Ernest Hardy Interviews Sapphire + Tayari Jones & Breadmaking

Yesterday I mentioned the author Sapphire, from whose novel Push director Lee Daniels created his new film Precious. Journalist, critic and critical thinker Ernest Hardy posted an interview with Sapphire yesterday on his blog, Blood Beats. It's excerpted, he says, from a longer version that appears in LA Weekly, which he writes for, and from an extended conversation that he and Sapphire had. It's definitely worth reading.

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Continuing on the Precious tip, Tayari Jones recently noted on her blog that the controversy swirling about the film had gotten to her so much that she decided to bake a 7-Up pound cake--and she posted the recipe on her blog. (I am going to have to try it.) It looks delicious enough to calm anyone facing anything.

(BTW, Congratulations to Tayari also for having her new novel picked up by Algonquin Books!)

I can't claim similar grounds for my baking, but I do look forward to any excuse to create a loaf of bread. I don't know what is going on with this bread-baking mania, but I really enjoy doing it, and it really calms me down. I did finally make one of the bread recipes Miriam sent, for Irish soda bread--and then turned what was left of it into bread pudding with chocolate that was one of the best desserts I've made in some time. But before I post that, I'm going to post the basic bread recipe from which almost any standard loaf can be made.

I should add that a number of people I know either can no longer eat bread--at least store-bought bread--or deign to for dieting purposes, but I wonder if this homemade bread has the same effect. Recently when we had gone through several micro-sized baguettes I baked C bought some bread from Calandra's Bakery, and it molded after about 4 days (!?), while other store-bought bread--baguettes, Italian bread, etc.--turns to stone if left out of the refrigerator. The bread I bake 1) usually keeps for a week without mold if not refrigerated; 2) retains its flavor for weeks, even if refrigerated; and 3) maintains its consistency as well. I wrote to Calandra's to let them know about their bread, but I got a very terse, robotic response from some PR person, so if you're in northeastern New Jersey and shopping for what you think is homemade-style bread, you've been forewarned.

The Basic Recipe

I adapted my basic recipe from Mark Bittman's New York Times "no knead" recipe. It's a better bet than his book, How to Cook Everything, which is excellent but unaccountably uses "pounds" instead of "cups" for the basic recipe, which causes unnecessary confusion. There are several keys to getting consistently good bread with this recipe, I've learned. First, you should always use rapid-rise yeast. Second, mix the flour in a glass bowl, then cover it with a plastic shopping bag (which increases the heat and moisture in the bowl and yeast growth) held in place by a rubber band--it's far more effective than a loosely draped tea towel, a cutting board, etc. Third, keep the covered bowl in a warm part of your kitchen. Fourth, always use a little olive oil during the second (even if brief) knead period. It is essential to prevent the dough from sticking or burning, and it adds flavor.

Okay, so here goes. You start with:

1 packet of rapid-rise/quick-rising yeast (VERY IMPORTANT)
2 teaspoons of salt (Bittman says 1.5, but 2 give more flavor)
3 cups of bread/unbleached flour/whole wheat/rye flour
1/2 cup of pastry flour (VERY IMPORTANT)
1 1/2 cups of water (you can often use a little less but adjust according to the dough's consistency)

C figured out the pastry flour addition. It is essential because pastry flour has LESS gluten and is lighter than regular flour, so when the dough rises, it adds more air bubbles. Do not use self-rising flour, cake flour, or other kinds of prepared flours. Some combos to try are:

1) 3 cups of unbleached whole wheat bread flour + pastry flour = French/white bread
2) 3 cups of unbleached general purpose flour + pastry flour = French/white bread
3) 1 cup of stone ground whole wheat flour + 2 cups of unbleached whole wheat bread flour + pastry flour = lighter whole wheat bread (hearty)
4) 3 cups of stone ground whole wheat flour + pastry flour = fuller whole wheat bread (VERY hearty)
5) 3 cups of whole rye flour + pastry flour = rye bread (and darker than rye bread that you buy in the store--EXTREMELY hearty)

And so on. The proportions are key, and the heavier the basic flour (rye, whole wheat), the more important the pastry flour.

