One of the things that people don't understand about disability is the profound psychological changes it causes.

I was seeing a therapist when I was first disabled, and after a year or two, I mentioned some of these things to him. He said, "Oh, yeah," and shrugged his shoulders. "Everybody goes through that." I wanted to throttle the bastard. And you didn't think to mention that to me?

And I had a better introduction to disability than many people had, having lived with a wife who spent the better part of two decades dying of an incurable disease. I saw what had happened to her, and yet it hit me by surprise when the same things started happening to me. Hey, I'm not dying! Except that we all are, I guess.

And Now It's Blondie's Turn

And watching Blondie adjust to her disability, it's as if it were the third stanza of the same disability dance. I see her going through the same things I went through, and I'm trying to help her transition, but my memory isn't all that great, and I don't know what to tell her about the things that are just now sinking in for her. Maybe that's why nobody mentioned those things to me, because they couldn't.

There are two parts to any disability. One is that inability to do what you used to do, what you want to do, what you damned well ought to be able to do, what you have to do. Those things vary from day to day, or even sometimes from hour to hour.

At 10 this morning, I couldn't reach down and pick up the pint of jelly that fell out of the refrigerator. I left it there, just lying on its side on the floor. At 11 this morning, I was able to bend down and coax it into my hand, not easily, but I did it. At 12, I tried to put on my shoes, and I couldn't, and I couldn't reach them with either hand, either. At 12:15, it worked. Part of the problem is the lack of range of motion in my right hip, the thing that makes me a gimp; the other part is the stiffness brought about by arthritis, and that arthritis comes and goes, almost on a minute-by-minute basis.

Labeling The Label

The other part of the disability is The Label. Blondie used to get so mad at me. When people would ask me what I did - a natural question in a society when your occupation defines your caste - I'd tell them that I'm a government agent, that I'm instrumental to keeping the economy growing smoothly. They'd ask for details, for obvious reasons, and I would explain that the gummint pays me to stay the fuck out of the workforce so I don't screw things up. I thought it was self-deprecating humor. Blondie said it was self-deprecating, but not humorous, that I was deflecting, and I needed to have more respect for myself. Lately, though, Blondie's been telling people that she's a gummint agent, vital to the recovery of the world economy....

The other part of The Label - admitting to yourself that you're disabled - is that Blondie's almost as old right now as her parents were when they died. She's openly talking about what I should do when I become a widower, and what she intends to do when she becomes a widow. It's rather annoying to me. Three of my four grandparents and all eight of my great-grandparents were in their late 90s when they died. The exception, my grandfather, died of disease in his early 30s, but his identical twin lived to be 98. I don't intend to die tomorrow, and it never entered my mind that this wife wouldn't live to her late 90s. I don't know that I'd have gotten involved with her had I known; it was awfully damned hard on me when Em died, and I don't want to go through that again. Kinda late to unring that bell, though.

Death and disability aren't the same thing, of course, but The Label profoundly affects how people treat you. Blondie and I went shopping today, and while looking through the freezer chests, she met another shopper who announced, "Excuse me, I've been having strokes lately." Blondie was flabberghasted. "You, too? I have been having strokes lately, too. And the same sorta thing happened last week with a neighbor from across the street. We thought they were stuck-up, because they never acknowledged our existence, but it turns out he's almost totally blind, and she's senile, and it takes the two of them working together to attend to the affairs of daily living.

Romantic? Or Pathetic?

Frankly, I alternate between thinking that it's awfully romantic, the two of them caring for each other, and thinking it's awfully pathetic, a really shitty way to have to live. Mama used to talk of the futility of two drunks, hanging onto each other for support. Often, she was speaking metaphorically, and I was one of the metaphoric drunks she pitied for their foolishness, but here was a couple forced into that situation by circumstance beyond their control, unlike my former situations, forced upon me by own my poor judgment.

It took me a long time before I could say or write "I am a gimp" without cringing. At this point, I don't shy away from that label. It's not my fault, my reasoning goes, and even if it was my fault, the federal gummint says I can demand reasonable accommodation to my needs. I do assert my needs, not just for myself, but for many other disabled individuals who are less willing to be an asshole in order to advance society. I have the self-confidence to step forward and assert myself. Most of the newly disabled are afraid to do that; they don't think they are deserving. And many of the well-established disabled are never able to speak in defense of themselves.

