Nothing but the bread

This is how a little bit of today went for me. The story goes like this: My mission for this morning was to go downtown and not drive around for 23 minutes trying to find a car park, than to pop into the Mariners store and buy an over priced plain shirt for my dad, with a collar. You see, I work at a great place that has great shirts but at the moment we are greatly out of them, leaving me to either drive to just one place where I know I could buy my extremely fussy dad a not so awesome but collared shirt from a baseball team that really isn't anywhere near worthy, or so I hear of sending merchandise to another hemisphere, or, I could drive around in Seattle traffic, with no horn in my car right now mind you, and just maybe find him a spectacular shirt at a stinky, personable old pub. Stinks to me, but I chose the first one. You need to wait though, and see why, just why oh why, it was accidentally worth buying Mariners merchandise.

The answer is:

Flour

Water

Yeast

Salt
Warmth

Tenderness

I know that it looks like a plain old 'French Stick', as my mum calls them, nothing out of the ordinary, baguette. Well, it just isn't, it's the way they all should be. The taste of simplicity is still jumping around in my mouth.

I turned the corner onto 4th Avenue and came face to face with about two dozen hungry tourists with ear pieces on and their mouths full of Tom Douglas' Triple Coconut Cream Pie, trying really hard to listen to their overly cheery guide and shovel as much roasted coconut into their mouths at the same time. This was about the same time I told myself that as a reward for driving around for nearly half an hour in downtown traffic, I could take myself into the Dahlia Bakery, for the first exciting time.

So, on my way back from buying my dad his shirt, I opened up the wooden door to the fortress of goodness, and, did I hear a little bell ring? I think that was in my hungry imagination, and scoped out what I might want to treat myself to. I was definitely getting a cup of tea, I knew that much, but what else, hmmm. Outside on the blackboard it says that there were breakfast egg sandwiches. Why don't feel like one of those right now? I'm a sucker for eggs on two pieces of good toasted bread. Than, out of the corner of my eye, at the pit of my stomach, the answer was there. The rustic bread stick. The baguette. The French loaf.

I will take that one please.

I may have blushed.

All this, before I had even ripped a big ole' piece off to satisfy my curiosity.

Of course when I did taste it I moaned and tore around for more while I was back driving in downtown traffic.

This stick of bread is humble

This bread stick is crunchy on the outside

This stick of bread is like a ball of the softest cotton on the inside

Thank you bread stick

Now that I am back home in my cozy kitchen, I search in my fridge for things to spread, slice and heap onto my perfectly imperfect stick of bread. I have wonderful cheeses and delicious hummus, crisp, green arugula and bright red tomato's. Epic, to say the least. But there is nothing, nothing I find myself even coming close to putting on my faithful stick of bread.