Baking Bread

We once had a real estate client who told us, when he learned that we had planted a vegetable garden, someday maybe we would make enough money that we wouldn't have to grow our own food anymore.  Martha posted it on Facebook and it received a lot of comments.

In reality - if one takes into account the cost of fertilizer, plants, and seeds (not even including man-hours of labor) - it probably costs more to grow one's own food.

But of course one cannot count the cost of labor, the good gentle exercise out of doors.  Let's start at the very beginning.  First there is the raking of leaves (which I have finally completed this year), hauling several loads uphill to the compost bins where they slowly decompose over the winter.  In the spring, there is the hand-tilling of our raised beds, incorporating all that compost hauled back downhill into the soil.  And then there is the laying out of rows of beans, the placing of tomato cages, and the careful planting of the young seedlings in the best possible location, dirt accumulating under the fingernails, the sweet smell of fertile soil.  And during the summer the mulching, watering, placing deer-netting over the succulent young plants.  That's a lot of work to finally enjoy the easiest "labor" of all, wandering down to the garden on a late summer evening with bucket in hand to pick ripe vegetables.  Surely there is nothing better than a vine-ripened tomato still warm from the sun.  My mother-in-law has a plaque in one of her gardens that I have often seen in this part of the country, a quote by Dorothy Frances Gurney:

Why, indeed, would anyone spend good money on seeds and plants, and expend so much labor?  You don't need to ask a gardener.

In the same way, baking bread is like gardening.  Our client might just as well have said that maybe we would make enough money to be able to buy a loaf of bread.  But in the same way, we would have missed the sweet smell of bread baking in the oven and the lovely fragrance as it cools on a wire rack on the kitchen counter, which is what is occuring while I post this.  It seemed like a good day to bake bread, with temperatures plummeting rapidly outside and the wind beginning to howl (wind chills close to zero are expected by morning).

Not bad for my first loaf of the year!  It's a boule, and I used the same method I have used for the past two years as set forth in Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day, by Jeff Hertzberg and Zoë François.  And it really works!

The reality is that Martha and I both enjoy doing things ourselves, and have always done so.  We love to cook our own meals, and to bake.  We designed and built our own house.  And, in a way, we designed our lives, which is as it should be.  There are far too many people in this world who allow their food to be sold to them out of a big store, their bread to be delivered in a plastic bag from the bread aisle . . . and their lives to be designed by others.