Bread Crumbs

The lesson of the day today was making bread crumbs. Which, I know, sounds as dull as shit and it is. I truly had a moment where I stared at the textbook and thought, "this is cooking? This is seriously a skill I need to learn?" But I'm committed to doing all of the lessons in the book so I hauled my ass to the Bed, Bath, and Beyond on Sixth and bought a Cuisinart.

This, by the way, is not my food processor--I do not have a lovely assortment of fruit in my apartment right now nor would I arrange raspberries next to my evenly sliced canister of peaches just to give you a sense of my purchase. Why did I need a food processor? Well, first and foremost, I left the one that we got for our wedding back at the old apartment because, at the time, I thought it took up too much space to be worth owning. And secondly, I looked ahead in the book and realized that I wasn't going to be able to do most of the lessons without it.

So I ground the chunks of bread as per the book's instructions and then passed the crumbs through a colander which really didn't work well at all. The instructions told me to use a tamis, but not knowing what a tamis was and seeing a picture of a tool that looked vaguely like a colander, I thought I would be fine. Not so much. Perhaps my bread wasn't dry enough--I used day-old bread from a nearby bakery. Regardless, I now have a container of bread crumbs and nothing to make that requires bread crumbs.

It is impossible to make bread crumbs without thinking about the story of Hansel and Gretel and the idea of leaving a path for yourself to return. What does it mean when you don't leave a path? That you don't want to return? I mean, there is a huge part of me that wants to turn around, call this off, return to my marriage, at least go somewhere where it's easy. And yet, all of my bread crumbs are tightly sealed in a container. A conundrum.