January 2

Sunday, like all Sundays, will feature French Bread, along with blueberry scones and cherry muffins. There will be corn chowder for soup. Be sure to check the freezer for discounted prices on Christmas specials like panettone and pound cake. And by the way, my French Bread recipe contains no dairy products. I use the simplest bread recipe of all time: flour, water, yeast and salt. For this reason, French Bread gets stale rather quickly, so it's best to freeze it if you're not going to eat it the same day. If you freeze it, the best way to use it later is to run it quickly under a cold water faucet and pop it in the oven at 350 for five minutes. This will crisp up the crust without drying out the crumb, and here's an interesting note: the reason bread gets stale is not because it dries out. Rather, it is because the water molecules in the bread become bonded to the gluten molecules. Briefly heating the bread shakes the water molecules loose of the gluten and restores a moist crumb. It only works once, though. After that, it's bread crumbs.