A New Hobby ("Man, I Feel Like a Woman!")

Cooking has never been somthing I have excelled at. I usually get distracted by other activities and forget that I am waiting on a pot of water to boil. A timer may or may not get set - which means whatever is in the oven may or may not get burned. I do not have very good taste buds - and so most of the time, I cannot taste when something is slightly old or stale. I certainly have a difficult time blending salt and spices. I will never be a person who can throw ingredients into a bowl and produce something exciting, much less edible. However, I do enjoy the idea of cooking.

A couple of months ago, Becky and decided to take up bread baking. We meet once a week and experiment with all different kinds of breads - most of which you cannot find in Slovakia.

Bagels are the sleepiest bread that we have tried. They must rise twice and rest at least twice and once more after they are boiled. Because I am often ansty, I usually will poke at the bagels while Becky and I are talking. Usually, her response is, "Meghan, don't poke the bread - you're going to wake the bagels. They're sleeping."

Usually, Becky and I pretend that we have our own cooking television show. We narrate what we are doing as we go - in funny, rapid fire dialogue. Thankfully Becky plays Al Borland to my bumbling Tim Taylor-esque style of hosting and baking.

So far we have tackled quite a few recipes. We've made cinnamon raisin and brown sugar cranberry bagels, sour dough bread, bread bowls for soup, asiago bread and graham crackers.







This week we are making foccacia bread and ciabatta bread for a group pannini dinner. English muffins and tortillas are the last items on our list of things to try during our time in Tisovec.

I enjoy this new hobby immensely. It's good to spend time with Becky and I have found that there's something very therapeutic about kneading dough. While I am still very much an apprentice baker, I am excelling under Becky's tutelage. I often joke with her that, while I am not a particularly feminine person, when I bake, "I feel like a woman!" The first time I told Becky this she snickered so hard she snorted. Now she always responds, "We are women. Watch us bake!"