Life As A Superhero

So I not only wear the label of Gimp, but the label of Asshole as well, because I see myself as a D.C. Comics Superhero, a guy who fights for the rights of the disabled, for the benefit of society at large, because the cost of reasonable accomodation is, by definition, reasonable, while the contributions made by the disabled can be enormous.

I don't think Blondie will ever be able to wear that Asshole label herself. As long as I live, I will have to fight for her, which is not exactly a burden; she's worth it.

You know how earlier, how I mentioned that some days are better than others? Today, I made bread, which is something I haven't done for a couple of years. Back in the 1970s, there was a period of about five years where I made all my own bread. I made a hearty, nutritious hearth bread, a light rye flavored with honey, and a lot of my meals consisted of fresh produce, my homemade bread, my homemade yogurt, and old-fashioned peanut butter, the kind of peanut butter made from nothing but peanuts and salt.

She Thought They Were Wonderful

Blondie was complaining about the bread she's been buying, and she asked me if I could make her some whole-wheat bread. I don't particularly care for the flavor of whole-wheat bread, but that's what I made. It was light, and a little on the sweet side, and she thought the loaves were wonderful. There's an art to making bread, and since I was out of practice, I was flabberghasted that the loaves turned out as well as they did.

This was also the first bread I'd made with a dough-hook mixer. A couple of years ago, I got a "deal" on a KitchenAid mixer. Prior to that, I'd always mixed and kneaded the bread by hand. Whew! It's a real labor-saver. I gave up making bread because my arthritis was so bad, but the KitchenAid makes it easy enough that I think I'll be able to do this on a regular basis.

Some days are better than others, but one of the things therapists tell us is that we need to get into the habit of doing things on bad days, because doing things helps turn bad days into good days.

And who knows? Maybe if Blondie and I do things together, perhaps that will reprogram the wiring she got in her genes, the ones that have the "stop" programmed in just a few years from now. Stranger things have happened.

Other Bloggers On Related Topics:
disability - genetics - hearth bread - homemade bread - honey - jelly - KitchenAid - labels - peanut butter - rye - strokes - whole wheat - yogurt

I've been reading a lot, lately.

I had said that I would wait until the price of Kindle dropped to $89 before I would buy. I got ants in my pants and picked one up when the price dropped to $114. If I'd waited a couple of weeks longer, the price would have dropped even more; I see the price at the left side of this page, is now $99. Oh, well. Not my first mistake.

In the end, it was Blondie's medical care that caused me to jump early. I was spending too much time in waiting rooms with nothing to do, and that time was weighing heavily on my hands.

No Whine Before It's Time

Finally, when she had an appointment that was going to last several hours, I dropped her off and headed for Radio Shack. I had seen a couple of other e-readers at Border's and at Barnes & Noble, and they made a not-altogether-favorable impression. The folks at B&N had two models, and one was considerably better than the other. The poorer one was to be replaced by a new model within a couple of weeks, and that was exciting, but after decades of being a cutting edge user, I wasn't eager to do that again; a better term might be bleeding edge user.

And when I actually got to try out a Kindle, it resolved one issue that really bothered me about the Nook and Kobo. It was not nearly as sluggish. It wasn't easy to actually try a Kindle, though. At Manor shopping center, they didn't have any that weren't sealed in boxes. You couldn't even lay your eyes on one without buying it, much less turn it on and see how fast it turns pages.

It was several days later, at the Shack in the shopping center between Oregon Pike and Lititz Pike at US 30. Look, I said. I want to buy one, but there's no way in hell I'm going to lay out more than a hundred bucks for one if I can't see it in action first. You've got a money back guarantee, right? The clerk nodded. So if I buy it, and I'm dissatisfied, there's a lot of forms to be filled out, right? The clerk nodded. So let me try it first, and there won't be any return. I'll either buy it, or else I'll drive over to Barnes & Noble, and buy an e-reader there.

Well, She Said, There Are Different Models

Well, she said, there are several different models. I said, oh, that. I want to see the $114 one, the one without 3G, but with special offers. She nodded and disappeared into the back. After a couple of minutes of fooling around with it - it needed to be plugged in to work - I said it doesn't seem to be backlit, and it seems to be fairly fragile. I ended up buying a battery-powered book light, and a cover to keep it in, bringing the price up to about $150.

