Bruce, Still Unemployed, Makes Some “Bread”

“It’s amazing how good bread is! It’s just flour and water! And yeast and salt!” exclaimed Bruce, having taken a two-hour class called “Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day,” which was bequeathed him by our friend Amy, who bought the class at a silent auction and then couldn’t go. Now it seems that we’re going to have freshly baked bread every day. It smells good, it tastes great, and apparently it really doesn’t take much time. You make a big pile of dough and keep it in the refrigerator, then lob off a hunk and bake it. Oddly, some of the loaves are better than others. Ah, chemistry. I just don’t get it.

One thing that goes with bread is, of course, soup. Bruce made a red and yellow pepper soup à la Alice Waters. When I saw the bag of peppers sitting on the kitchen counter, I snidely remarked that they probably cost as much as an equivalent pile of steak. But no! These gigantic, beautiful peppers were $1 each, at the market where Sears used to be, the name of which Bruce can never remember and is in fact called Midtown Global Market http://www.midtownglobalmarket.org/. He doesn’t recall which store – it all melds into one gorgeous, multi-ethnic shopping experience. The soup only called for three peppers, onions, some broth, and not that much else. So, pretty economical.

When people came over for dinner the other night, he made the soup, gnocchi with a parsley/grape tomato/garlic sauce, sautéed kale and carrots, and for dessert, poached pears and kumquats served warm over ice cream. Now, I don’t want to brag, but he makes stuff like this all the time! It’s ridiculous! I mean, tonight, a plain old Monday night, the most prosaic of weeknights, we had basil garlic fettuccine with a sauce that you wouldn’t even believe made from the leftover red peppers, and grilled eggplant (my favorite food in the world), and salad. What inspires a person to such culinary excess, when a person could just as well open a bag of Doritos and get along fine? Bruce says that today he felt like eating lamb, but he went to the store and realized that the lamb was too expensive, not to mention ethically ambiguous, so he got eggplant instead, and made it taste like lamb. Well, if that's what he finds amusing, so be it. One can only send out so many resumes per day.