Breads

A friend, the chef of a catering firm here in Houston, brought my son and me a gift of the traditional St. Patrick’s Day Soda bread and some split pea soup to go with it. I didn’t know about Soda Bread being traditional. I always thought it was corned beef and cabbage.

My son thought Soda Bread would be a new taste experience for me but I had eaten it many times during the depression years when Grandma and Grandpa Abbott lived with us on the asparagus farm. Grandma and Mom baked it occasionally but the family really never cared for it so we didn’t have it often. The Soda Bread of my childhood was plain not fancy with nuts and raisins like ‘Chef’s’ present.

It took skill to bake things in the oven of our big cast iron kitchen range. We seemed to have developed a sixth sense when we baked pies, cakes, rolls and loaves of bread. The wood and coal fire would have heated the oven to an unknown degree and we had to guess at the baking time. We timed the baking of bread according to the color. When the crust turned a golden brown it was time to remove it from the oven.

When I got home from school in the afternoons, I often had to finish working up the bread dough Mom had made earlier in the day. The yeast dough would have risen to fill the container and it had to be punched down before forming it into loaves. If bread was needed for supper that night, I might make rolls as well as loaves. I often made ‘fried bread’ too for an after school snack.
I would stretch and pull a small pinch of raw dough until it was about the size of my palm and drop it into a skillet of hot oil. As soon as it was golden brown on one side it was browned on the other then drained on a paper towel.

The kids would hang around the kitchen yelling ‘dibs’ for the next piece and slather mounds of butter on it while it was still piping hot. They would juggle the bread from hand to hand until it cooled enough to eat.

Many years later some girl friends raved about eating ‘squaw bread' at an Indian pow wow and invited me to join them the following week. You can imagine my surprise when I saw that ‘squaw bread’ was nothing more than our ‘fried bread’. I told the girls I had been raised on the same and they refused to believe me.

When my sister, Esther, visited several weeks ago, my son took Esther and me to browse Central Market. When we came to the bakery, the choice of breads was over whelming. Every size, shape, color and ethnic preference was exhibited. The delicious odor of baking bread caused our eyes to get bigger than our stomachs and the three of us left the market with enough varieties to feed a platoon of Marine recruits.

I want to make Boston Brown Bread and have saved a lot of coffee cans to use when I get around to making the recipe. Mom used to make it often for the family and Esther remembers helping her but has forgotten the details. She recalled enough of the recipe and how the coffee cans were used, that I could surf the net for a recipe that fit Esther’s memory. Until I found the recipe I had been unaware that brown bread is cooked on top of the stove and not in an oven. The batter is poured into greased coffee cans, covered with aluminum foil and placed in a pan of water which is simmered on top of the stove.


My brother Mickey taught me how to make Angel Biscuits years ago when I lived in Palo Alto. He was spending the Christmas holidays with me on his weeks of R&R before returning to his job as cook on an oil rig off the coast of Alaska. Mickey was a gourmet cook and was a delight to work with in the kitchen. He was a lot of fun and enjoyed sharing his knowledge, but he could and did use every pot, pan and utensil in the kitchen to serve his purpose then steadfastly refuse to wash them and left the clean up to others.

I am not fond of biscuits and rarely eat them, but Mickey guaranteed that I would like his Angel Biscuits. I was doubtful, but was happy to hand him so and so and give him this and that when he asked. He was right! I was won over after the first bite! They were so delicious I asked him to make them several more times that Christmas holiday.

Recently I have discovered Bread sticks. There is a place here in Houston called, Café Express. They keep a large basket filled with imported Italian bread sticks on the condiment bar. Each packet holds 5 or 6 sticks each a foot long and half the diameter of a pencil. They are scrumptious and I thoroughly enjoy the way they ‘crunch’ as I nibble from one end to the other.

