Wednesday, October 4, 2006
Last week Jim and I went on a whirlwind trip of New England as his birthday present. One of his life's goals is to see all 50 states, and his total had been stagnating for a while at 36. And he's not getting any younger. So he decided that he could get five states in one trip if we tooled around New England for a week. We started in Boston, then went to Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Connecticut, and Rhode Island, ending up on Cape Cod for a few days. Now he has only nine more states left to see.
In the midwest, we are suspicious of Easterners. We fear that they are more sophisticated than us prairie folk and that they might try to pull the wool over our eyes. No wool-pulling that I noticed, however--just very helpful people, very good food, and lots of history. Because I was in the above states over the weekend, I didn't bake my usual weekend bread. Coming back on the plane, however, the bread-baking urge came upon me, and I decided that I could bake something easy after I got home. I cooked a potato and started making this potato loaf.
You would think that after baking bread for nine months, I wouldn't be so quick to forget that the resting and rising and resting and rising and baking parts add up to a lot of hours, but you would think wrong. I cheated a little on the last rising because I was about to fall asleep on the kitchen floor, so the loaf is a little petite, but quite edible. It's a good basic bread, with a heartier taste than the basic white sandwich loaf. I think it would make a fine meatloaf sandwich, if I only had some meatloaf, or a good egg salad sandwich, if I only had bothered to cook some eggs. It was also quite satisfying with butter and jam, which I did have.
In fact, it made me think of children's book Bread and Jam for Frances, in which Frances the badger refuses to eat anything other than bread and jam. I always liked the book, but thought that nobody would really want to exist on a steady diet of bread and jam. Eating my midnight snack last night, however, I began to have a little more empathy for her.
8 comments:
Yiuma,
The sweet potato bread was a lighter, airier dough, and I used a slightly bigger loaf pan for that one. This potato loaf is more of a sandwich bread--it's not at all heavy, but it's more substantial.
Oh, now see, if I had known you were going to be in Rhode Island, I would have asked you to stop in. You know, with some bagels and some of those chocolate sticky buns-thingies. Thanks for such an entertaining blog, I look forward to your weekend reviews every Monday!
Chris, still hungry in RI
mmm! i just had a lobster roll with a toasted potato bun. delish!
If I'd known that I knew someone in Rhode Island (sort of), I would have stopped off and delivered some baked thing that could pass the TIA's inspection.
That is a very fine looking loaf of bread!
Harry,
Thank you--I still wish I would have tried it on a meatloaf sandwich. There's always next year.
OMG, I don't even want to think how tasty it would be with meatloaf.
Harry,
The sad thing is that I finally made some meat loaf after thinking about this sandwich for a few weeks, but by then the bread was all gone.
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