To start, you pour the yeast and salt in the bowl, then add the flour. I either gently stir or whisk these together to ensure that everything is well distributed. Then you slowly add the water. It may not seem to be binding into dough at first, but keep stirring and folding it, with a wooden spoon (you could use your fingers as well), and you will see that it starts to become shaggy, then more of a ball. I suggest not adding all the water if you can; you don't want the dough to be a wet mess, just moist. If it's too wet, then add a little more flour. But if it appears too dry after you'd added the suggested amount of water above, then add a little bit more water so that you can at least pull it from the sides of the glass. Create a little ball, and then cover it with a plastic bag (the basic supermarket ones are great), holding it in place with a rubber band. You don't want any air to get in or out. Let it sit for 3-4 hours. You could create it in the morning before work, and it'll be ready when you get home. It also can sit for longer (6-7 hours, etc.).

NOTE: Rye bread does not rise as much as other kinds of bread. Bittman says it barely rises at all, but with the pastry flour, mine does expand a bit. So don't be dismayed if it doesn't puff up like wheat/white bread.

After the dough has sat for the necessary amount of time and risen (you will see it double or sometimes triple in size), you want to pull it out and on a clean, lightly oiled (olive oil) cutting board, press it down and fold it into itself several times. I always do this by hand. Do not overknead it, but perhaps turn it into itself about 10 or so times. This is the stage at which you can add raisins, nuts like pecans, walnuts and pignoli, olives, herbs like rosemary or chives, garlic, chunks of sun-dried tomato, anything. I have tried many of these. The key is to make sure they're not oily or wet (so wash the pitted olives well and dry them). When you've kneaded or added ingredients and kneaded the dough, form it into another ball and return it to the plastic bag-covered bowl. Let it sit and rerise for another 1/2 hour. (You could let it sit for longer if you like, but usually 1 hour max is great.)

Now comes another important step. As the bread is rerising, you should turn the oven on and set it to 450°. If it takes your oven a while to warm up, start as soon as you return the dough to the bowl. If it warms up quickly, you can do this about 15-20 minutes before you bake the bread. You want the oven HOT, though, when the bread goes in. About 10-15 minutes before you bake the bread, you should put whatever you're baking the bread in or on--an ovensafe covered crock/French pot, a baking sheet, a bread stone--into the oven so that it warms too. I either use a covered crock pot or a baking sheet, depending upon the bread I'm making. Neither needs to be oiled because you've already oiled the bread, and loose oil in a crockpot or on a baking sheet will begin to smoke...bad news!

When the bread has sat for at least 1/2 hour and rerisen, remove the plastic-bag cover. Then remove the crock pot/baking sheet/bread stone and set it atop your stove. You should carefully place the rerisen dough into the crockpot (and cover, to keep the steam in, which will make the bread light inside and hard outside) or onto the baking sheet/bread stone. Form it into a boulle or round loaf, or stretch it out if you want a longish loaf. (For baguettes, break it into two pieces and stretch them out. Put it back into the 45o° oven and let it cook for 30 minutes. (During the baking process, you can gingerly score the top with a knife if you want to be fancy.)

If you put it in a crockpot, remove the pot top (a palindrome!) after 30 minutes, and let the bread bake uncovered for 15 more. It should be light/golden brown on top. If you cook it on a baking sheet, it will also be golden brown, but the crust won't be as hard. The trick to getting a harder crust if you bake the bread on a baking sheet is when you initially put the baking sheet in the oven, to place a pan underneath it, let it heat for a little bit, then CAREFULLY add water so that it steams. You can also spritz (or use your fingers to sprinkle) water on the hot insides of the oven and on the baking sheet to create steam. This creates a hard crust, and is essential if you're making baguettes.

Also, be VERY CAREFUL when spritzing not to splash water on the oven's light bulb. Why? Because it explodes! I can attest to how difficult it is to clean up the broken glass, and to having to throw out the bread for fear it's been pierced by glass shards. Not fun.