When I first discovered them I took to grabbing 3 or 4 of the packets to nibble on while we waited for our orders, but I made certain there was a packet or two left that I could take home when we finished eating. My purse is too small to hold bread sticks, so recently I graduated from nibbling them while eating there, to getting orders ‘to go’ which allows us to stop at the condiment bar on our way out to grab a really big handful of bread sticks. The other day as I was eating the last of the sticks I had at home, I wondered if there was some way I could, in easy conscience, exchange my purse for a tote bag the next time we go to Café Express. Perhaps the more prudent move would be ordering a case directly from the bakery in Italy.

I.E.

i.e.
Function- abbreviation
Etymology: Latin - id est
that is

‘i’ before ‘e’ except after ‘c’ and sounding like ‘a’ as in neighbor and weigh. I learned that rule in grade school spelling and it has certainly helped me with spelling thru the years. But it also has me reviewing the whys and wherefores of the English language since I’ve recently started to learn German. The rules of English grammar have been dormant in the back recesses of my mind, but now I have to drag them out and try to make sense of the new language constructions. The pronunciation of ‘ei’ in German is not like ‘a’ as in neighbor and weigh, but like ‘eye’.

My interest in German started when I began to play chess on a German chess server where players from around the world meet 24/7 to play chess. I am unrated and play for fun in the beginner’s room. I enjoy the game, win, lose or draw, and have an appreciation of my opponent’s ability to maneuver his pieces around the board. Many high rated players also play in the beginner’s room. They know all the tricks and practice their skill in unrated games with peons like me.

User names and the flag of their country identity each player and a rating is listed if the player has one. Players can choose to play either rated or unrated games. The number of players often peaks at over 6000 with the common language being chess. German dominates the chat line but players who know the smiley codes often type ‘sad’ or ‘happy’ text messages, which seem universal.

I’ve kept a German to English translation page minimized behind the server screen so I could satisfy my curiosity about some of the remarks on the chat line. As my interest in the language increased, I bought a unique beginning German book by Charles Berlitz that has every sentence and dialog written three times, first in German, then in easy to read syllables that show how to pronounce it and finally in English. I also subscribed to the online BBC German course. I’ve made enough progress in the language to understand some of the words written in the chat line, but still have to use the translation web site to get the total meaning of a comment. I myself never chat or make remarks.

That is……. until now.

A high rated German player has begun a flirtation with me. He uses his first name followed by what I assume to be his age, 38. It started when he frequently challenged me to games which he consistently won. My chess playing is strictly trial and error and a win on my part is almost always by accident and tickles me no end!!! Eventually I did win a game or two and he began watching as I played other opponents.

One day he got my attention by sending me a bell tone and wanting to chat. I told him I didn’t speak German. He doesn’t speak English. He asked about my job and my age, but I ignored all his questions. Our dialogs began by his saying Hi and me replying Hi. My initial forays in German were phrases like, Gutten Tag, Gutten Abend, Danke and Bitte. I never refused to play him when he challenged me to a game but I never invited him to play. As the quality of my games improved our games lasted longer and I made him work for his wins. He was always courteous and sent smiley kisses.

That is…….

Until the day I won two games in a row. Up to this point we had played only one game on any given day. On this particular day my first win must have irritated him because he IMMEDIATELY challenged me to a second game. I happened to win the second game in short order which surprised me as much as it did him! I sent him the usual ‘thx’ for the win, but there was only silence from his end. 20 minutes later he posted a naughty word on the chat line which I knew was a reaction to his losses. I was shocked that he would let his losses cause him to react as he did. Three or four days went by before he spoke to me again.

Our greetings have been reduced to an exchange of ‘Hi’ but as of yesterday, I doubt seriously he will ever want to play chess with me again. Yesterday I won THREE games in a row from him and I haven’t stopped laughing. I think our flirtation is over. I’ll miss the bell tones, the chats and the smiley kisses.

I think if he knew I only took up chess as a diversion a couple of years ago, and that I was an old lady closer to being 86 than 85, he would really swear!!!!