I was tethered to the electric socket because it needed charging, so I had difficulty staying out of the way of people wanting to buy other stuff, but we all tried to make it work, and nobody seemed to be overly annoyed with me. They told me the password to use their WiFi, and I was able to register the Kindle with Amazon and "buy" a couple of public domain books - Tom Sawyer, and the Autobiography of Ben Franklin - for free.

But I hadn't had breakfast, and my blood sugar was low, and I was unsteady on my feet. I decided the Kindle had charged up enough for the time being, and asked where the nearest hotspot was that had seating and food. They thought the coffee shop a couple of stores down fit the bill. It turns out that they don't have WiFi, and there was a long wait for seating, but I managed to make it Giant without collapsing - yeah, I know it sounds like I'm exaggerating, but I'm not. When my blood sugar drops, I get really weak.

The Giant Hotspot

So I bought a bowl of soup and a large Pepsi, and tried to figure out how to connect to the Giant WiFi hotspot. The cold, syrupy pop really was a restorative, and the soup helped a bit, too, but I had trouble connecting to WiFi. I'm not sure if it is inexperience or low blood sugar making me stupid. One needs to connect to the Gtiant website, and agree to Terms of Service, which I eventually figured out. Once I did that, it will be a snap next time. But I haven't used any other hotspots in the month I've had the Kindle.

The soup was too hot, and not quite as tasty as one could hope, but it didn't taste like Campbell's, which was a big plus. I grew up eating a lot of Campbell's Soup, and if that's all you're used to, it ain't bad, but Em, my late first wife, made wonderful homemade soups, and I have a tendency to try soups in restaurants; half of them have really good soup, and the other half have canned condensed soup, which as I said, ain't all that bad, but it is a pretty big disappointment if you were hoping for real soup. And as I said, it was better than Campbell's, but it wasn't going to win the chef any prizes.

All this took longer than I had expected, and I envisioned Blondie waiting impatiently for me on the steps of the office building where she had her appointment, but this time I lucked out. In fact, I had about an hour to wait before Blondie got out, and by that time, I discovered that there's nothing quite so annoying as a Kindle with 2 books on it, neither of which really suit your mood at the moment.

Trying To Fill The Grand Canyon

Since then, I've done my best to fill the solid-state hard drive on the Kindle. I've not been very successful. I have about a hundred fifty books on the Kindle, and I've hardly made a dent in the 4 GB of storage. Books range in size from less than 50K in size to about 500K in size, evem at a half-meg, it'd take 2000 books to use up one gig of memory. I'm not going to run out of memory soon.

And I also realized at that point that I should have bought the 3G model. If you want to get a book with my Kindle, you need to be a WiFi hotspot, or else be able to hook by cable to a computer's USB port. When you're sitting in a waiting room and nothing on your Kindle piques your interest, it'd be nice to shop Amazon for another book. It costs a little extra for the 3G model initially, but with it, you can connect to the AT&T cellphone grid to the internet, and the air time is all on Amazon's dime.

What's more, you can go to Wikipedia, to Google, or whatever other internet site you care to visit. The browser isn't very satisfactory, because your page is so much smaller than what many websites are written for, but if you're in Timbuktu and you want to look up the address of the place you're going to, or the phone number of someone you're going to meet, being able to use that browser for that limited purpose might be worth a lot.

I Recommend The 3G

So I'm recommending to you that you get the 3G version. If you do, and you're unhappy that you did, come see me, and I'll pay you some money to swap Kindles with me. Radio Shack accepts returns within 30 days, but they want all the packaging, which I no longer had when I realized my mistake, and besides, I'd assured the sales clerk that I wanted the cheaper model. Silly me.

When Kindle was new, they offered best-sellers for $9.99, which was quite a savings over the hardcover pricing. Apple came along and decided they wanted to steal the Kindle market with iPad. They signed up the six largest book publishers in an agency model, which is to say that the publisher is the merchant, and the itunes store gets paid a commission. Amazon had to take the agency model as well, with the publishers choosing to up the ante for e-books.

