sourdough

Some of you guys are thinking, gosh, four entries in five days, what the hell's up with that? Leave for a few weeks and bang, great literature is born.

Yeah, well, (nudge), for those of you who weren't in my notify list, (nudge), serves you right. (Nudge).

Moving on. . .

I was wandering the narrow passageway of my kitchen preparing my Saturday morning meal, when it occurred to me that toast plays a role in my life far out of proportion to its actual value. In the movie version of Annie the Musical, available on both VHS and DVD from your friendly neighborhood amazon.com web connection, plucky, lovable Orphan Annie jumps into the pool with crotchety, heart-of-gold Daddy Warbucks and attempts to soften his more tender sentiments towards his personal assistant, what's-her-name. "She thinks you're the greatest thing since sliced bread," she tells him, much to his discomfiture.

"Sliced bread?" I used to think, every time I squirmed through this movie. "Why the hell sliced bread? Why not penicillin, or Teletubbies, or indoor plumbing? Why the hell am I even watching this? What I wouldn't give for Orphan Annie to drown right now. C'mon, Orphan Annie. Drown. Drown. Drown. Drown. Drown. Dammit. She got out."

That was until I started living the unemployed life in Redwood City, one block away from an Albertsons that glares polite daggers at a Safeway across the street.

Both stores are on the "wrong" side of the tracks, "wrong" being the side that I live on as opposed to the other side, where there are small, whimsically named stores that actually use the word "Boutique" in their signs, and the streets are paved with colorful, artistically layered bricks that are slippery and litigious when wet.

Of the two stores, Albertsons is more ghetto. Argue as I might with the Guy, there really is no getting away from the fact that my neighborhood runs between ghetto and pure blue collar; that is to say, by day it's at the bottom of the hill where Professor Utonium and the Powerpuff Girls live, while by night, it's a trolling ground for cop cars, though that could be partly the responsibility of the 24-hour doughnut shop down the block. (NB: Always thought the whole cops-and-doughnuts thing was an urban legend perpetuated by people who looked down on both cops and doughnuts and thought the best way to damn them both was to link them together. Who knew?)

Albertsons is more ghetto. It uses less lights -- which I applaud, save electricity, all that -- and less cashiers, (one, sometimes even two people on a busy night), and actually manages its inventory in the aisles as opposed to leaving it all locked away behind great metal swinging doors parked right between the meat and fish departments, if you're willing to call a glass case and a short man in a greasy apron a "department."

The worst thing about Albertsons is that they have a very poor selection of groceries. If I were in the market for a bucket of lard and burrito beans that make you pass gas on a regular, explosive basis, Albertsons would be the place to go. In the pages of Yuhri-cooking, however, farting and lard are not movers and shakers.

As it is, I usually make most of my grocery purchases at Safeway, where they carry brand names I actually recognize and groceries I actually use. Significant to this whole story is the fact that both Albertsons and Safeway carry Santa Rosa Sourdough Bread, pre-sliced, a great big massive lump of sourdough-y goodness that can be yours for only $2.39!

Sourdough bread is my personal equivalent of cocaine. At any given time there are two bags of bread on my kitchen counter: one nearing completion; another ready to go. Twice a week or so I make a trip to one or the other of the grocery stores to purchase my next bag.

My eating habits have been a source of constant conversation between my mother and her relatives over the years; during the period when most other children were busily launching their vegetables into Jackson Pollackian artistic renderings on kitchen walls, I was obsessively attempting to eat every non-animal green or orange thing in sight, part of my fierce ambition (mentioned in previous entries) to become a rabbit. There was another period of time where I would eat absolutely nothing but fruit in one form or another, while all other types of food were anathema.

At all times during my childhood, I had a strictly non-Japanese habit of eating everything separately, neatly dividing every possible divisible foodstuff into component parts and eating it independently from its fellows. This used to infuriate my mother, who would watch me painstakingly clean up my little palm-sized dish of pickled whatsit before even starting on my rice.

Japanese cooking is full of little dishes of little things that one is supposed to eat with the rice. The rice and the little things are intended to make a harmonious whole in one's mouth. To put it in a western context, my eating habits were rather like requesting spaghetti and meatballs with the spaghetti, meatballs, and sauce all served in separate containers and eating each in turn without ever letting the three mix. My mother worried over me constantly, and there was many a meal that was destroyed by a battle of wills between the two of us, both yelling at the top of our lungs while my father and sister stoically ate what they could reach before taking refuge in the TV room.

Nowadays, it's bread.

You realize of course that my roommate almost never eats sourdough toast. Each of those loaves weighs at least three pounds. Every week I managed to inhale approximately five pounds of toast, outside of any sourdough I manage to filch from bread baskets in restaurants I happen to visit with the Guy.

I'm starting to wonder if this might not be some sort of foreshadowing. I should start tracking the bread consumption trends across the world. Last night I had an ominous dream about alien body-eating jellyfish from outer space who descended on us en masse and started popping video store clerks as after-dinner mints. It's possible that the dream was somehow related to the spicy Szechuan we had for dinner, but it would make some sort of cosmic sense if they were planning ahead by conditioning us to pre-stuff ourselves with sourdough, wouldn't it? I mean, just look at what Stove Top is made out of.

Doesn't it more sense than the idea that I might be some kind of crazed sourdough addict? Doesn't it? Doesn't it?