Hello, Old Friend

The wind is crazy out there in B'ton today. The kind of crazy I remember from Eddie Bert where I had to hold on to steady myself. The kind of crazy that rendered the $6 umbrella I hastily purchased immediately useless (I'd just gotten soaked earlier in the morning). Not only did I have no use for it, but I had to close it tightly in my hands to make sure it didn't fly away or cut me. Like an episode of Scandal, this weather is absolutely bananas. 

Not that I mind. It's been 24 hours of reuniting with old friends. Nik said that this was an American tradition-- meeting with friends before Thanksgiving-- and I guess she has a point. Between breakfast and lunch today, I'm hiding out from the weather at Flour Cafe right now--another old friend. If all goes well, I will have had meals with friends from high school, college, and grad school, and in that order, too, by the end of the day. All I need is Young Bo now (or Uzi, or Jen) to bridge the intervening years. 

(I used my scarf to cover my head from the rain)

Moi: I feel like a little orphan. 

Nik: You look like a babushka. 

Carbo Fully Loaded

Today was the annual color run in B'more.  I joined half a dozen friends post-run for brunch.  Not that I ran in the race.  I had breakfast then went to church.  They ran around.  And we met up to eat.  Just like how I like my Sundays to be.

Not only did I not start my day with exercise, my biscuit consumption sank to a new low.  Or maybe a new high.  

Ilene: What, do they know you by name?

Moi: Oh, we're long past that point.  

This morning, I didn't get a biscuit sandwich at the farmer's market.  I "just" got a slice of poundcake.  And Damian (the benevolent biscuit baron) expressed his disappointment.  "This isn't like you."  "But I also got a plain biscuit!"  "That's a little better.  I'm just surprised.  I thought you would have gone for the oxtail."  

Having 2 breakfasts isn't easy, Folks (2.5 if you count the bite of challah I stole before I left the house).  And sometimes, it means disappointing a few biscuit-makers along the way.

Staff Meals

I've been on a bread making kick lately.  A kind of kick I never would have gone on in B'ton.  There was no reason to when I could get olive ciabatta from the bocadillo shop downstairs, or brioche and pastries from Flour (oh sweet, Flour) two blocks over, or vendors like When Pigs Fly at the SoWA markets on Sundays.  Or hop over to Chinatown (cheap buns and rolls at the old Canto shops, the fancier Taiwanese stuff at 101).  Good bread existed everywhere.  Not Paris good or Taipei good.  But good enough.  Here in B'more, I've been on a bread kick out of laziness and desperation.  I live in a bread desert.  So last week, not wanting to go to the grocery store for disappointing subpar bread, I made it myself.  I tossed together a white bread-cheddar-salami-rustic-winging-it-without-a-recipe loaf.  It was good enough.

Today, I upped the ante with an actual recipe and made a challah boule.  The fun of saying both those words, together and separately, was worth the (very little) effort.  Turns out, yeast does most of the work in these situations.  I just had to measure and clean up.  The recipe said to wait for the bread to cool.  But I was impatient to have it with my dinner-of-breakfast-food-egg-scramble that I gladly burnt my hand for the fresh bread.  And I would gladly do it again for another taste at the fluffy, sweet, just-out-of-the-over taste.