More on Toast!

Are you tired of my endless bread fascination? Well, I'm sorry but it's gotten even better! Last friday morning my neighbor Adriana came over to make bread with me and she wanted to make the whole wheat bread - so I said - Ok, but you have to go get more flour at the store... this was my first time working with this percentage wheat flour - that part was easy but of course I had to make it tricky. There is another recipe that makes a seeded whole wheat - flax seed, pumpkin seeds and sunflower seeds - the pumpkin seeds are my contribution as I had a handful in the cupboard. The problem was the flax seeds. The recipe called for adding 1 cup flax seeds soaked in 2 cups boiling water. Do you know what a slime fest that was? Seriously - okra has less slime than this glop. So, after the second turn (sorry, if you want to make this bread you have to buy the book) we tried to incorporate the whole flax mixture and the toasted pumpkin seeds. Needless to say it was a mess - wet is an understatement. The truly tricky part was trying to "get tension" in the loaf - it was just a sticky glob. I ended up just dumping it into my towel lined basket and hoping against hope for the best. Well, the best is what I got! I put the sunflower seeds on the top and baked it and what a slice of toast it was!! Now I have to say it was a hard one to deal with but I'm going to put that aside and make this again. It was super moist and kept really well - and toasted well of course!

A little story about a girl and her toast...

A couple weeks ago we went to our friends opening of their new tasting room here in Healdsburg with another couple. Needless to say the vino was flowing and quite a bit flowed down our gullets. Us gals decided to go out for one more libation at Spoon Bar while the boys went home. We had one cocktail (ok, maybe there was 2) and called a cab to take us home. For some reason on the way home we were chatting about my bread making adventures and the cab driver - Francis - said - "oh yeah, your husband was talking about that earlier - what a great cook you are!" Ah, yeah not a lot of cabs up here. Anyway, we were talking about how hungry we were and boy a piece of toast with almond butter and sliced pears on top sure sounded good... So I invited our taxi driver in for a quick one - toast that is. Rich was already in bed but heard a guy's voice downstairs and was surprised to realize it was Francis our cabbie! The next week when I ran into Noah one of the owners of Banshee he said "Hey, I heard you had the taxi driver in for a drink." Small town huh? This is sooo how urban legends get started! For the record - I invited the cab driver in for toast. And he thoroughly enjoyed it.