Category: Everyday Life

Revenge lunch!

‘Right! Today, I’ll try to bake Heidi’s bread again! ’ I said that this morning with great enthusiasm. If it turned out all right, we could eat it for lunch.
I baked terrible Heidi bread during Golden Week, then baked butter rolls and bagels like scones or cookies. After that, I tried to bake bagels twice, and somehow it got a little better. I don’t care if it’s ‘Even a poor shot will hit the mark eventually’ or ‘What one likes, one will do best’ or ‘Practice makes perfect’. But I don’t want to be ‘Enthusiasts are often the worst at what they do’.

After some mistakes, I finally searched for how to bake bread and people’s comments about it. Many people publish their own recipes, so it is very helpful for beginners like me. I thought I’d have done better to search for this before I started baking, but anyway it’s too late now.

I now know I did a few things wrong, and I can say that the kneading and the first rising make all the difference in baking. I could watch a movie of the steps in bread making on a flour company’s home page. Kneading doesn’t look so difficult when someone else is doing it. When I do it myself, I often think ‘I’m getting tired’, and ’My arm will bulk up’. How much I have to do is also hard to know. The cooking time also takes some hours. Now I really think I admire people who bake things by themselves. It takes ten minutes or so to eat, so if you think about the ingredients, and light and heat expenses, and all the trouble, it’s really luxury stuff, isn’t it?

So I feel happy and enjoy the taste when I can bake a bit better.
It takes a long time as something to serve to somebody though. (Except a husband.)
Today’s baking was not so bad: it looked like bread, so compared to Golden Week, we could have a revenge lunch, with potato salad, coleslaw, and sausages.

– YS, 16 May 2007

16 May 2007