"Dear Lord, we thank you for this food, and we ask you to bless it --- especially tonight because Daddy cooked it. Amen."
All right, so perhaps I'm not quite as good of a cook as my wife. You have to understand, though, back in the old days, when I was single, there really wasn't much of a demand for me to do any cooking.
My main foods at that time were cereal, peanut butter, pizza, and burritos. Not all together, of course --- well maybe in certain combinations --- but generally I ate them separately.
Now, suddenly, I'm married with four kids and...
Well, I guess that didn't exactly happen suddenly, but...
Anyway, my wife and I both work, but since I work at home I'm often the one that does the cooking.
I had to do some learning in the beginning. I remember my wife used to come into the kitchen while I was cooking and say, "Smells like you scorched the food."
About the first ten times this happened, I just sort of ignored her. Eventually, however, I got curious.
"What do you mean by 'scorching'?" I asked.
"Scorching is when the food on the bottom of the pan sticks and burns to an inedible crisp," she answered coldly. It seemed to me she was implying that it was a bad thing, too.
"It makes the whole pot full taste burned," she continued with a look of disgust on her face. To which I replied, "What? You can prevent that?"
After that, I started taking a few lessons from her on how to cook. She taught me about stirring the food while it's in the pot, not cooking everything on high, greasing pans before putting food in them, blowing the foam off of the pot when the macaroni starts boiling over, and other advanced techniques. Eventually, I started getting pretty good at a few things so I decided to try something a little more complicated.
I tried making bread.
Now, I'm really good at making biscuits. In fact, they are one of my specialties, but they're not quite as complicated as making bread.
First, there was this whole idea of "kneading" the bread. My wife came up to me just after I'd broken my second wooden spoon while trying to stir more flour into an already thick lump of dough.
"No, no, no!" she cried, obviously distressed over the death of the spoon. "You are supposed to KNEAD the bread!"
"Of course I NEED the bread!" I replied. "Why do you think I'm making it?"
However, it's the whole idea of letting it "raise" that has proven to be the most difficult for me to master. You wouldn't think it would be all that hard. I mean, all that is required is to simply let the dough sit around by itself for a while. And in fact, that's really not the problem. It's the coming back on time later that I find so challenging.
The last time I tried to make bread I set it aside to let it raise, just like I was supposed to do, and went about my business.
Some time later, I just happened to be walking through the kitchen when I noticed this giant balloon sitting in a bread pan with a towel thrown over the top of it.
"What have the kids done now?" I thought to myself as I lifted the towel. "Oh yeah! I'm making bread today," I concluded.
I hadn't noticed that the recipe was called "Balloon Bread", but apparently that's what it was. So, I threw it in the oven and proceeded to cook it. A giant loaf of bread for all my hungry kids to feed on for a few days sounded good to me.
Some time later, I just happened to be walking through the kitchen past the oven when I thought to myself, "Why is it so hot over here? What have the kids been messing with now?"
Amazingly, it wasn't burned, too badly anyway. You see, once in a while I just happen to come along at roughly the right time. In the end, though, I wasn't all that impressed with the Balloon Bread recipe. To be honest, it tasted more like sour air than bread. I don't really remember pumping it full of carbon dioxide myself, but I'd swear that was what was in there. Hmmm, carbonated bread. What will they think of next?
One day, however, I decided to put forth a tremendous effort into my bread making. I worked hard, set timers so I'd remember what I was doing, and everything. Plus, I scrapped the Carbonated Balloon Bread recipe, and went with one from another cook book.

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