real bread & real cars

One day earlier this week Linda went out and bought us a counter top toaster-oven, for us a daily-use appliance at 7H that we'd not had in our several kitchens for the two plus months of hurrication. Once the toaster-oven appeared, it stirred in me a taste for bread, real bread, Italian, French, something real. Publix bakes and sells real bread in the bakery, and Linda came "home" with about half a dozen various loaves of their real bread. It's not foam like American bread, it's real, solid European-style bread, and you may have to slice it yourself, which is a good thing.

Since the toaster-oven came to enjoy hurrication with us, my breakfasts have been a thick slice of, I started with the Italian, bread topped with slices of a startlingly good cheese from Trader Joe's that Tass brought and now I'm out of it and hope she may bring another pkg of it when they arrive at The Pointe while we are at church Sunday morning. 

Thick slice of real bread, slices of that real cheese that makes me think I'm in the Alps, put in the toaster-oven to toast and watch it. When the cheese breaks down melting and soft, open the oven door, slide the rack out. Pour a few drops of Tabasco sauce into a teaspoon and smear it over the semi-melted cheese. Slide it all back into the oven and close the door. Keep watching through the glass. Once the cheese toast is ready, slide it out onto a bread plate. Pour a cup of coffee, stir it with the teaspoon that had the Tabasco in it (try it, you may like it, Sam I Am), and take plate and cup to wherever I'm enjoying breakfast this morning; sometimes the dining room table with all the wonderful windows looking out, this morning my chair by one of the windows in our bedroom. Were weather permitting, I might breakfast on our private little balcony porch, one of three that this condo has; but as M1 has irrational moments of donning coat and hat, picking up purse and dashing out the door, we are not letting her out of our sight

As well as with Tabasco, the bread is also good with just the cheese, toasted or not, and also good with strawberry, blueberry, raspberry, orange marmalade, or apricot preserves spread on top of the melted cheese once it's taken out of the toaster-oven. Not to mention butter. 

What made me lusting for the European style real bread came to mind later. A lifelong and ongoing like, love is too strong a word, for war movies, war novels, war history books. I'm still reading, because books that I love I read very slowly and keep turning pages back to something I read before, and stopping to look up things and titles and ranks and places on the internet, putting the book down after an hour or so and maybe not picking it up again for days. Just so, I'm still reading "The Great War and Modern Memory" and I'm always watching WW1 and also WW2 films and documentaries. Often, a sergeant or Feldwebel or corporal or other soldier with a huge loaf walks along among his troops, breaking off and handing chunks of bread to soldiers on the battlefield, in the woods or in the trenches. I can break off chunks of my bread to honor all of them, both friend and foe, to honor all who fought and never grew old because the stupid, arrogant bxstxrds in national leadership sent them off to war.

But instead of breaking off chunks, generally I cut a thick slice with a breadknife. 

What might I have a picture of and on my mind this morning - - 



On this performance car, a Dodge Challenger, those little chrome things forward on each side of the hood, over the headlights, are for hooking to cables securing the hood so that, at high speed, the hood does not break loose and fly up and back against the windshield. This is a real car, and it has a real spoiler that's there for another safety reason: to hold down the rear end of the car at high speed.

LHMCHMLHM

T