It turns out that those publishing houses are in trouble. Writers have decided that they don't need publishing houses. They can hire copy editors, artists to design a cover, and do their own promotion out of their profits. If a legacy publisher gives the author a 15% royalty on a $12 book, that's $1.80. A self-published author can sell his book for $2.99 and his royalties will be $2.10. Cutting the price turns sales from a thoughtful purchase into a impulse item, and sales skyrocket.

Legacy Publishers Are In Trouble

Undoubtedly, the legacy publishers will either figure out a way to give authors a better deal, or they'll go out of business. Either way, the name authors will soon be much cheaper than they are now. For now, there are a lot of less-well-known authors out there with inexpensive books. The sweet spot for pricing, authors are told, is 99c to $2.99.

In fact, there are a lot of free books out there. All the Gutenberg Project books are free, although enterprising editors have created enhanced versions of many of those books that they sell for 99c or so. By "enhanced", I mean that typos are fixed, the books are laid out more attractively, and they have an attractive cover. However, there's a constant flow of new free books entering the Kindle Store.

Some authors are more interested in fame than fortune. Other authors are trying to change the world, and they want people to read their books so that they eat local foods, worship God the right way, or treat gays with respect, etc. I'm not so sure these books are worth the bother of downloading them. As one Hollywood producer once said, if you want to send a message, put it in a telegram.

Let Free Introduce You

Another reason books are offered for a dollar is as an introductory special. This is especially important for an unknown author. If your book is released for free, you may get a hundred favorable ratings on the five-star basis, and have a dozen or more people posting good reviews of your book on the Amazon site. With that kind of recommendation, potential readers may be willing to buy your book for $2.99 or more.

And it's not just unknown authors that do this. I see Kindle versions of books previously published as hardcover or paperback books being offered for free. I just "bought" a free copy of Cybill Shepherd's biography, Cybill Disobedience, a couple of days ago. I don't know what Harper/Collins's plans are, as far as pricing, but a new copy of the paperback is $24.00....

Amazon is making it easy to publish for the Kindle, and you don't have to sell only at Amazon. You can also sell at Smashwords, or sell the book on your own website. Amazon is trying to steer authors to the 99c to $2.99 sweet spot for pricing by offering higher royalties if retail prices are in that area.

They Gotta Sell The Books, Though

However, they are trying to sell the books. Experts figure that Amazon is losing a little money on every Kindle device sold. Consequently, Kindle won't let you price your book for less than 99c. There's a way around that, though. You simply offer the same book at Smashwords, on your own website, or elsewhere for free, and when your book is released at 99c on Amazon, you click the link that says "Tell us about a lower price elsewhere." Once Amazon sees the lower price elsewhere, they will drop the price to zero to match the price.

If you're doing this as a limited time offer, though, it's not clear how you get Amazon to goose the price back up to 99c or $2.99, or where you think it should be. After you raise the price on the other website, how do you get Amazon to realize that the price has changed?

I love my Kindle, and I'll tell you why - but that will have to wait for another post.

Other Bloggers On Related Topics:
Agency Model - Amazon - Barnes & Noble - Border's - Giant - Kindle - Kobo - Nook - Radio Shack - WiFi

Don't pay the ransom, I've escaped!

That's the punchline of an old joke. He'd been out partying with his co-workers, and now he had to go home to his wife, so he yells that out as he enters the back door.

I don't know whether he got away with it, but I've been AWOE - absent without explanation - for quite a while, and I've been feeling guilty about it.

Agoraphobia Rules!

I've mentioned before that my agoraphobia doesn't completely keep me from leaving the house, but it sure binds up my gut when I do. Normally, if I leave the house on Monday, my gut will be working again on Wednesday, with the help of a laxative. It helps if I've been planning ahead; if I am aware on Saturday and Sunday that I will be going out on Monday, I can psych myself up for the ordeal, and it doesn't affect me as much.

Consequently, I've been going out two or three times a week over the last five years, and this disability hasn't been a really big problem. Things changed, though, when Blondie lost her driver's license. Her doctor said that because of her dementia, she ought not be driving.

That means I have to drive her where she needs to go. In theory, she could ride the bus, except that if she gets confused driving a car, she would really get confused riding the bus.

No Compromise? No Problem!

I've tried to negotiate a compromise with her, that she plan where she's going, and what she needs to do when she's there. I don't want to do four trips to Fruitville Pike in a given week; odds are really good that one trip will do it.