Remove the bread after more 15 minutes or it's browned on top. You don't want it to burn. Place it on a cutting board and let it cool to room temperature. Don't cut it right away, but let the inside cool. After about 5-10 minutes, if you want to try some with butter or olive oil, or something else, you can sample it. To keep it for a week, you just place in the same sort of plastic shopping bag you used to cover the rising dough, and let it sit out at room temperature. If your home (apt./house) is really warm, then refrigerate it after a few (2) days, but if not, it should keep for 5-7 days without refrigeration.

And that's the basic bread recipe! I'll post one for semolina bread, and one to make pumpernickel bread, very soon. Both are similar but involve a few more steps/tricks.

Some bread photos:

Olive loaf

Rye bread, cooled and sliced

Pumpernickel bread (first time--I added too much molasses, so it was too sweet and crumbly. The second time I got the amount right. Recipe coming soon!)

Two mini-baguettes

My standard pecan loaf

Semolina loafs

Bread pudding, made with leftover Irish soda and chocolate

Update from the Far Side + Small, Good, Yummy Things

In my last post, I mentioned that it had been aeons (I love this spelling of that word) since I'd posted, and then I promptly went out and, in the most derelict fashion, spent another aeon away from here before posting. Unlike last August, I have thankfully not been ill and dealing personally with our faulty health care system (and I speak as someone with employer-provided health insurance, and strongly believe we need a public insurance option and extensive reforms to improve the system). C and I also haven't headed for the hills this month; we'd hoped to go to Brazil, I primarily for professional reasons, but decided based on economic considerations to postpone it, so we'll see when that becomes possible.

Instead of posting to the blog, I've been reading; writing my novel and short stories; reading; reading grad student work, since that's a year-round responsibility; reading; mourning; reading; trying to write an essay in French; reading; writing letters and emails to politicians and donating when possible to support progressives; reading; preparing for conferences later this year and early next; reading; listening to the radio and watching far too much TV, including almost anything that happens to be broadcast by Bravo; reading; watching Netflix films; reading; going to the movies and wondering how Hollywood stays in business; reading; hitting the gym regularly; reading; hanging out with a few friends and seeing others off as they move across the country; reading; working on other literary projects; reading; dreaming of new ones; reading; reading blogs, magazines, journals, newspapers, especially if I did not have an opportunity to read them during the past academic year; reading; tweeting (as you now know) and reading others' Twitter feeds; reading; , not following Facebook all that much; and doing all the other things that I do when I'm home in New Jersey.

As I noted on my Twitter feed, one of the books I finished recently was Benjamin Moser's biography of Brazilian 20th century great Clarice Lispector, Why This World (Oxford, 2009). In fact, as soon as Reggie H. (naturally) mentioned that the book was out, I ran to 2 different bookstores in NYC (my favorite in Jersey City having closed this past spring), and one, the independent Three Lives in Greenwich Village, was able to get it for me in a day. Moser's true skill in the book, beyond his thoroughness, his assured narration, and his infectious enthusiasm, sometimes to the point of hagiography and hyperbole, is to trace out the autobiographical skeleton and philosophical underpinnings of Lispector's work, revealing how so many aspects of her life, beginning with her Jewishness, and ranging from her family's hair-breadth escape from the pogroms in Ukraine, to the horrific suffering of her mother during that period, to her childhood in the exciting but still backwater northeastern capital of Recife, all helped to mold Lispector's life trajectory in singular ways that distinguished her, as a creative person as well as a public figure, from all of her Brazilian peers and gave her work its indelible, and indelibly strange and compelling stamp. One effect of the book was to make me want to return to all the Lispector books I'd read before, like The Passion of G. H. and Stream of Life (Agua Víva), two of her greatest, as well as her masterpiece, The Hour of the Star (whose famous English translation, by Giovanni Pontiero the scholars César Braga-Pinto and Ben Sifuentes-Jaureguí told me, is quite faulty, as it leaves out an entire paragraph and mistranslates others), and to read the ones I'd never gotten to, like The Foreign Legion, or The Chandelier. It also expanded my understanding, via its recourse to biography and historiography, of all of these works, in ways I hadn't imagined. Thus with The Passion of G. H., what is playing out in this book in part is Lispector's coming to terms with a capacity for self-understanding so brutal, so obliterating, that its materialization as the book's fictional plot in a sense must result in the horrific scene (which I will not give away) that continues to shock and surprise readers. Moser suggests that Lispector had reached not only an aesthetic, but a philosophical limit with this book, and goes on to show how what followed takes up another major strand that was present in her earliest writing. I should add that there are many fascinating biographical nuggets in the book, such as that Lispector, of all people, once translated, quite lackadaisically, Ann Rice's Interview with a Vampire into Portuguese; that an American poet became so enamored of her that he threatened suicide if he couldn't be with her (he couldn't); and that she was once invited to a paranormalist conference in Colombia based primarily on the wealthy organizer's impression that she was a "witch," by which I mean in the supernatural sense. More than anything, though, Moser's biography helped me to appreciate Lispector's achievements that much more, providing a much more detailed context in which her work appeared, and a deeper sense of its impact on her national literature as well as outside Brazil. The Hour of the Star, in its flawed English version, sits amidst the stack of books I plan to get through by the end of December, but I also am going to try, if I can, to approach the Portuguese to see exactly what it is I--and most of her English-language readers--have been missing.

