Bread Bakers Anonymous

05.10.07

Hi. My name is Julia, and I'm addicted to bread baking. I guess I started—I mean really started—about four months ago, although of course I'd experimented a little in high school and college, nothing serious. It was always a social thing, something I did with friends, like whipping up chocolate chip cookies on a Sunday night.  I grew up around a bread-baking addict, a mother who was always proofing yeast, borrowing starters. One day on the phone, she gave me a simple rye bread recipe, one so easy I didn't even have to write it down. From then on, every time I found myself stressed out or lonely, I would hit the flour. It wasn't social anymore—in fact, I preferred to do it alone, at home, even in the morning. It's escalated from that simple rye bread to the point where I'm cooking up crazy experiments—my kitchen has become a bread lab. Now I'm throwing in so many seeds and nuts, I've got blue jays lined up outside, leaving drool on my window.

I've been skipping social gatherings to get home to my rising dough before it implodes. People have started to notice my withdrawal from society: "Hey, Jule, we haven't seen you in weeks. Where have you been?"  I make up elaborate lies: "Oh, I promised this baby that I would baby-sit for it so I had to go do that."

"You promised a baby you would baby-sit? That doesn't make any sense."

"Um… you know what I mean, I promised the mom, not the baby.  The mom had to go to aerobics class."

"For two months?"

"Yeah, well she's an Olympic gymnast so I—"

"Pull it together, Julia. Nobody buys your lies. Olympic gymnasts can't have babies."

I showed up at a party the other day and a friend took me into a corner and told me to wipe the white powder off my shirt—she picked up my hands, took one look at the dough under my nails, and shook her head knowingly.  "When you're ready to get out of this, come talk to me," she whispered. But I'm not ready. Sometimes I think, hey, maybe I should go for a walk, do some laundry, pay my taxes. But those ambitions go out the window when I think the alternative: In three hours, I could be cracking open a hot, crusty loaf, slathering it in butter, and getting high. 

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