Au Mal Pan

I made an executive decision while I was out and about yesterday to remedy the Crappy Bread Cookbook situation. It has now been replaced with one that was on sale at Barnes and Noble, and this one uses a variety of measurements for each ingredient and decent descriptions. I also don't get the feeling that this was translated from some other language in to English and that something huge was lost in that transition!
Although I think it's a bit audacious of them to call themselves "The Best-Ever Book of Bread", they do have a LOT of recipes in there and the directions are quite different than the ones in my current book. I hold out hope that some day I might produce a lovely loaf of bread.
Also... it tells you how to make them in the oven AND in a bread machine, so that rocks.
Why all the big deal? you might say.... it's just bread! Just bread is something that I think some folks should be slapped for. There are people who subsist on the bread they manage to bake every day. There are no sushi bars or cocktail hours there, just a wood burning oven and whatever ingredients they have on hand to make their meal. Bread is seriously sacred stuff, and we forget that in an age where we can wander by an entire aisle of bread products that are of varying degrees of flavor and quality.
There is also the memories of my childhood when I had warm, homemade biscuits that my Mom pulled out of the oven. Anything that came out of the oven baked, honestly, and I wish to possess that magic. I want to hand my kid a totally awesome, warm biscuit so that they can get excited about putting honey and butter on it just like I used to.
And the other, final, darker reason... I must sometimes face up to the fact that I learn how to do things from scratch just in case the Zombie Apocalypse happens. With the loss of electricity and massive infrastructure to create all these goods that we rely on (and when you think about it, it is SCARY crap, how much we rely on others for our food and well being) the person who can do the basics and do them well is the one that's going to come out on top. So I learn to bake bread for my children, and to defeat the zombies before they've even arrived. And that is the truth.