Bread

That's all, just bread. Yesterday morning, Sunday morning, I had a bowl of coffee made with Extracto coffee and Noris milk. With that I ate many (too many?) pieces of toast, made from Ken's country brown loaf, with Ayer's Creek damson plum jam as well as apricot jam made by a friend. That's a lot of name-dropping, but I do it not to show off.

It's just that I was so pleased with my breakfast, and thankful. Such simple food--bread, jam, coffee, milk. But each ingredient was the best you can get--and fairly simple to procure. The coffee we buy at our favorite coffeehouse. The milk is delivered in glass bottles every Thursday. It's not homogenized, and there's always a thick plug of cream on the top. The jam was, admittedly, a splurge. But it was a Christmas gift, as was the homemade. Note to self: make more jam next summer.


And the bread? Over the years, whenever I've attempted to economize, I've felt twinges of guilt at buying bakery bread. Recently, however, I made a surprising discovery. Ken's 1.5 kilo loaves, (52.8 ounces) cost $8. That's about 15 cents per ounce, or $3.60 for a 24-ounce loaf. Cheaper than most bread at the grocery store. But who cares? That bread is the most delicious thing. Chewy and complex tasting with a slightly toasted dusting of flour on the crust. And the crust--one of the best thing about Ken's bakery is that everything is baked enough. So the crust is dark and crisp and something that always makes me happy.