Bread... or something like it

    I've been cooking for myself for a lot of years and, as a consequence of that fact - and the fact that I don't like bland, boring food -  I've become addicted to cookbooks that are just a bit off-center.
    It was, therefore, probably inevitable that I snapped up a copy of the The Kiwi Beer Lover's Cookbook by Sam Cook when I saw it while browsing in the Paper Plus bookstore in Lower Hutt a few days ago. The book is, I discovered while flipping through the pages, full of great recipes and every single one of them, including one for chocolate mousse, uses beer as an ingredient. I'm a big fan of chocolate mousse, but the recipe that caught my attention, and held it, was for something called "The World's Easiest Bread."
    There's a reason for that.
     The fact is that I can cook a turkey for Thanksgiving, make a decent pot roast and even lay out a pretty good three-course meal on those rare occasions when I invite a few folks over for dinner. I make more than two dozen kinds of chili and they're all pretty darn good.
    I cannot, however, bake.
    Oh, I've tried and now and then I've made a loaf of bread or baked a cake - from scratch - that is actually edible. More often than not, however, the result is either rock hard, toxic, or both. Honestly, you could build a pretty decent wall around your house with the number of ruined cakes I've made over the years... well, let me amend that to say that you could if the Environmental Protection Agency would allow you to use them for building materials. I may be wrong about this but I think the EPA has formally declared my cakes and breads to be health hazards and put them on a list of things that, along with friable asbestos and some kinds of dioxin, are not allowed near human beings.
    In addition to the name, the fact that this recipe has only three ingredients made me eager to try it out.
    (You'll have to buy the book to find out what those ingredients are. We authors have to stick together, after all.)
    I had discovered that the house we're renting has a wide variety of pots, pans, dishes, plates, knives, forks, spoons, glasses and mugs but no loaf pans so, while shopping for my ingredients at Countdown, I picked up a package of three lightweight aluminum ones. You know the kind; designed to be used once, maybe twice, and then discarded.
    Armed with my ingredients, the loaf pans and brimming with confidence I set about making "The World's Easiest Bread" Tuesday afternoon.
    Problem One: The house also does not come equipped with a measuring cup. I had to estimate my ingredients, as a result, and I'm not really good at that.
    Problem Two: I thought I had preheated the oven to 180 degrees but it turns out I had not. To turn this oven on you have to set the temperature with one dial and then, using another dial, turn it on.
    (I did not discover that until it was time to put my bread in the oven... I opened the oven door carefully after getting my ingredients mixed and the dough stuffed into the loaf pan because I was expecting a blast of hot air. Instead of being filled with hot air, the inside of the oven was stone cold.)
    Not wanting to let my dough sit for a half hour while the oven warmed up, I popped it in the oven anyway.
    Forty-five minutes later I pulled it out.
    It was, I must say in all honesty, one butt-ugly loaf of bread.
    In the first place, the loaf pans I bought were too small and so the bread had risen to the height of something resembling a seventh-grader's science project on the Himalayas.
    And, because the oven had not been properly warmed up, it was not quite cooked all the way through. Mostly, just not quite.
    Another disaster, I thought.
    Enter Josep's cousin Elena, riding to the rescue like a petite, very female colonel leading a cavalry charge: We could, she said, slice it and then toast it in the oven.
    I did that.
    It worked.
    We had it for dinner along with something Josep's mom Elena made out of chick peas, onions, garlic, tomato sauce, hard-boiled eggs and Chorizo sausage. No one got sick from eating my bread. In fact, there's just a small hunk of it left, which I'll have with coffee in the morning.
    After I toast it..
    So maybe Mr. Cook was right.
    This might just be the world's easiest bread to make.
    Now, about that chocolate mousse...

This is all that's left of my bread... For more information about  "The Kiwi Beer Lover's Cookbook" email the publisher at info@hurricane-press.co.nz