Simple Pleasures: Avocado, Toast and a Poached Egg

I am slow to warm to food fads, so when I started seeing the words "avocado" and "toast" together and read dripping prose extolling its intoxicating, if not orgasmic, properties…well, I have to say there was a certain amount of eye-rolling that ensued. The photos were beautiful, of course. It's almost impossible to take a bad picture of those luscious green-and-yellow-tinged slices of avocado, and slathered on a thick piece of good bread it's hard to go wrong.

I did order it a couple of times at local cafés, but was underwhelmed with the experience. So the other morning when I was getting ready to poach an egg for breakfast, I remembered that there were a couple of ripe avocados sitting in the fridge. Should I try it again? Of course!

Nothing could be simpler: peel and slice half of a large avocado. Cut a thick slice of good artisan bread and put it in the toaster. When the water boils for your poached egg (I always add a scant teaspoon of vinegar), crack it in and while it simmers, toast your bread. As soon as it pops up, butter the bread, top it with the avocado slices and then, when your egg is perfectly cooked to your personal preference—mine is with the white cooked and yolk jiggly—put it on top of the avocado slices. A shower of flake salt and fresh-ground pepper and you can call it breakfast. (A nice one, too, even if it was the darling of the moment. But that was a few minutes ago.)

Toast for Breakfast

I need something quick for breakfast. A chore is calling me away from my computer, out into the day, and it strikes me that I haven't had anything to eat. Never mind that I'm meeting a friend for lunch in a little over an hour.

Yogurt? Not in the mood. Had eggs yesterday, and they'd take too long. Out of granola (make a note to pick up supplies for the next batch).

Toast will do, since there's nearly always a loaf of Dave's sourdough sitting on the counter cut-side down, its flavor deepening and its crust thickening, requiring some work to slice but giving it a lovely crunch when toasted.

The toasting is tricky, too, since long slices from the center of the loaf need to be halved and stood upright to fit into our old toaster, but today's is just the right length to slip in whole. It requires two punches of the toaster's knob to get the right ratio of browning, since we've neglected to adjust the timer to our requirements, though a full two cycles starts to burn the edges so I have to remember to pop it up just before the second cycle is complete.

Like I said, tricky.

Get out a plate, pull the butter from the cupboard and a knife from the drawer, slather the warm slice with enough butter to cover it, trying to avoid the inevitable airholes that will drip butter on my keyboard, the counter, the dogs who are lying at my feet eagerly hoping for just such an event. Being out of Ayers Creek jam (another note to pick some up soon) I rummage for honey in the pantry and drizzle the amber liquid, then sit down with the last half mug of coffee from the pot.

Crunching ensues, and I even remember to save a couple of bits of crust for the dogs, still waiting hopefully below me.

Panzanella Redux: A Million Options

In the time since my last post on the bread salad the Italians call "panzanella," I've made at least two different versions of the recipe. As long as the tomatoes are juicy—perfect for those overripe specimens you just couldn't fit on your tomato platter—and the olive oil is plentiful, you're in business.

The raw material.

The two versions? Well, considering I have access to a virtually endless supply of bread because of Dave's homemade sourdough habit, we've had bread salad as both a main dish and a side salad. The first version consisted of the basic recipe combined with about a tin's worth of leftover albacore that I'd had the foresight to bag and freeze. The second was based on a variation of my friend Michel's panzanella (above) that she whipped up for an evening of wine and snacks to celebrate her new job, which eschewed the basil and added capers and chopped castelvetrano olives.

Seriously, that's it. As long as the bread has soaked up enough of the tomato juice and dressing, which takes about an hour, it's ready to eat. Talk about fleeting pleasures of late summer…grab a loaf of your favorite bread and as many ripe tomatoes as you can and get to it!

Artisan Bread: Don't Put It Away

The advertising business has a maxim that goes something like, "If you want your message to get through, repeat it. Then repeat it again. And again. And again. [etc.]" It's why we remember classic slogans like "it's the real thing," "the un-cola" and "you deserve a break today."

A few years ago I bought a giant—and I mean at least 20 inches across—loaf of artisan bread from Pearl Bakery to take on a beach weekend with friends. As she handed it to me, the sales clerk said, "Don't wrap it in plastic or put it in the refrigerator. Leave it out on the counter even after you cut it open. The outside will get nice and crusty and the flavor of the bread will continue to improve."

We got to the beach and, when we'd used some of the bread with our crab Louies and it was time to clean up, I just couldn't do it. The bread was popped into a plastic bag and went into the fridge. It was fine, of course, but lost that crusty crunch of an artisan loaf.

Years later we were on a road trip to the Okanagan region of BC to check out its food and wine scene and ran across an artisan bakery called Walla in Penticton. We bought a loaf of artisan bread from owner Benjamin Manea, a Romanian-born Israeli, and as we left he said in a stern, heavily accented voice, "Before you buy, you need to know about this bread." He instructed us to never, ever put the bread in a plastic bag in the fridge, that when it’s cut open it needs to be stored cut edge down on the counter and that it would last for four days. As we were paying, he grumbled something about people not knowing how to take care of fresh bread.

When Dave started making his own sourdough bread we remembered Mr. Manea's instructions and started leaving the bread out on the counter, standing it up on its cut side after slicing what we needed. As the clerk at the bakery said years earlier, the outside gets a nice hard crust and the inside keeps its chewy, moist texture for several days—up to a week, though a loaf rarely lasts that long.

My brother, who regularly is given a loaf so his son can have toast for breakfast in the morning before heading off to school, leaves it on the counter as instructed. But if it happens to be a day when their housekeeper comes to clean, she wraps the bread in plastic and puts it in the fridge. I guess she just hasn't heard the message often enough yet.

The Bread Man Cometh

The bread pictured above just came out of our home oven after two years in the making. (Talk about long fermentation…)

It started innocently enough one day when Dave stumbled across a blog called The Fresh Loaf, a news and information website for "amateur bakers and artisan bread enthusiasts." And enthusiastic they are, to the point of obsessiveness, with a focus that edges right up to crazy. Interestingly, if not surprisingly, it's based right here in Portland, so perhaps that single-mindedness is understandable, considering how this town feels about other foodstuffs like bacon, waffles and fried chicken.

In any case, Dave made a few stabs at baking his own bread using recipes he garnered from various websites and books, even going so far as to start his own sourdough from the yeast left at the bottom of a bottle of Doggie Claws from Hair of the Dog. Results of these experiments were mixed, from lumpen to acceptable, but none had the crisp crust and bubbled interior of the artisan-style loaves he was dreaming of.

Then on Christmas a year ago some friends, aware of his growing interest (read: budding obsession), gave us a book called Tartine Bread by Chad Robertson. Robertson's use of a wet dough fermented over many hours along with his method of baking each loaf in a cast iron Dutch oven became the catalyst Dave needed to start turning out the gorgeous loaves he'd imagined.

This is not to say he's completely satisfied—after all, what obsessive…er…I mean…"enthusiast" is—but he's happy with the results he's getting. And, needless to say, so are those of us who've been lucky enough to have a thick slice warm from the oven or sopped with soup or braises.