She chafes at that. It's terribly difficult learning to accept new limitations. I don't blame her. I rail at times at the universe for things I haven't been able to do since the early 1990s.

Doctors, though, aren't easy to schedule back-to-back, and even if you could, it's terribly exhausting to "break in" a new doctor. Week before last, we had 6 appointments on 4 days between the 2 of us, and last week we had 7 appointments over 5 days - and one of them, I sat in the parking lot for four hours, waiting for her, which was awfully stressful on me.

Olympic Achievements

Needless to say, I was world-class constipated. My doctor says to use Miralax. It's PolyEthylene Glycol, PEG for short, which is a stool softener and a lubricant. The directions say one dose a day, usually get results in 1-3 days, don't take more than 7 days without doctor's OK. After 14 doses in 5 days, I still hadn't broken free.

My baccalaureate degree included a major in mathematics, and they say when a mathematician has a problem, he works it out with a pencil. That doesn't work well for me; instead I lit an M-80 firecracker and swallowed it. Simultaneously, my wife belted me, at my request, in the gut with a 20-pound sledge. That didn't exactly solve my problem, but it seemed to be doing something, so we kept repeating it every 30 minutes, and after 4 hours, I started to get things moving.

It Takes A Big Guy

As you might imagine, carrying around 10 days of fecal matter in your gut isn't going to make you feel chipper. Even worse, it made my belly swell - and when I sat up, it cut off circulation to my legs. My legs, especially my left leg, developed the worst case of edema I've ever had.

It was painful to walk, but once I got traffic moving on Hershey Highway, the edema didn't go away immediately. I spent a couple of days in bed, and then a third. It wasn't just painful to walk on my feet, it was so excruciating that I couldn't even stand up. even after the edema went down.

I couldn't drive myself anywhere, and Blondie no longer has a license. I called my primary care physician to ask if I should have an ambulance take me to the hospital. I thought the pain was skeletal, from arthritis, and the discoloration of the toes was bruising, but I don't want to lose these feet to gangrene.

The Doctor Is OUT

She was out of the office. Day off. If I go in and deal with a stranger, the doctor will be unfamiliar with my set of problems, and won't know whether he can believe me, and he'll pooh-pooh me. I decided to wait another day. At the same time, I asked Blondie to put some footlets on me.

The snug footlets pulled the metatarsals of my feet together, and with an extra day to heal, it became possible, though painful, to walk on my feet. I appear to be healing.

Well, almost. The urine I've been passing has enough blood in it that it looks like watery Pepsi. It was a kidney stone, the last time this happened. I'm having a test in the morning that will tell us the answer.

I'm Not Complaining

Please don't get the idea that I'm being whiny about physical complaints. I'm trying to relate what's happened without whimpering. Believe me, there were many times in my teen years and my twenties that I had no acute symptoms when I felt much worse. While it hurt a terrible amount to walk, I had a ready remedy available: I didn't walk. Duh. Save your sympathy for someone young and lonely.

Although I've spent a lot of time in bed, I haven't done well at catching up on what TiVO has recorded for me. I am really aching to see "Invention of Lying" which I recorded on the 10th, but I haven't seen it yet. I ask myself "Am I going to be awake for 90 minutes to watch all of it?" and "Do I have the energy to follow what's happening?" and I choose something that's 30 minutes long, or a variety show like Graham Norton.

Do You Believe

This afternoon, there was a movie on that I wasn't watching, so I can't give them proper credits, but one character asks the other, "Do you believe in Happy Endings?"

I heard that, and immediately drifted away from the movie. Happy endings are those sundaes they offer at Friendly's aren't they? And of course, there was Gwen who used to ask a guys if they believed in happy endings, and then she said she was sitting on a happy ending, and offer him her phone number. I would have to say that yes, it was a happy ending.

Been There, Done That, Glad To Be Back

But I think growing old has a lot to do with happy endings. Over the years, I have learned to be contented with less. I used to have more, and a worked myself into a frazzle because it was never enough, and frankly, I see opportunities all around me that I'd love to tackle, were I young, had I enough capital, if I had the stamina to work 14 hour days, 7 days a week. I'm not kidding. Nobody works those hours unless they love what they're doing, and I loved what I was doing. But at this point, I have learned to accept reality.

