HAPPY 100!!!
CHRONICLE: ALBUQUERQUE, NEW MEXICO, JULY 17,2024
This week, Lonely Kitchen Chronicles is celebrating a milestone with its first 100 subscribers, plus plenty of followers to boot. What a privilege it is to know you’re reading along as Lonely Kitchen Chronicles continues to grow and evolve.
From the bottom of my heart, THANK YOU!!
So, like the true bread lover I am, I made a batch of biscuits to celebrate but decided to bake them like a cake in a cake pan instead of cutting the dough into individual discs.
I’ll bet you’re thinking what a cute idea! Why didn’t I ever think to bake my biscuits like this?
In all honesty, I think biscuits turn out better made the traditional way, by cutting them individually, baking them on a sheet pan until golden on top and bottom so their flaky layers develop. Not that my biscuit cake wasn’t good…it was. But it lacked that delicate, buttery goodness I seek in biscuits.
Rather than suffer through the slightly dense biscuit cake, I decided to make biscuit bites. I cut the cooled biscuit cake into wedges, then cut the wedges into bite-size pieces, placing them on a wire rack to dry out overnight. The next morning, I brushed them with melted butter, then sprinkled them with cinnamon sugar before baking them in a 325 degree oven for about 8 minutes.
Holy biscuit! These are delicious. Today, I used them in a breakfast parfait, a riff on English trifle made with layers of mixed berries (strawberries and blueberries in my case), cottage cheese instead of pastry cream, and my cinnamon biscuit bites instead of sponge cake. Oh yeah, I also layered in a bit of buckwheat granola for some added crunch.
As you can see, I just can’t help myself from lighting a candle in celebration of reaching 100 subscribers!
And, I have to say…cinnamon biscuit bites are as delicious as they sound.
As you probably know by now, I’m a bread eater, a dedicated glutton for gluten.
Most breakfasts for me include eating a piece of toast…or a muffin (biscuit bite anyone?) or a small stack of pancakes I’ve meal-prepped, pulled from the freezer and warmed up in the toaster oven.
Last week I watched A Gentleman in Moscow, one of the best book-to-screen adaptations I’ve ever seen.
Watching it reminded me not only how much I loved the book but how bread is synonymous with our cultural identity, our heritage and history.
Bread is sustenance and so much more.
I read A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles when it came out in 2016. I enjoyed reading it so much I was reluctant to finish it. It’s one of the few books I thought I’d re-read the instant I closed the back cover. But I never did re-read it, too eager to move onto the next and newest book out for publication.
In case you haven’t read A Gentleman in Moscow, it tells the fictitious story of Count Alexander Rostov, a privileged aristocrat, who in 1922 is sentenced to house arrest in the luxurious Hotel Metropole just steps away from the Bolshoi and the Kremlin. If he sets foot outside the hotel, he will be shot on sight.
Count Rostov, whose treasured material possessions have been confiscated leaving him with only a few bare necessities, eventually discovers that it’s his inner, emotional life which pays dividends through the relationships he makes and maintains during his confinement set against Russia’s decades-long political turbulence.
Really, if you haven’t read this book, you must. At the very least, it’s worth watching on your favorite streaming platform.
Anyway, last week as I was watching episode three, I found myself on the edge of my oh-so-comfy recliner, gripping my armrests.
How could I have forgotten that the Count finds his way to the hotel rooftop on a summer pre-dawn morning where he encounters Abram, a seasoned hotel handyman and keeper of bees? Or the bread? How could I have forgotten about the bread, the deep, dark bread of Russia, and the bee hives Abram tends, the honey that tastes of lilacs?
Abram refers to the bees, as “the boys”.
As the Count asks Abram about the humming noise coming from a corner of the roof-top where he thought old boxes had been discarded, Abram tells the Count they are actually bee hives. His bee hives.
“Making honey is what bees does. Here.”
Leaning forward, the old man held out a roof tile on which there were two slices of black bread slathered with honey. The Count accepted one and took a bite. The first thing that struck him was actually the black bread. For when was the last time he had even eaten it? If asked outright, he would have been embarrassed to admit. Tasting of dark rye and darker molasses, it was a perfect complement to a cup of coffee. And the honey? What an extraordinary contrast it provided. If the bread was somehow earthen, brown, and brooding, the honey was sunlit, golden, and gay. But there was another dimension to it…An elusive, yet familiar element…A grace note hidden beneath, or behind, or within the sensation of sweetness.
What is that flavor…? the Count asked almost to himself.
The lilacs, the old man replied.
This is the scene that made me grip my arm rests.
Why?
Because watching the Count eat, wait…make that taste the “earthen, brown, and brooding” within each bite of his Russian bread is similar to my experience of eating toast each morning.
I imagine the Count–in all his fictional glory– and I to be kindred spirits. We both taste the power that food, bread in particular, has to transport us, to ground us, to remind us of home or where we come from.
There is a memory bank within each morsel of bread, sparked by a swirl of honey or a smear of jam, waiting to be shared as day breaks.
This is the power of morning toast.
Thank you. I loved this piece and revisiting A Gentleman in Moscow!