Speaking of movies, and in particular movies about vampires, which are still all the rage (cf. Monster Theory), one I recommend, is the Swedish horror film Let the Right One In (2008), directed by Tomas Alfredsson. Anyone who watches the enthralling, disturbing, and sometimes outright farcical True Blood (or has read Stoker, Rice, and others), knows the basics of vampire lore, such as the threat from the sun, the necessity of being invited into human beings' homes, and the overwhelming need for blood, and Alfredson hews to them even as he creates something quite fresh, a revenge tale of sorts involving two children, one a vampire and one not, in an utterly bleak and yet beautiful Stockholm. The story centers around an androgynous, taciturn and almost frighteningly pale little boy, Oskar (Kare Hedebrand), whose parents are divorced and who's the victim of continuous bullying by a group of schoolyard thugs. Raised by his single mother in an ice-laden apartment complex which appears to be fairly devoid of people--really, the setting alone was already scaring me--he encounters a raven-haired little girl, Eli (Lena Leandersson), who turns up one day, amidst the frigid weather, without so much as a coat. Eventually he learns why Eli doesn't appear to be bothered by the cold, and why he doesn't see her during the day; he also learns that he's falling in love with her, despite some bloodcurdling aspects of who she truly is. The acting in the film is almost perfect, it manages to invoke tenderness without sentimentality, and though it become quite clear how the plot is going to unfold, at least up to the end, which Alfredson sets up in very skillful fashion early on, the movie still provides a good deal of immersion into vampirism, and real horror, including the requisite bloodletting.

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One thing I've been trying to do is not let the increasingly crazed political situation in the country, particularly swirling around health care reform, send my blood pressure into the outer stratosphere. The GOP bringing the crazy isn't surprising; they gave us more than enough of a preview last year, and have, as the consensus historian Richard Hofstadter pointed out before I was born, the Republican Party has long been a repository for extreme nuttiness, though I think things really took a turn for the worst under 1) Reagan's presidency, when illogic was actively embraced and empowered, and 2) when Bill Clinton won in 1992. The right wing, including its Congressional annex, became totally unhinged at that point, which culminated in the attempted impeachment of Clinton in the late 1990s, despite his having governed as a competent, moderate Republican for nearly half a dozen years, and the 2000 coup that installed George W. Bush. (Yes, that sounds nutty too, but the 2000 election, if you think about it, was hardly legitimate.)