And that's worth a lot.

Other Bloggers On Related Topics:
- agoraphobia - Aleve - arthritis - bed rest - diabetes - disability - Dulcolax - edema - happy endings - metatarsal - Miralax - nephrologist - NSAIDs - primary care physician - specialists - vascular dementia

Bob Greenblatt, chairman of NBC Entertainment, said it:

We will always recognize an artist's freedom to express him or herself, but not when reckless things are said no matter what the context.

Always, huh? I think we have a new candidate for the presidency, 2012. It's rare that someone makes a statement so utterly inane that, at first glance, appears to be sensible. Greenblatt has a real talent for politics. He could teach Sarah Palin a thing or three. Can we hear you say, "All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others?", Bob?

What he was referring to was Tracy Morgan's rant about gays, which was part of his stand-up act, June 3 at Nashville's Ryman Auditorium, long-time home of the Grand Ole Opry. Among other things, he apparently said that if his son came out of the closet, he'd pull out a knife and stab him to death.

Restaurant owners, at least the smart ones, know we eat with our eyes, then with our noses, before the food ever passes between our lips.

It's even more true in these days of television advertising. A syrupy icy cola, spicy and biting in its effervescence, is appealing enough in actuality, but when it's depicted with ice flying forcefully into the glass of cola, the cola splashing all over in a tsunami of flavor, it's even harder to resist.

That BK Ad

The latest ads for Burger King, showing cola falling sideways into a cup, with a Whopper in the foreground, is exceptionally appealing. If you were to call it food porn, you'd get no argument from the videographers; that's exactly what they call it, themselves.

The Supreme Court uses the word "prurient" to describe porn, pruritis being a medical term for itching. Porn is only porn to the extent that it makes you itch, makes you feel desire - and that's exactly what food advertising is all about.

The Twisted Logic of Yeastbreads

Of late, one of the hot items to hit the television screen is pretzel bread. It's being used in microwavable frozen sandwiches. They used to promote the pie crusts used as a bread substitute, and then tortilla wraps became the hot thing, and now it's pretzel bread. Have you noticed the common theme? They are all things you cannot easily make for yourself at home.

You can, of course, buy Pillsbury All Ready pie crusts, or buy tortillas, but those both look fairly hard to use. Pretzel bread seems even more difficult, doesn't it? That's a key for the restaurant business, and it's increasingly important in the convenience food market.

Cinnamon Rolls A Fraud

About 40 years ago, I was a retail manager, walking through a mall with another manager. We passed a bakery that emited wonderful scents of cinnamon rolls. "That smells so wonderful," Jim told me, and I agreed.

"But did you ever try them? They are a real disappointment. If they tasted as good as they smelled, they'd have a wonderful chain of bakeries."

Jim told me I was mistaken. The cinnamon rolls were too dry because they didn't have enough fat. Butter is expensive, so they deliberately used very little. "They don't see mall workers as their market, but rather shoppers. If you only buy once every 4 or 6 months, you forget how bad the cinnamon rolls really are."

Hot bread is terribly appealing, and if you have repeat customers, it's a high markup item, even if you do it right. Hot pizza, hot donuts, and hot soft pretzels can be the basis of a highly profitable business. Cincinnati used to have two Bagel Factory locations that sold bushels of fresh hot bagels at a high markup. A guy would have to be crazy to open a burger joint when hot bread is both cheaper to produce and more appealing than a hamburger sandwich.

Can I Make Good Pretzel Bread?

All of these ads for pretzel bread have made me wonder how pretzel bread is made. I've wondered for a long time about how pita pocket bread is made as well. Consequently, I set out to make some pretzel bread tonight.

The "secret" of pretzels is that the dough is boiled first in alkali water before being baked. When bakeries produce bread, they have special ovens that inject steam during the baking process. The steam puts a nice brown crust on the bread. Boiling the dough in alkali water not only produces the brown color of pretzels, but the characteristic pretzel taste.

Traditionally, pretzels are boiled in lye. The problem with lye, though, is that it's pretty corrosive. You really need to be wearing rubber gloves, and carefully clean up any spatter or spill, and keep your tongue in the correct corner of your mouth in order to minimize accidents. A saturated solution of baking soda does the same thing much more safely, and although it might be more expensive for an industrial pretzel manufacturer, the costs of rubber gloves, etc., make lye more expensive, not less, for most people making pretzels at home.

