Mike brought a loaf of bread I’d made when he went to see our niece Ruby last Sunday. She’s tired. She’s a single mom. Her son is two. Do you remember taking care of a two-year-old boy? They went out for burgers. They went to the beach. They threw rocks. They ate ice cream. I didn’t get to go because I didn’t feel well enough and Mike didn’t want to have to turn around and come home in the middle of the afternoon if I started feeling worse. I get that. I felt left out, but I get it. So, I sent him with a loaf of bread I’d made when I got too tired the day before as I experimented with making croissants which came out ugly but which Nick promptly ate and said I should make again. I only got to taste one single bite of one and the guys ate the rest of them, ugly or not. Mostly Nick ate them. And the rest of the loaf went toward making cinnamon bread because I got tired before I finished and needed to quit but didn’t want to waste the dough.
Later that day, Ruby texted me that she’d missed me. We got going with a shit-storm of texts but they were the fun kind of texts and not annoying ones. Ruby is funny and warm and completely irreverent. She knows sfuff. She’s experienced stuff. She knows I’ve experienced stuff. She asked for my recipe for the loaf of bread.
‘So, the bread,’ I texted her:
Mix:
2 cups flour
4 tablespoons brown sugar
1 teaspoon salt
2 packages yeast
(I used loose yeast and misread teaspoons for tablespoons, so I added 5 tablespoons yeast but then I dug out a bunch and hopefully ended up with about 2 tablespoons.)
1/4 cup melted butter
(It said softened, but it fucking melted in the microwave. Just make sure it’s not hot enough to kill the yeast. You want it to be the same temperature as a baby’s milk that you tested on your wrist back in the day. Did you ever burn a little red circle into your wrist testing milk for your baby? I did.)
1 cup warm milk
(I was OUT OF MILK! How could I be OUT OF MILK? So, I used a half cup of yoghurt and a half cup of warm water instead. Repeat the temperature stuff because the baby-yeast can’t handle the heat.)
1/2 cup of warm water
(My ancient recipe calls for you to warm all that in a saucepan, but I never do it. But I try not to kill my yeast.)
Gradually add ingredients blah blah blah. Just throw that shit together and knead it in the bowl with enough flour to blend the ingredients and get a dough ball that feels like a baby’s powdered butt. There’s a baby theme here, some kind of metaphor of treating yeast like it’s precious. Add oil to the bowl and turn the dough ball over in it so it doesn’t stick. Cover it with a damp paper towel then let it rest in a warm place for a half an hour, fifteen minutes if you used quickrise yeast. You want it to roughly double in size.
Then, noodle around with butter, the dough, the freezer, and a rolling pin until you’ve used up all but enough dough to make one loaf of bread, maybe half of the remaining dough, maybe a third.
In a microwave-safe bowl, combine:
a stick of butter, 1/2 cup?
1/3 cup brown sugar
cinnamon (no idea how much I used)
a pinch of salt
(If I have big hands, will I use too much salt?)
a handful of old chocolate chips
(Who was it that left less than a quarter cup of chocolate chips in this bag under the brown sugar and a bag of dried butter beans at the back of the cabinet? They’re within their expiration date. Does chocolate even expire the same way milk does?)
Microwave it until it’s slightly melted. Taste test. Add a little more cinnamon because you can almost never have too much cinnamon.
Divide the dough into what will roll out on a floured cutting board because it’s too much of a hassle to pull out the pie sheet. Roll it out to about a half inch thick. Smear the gooey sugary stuff onto the rolled-out dough. Roll these two layers like a jelly roll and try to keep all its guts inside while you lift it into a greased loaf pan. Let it rise for thirty minutes, fifteen if you used quickrise yeast. Sprinkle with sugar and cinnamon. I don’t know how much. Cut some diagonal lines into the surface of the bread for decoration. I didn’t realize until well after I baked the loaf that it would have been prettier if I’d sliced the jelly-roll thing into rounds, let them rise, and baked them as actual cinnamon rolls instead of a single loaf.
Don’t preheat your oven. It wastes energy and the gradual increase in the temperature will let the loaf rise a little more so you might not have wet yeast in the center of your bread when you’re done. Save the environment! Bake at 350 degrees until it’s golden brown and sounds hollow when you thump it. I have no idea how long. I set a timer though, so I don’t forget that something was in the oven.
You can roll that dough in cheese, basil, and melted butter if you’d rather.
I also threw a couple of the rolled-out doughs into the freezer because I knew we’d eat too much sweet buttery gooey bread at one time if I didn’t. Label and date that container or you’ll pull it out of the freezer a year from now and have no idea what the pasty-white stuff inside covered with frost heave is and whether or not it’s edible or it’s been in there for three years and you should throw that shit out.
Nobody ever tells you this stuff in recipes or on those cooking shows. They just expect you to know when to throw out those bits of freezer-burned dough and use that chocolate anyway because it still looks okay even though the expiration date is coming soon. They never tell you in cooking classes to use your older ingredients first, within reason. They never tell you how to define reason when it comes to food. They never tell you that throwing out food is contributing to climate change. Save the environment! Eat good food!