Part of the problem has been what I view as a lack of leadership and forcefulness, and an almost reflexive accommodationism, from President Barack Obama. Now I did say that I would be publishing some political thoughts back around the time of his 100th day in office (an arbitrary guidepost that the legacy media turned into a referendum moment of sorts), which I glibly called "100 Days of Obamatude," but my rising disillusionment with his tenure thus far has reached the point--perhaps disillusionment isn't the right word, and disappointment is more apt--where I haven't been able to muster the energy to commit the critique here. I do still support him, and do not regret that I voted for him. And yes, there were omens of what we've seen from his time in the Senate, one of the most outrageous being his total flipflop last year on the FISA bill and telecom immunity; his cravenness on this issue was about as huge a flag as there was. Others pointed, in a kindly but firm manner, to his narcissism, blinding self-regard and apparent entitlement (though what major politician doesn't possess either), his lack of experience and thin resumé, and his congenital desire to compromise. None of these things are and should never be dealbreakers for a president, and in light of who he was running against--and I don't just mean the loony GOP ticket--he looked then and continues to have been the best choice. On a symbolic level, he has been decent to very good so far, and some of his efforts, like his shepherding the flawed but necessary stimulus bill through Congress, his nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, his lifting of some Bush-era extremist regulations concerning reproductive rights, and his championing of the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Bill, have been exemplary. However, in so many other areas, the rhetoric and actions have been equivocal to dismal enough to provoke deep cynicism, in addition to dismay, disgust, and worse. I won't enumerate them all now (his economic approach and the ongoing sub-dom relationship with Wall Street; the continuation of the Bush torture regime; the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and his dealings with the military leadership; the disquieting indifference towards LGBTQ equality and rights; etc.), but the health care reform issue and the consequent battle provide a good example.

When he was campaigning over the last two years, Senator Barack Obama outlined many elements of what he foresaw as necessary to ensure real health care reform, a fact that is probably evident to anyone who isn't rich, is over 35, and has to deal with our current health care system. Two of Obama's rivals for the nomination, John Edwards (who despite a plethora of ideas thankfully did not get that far) and Hillary Clinton, proposed more sweeping and progressive health care reform plans, and when he was elected, Obama appeared set--and suggested, in his public comments--that he was going to adopt most of the better features of the Edwards and Clinton plans, and marshal them through Congress, thus transforming, in Rooseveltian fashion, the contemporary health care landscape in the United States. As the battle--and it was always going to be a battle, because the GOP, from before November 4, 2008, demonstrated its deep and abiding opposition to an Obama presidency, and has done nothing to change that--has unfolded, Obama, along with key elements of the Democrat party, has repeatedly said one thing and done another, misled and outright insulted his strongest supporters, cowered and gone oddly silent at times in the face of vicious GOP attacks and very dangerous, destructive lies, and shown very little passion or consistency on what is literally a life-and-death issue.

One of the key things President Obama promised was "transparency" surrounding the health care push, but we've since come to learn that in fact we've gotten anything but. Instead of the discussions being broadcast on CSPAN, we've learned that key White House officials may (or may not, though it's likely they did) negotiate in advance both with Big Pharma and the insurance companies to give them a great deal of what they wanted, in effect suffocating real, transformative reform before it was ever really possible. The White House also keeps involving perdurable milquetoast and former Senator Tom Daschle, a man who while Senator Majority Leader never missed an opportunity to let the GOP roll right over him; Daschle was supposed to be the Secretary of Health and Human Services, and thus to help "fix" this whole health care "reform" effort, since he has spent his post-Senate career joining his wife in shilling for a host of health care industry clients, but he failed, unlike the masses of we little people of whom Leona Helmsley once so contemptuously spoke, to pay his taxes, so his official stint in the Obama administration was kiboshed. He nevertheless continues to keep a finger in the mix--those powerful, wealthy clients, you know--and so we've gotten this horrendous, ridiculous notion of health care co-ops, which none of their proponents can lucidly explain, in place of the already watered-down government, or "public" option, which itself is a watered-down version of what would truly transform US health care, slash costs, and make quite a few insurance and pharmaceutical execs and shareholders very unhappy: a universal, single-payer system. Obama continues to finagle with Daschle, and the "Gang of Six" in the Senate, led by notorious conservadem Max Baucus, and will still have to deal with the rest of the Blue Dogs in both the Senate and House, as well as ideological Mr. Hydes like Arlen Spector (support Joe Sestak and do Pennsylvania and the country a favor!) and Joe Lieberman, who are probably salivating at the chance to sabotage whatever the Democrats produce, so who knows what will ultimately emerge and be labeled "health care reform." It's clear that without a public option, if purchasing a health care package is mandated, the main beneficiaries, under George Bush and the Republican Congress's boondoggle, will be the insurance industry and Big Pharma, again. But we're being conditioned, badly of course, to be ready to accept whatever does appear, which Obama will sign and thus declare as a victory. Half-assed is now supposed to cut it. And we're supposed to say, as we've had to say again and again with this administration (and as was the case, I recall, under Clinton, when he was not turning into an outright Republican on social or economic policy), well, it was better than nothing, which is, admitted, something....

