52 Loaves, Three Continents and Six Daily Calls to Prayer

How did William Alexander have time to bake, let alone travel when he was dealing with renovating the big brown house in the town that time forgot and tending his 22 beds of vegetables.  Well, the horticulture does recur in this book when he decides to grow the wheat, to grind the grain, to build a brick oven to bake the perfect loaf of bread.  Ah come on, talk about obsessive compulsive.  Even rereading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance to not settle him down.  It is only when he goes to Normandy to a monastery built around 635 AD does he come close to his perfect boule, actually a more communal bastarde, given that the monks want each of them to have a slice that is equal to everyone else's.

While I laughed by the first few pages of The $64 Tomato, I was tearing up in the last few pages of this book.  His critiques from his children who only want him to make croissants, his outlay of huge amounts of money to learn how to make restaurant quantities of bread at Escoffier in Paris, and his side trip to Morocco, all come together to have taught him what he needs to know to reintroduce home or in this case abbey baked bread to the monks.  Only to return home to miss the regime of vigils to complines and to receive an email that the monks will vote on whether to continue to use his recipes.

I think I have another one of Alexander's books on reserve but it seems a long time in coming in from the hinterland branches.  Will head over tomorrow to return this one and collect another, I hope.  Otherwise, I think I will start another alphabet sequence of biographies.