Wonderful. After days and days of having trouble sleeping because I was just not sleepy at all, when does my brilliant brain decide to give in and let the sleepiness hit me?
Just as it’s time to sit down and do the day’s writing, of course.
Sure. Why not. I can take a joke, Universe. Right back atcha.
Oh well, remember Finagle’s Law : the perversity of the universe tends towards a maximum.
Or, to give props to that early pioneer in pessimism, Murphy : if anything can go wrong, it will.
His early formulation is less scientific and rigorous than Finagle’s, but I like it anyhow because it makes a case for very careful and thorough planning.
So here I sit, eyelids heavy like they are carrying luggage (the bags under my eyes, perhaps?), wanting nothing more than to succumb to the alluring entreaties of the king sized bed not four feet from me and slide under the sheets and into the soft and sure arms of Morpheus’ sweet oblivion.
What I am saying I want to go to be with Lawrence Fishbourne
Apparently, part of being sleepy like I am right now is losing the ability to stop myself from waxing poet at the drop of a hat.
Oh well, the news is not all grim, dark, and inviting. My dear sister Anne sent me a $75 gift certificate for Amazon.ca as a belated birthday gift, and I have spent it on a brand new Sunbeam bread machine plus a book of 300 bread machine recipes. Yay kitchen gizmos!
A bread machine might seem like a mildly eccentric choice for birthday gift, but I had acess to one when I was living in Silicon Valley and they are a ton of fun.
For one thing, to me, it is always a miracle that it can be that easy to make bread from scratch. I have done it by hand before, and while it is a lot of fun, it is also a lot of work, and a lot of mess.
But with a bread machine, you just put the ingredients in, tell it to do its thing, and a couple hours later, you got fresh baked bread. It’s like magic.
And of course, your living space smells fantastic. The smell of freshly baked bread is one of the best smells in the world, bar none, and the bread machine makes the whole place smell like that as a mere side effect of making you tasty, tasty bread.
And I am a man who loves his bread.
Once I have the thing (it should arrive between June 4 and June 7, says Amazon), it will be a loaf a day for a long time, I think. And with all those recipes, I can make a new bread every day if I feel like it. So very fun!
I am in particular looking forward to being able to make sweet dessert type breads with Splenda instead of sugar so that I can finally have desserts. Within reason, of course… sugar or no, bread is still a starch on the old Food Pyramid, and that means carbs, and that means blood sugar.
Still, it will rock the block to be able to make myself gingerbread or cinnamon bread or spice bread or whatever, all in versions that I can eat without it putting me over the red line.
Of course, that means I will also need to stock up on basic baking ingredients. Flour, baking soda, baking powder, milk, eggs, and so forth. Eventually, such things can be added to the Costco list once I have made a case via my excellent breads that such expenditures will benefit everyone in the apartment. I will in particular be looking for feedback on various breads to see which ones make Joe and Julian the happiest so I can be sure to keep those on hand.
What can I say… I love to feed people!
I knpw we always have salt around, and Jennifer left us some cinnamon and ginger behind when she moved out, so I won’t need to buy those. I think we have some flour somewhere, but if we do, it is not labeled, and there are many reasons to always want to know which white powder is which in your household. Plus, if we do have flour, it has probably been there forever, and not exactly springtime fresh any more, so it is probably best discarded anyhow.
I see a trip to the bulk section at Save-On Foods in the near future.
So, yay, new toy. That should be a lot of fun. I hope it turns out better than the slow cooker. I have used the thing maybe five times, and never to particularly good effect, and now it just sits there next to the rice cooker, reproaching me for my lack of industry and commitment every time I make a pilaf.
The problem, I think, is that my slow cooker plans rested on me somehow becoming the sort of person who finds a recipe, goes to the store to buy the ingredients (which he can totally afford) and then comes back and spends time chopping and dicing and browning things before putting them in there and leaving them to cook for a long time.
I am not sure who that guy I thought would be using the thing was, but he sure ain’t me.
The bread machine is more manageable. I can stock up on tons of flour and yeast and whatnot, and then putter away happily with no extra trips or extra work involved. Just measure, put into bread machine, and push the big happy GO button.
And then, my friends, we will start making some serious bread.
Who knows, if I can manage to get some more income in, I might be able to get both bread machine and slow cooker going, and fulfill my dreams of making bread and soup at the same time, and having very pleasant meals of soup and sandwiches all made from scratch.
Not all dreams are about leaping over rainbows, ya know.
Some of us just want nice bread.