It certainly doesn't help that we have such a hapless, duplicitous, corporate-muzzled legacy media, but I already knew this. I've railed about them more than once on this blog. The vast majority of print and telemedia journalists and the accompanying punditocracy were going to be worthless when it came to the health care reform issue, just as they'd been worthless, to a perilous extent, throughout the 8 years of George W. Bush--and Clinton's two terms, where the leading paper of record, the New York Times, to give just one execrable example, distinguished itself by pushing the Whitewater scandal relentlessly until it was finally debunked and Bill and Hillary Clinton were exonerated, by courts of law no less, of wrongdoing, yet the Times never saw fit to apologize for its highly damaging behavior. We are now near the end of August, yet one could search high and low for a clear, extended discussion, on TV or in the major papers, of what the current health care issues are, why the US spends so much more than any other industrialized country and what the sources of these exorbitant costs are, what the prospective Congressional plans would really look like and how they would play out economically, what various real stakeholders (from patients to doctors to insurance and pharmaceutical executives, etc.) would stand to gain and lose, and what the projected effects, not just on the health care system itself, but on US society in general, would be. Perhaps the media didn't do this when Social Security or Medicare and Medicaid were being discussed either, so maybe this is beyond their pay grade or ken, but in the absence of the Democratic Party, major Democratic Congressional officials, and the President doing this in a sustained fashion--and thus helping to counter the sheer derangement being catapulted, for obvious reasons, by the insurance and Big Pharma lobbies and by the likes of Sarah Palin and a good deal of the GOP--having the legacy media just do its job would have very helpful and productive, whatever the outcome of the health care reform push might be.

So, as I said, I try not to let it or them get to me, whether it's Andrea Bernstein on WNYC's Brian Lehrer Show expressing relief that reporter and author T.R. Reid was not a "leftwing nut" and failing to ask basic questions about economic baselines and costs of Reid, whose new book, The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care, on his experiences with universal health care systems in the world's other advanced democracies sounds fascinating, or Chris Matthews parroting right-wing talking points one minute while bemoaning right-wing behavior the next, or the President and his administration negotiating against themselves, either because they want the bill to fail or be torn apart and fairly worthless if it does pass, they're somehow cowed by the GOP and completely beholden to the industries they're supposed to be challenging, or they're just too in their salad days--or, and I hope this isn't the case, too incompetent--to grasp how to deal with the opposition. Of course there could be other reasons why the situation is unfolding the way it is, so pardon any ascriptions of bad faith to the President (if not to people like Rahm Emanuel, a corporatist if there ever was one), but it's frustrating to witness things occurring--ravel, really--as they are, and to realize that I, nor anyone else really without power or access, has any voice, no matter how insistent we are.

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One of the things I've been doing is making bread. In addition to saving money every week, because this homemade bread is far cheaper than store-bought or even farmer's market-bought bread, and does last quite a while (sometimes up to 2 weeks without getting hard or moldy), the breadmaking is quite therapeutic. Each loaf has been an improvement on what's come before, it's fairly easy to do and hard to screw up even with a bit of experimentation, and it's so satisfying and delicious when it's done. As I mentioned, I started making it in Chicago, after C had pioneered it in NJ, and since then I haven't slowed down. So here are four different types of some of the breads I've been making and we've been enjoying.

