Wednesday, May 29, 2002


should we here at bread, coffee, chocolate, yoga offer thanks and gratitude to yon aged hippie longhaired lefties?

alexander cockburn definitely thinks so. . .(his leftie newsletter here.)

i personally began baking bread as a teenager with a horrible recipe for batter bread from the old joy of cooking cookbook. i was dying in independence, mo. at the time. always grounded, sent home from school for my manic-panic fuschia hair, i hated tv. (readers should know i went through a long anti-tv period in the late 70s and early 80s. instead, i listened to the cure and the kinks. everything around me had slid into dinosaur, arena rock; i was desperate. . .) one bored weekend afternoon i made this terrible batter bread. yet it was still much better than the bunny bread we bought at the store. breakthrough!

i've really been baking bread ever since; when i lived in santa fe, i baked it three times a week. of course, at that time i was using some laughable recipe i had learned from a gauzy hippie chick on old upper canyon road. it never turned out well. but my starving-artist neighbor charles iarrobino (this was well before he had discovered venice) and i would go pick some apricots that grew wild on the trees and eat ratatouille, apricots, and this sad bread. . .it was always too dry. . .but in santa fe i did discover trappist organic flour.

in those days, bread wasn't "real," and learning how to bake authentic european-style hearth breads was difficult. it was in santa fe that phillip whalen turned me on to real coffee via peets. whalen also gave me a battered copy of the old tassajara bread book, and things began to look up for me.

while i no longer bake bread in any of those styles now, and laugh at the memory of the whole-wheat adobe bricks i used to produce, i guess i do owe something to someone. edward espe brown? zenshin whalen? ray davies? i'll choose to thank mr. right, who eats it all and is kind enough to say he likes it. . .

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