Give us this day...

I like making bread.
I quite like eating it, too, but mostly I enjoy making it.
Saturday morning always used to be baking day. I would make a week's worth of dough and leave it to rise while we went shopping. On our return, I would shape the loaves or rolls, put the oven on, and 45 minutes later we would have steaming hot bread fresh from the oven.

We would then hover over the cooling rack, arguing over whether it was cool enough to eat. Invariably it wouldn't be, but one of us couldn't wait any longer and would hack into the first loaf, slather it with butter and the breadfest would start. Half a loaf would disappear before you could say "Isn't hot bread supposed to be bad for you?".

Now I have the opposite problem.

Even with my little loaves, it is still too much for me to eat before the bread goes stale. OK, there are things I can do with stale bread, but I only need so many breadcrumbs and it is an expensive way to feed the chickens. There's also no point in making smaller loaves as they would be too small to make a decent sandwich.

So I started to cut the loaves in half and freeze the halves separately. It's an eminently sensible thing to do, but there is something so pathetic about that sad little widow's portion of bread defrosting on the counter that I can no longer bear to do it.

Rolls are part of the answer. Somehow they don't seem as lonely as half a loaf. But mostly I just make and eat less bread.

When my workforce are in residence working on the extension, though, it is worthwhile making a big batch. At lunch today, I estimate that the first loaf off the production line lasted all of about five minutes. I've no idea why that makes me feel so happy, but it does. Perhaps it is another of those elusive glimpses of normality.