First, I want to highlight the Irish soda bread I made based on a recipe that my former undergraduate student, the very brilliant Miriam*, who currently is on the high seas but does manage to post comments here regularly, sent me some time ago. (Finally, I made it!) I love Irish soda bread, and was particularly fond of the version the Plough & Stars, a longtime Cambridge, Massachusetts bar (is it still there?), used to serve on Sundays, with eggs and Irish sausages, a perfect tonic to sop up a hangover and fortify you for the rest of the day, so I decide to try my hand at making some, and it turned out very well. To Miriam's recipe I added raisins and perhaps more butter than was necessary, so the crust was quite flaky, but it did hold up well whether sliced and covered with marmelade, fried in an egg-in-the-hole style service (particularly delicious), or battered and turned into French toast. The innate sweetness and thickness of the bread made it especially perfect for this purpose. It also kept, first in a simple plastic bag, and then later in the refrigerator, for about 2 1/2 weeks.

An overhead shot of the Irish soda bread. It was particularly delicious with eggs, and as the base for French toast.

The Irish soda bread from the side. Those are raisins lying on the pan.

Back in late June, I made semolina loaves, another favorite from the farmer's market. C had suggested that I just adapt the recipe I regularly used but substitute the semolina instead of the wheat flour, but I thought I should try to find a semolina recipe, and I did, and it was considerably more involved than my usual minimal knead recipe, but the results, visible below, were pretty good, so I do plan to try it again. Like the Irish soda bread but unlike the boules, it doesn't go in a pot, but bakes on a tray, though with a pan of water beneath it, to ensure that it has the space to rise but forms a good crust and achieves a light, puffy texture. I am going to try it again, but perhaps with more of a sourdough flour to see how that turns out, though I'm not so much a fan of sourdough as I am of other doughs. The bread last for about 2 weeks, stayed soft, unlike other semolina loafs we've bought, even from bakeries, and was perfect plain, buttered at breakfast, to make sandwiches, what have you.


My next experiment was making an olive loaf, using the unbleached bread flour, the unbleached white flour (as opposed to the whole wheat or rye flour), and the pastry flour. Olive loaves are one of our favorite purchases at the farmer's market. Since I am boycotting Whole Foods, which I know has delicious, not excessively brined fresh olives, I picked up several different types of fresh, black and dark olives from the local A&P. They were extremely brined, so to prepare them for the olive bread, I made sure they were pitted, washed them 2-3 times, then tasted them to make sure they weren't too salty, then diced them up so that they would be easy to knead into the bread. At the stage when I knead the bread shortly before I bake it, I folded the olive pieces in, and then let the dough rise again for about 30-45 minutes. The result was, if I may say myself, quite successful. The second version I made the other night also worked well, and baked into an almost heart-shaped version, which is easier to cut for sandwiches. The original loaf lasted about 2 weeks, and did not harden or grow moldy, even though not refrigerated.

The olive loaf. I washed the olives three times to remove the brine (and pitted the ones that weren't already pitted).

This is the original white loaf, with pecans, that I've been making a lot. During the winter I tended to make a whole wheat version, and also tried a rye version. (I need to learn how to make pumpernickel.) It's my personal favorite, in part because the nuttiness of the pecans really flavors the bread in a wonderful way that doesn't overpower it. Whether for sandwiches, as an accompaniment to a lunch salad or with dinner, or even to make croutons or bread pudding once it nears the end of its freshness, it's a great option. Without the pecans it would be tasty, but with them, it is simply beyond.

My favorite, the standard pecan loaf.

*In an earlier comment section, Miriam noted a great used bookstore on Commercial Street in Provincetown; I did not publish the photo of it, but I snapped a picture, as I often have, as I was entering it, and titled it "My favorite Ptown bookstore" on my Flickr photostream. Why am I not surprised that Miriam would have mentioned it? :-)

Weekend Notes

I saw today that President Elect Obama is backing the laid off workers who've staged a sit-in since the beginning of this weekend at the Republic Windows & Doors plant (here) in Chicago. The roughly 300 employees were told on Tuesday that because of financial problems caused by Bank of America's cancelation of a line of credit, they would be let go by the end of the week, which was last Friday; one problem is that they didn't receive severance or benefit pay. The article implies the union is working to resolve the issue, while the owners of the company are engaging in shell games and not responding to media queries about what's going. Local politicians are condemning Bank of America, which is an easy target since it's one of the few remaining banking behemoths, although it's doubtful that such posturing will have any effect. Meanwhile, the protesting workers are wondering when they'll get their pay and what will they do just as the holiday season is rolling around. Any bailout coming for them and the hundreds of thousands now out on the street?

