Do you ever bake bread for your dog? A few months ago MB gave me her bread machine right around the time I was trying the Atkins diet so it didn’t get much use. But now I have this Jes around who has her own bread machine and likes the smell of fresh baked bread in a house. I’ve managed to get the smell down, but not the bread. Actually I’ve only made two loaves recently. My few attempts early had turned out fine, but then I had some flour go buggy on me over the summer. Since then I’ve been keeping my flour in the fridge as a hive preventative.

The flour guys will tell you that your flour comes already stocked full of high protein critter eggs and they just need the right temperature and a little moisture to fulfill their generative potential and be born into a bleached bright bread basket of fertile soil. Anyway, keeping your flour in the fridge prevents the great hatching, or spawning, or whatever it is flour bugs do. It also prevents your flour from rising properly, because the yeast, just like the weevils or whatever the little black winged bastards are, don’t like the cold. Weevils gobble, but they don’t like cold.

As David, Jes’ stepfather said recently, “Cooking is an art, but baking is chemistry.” So my first loaf of French bread came out like pound cake. I did not intend to feed it to the dog, but I did leave the room, so fair’s fair. I was not upset to see that it had disappeared. I was a little upset to sit down in a sea of crumbs on the couch sometime later. But I accept a little rebellion from the canine now and again, after all he is a eunuch trapped in a house much of the day destined only to bark at the passing pedestrians, so why not seal a little bread.

Not one to take defeat at the periodic table of a little chemistry, I made a second loaf. I’d like to tell you how it was, but apparently the dog learned that I don’t get upset when he steals a loaf of bread – he’s seen Les Miserables and knows I’m a social liberal– so he got this last one on the morning of the baking.

Actually, the story is more humorous as I couldn’t get the loaf to drop from the bread machine pan so I began to try to pry it lose with a turkey carving fork. This did not work. It did, however, aerate the bread into an interesting Swiss cheese like formation. I sliced off three slices and offered them to Jes, who declined. When I came back in the room a few hours later the stale Swiss slices remained in their still life symmetry, but the loaf proper had gone the way of the dodo bird: extinction.

This is an informed assumption as there were no crumbs to indicate culpability. The usual suspects include: me, twenty seven fish, a cat and a dog. They are not flying fish or walking fish, the cat is smaller then the loaf in question, and it wasn’t me, so that leaves the repeat offender. What should I bake him next? The first two were French bread.