A Rather Simple Recipe

I started off with 1.5 cups of warm (about 110F) water, a tablespoon of sugar, a teaspoon of salt, and a tablespoon of active dry yeast. I recommend you get the rapid rise yeast for everything - there's nothing that the active dry yeast works better in - but a yeast cake, a packet of either kind of yeast, or a tablespoon of either bulk yeast will do. After 5-10 minutes, the water should be foaming up; that'll tell you that the yeast is good.

Add 4.5 cups of flour and a half-stick of melted butter, and mix with the dough hook until the dough is smooth and pulls away from the sides of the bowl. Then roll it between your hands to form a ball, oil the outside with about a tablespoon of vegetable oil, and let it rise in a warm place until it doubles in size, which should take about an hour or so.

Dodging The Draft

In modern homes, it's hard to find a warm draft-free place to raise bread. It took me a long time to learn that I should not use a stainless steel mixing bowl for this. A plastic mixing bowl is OK, but a pyrex mixing bowl, or an earthenware mixing bowl seems to be the most satisfactory. I think it's because they hold the temperature best. Plastic doesn't hold temperature, but it's a good insulator. With stainless steel, the bowl can change temperature too easily.

If you're making pretzel bread, what you want to do is to flatten out the risen dough. I would recommend splitting it into 4 equal parts for easiest handling. They make a tool known as a counter scraper that's a flat sheet of metal about 3" by 6", with a wooden handle along one of the longer sides. It's not common in the kitchen, but I've found it very handy. Amazon has the Wilton scraper for about $7 but it's only $2-3 for one at a restaurant supply house.

In any case, to make pretzel bread, you simply pretend that you're rolling out biscuits, only instead of punching out circles with an empty tin can, you simply cut a piece that's 3" by 4".

Boiled In Soda

Each of these pieces of dough needs to be boiled for about a minute or so in baking soda water. Put 3/4 cup of baking soda in three quarts - measure it! - and set it to boiling.

I tried using a hamburger turner to deposit the dough into the soda solution, but I think it would work better if I used the wire mesh scoop I use for french-frying. I used a wide shallow pan to boil the solution, and that was an unwise move as well.

The solution was boiling up in the center, where it was hottest, and sinking down at the edges where it was cooler. The dough kept moving from the center of the pan to the edge. It probably would be better to use a smaller diameter pan, so that all part of the dough were equally treated by the solution. On the other hand, I could see no evidence whatsoever that one side was boiled harder than the other edge.

A Swell Idea

Boiling the dough makes it swell up. I was happiest with the dough that was about 1/4" thick before boiling and 3/8" thick after boiling. After baking, it was thicker still.

While I was at it, I also made some pretzel-shaped pretzels. This recipe is supposed to make about 10 pretzels.

As I removed the dough from the soda solution, I put it on a half-sheet pan that had been coated with vegetable oil. When I got through, I put the pan in a 450F oven for 12 minutes, and it came out just fine. I lubed the tops of the pretzels fresh out of the oven, and since I didn't have any pretzel salt, I just hit them with table salt.

Rating The Recipe

The pretzels were a lot better than the tasteless and tough Hot Sam pretzels (and the Superpretzels found in the freezer section of the store). They were chewier than Auntie Anne pretzels, and a little tastier - pretty much on a par with the pretzels frequently sold in front of Sharp Shopper.

The thing is, though, you can't buy pretzel bread anyplace except as part of a junkfood sandwich. This pretzel bread tastes pretty good as a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich, and I'm betting it would be great as an egg salad sandwich or a ham and cheese sandwich.

Soft pretzels don't deal gracefully with the passage of time, and I can't imagine that pretzel bread made Saturday night will be very good on Tuesday, or even on Monday, but I'm hoping that it'll be OK for lunch on Sunday. Blondie had fallen asleep by the time I pulled the pretzels and pretzel bread from the oven, so she won't appreciate them otherwise.

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All Ready pie crust - Auntie Anne - baking soda - Burger King - cinnamon rolls - dough scraper - food porn - Hot Pockets - Hot Sam - pretzel - scratch biscuits - Sharp Shopper - Superpretzel - Wilton - wraps