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To add insult to injury, the parent company of the newspaper to which I'm linking, the vaunted Chicago Tribune, for decades the Second (now Third) City's leading, conservative paper, is on the knife's edge of bankruptcy. As in, it could come as swiftly as this week. The Tribune Company's owner, Sam Zell, took the company private for about $8 billion, an insane amount even factoring in the portfolio's sterling pieces, the Chicago Cubs, and the major league baseball temple, Wrigley Field, neither of which he can unload right now, and repeated decimating waves at the company's various units, including the Los Angeles Times, Baltimore Sun, and the Tribune paper itself, haven't brought in the fantastical revenue needed to service the debt. As I wrote to some correspondents earlier, "the media entities under Tribune control are like those insects that are devoured from the inside out, leaving the appearance, though sickly, of being alive, while being utterly hollow on the inside." Well, not completely hollow, but they're getting there, and we can certainly thank greed and deregulation, alongside the technological challenges the newspaper industry is facing, for hastening these events. At this rate, the nation's second and third largest cities could find themselves with one less major newspaper by January 1, 2009, if things continue on the track they're on now.

(On yet another point, this grim news about the publishing industry came out last week. As James Schuyler once wrote, another day, another dolor.)

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On a completely different note, I found Marc Lacey's New York Times article on the muxe, transgender/gender-queering people and related social matrix in Oaxaca, Mexico, both fascinating and a bit confounding. Confounding because the article proceeds as if, despite the wealth of material on gender and sexuality among indigenous peoples and a great deal of work on global performances of gender and sexuality, and despite the extensive contemporary discourse in gender studies and queer theory, there were little context whatsoever beyond the notion there are gay people, there are straight people, and there are some men who don't exactly fit either category but many of them dress up like women, consider themselves women, assume important roles in their community and are mostly and widely accepted, yet how do we define them according to the very fixed rubric of gay/straight? (Of course the word "lifestyle" has to enter the picture!) Etc. I say this not to criticize Lacey so much as to note that for the umpteenth time I'm registering the vast gulf between how things are discussed within academe and outside it, here in the putative newspaper of record. What might an article that were graspable by most readers yet that took into account contemporary discourse on gender and sexuality look like? How might it read so that anybody could read and engage in and with it, and how might academics, and non-academics open up conversations even more to make this happen?

“Thalía,” who was named princess the night before at a vela, or community celebration, for the muxes, waits for a parade to begin (New York Times, Katie Orlinsky)

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I was going to write about how I've been baking bread of late, and how it deepened my appreciation first for anyone who does this regularly, for homemade food and cooking, for the felicities of the Internet as an archive and resource, for the simple and profound joy you can derive from successfully accomplishing a task of this sort, for C's marvelous examples as a cook, for my ancestors who had to do this sort of thing with far less at hand, for the delight of finding another way to be thrifty, for finding a way to take my mind of the mounting stacks of material to be read and my own glacially proceeding writing projects, and for the ending of Raymond Carver's famous story "A Small, Good Thing," which I regularly teach and which, despite its evident exemplary status in the contemporary, American realist canon, still carries a faint whiff of the ridiculous with its suggesting that devouring freshly baked bread might create an affective, emotional and social bridge between a grieving couple, parents who've lost their only son, and a crank of a baker whose isolation has led him to behave in an unconscionable way. But then, I made and baked and ate this bread--C. had already done so a number of times--and I realized that Carver might be on to something. I'm not saying that freshly baked bread is the best offering to patch up a broken friendship or any other sort of inimical situation, but the smell of the bread coming out of the oven, and the taste, with just a little butter, or olive oil, or olive tapenade, is enough to calm even pretty severe personal tensions. Or at least I thought so after this last loaf came out of the oven. It really is delicious. Since I've heard that a few readers enjoyed the mulled wine, I'll post a recipe for the bread soon. I need to try it a few more times to make sure I've got it right, and then I'll post it here. A photo, though, of the penultimate loaf: