2006-03-12 - 5:54 p.m.
I am going to write about bread so that Eva will write about Tucson. Quid pro quo, Doctor.
Tonight I baked beer bread. It was my first time baking something other than cornbread. Well, I guess there was the time that Nick and I made cookie dough from a mix and just poured it into a loaf pan and cooked it and ate the entire cookie loaf while watching nature films. We were not high when we did this, believe it or not.
Anyway, beer bread is pretty damn good. I think my cornbread might be a safer bet, but I am well pleased with my beer bread. The recipe is more or less as follows:
-Two cups whole wheat flour
-One cup of the following ingredients, mixed in no particular proportion: buckwheat flour, cornmeal, flax powder, miller's bran
-Three teaspoons baking powder
-Two teaspoons of salt
-Maybe a quarter cup of molasses
-A cup or so of raisins
-One pint of bottle conditioned beer (I chose "dark hefeweizen," a beer I'd never had in liquid form but predicted would be sufficiently yeasty and flavorful)
-One egg, beaten
-A shot of canola oil and a few squirts of honey, because what could it hurt?
Mix the dry ingredients. Mix the beer and beaten egg and pour into the dry ingredients. Add molasses, oil, and honey. Pour in a greased loaf pan and bake in a 350 degree oven for fifty minutes.
The bread was pretty moist, but it had a tendency to break into chunks when sliced. That was all to the good, as I just slathered some organic peanut butter on the chunks and sent 'em on a one-way train to Gut City.
There is something about baking on Sunday night that puts a pleasant cap on the weekend. Of course, my weekend had already been pretty damn pleasant. I spent Friday afternoon playing chess with Jeremy, and then headed to Acqua with a couple of TFA corps members from grad school. I am not crazy about Italian food but they served me some whole wheat pasta with eggplant and basil that just about changed my mind. I have since read some online reviews that criticize Acqua for weak service and loud patrons, but we avoided all that bullshit by dining early.
After dinner I headed back to Brooklyn and hit the weights and sack in that order. The next morning I woke up at 0500 hrs so that I could get back to the Bronx and take the chess team to a tournament. We didn't win too many games, but thank God nobody got hurt.
Today I continued the chess theme by going to see Garry Kasparov speak at a Barnes & Noble on the Upper West Side. Kasparov may be the Willie Mays of chess, but he might want to learn how to work a crowd. My favorite exchange from the question-and-answer session was as follows:
Seven-year-old: What was it like to play a computer?
Kasparov: Heh. Is very different from playing a person. Next question.
Anyway, I got Kasparov to autograph one of his books for me, so that was pretty sweet. Then I stopped at Fairway for beer bread ingredients and made my way home. This weekend was very fine indeed.
EDIT: I just remembered that I baked something else once. It was a very awesome cake, baked with the help of my very awesome sister C. See below.
