SOMETHING IMPORTANT IS HAPPENING!

There are few things I enjoy more than making bread.

If I'm puttering around the house and need to feel like I'm doing something, I sling some yeast into a bowl of water, get out the flour and salt and dust up the countertop. Working my knuckles into the soft dough fulfills some primitive urge.

And as long as bread is rising in the kitchen — even if I'm lazing on the couch — I feel like something important is happening. Someting is being accomplished.

The first real bread maker I knew was Rick. Occasionally my mom would make some sort of homemade bread, usually something quick without yeast. And the lunch ladies at my small, rural school made dinner rolls from scratch. My favorite lunch as a kid was "pig in the blanket" — a hot dog encased in a giant, soft, freshly baked bun.

But Rick was the first person I ever knew who loved making bread, who really delighted in the process from beginning to end and thought hard on how to improve the next batch. He made circular loaves in coffee cans using a sourdough starter he brought home from Africa. He experimented with different fats and flour and molasses and yogurt and herbs. I'd go over to his apartment and there'd be a dozen brown loaves cooling on the countertop. The fragrance would make you weep. And nothing was better than the sight of butter melting into the round slices, except the taste.

My ex-husband, Steve, was also a bread man. He got a hankering once to make a baguette at home, and I thought he was crazy. Who is qualified to make French bread at home? Don't you have to have a special oven? And equipment and ingredients? Don't you have to be French, for Pete's sake? It reminded me of when his mother, in one of those ridiculous cost-saving measures that bored, well-to-do housewives are so mysteriously susceptible to, tried to make "Heinz" ketchup at home. A complete disaster.

But Steve was determined, and before long he had learned to make a long, beautiful, tasty loaf of golden goodness — and it was authentic to boot: no ingredients except water, white flour, salt and yeast. The variables are rising time and humidity and oven temperature and a lot of little factors he loved to obsess over. (Come to think of it, Steve and Rick also made homemade beer and I've heard lengthy discourses from each on the miracles and vagaries of yeast. God, I love men who make things — how they combine their boyish passion for science and erector sets and "how things work" into something so delightfully domestic and earthy as bread and beer).

One Christmas, my parents bought us a bread machine. We used it maybe a dozen times before I gave it to Goodwill. The bread was passable, but not exceptional, and if you don't get your hands gooey making bread, then you haven't really made bread.

So my favorite thing to do on my day off is to mix up some dough — like that which became the Irish brown bread pictured above — to get my fingers all sticky with goodness and wait for the miracle. Sometimes I get the hankering rather late in the day, so I don't have a finished product until almost midnight. And I have no one to share it with. Thank God!