The Spoils of Homemade Bread

It is so easy to simply grab a loaf of bread and toss it into the cart at the grocery store. Done! And while our grocery store does offer some nice artisinal bread choices, it never compares to the warmth, the smells and of course the taste of homemade bread!

With Spring taking its grand old time getting here, I feel myself slipping back into winter's hibernating dreariness. Instead of craving fresh salads with lite vinegarettes, or delicate asparagus spears with hollandaise like I usually do come April, I could go for a warm pot of stew or a nice hearty soup. One look outside on a day like today where the weather can't make up its mind whether it wants to snow or rain, so it does both and it all comes down with a fierce wind helping it along, blowing vertically across the yard...time to make bread.

There's nothing more pleasant than working in the kitchen, on a Sunday afternoon, with the warm oven heating the room, the rising dough and the inner depths of my soul. My grandmother's bowls scattered around the counter tops, with flour sack towels lying over puffs of soft dough at different levels of rise.

My favorite part of making bread is the kneading. There is something inherently human about handling bread dough. It's just right somehow. Bread dough is very skin like, very organic and soothing. Flashes of my grandmother's hands with delicate blue veins, swollen knuckles and autumn leaf skin, dry and old but full of a summer's worth of character, come flooding back to me as real as if it were yesterday. Her hands, though aged, could wield a round of bread dough without thought or concentration. It was second nature, something she had done a thousand times. It was not nostalgic, or old fashioned. It was action without label, or maybe yet, it was in fact for her, life.