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This Sunday in beautiful uptown Astoria finds me as most Sundays do, dancing back and forth between things. There is bread to bake, a bathtub to scrub, more egg research to do, a proper tribute to John Hess to be put to words, although those words will probably turn into a screed about how last Wednesday's New York Times food section had not a word to say about him, even as they had room for more verbiage from their food critic about the restaurants at the Time Warner Center, mostly about how -- shock and amazement! -- the restaurants aren't at street level! They're on the fourth floor! If I were to write a "Dear friends at the New York Times Dining In/Dining Out Section," I would paraphrase what a letter writer once wrote to the late, much-missed Trouser Press Magazine about MTV: "Why all the worship of the TWC restaurants? Make 'em take out an ad instead." Nonetheless, even in the midst of all this frenetic sitting-around, I find my thoughts pleasantly absorbed by a pair of comments to Friday's post, one from Owen on bread and its memory, the other from Tvindy on the, in his words, "subliminally sexual aspect" of the food photographs I took while on my writing retreat to Arkansas last summer.

As I write this, two loaves of bread are proofing in the kitchen, growing nicely to conform to their buttered tins, short, plump and so close-grained as to be almost without texture. This is no ciabatta, no peasant loaf, defined by the bubbly, lace-like crumb that comes from careful preservation of the air pockets that form during fermentation; looking at the internal crumb, you could almost mistake it for pound cake, but for the taste, which is not of sugar or egg, but of sweet wheat, augmented by milk and a little butter. I have no doubt that the bread will be good, very good, even, but I still feel a bit of dissatisfaction at the choices I made in the shaping process: I formed the dough into a log, using the shaping techniques I learned during my bread bakery apprenticeship and practiced a thousand times at the shaping table, but I overestimated the elasticity of the dough and formed the log by rolling up my carefully-formed rectangle along the short end, not the long end. It's not wrong, but it will definitely give me a different shape than it would have if I'd made another choice, and I will be haunted by this, wondering what would have happened had I done it differently, at least until I get the chance to make more bread.

It is not just the shaping that tells in the final loaf, though. What you get at the end of your bake depends on the type of flour you use, the type of yeast (commercial or wild? straight dough, sourdough or preferment?), how long and vigorously you mix your dough, how you shape it, what cuts, if any are made in the dough prior to baking, the amount of steam in your oven. Short of anything that would actually deflate your dough in the oven (such as tearing the dough in a way that causes all the air to rush out, or overproofing the dough, which renders it too weak to hold on to that lovely captured air during baking), odds are that none of these choices will make or break your bread; in general, bread is a forgiving little critter, and you will still end up with something that is a pleasure to eat. But what makes breadbaking both frustrating and exciting is discovering how much you can and can't control. We can't control weather, humidity, vagaries in the flour or in our ovens, but we can make adjustments in the way we work with the dough, to compensate for these factors. It can be quite an emotional workout, baking bread, even at a large-scale commercial level. (Any doubts I had about this were dispelled after the August 2003 blackout in New York City, when the woman who owned the bakery where I apprenticed told tales of watching literally thousands of pounds of dough rise, overrise and bubble onto all available surfaces, effectively voiding two days' worth of production.)

Since I am loath to continue rabbitting on in such generalized, teetering-toward-pretentious-nonsense terms, I'll give a concrete example. In 2002 I took a pair of week-long professional breadbaking classes in Vermont. One of the key lessons our chef gave us was that gentle handling of the dough would reward us with a loaf of bread that retained the deep flavor and sweetness of the wheat from which our flour was milled. Vigorous kneading was saved for specific breads, like brioche, where you need strong gluten development to counteract the gluten-weakening properties of butter and eggs. For most other, leaner doughs, Chef recommended that we mix our doughs just enough to incorporate the ingredients; from there, we would turn the dough into large tubs to ferment. The dough would be loose and soft; after 1/2 hour we would give the dough a series of folds, also known as "turning," that served to strengthen the gluten without overworking the dough. (Chef has told stories of people who trained at bakeries where the dough would be kneaded vigorously, at high speeds, for 20 minutes; the result was a bubbly extensible dough, but a dough bleached out by vigorous oxidation, which effectively killed the carotenoid pigments that give bread such wonderful flavor and color, and gave the dough the appearance of toothpaste.) One day we were making ciabatta, which required mixing the dough, fermenting it for half an hour, turning it and letting the fermentation continue. On one batch of dough, we had forgotten that it had already been turned and we gave it a second turn, which tightened the dough further.

When we finished baking the breads, Chef took one of the properly-turned breads and put it next to the bread with the extra turn. We could see that the latter was smaller, and more neatly-shaped. He cut the breads open and we tasted; both were full of the heady, clean flavor of wheat, but the extra-turned bread had smaller air holes, less translucency to the crumb, just a different mouth-feel. Again, it wasn't bad bread; in fact, it was very, very good bread, but looking at them side-by-side, we could see just how much memory bread has, and what a difference our choices make.

As for Tvindy's assessment of my photography from the retreat...well, dear friends, I'll just post some examples and you can judge for yourself. I don't know if I felt particularly inflamed, subliminally or otherwise, when I took these pictures, but I do know that I was thoroughly absorbed in the work I was doing, and I was as close to perfectly happy as I've ever been in my life; it was only missing Lloyd, 1,300 miles separating us, that kept that happiness from being absolute. In one day, one three-hour plane ride and a 90-minute ride through northwest Arkansas, I went from being a harried, cubicle-bound desk monkey to a writer, a real writer, in a way that I never felt while squeezing writing around a full-time job and the other ephemera of daily life. It was the first time that all that was expected of me was to write, and read, to do research, to turn my mind out of its normally crabbed, cramped space and let it breathe deeply. This is not to say that it was all exciting, a Happy Land of neverending baking and writing and drinking wine on the deck, although I did plenty of all of that. Much of my time was spent not on writing or baking, but on research, and most of that research took the form of hours of crawling through the online catalog of various ag school libraries, downloading those articles I could read online, copying the catalog information for the ones I couldn't, as a plan for future research trips. I still remember the day I decided to skip my daily walk into town so that I could get a full day's work done; by the time dinner was over, I was restless and ready to do something else, but except for the bars in town, everything else was closed and the trolleys had stopped running. I found that if I took the morning off and worked in the afternoon, or if I took the afternoon off and worked in the morning, I was ready to come back from dinner and keep working, sometimes until 1 or 2 in the morning. What a glorious luxury that was, the luxury to find a schedule that worked for me. How I miss it, now that I don't have it anymore.

It was in this frame of mind that I took these pictures, but I never realized how it showed until now. I only knew, at the time, that I was working with beautiful produce, creating beautiful things, and I was captivated by it all. It has been 20 years since I first read, in college, A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf, and even though I nodded in agreement when she said that the two things a writer truly needs are a fixed income and a room of her own, I never understood her point as viscerally as I do now, remembering my time at the Colony, looking over my photos, feeling a renewed sense of longing and frustration, wondering if I will ever be able to achieve this state ever again.

To those of you who saw these photos last summer, when I was freshly enraptured by the amazing farm butter and eggs and cream and fruit to which I had daily access (and which I miss, even now, six months later), I apologize if you feel as if you're having leftovers for dinner. But it *has* been six months, and I'm still enraptured, and, like a proud auntie, I just can't help but share.

Okay, the gooseberries are a cheat.  I bought those after I had returned to New York.  But I was freshly returned from Arkansas and I was still inspired.  I found the gooseberries at the market.  Hello, beautiful, I said.