Telling the Truth

Is it just me, or does this bread look delicious?  Like I’m really living in my rustic farmhouse fantasyland where I make everything beautifully and effortlessly by hand?   As I was cutting and spreading it, I was wondering just how GOOD and SATISFIED I'd be feeling if I’d made the jam myself too, like, a year ago and then kept it in the cupboard with a little label on saying the kind of fruit and the date.

I made the bread using the same sourdough recipe that worked so well for me last year.  The weather here has turned delightfully Autumny (the Townsvillians are talking about “winter”; it was a story on the news when three French backpackers got lost in our local rainforest and spent the night on a rock ledge "while temperatures plunged to 12℃”).  I started up my sourdough starter a while ago, and last week I made a terrible loaf (not concentrating; put in twice as much water as I should have) so I was really pleased with how this one looked coming out of the oven.  I rapped it on the bottom, and it sounded hollow.  Good sign.

But.  However.  It tastes ...only fair to moderate.  I cut the first slice right off the cooling rack, spread it with butter and then something out the window caught my eye.  Maybe a bird, or a colourful butterfly.  I had made it all the way out into our front yard and was looking up in a tree when I realised that I had been munching on the bread all the while.  The taste of it had not even intruded into my consciousness.   When have you ever eaten bread fresh out of the oven and not even realised you were doing it?  I should have been thinking "MMMMMMMMmmmmmmmMMM ... delicious!" but instead all I was thinking was, "yes.  It is bread that I'm eating.  Chew #1.  Chew #2. Swallow?  OK, yeah, swallow."

What a shame.  Maybe if I was a better blog-liar I would have had you believe that it tasted just as good as it looks.  Time to work on that perhaps?