BLTs

Yesterday, I was mildly gushing about bread and why I love making (and eating) it so much, and the idea of making BLTs for lunch over the weekend surfaced somewhere. True to form, I woke up (at 11.50am) with an itch to make some sandwiches, and almost immediately after shaping a loaf of brioche dough reserved for moresome peanut butter snackies tomorrow, started fussing about the kitchen.

I can't say that I was brought up in a very strong BLT (bacon-lettuce-tomatoes) tradition, because I wasn't- my childhood breakfasts were always unnervingly eggy, but I think BLTs are going to become a bigger part of my life now. There is something deceptively healthsome about how the lettuce and tomatoes disguise the fact that there is calorie-rich bacon lying surreptitiously within, and I am nothing if not the paragon of self-deceit.

The one claim to healthfood that I could find was, of course, the excellent bread. It was sweet, yeasty and wheaty from all that great wholemeal flour, with an incredible depth of flavour from the pre-ferment (in this case, a biga- a small portion of the dough left to steep overnight for added yum) I had included. 

Lightly toasted just to warm it up rather than to create palate-rasping wheaten scotch-brite and then filled with crunchy lettuce, tomatoes (which could have been fresher!), and oven-crisped bacon, this bread makes an excellent sandwich. The BLT was satisfying on so many levels that I don't think I need much sustenance for the rest of this busy Saturday.

A note on the bacon- for a few weeks now, I've been experimenting with ways to cook bacon apart from frying it, which I find makes the kitchen way too greasy way too early in the day. I have found some success with microwaving it (on a plate lined with paper towels on high for about 3 minutes), but it takes quite a lot of precision to crisp it. With today's BLT, I grilled the bacon with the overhead grill function of my oven (most ovens will have this feature) for about 3-4 minutes per side until there were some brown and crisp bits which is how I like my bacon. The best part is definitely the no-greasy-floor thing and, certainly, no lingering smell of bacon in my clothes and hair (not that it's a bad thing, the smell of bacon, but you get what I mean).

I suppose one could experiment with a whole range of ingredients, but I like the simplicity of bacon, lettuce and tomatoes (or ham, lettuce and tomatoes), with nothing but a squidge of mayo and maybe some black pepper for effect. My brother likes his sandwiches with slices of raw onion and olives, and I think I shall try that for dinner tonight, assuming no one has whisked off my remaining quarter of a loaf. 

Anyway, I'm off to spend the rest of my relatively unproductive recess week reading "The Other Hand" by Chris Cleave, which is a semi-depressing, generally uplifting novel, which kinda describes how the past 6 days of schoolessness have been for me. 

Bread frenzy

It being recess week, I've lots of time for bread baking, the essence of which is, really, time. I could wax lyrical about why bread baking is so enjoyable in all its zen-like meditation, waiting and watching, or why it is poetic in its ancient-ness (bread baking goes back as far as Man's first cultivation of plants, which kinda works itself in as the start of civilisation :P), but it wouldn't be anything I haven't already done in tremendous excess elsewhere. 

I like how bread-baking is two-pronged (for me, at least)- it is a tremendously satisfying hobby while at the same time providing my family and I with a happy supply of yeasty, wheaty cushions to couch with cheese, eggs, a gliding of butter, ham, the works. Right now, for instance, I am trying to reproduce a 50% whole-wheat loaf from Rose Levy Beranbaum's amazingly generous blog (www.realbakingwithrose.com) with the greedy ambition of

turning out some fabulous BLTs for lunch over the weekend. To this effect, I think I shall make a trip to town later to buy some buffalo tomatoes. Alas, bread-baking is not expensive in itself, but it inspires expenditure on wonderful ingredients worthy of home-baked bread (both the making and the eating of!). 

That is the proofed (proven?) and risen dough waiting to be popped into the oven. It's quite an active dough and smells delicious even in its wobbly, airy, unbaked state. 

Popped in the oven for a 35 minute bake, this is the dough in its "oven spring", the rapid expansion of the dough as the yeast cells do a final, frenzied dance before the high heat kills them off. 

And here, the baked loaf- misshapenness courtesy of yours truly. 

Anyway, to start off the ham and eggs portion of this blog on a suitably greedy note, I shall now include a recipe for an excellent artisinal bread to encourage those of you who, while avid bakers and food lovers like me, have yet to venture into the mysterious valley of yeasted milk and honey- it takes an initial push like the one Rose Levy Beranbaum gave me with her beautiful volume, The Bread Bible, to start you on a journey of kneading, shaping, stirring and self-satisfied munching at 2 o'clock on a lazy weekday afternoon. Once you see the magic in coaxing deep, satisfying flavours and textures from hardly anyyhign more than flour, water, yeast and salt, I think it will become clear why I sometimes elect to stay at home just to tend to bread rising in my bedroom. 

This recipe (for Rose's basic hearth bread, not the one above) comes from "The Bread Bible", but also appears on the back of "Harvest King Better for Bread Flour" packets, and Rose, in that post, also includes some extra instructions (she is the goddess of meticulous instructions). This is one my favourite breads to make by virtue of it being so simple, and I hope you find it enjoyable too!

Tabula Rasa

There are few things in life that smart the ego and sentimental softspots more than losing 5 years' worth of writing in one fell swoop of a net-maniac's random cum-spurting. Indeed, that was what happened to www.dailybacktrack.com, and if you click on that link, you will see web ads for daily devotional bibles, back ointment and racing tracks. 

I know there are many people out there, very likely the same artless people who saw it fit to erase my presence from the internet, who think it no great loss that, overnight, a treasure trove of pointless, noisy, partisan, polemical, frankly very boring self-congratulatory hogwash was decimated, along with equally pointless posts with far too many eggs and too much ham. Maybe it's a good thing that it has all been washed away, like the internet was put on a brutal wash-and-spin cycle- I was probably getting too absorbed in a community of critics and cynics than fits my rather more amicable character. 

This is not without a lot of sadness, of course. As any person who invests a great amount of thought- lucid or not- in putting words on paper (or words on the net) should know, it is a terrible thing to lose it all, to never be able to look back at it with masturbatory pleasure, and to never again look at how one's writing, character, beliefs and, perhaps, identity had evolved over the years. It is like the death of a pet, for years I had taken it for granted that I could turn to my blog to write something pointless, or something terribly clever that I simply HAD to put down before I lost the thought, or simply angst as was the initial function of my blog- in the final weeks before this happened, I made a note to post some updates, to ruminate, to wax lyrical about stuff that was happening around me, to pay the damned bills, and I didn't have a last look before it was all gone.

This may all sound sooooo unnecessarily melodramatic, but I really did love my blog. I had entertained a thought that I would keep it going for at least another 5 years, that I would be able to look back in a decade and smile or wince or laugh or cringe at all the things I had written. Not everything was positive, a lot of it I regret writing and am ashamed of having posted (before it was shredded to bits in other blogs), but all of it was written by me, at different points in my past 5 years, no doubt, but there was a charming evolution about my blog that always made it fascinating to backtrack.  

With this new blog, I am going to tone things down a bit. I don't see any direction that it's going to take and chances are it will be very much like the last one- ridiculously, maybe even frustratingly *unfocused* (or eclectic!), but I do invite you, whoever is out there reading this, to play along with me and make happy potty time in my new sandpit. Yes, there will be no end to my awkward metaphors and my love of long sentences, because that's ME, dammit, and I hope that, if you were expecting this semi-tragedy to have thrown me off kilter into some emo pill popping net hobo, then you are going to be sorely disappointed, because I don't take well to destruction- I just rise above it and become sunshinier. Yes, that means more ham and eggs.