.
My mother, a talented cook, was not especially keen on the wife/mother expectations thrust upon her by the “Mad Men” mores of the time. She gladly relinquished her kitchen to me; in fact she’d have resented the concept of the kitchen being designated as “hers.”
So she was delighted to underwrite my bread-baking phase, and happy to lend her expertise. As much as I loved the idea of making fresh bread, I was completely unaware of the choreography involved in the process. There’s a thing about yeast and its properties and its sensitivities to temperature and ingredients. There are huge periods of waiting for stages of rising and something called “proofing” not to mention the fact that once all of the front end stages are completed, there’s a matter of waiting for the baking piece and once it’s out of the oven, you have to wait a few minutes for the bread to cool down before it can be safely eaten without serious injury. So much for instant gratification.
While my memory seems to look back at what seemed like months of bread-baking experimentation, I suspect it was no longer than a week or two, but I am also sure it was something with which I was obsessed. During the bread making epoch, I made white bread, French bread, rye bread, whole wheat bread, raisin bread, pumpernickel, rolls and virtually every recipe the Joy of Cooking offered.
I always came back to plain old white bread because it was the most reactive to the yeast, wherein it dependably rose with gusto, while some of the others seemed to rise with indifference or worse, not at all, leaving me with fragrant inedible bricks. The white bread, God Bless America, was the most popular among my family of tasters.
Somewhere, possibly in a landfill in New Hampshire, there may be remnants of the old family kitchen. Archeologists, many centuries from now, painstaking sifting through that landfill, will scratch their heads, write papers and give lectures about the layers of sturdy wheat-based cement and linoleum circa 1955 uncovered there.
Fast forward three decades, Melissa and I are making whole-wheat bread in the test kitchens of Rusty Hinge Road. I have hit upon a fool proof, all-wheat, batter-style bread found in Fannie Farmer. It works well, smells terrific and tastes pretty good. With the internet at our fingertips and about four feet of cook books on the pantry shelf, there is no visible end to the recipes available for the type of bread required by the French diet book my dour doc gave me. A wheat berry, rye and whole wheat recipe from last week is quite edible but a bit too dense. It toasts well, and it fills the house with an intoxicating aroma that cannot be described accurately except to say it smells like home. Particularly with a hefty dollop of fat-free ricotta cheese and a splash of that Korean hot sauce with the rooster on the bottle.
The diet seems to be working. The most used notch on my belt no longer requires a struggle to reach. I am starving most of the day, but using the Frenchman’s diet, I can choose from a variety of specific snacks to fend off the cravings.
And every morning, I look forward a slice or two of delicious homemade bread for breakfast.
Now, where are those pants?
Now, where are those pants?
