Baking Bread and John Keats

Baking Bread and John Keats 

I have been baking bread for fifty years yet still, rarely, ‘get-it-right’. That’s not to say I bake every week. Sometimes a month or more will pass with only commercial, or semi-commercial loaves from the local market gracing our table.

I will say, emphatically, the selection and quality of baked goods available today at the market is infinitely better than what the industry convinced us to eat back in the fifties/sixties. I still recall advertisements on many of the television western serials for Langendorf, Weber’s, Bond, and Wonder bread, and who knows how many other related brands urging us to fill up on their tasteless white product in order to become a healthier, smarter etc. young man/woman. Things don’t seem to have changed much, only the product.

I don’t have a mixer with a dough hook to mix my ingredients, (but neither did those early Middle Eastern people 8,000 years ago) but I often use a bread making machine for the initial blending and kneading. Many times, especially if I am consciously mired in some esoteric/philosophical internal discourse, or wondering just how many varieties of tomato seed I should plant, I dispense with the machine entirely, and do it all by hand. I’ve always done a lot of things by hand.

Simple breads are easy, and I don’t understand why more people don’t make their own bread, at least part of the time. With only four or five ingredients what could possibly go wrong? Or be easier? I just baked a loaf of Italian Sandwich Bread from a recipe I found in one of several dozen bread baking books on the shelf and it is, for a simple, basic, white flour bread, delicious, especially toasted.

So what was it I intended to say? I think I wanted to say a few words regarding John Keats, but like wind-dispersed pollen those thoughts have escaped their capsule and are miles away.

Grass Widows and Okra

 The Grass Widows are blooming on the basalt plateaus along the Columbia River. Little shards of fragmented blue sky floating and swirling in snow-melt rivulets. A something to fill any vacant spots in anyones heart. But, standing in awe of the tableau before me I wondered just how necessary, or important, are any of us in this sad, and often desolate world. Humans seem to be the okra in the stew.

Let me explain the ‘okra’ reference.

After my escape from the Air Force in 1964 I shared an apartment (Cedar Crest) in South El Monte with a good friend who had also recently been released from the Air Farce. A party time ensued as we attempted to distance ourselves from, and erase any dark atmospheric aura the military might have stained us with. And we were poor, like most of the other dwellers of the complex.

Well, trying to reduce our daily expenses we took to going around to other apartments (after their assumed dinner time) and asking for any leftover food they might have. Whatever they offered we added to our pot. As a result, every dinner became an unknown surprise, but something we, and many other apartment dwellers looked forward to. We kept the ‘Hobo’ stew happily simmering for several days/weeks(?).

But it all came to an abrupt end one evening. Something was amiss, something in the bubbling pot felt slimy, and was not particularly palatable. It had crawled across our collective tongues and found wanting. Our evolutionary and revolutionary dinner stew was brought to a sudden and final end. Nothing could redeem us.

We examined, analyzed, and finally decided the ‘Trojan Horse’ that had brought down our nightly communal dinners was the okra!

I eat just about everything but still can’t bring myself to eat okra.