Baking my own bread...

I'm baking my own bread these days. A well-cooked loaf has such an alluring, decidedly tactile character. I'm quite an active guy, so I typically consume food that has a good return, both calorically nutritionally. I'm not the only one; John Muir also thought pretty highly of bread. When he garnered the first ascent of Mt. Ritter in the Sierra Nevada (no slouch of a peak, by the way. I've done it with tons of gear and an ice-axe.), he "rolled up some bread and tea in a pair of blankets with some sugar and a tin cup and set off."

That's pretty rad.

As our culture flees from the nefarious carbohydrate by pounding meat, decrying flour, and converting to diets named after places (what the hell does South Beach Diet mean?), I hope we haven't thrown the baby out with the bathwater, or—as I knead an ample mound of dough on Wednesday night—the yeast with the honey-infused water. I've searched far and wide for a food as utterly satisfying, aesthetically proportioned, and versatile as bread, but my hands came up empty. Somewhere, somehow, I started to believe the lies about bread being a fattening, empty, wickedly tempting resevoir of potential ASS.

If bread was good enough for John Muir, it's good enough for me.