Sandwich day

DID YOU KNOW? Samuel L Jackson was an usher at Martin Lurter King Jr's funeral.

Today was not the best day. But whatever. Let's talk about good things first. Let's start and end by talking about good things. We can talk about the bad things in the middle. Kind of like making a sandwich.



Because today was not the best day, I had to stress eat. I was going to go to AG Ferrari with Ruth and Lauren, but I had some stuff to take care of on the Oakland front, so instead I stuck around the home. I remembered that I had some mozzarella cheese leftover from my last blog entry, so I decided to use some of that to make two small grilled cheese sandwiches with this really dense loaf of whole wheat bread that did not rise correctly. I put on arugula and tomato so it was kind of like a caprese. They were pretty tasty. So tasty, in fact, that I forgot to drink the glass of white wine that I had poured to accompany it.

That might be a good thing, since while "stress eating" sounds kind of charming in a Tina Fey way, "stress drinking" just sounds kind of sad in a Tracy Morgan way.

One thing I am really into now is searing things and then finishing them in the oven. It's so easy with a cast-iron skillet now. I made some roasted radishes this way on Thursday night, and then today I did that with my breakfast (fried oatmeal) and lunch (grilled cheese). I took a page from the book of Sam's Mom and chopped up the tomato really thin before placing it inside the sandwich, which meant that it was evenly distributed and did not ooze out. Sam's Mom does that with ham instead of tomato, but, you know, they're both pink; same thing.

The bad thing that happened today is that the backlight on my MacBook stopped working. Gosh, I'm glad that my last computer failed so spectacularly that I felt it necessary to get an AppleCare protection plan with this one. Anyway, this required me to go to the Apple Store in Emeryville to get that taken care of.

I really hate Emeryville; so much that when I think about it in my head, I call it "Archenemeryville." Biking there is just a total pain and the Apple Store is pretty much the only one in the East Bay, so everybody from Berkeley is there with their ugly kids and stupid iPhone problems. Anyway, I think everything is going to be okay; just a few days in the shop should fix whatever's wrong with the backlight, so no worries.


I also baked another loaf of bread for future sandwiches. This loaf rose pretty well and generally turned out a lot better. It requires two different day-long fermentation steps and is kind of a hassle, but, really, it's not too much more time-consuming that the no-knead bread I used to bake and it tastes two thousand times better.

I actually like kneading. I remember that I've previously compared baking bread to birthing a child. The kneading process, as you gradually add the flour and watch the dough slowly change and become more sticky and delicious, really makes it even more like the parenting process, I think.

Except with bread you hit it a lot more and then you eat it at the end.