Breadman Ultimate, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Machine 3 September 2009 12:29 pm
Posted by Tracy in : baking,breakfast,consumerism,convenience,cooking,eating,friends,kitchen gear,pictures,recipes,thank you Thursday , trackbackSo last week I posted a picture of some tomato sandwiches on homemade bread, and realized that there was more to their story. You see, that wasn’t just any homemade bread, but the fruit — I mean, product — of our bread machine, the Breadman Ultimate of this post’s title.
Breadman Ultimate is actually our second bread machine; its predecessor was not just our first bread machine but also the first in a series of appliances we’ve worn out through overuse — which you’ve got to admit is kind of badass awesome. That first bread machine was, no joke, Betty Crocker brand, I believe from a Fry’s Electronics in southern California. It was also the source of some controversy.
For starters, my previous experience with bread machine bread had left me underimpressed, to put it mildly. I mean, if I want to approximate bread with a substance of spongy, almost cake-like consistency, I’ll get something in a plastic bag from the store that lasts way longer than makes any kind of sense, amirite? Of course I’m right. (I’ve always been a food snob, kids. If anything, I’m developing a deeper appreciation of tasty crap in my old age, but that’s neither here nor there and really if anything is just more fodder for the TracyFood manifesta I keep meaning to write. Anyway.)
And but so then on top of that “it makes icky bread” skepticism was the fact that back around my birthday in 1999, when Peter got me the bread machine, our love was young and innocent and… ok, I can tell none of you are believing any of this so I’ll stop. We’d been together for closing in on two years, long enough to start feeling settled down and serious and stuff, and he got me an appliance. I mean, I’m all for practical gifts, don’t get me wrong, but this was way before I had enough of a sense of humor to get the boy a t-shirt of a fish delighted by a bicycle:
This is what a feminist’s partner looks like.
So yeah, I may have been a little snippy and over-interpretive of the bread machine’s significance at first. But Peter maintained his innocence, and — after many protests of the “I was giving you the gift of waking up to fresh-baked bread!” persuasion — eventually convinced me that he really didn’t mean anything horrifically antifeminist by it. Anyway. The gift of waking up to fresh-baked cinnamon raisin bread, it is indeed very persuasive, and by the end of October of that year, I was writing gloaty emails to Liz that “….he got me a bread machine for my birthday, and I like it? I am sooo domesticated…” Snerk. My mother, upon hearing the story of the gift and its fallout, took to referring to Peter as “Smooth Boothe.”
When the Betty Crocker finally died in 2003, we replaced it with the current Breadman Ultimate, which has served us well to this day (albeit with periodic dry spells when I was getting free stuff from Sundance or rocking the no-knead bread). It has been especially fantastic on several occasions this summer, occasions way too hot to fire up the oven. All of which is to say, this is a Thank You Thursday post for Peter, a.k.a. Smooth Boothe (and really, that’s Professor Smooth Boothe to you), the man who didn’t just get away with giving his radical feminist girlfriend a bread machine, but also gets mad Internet props for it almost ten years later.
