This weekend’s gazpacho attempt got me thinking about bread–namely, how much I miss delicious, crusty bread.

It’s not that I’m on an anti-carb bender, though I’ll be honest and say that eating two slices of toast (even plastic, sandwich-bread toast) always makes me want more toast and sends me teetering near “Oops I ate the whole bag” territory.  I can eat mountains of rice and pasta and not scrounge for more.  But bread?  Not so much.

The issue is that I eat a lot less bread here in Trinidad because I don’t have access to good crusty bread at all times–and, when I do, I have to make an effort to get to it.  Combine my laziness and my justified fear of turning into Dough-Chomping Monster and you’ll find I eat a lot less bread than I used to.

This weekend, I bought what appeared to be a standard, crusty Italian loaf of bread.  The crust was like soft cardboard.  The crumbs had the consistency of spongy styrofoam.  The bread was moldy after two days in my kitchen.  I was livid that I wasn’t able to even wrangle one toast, ham, and coffee breakfast out of the wretched loaf (which cost about $4 US, I might add).

It took a moldy gross loaf of bread to make me realize the obvious:  I should just bake my own.  I mean, I can make pizza dough, pitas, and sada rotis, so I should be more than capable of making a loaf of bread.

And yes, making bread is something adults do, and I’m not sure how I feel about being an adult… but I’d rather be a bread-making adult than a plastic-bread-scarfing girl.

With that in mind, I turned to  Rachel’s version of Nigella Lawson’s Hearthbread (from Nigella’s How To Be a Domestic Goddess–the only Nigella book I don’t actually own!) and let the action unfold (with fingers crossed, of course):

Sucess!  It was easy–and it tasted great with regular flour and sans parsley (I mashed the garlic with some oregano and lemon-pepper seasoning instead).

It might have been the best smell EVER to come from my kitchen.  Between the roasted garlic smell and the dough baking, I was giving my dog a run for his money on crackhead air-sniffing behavior.  I might have had better bread in France, but since this bread was in my kitchen and at my grasp, I can safely say this is the best bread I remember eating.  EVER.

Oh, and baking it was the perfect way to channel my rattled nerves for the half marathon and get my soup- and-salad meal on.  I was nursing a touch of cold and acting like I’ve come down with a case of bird flu and swine flu COMBINED yesterday, but I swear dinner that broccoli soup, salad, and bread cured me.