David Dubrow

Author

Breadhead Friday: Lean Bread

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A lean bread is one that has very little fat or sugar in it, if any.  Most sandwich breads aren’t lean breads: they’re enriched, so they contain things like sugar, butter, oil, flavorings, and other such things.  They’re great, but I wanted to make the lean bread recipe from Peter Reinhart’s Artisan Breads Every Day.

The recipe is very simple: water, flour, yeast, and salt.  You mix until everything’s combined, and instead of kneading it traditionally, you do the stretch-and-fold method four times, going in ten minute intervals.  It’s amazing how just one stretch-and-fold can take a rough, coarse, wet mess and turn it into a glossy, springy dough.

Shaping the dough

To develop flavor in the wheat, this dough requires an overnight rise in the refrigerator.  When you’re ready to bake, you take it out, shape it, and let it rise at room temperature for at least two hours.

More shaping

Typical hearth baking is next: a pan of hot water at the bottom of the oven to create steam, and bake at high heat.

The finished loaves. We both need to work on shaping and scoring

Overall, a fun project, and one that produces tasty bread.  I achieved a few larger holes in the crumb, but the important thing is that my little boy and I did this thing together.  We’ll see if he picks up the bread bug.

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Twitter Observations from a Twidiot

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A couple of weeks ago, I created a Twitter account and joined the Twitterverse.  Through observation and a few online articles, I’ve been navigating it as well as can be expected.  I’m tweeting, retweeting, following, and favoriting.

Like any social medium, it can be a time sink, and you get out of it what you put into it.  It’s difficult to be clever, current, and relentlessly positive in 140 characters or less.  I admire everyone who does it well.  It’s a skill that requires practice.  I have opinions and thoughts like everybody else, but I don’t want to alienate virtual strangers with unwanted political discourse or bitching.

My ultimate intent is to meet new people, learn from them, and discuss things of mutual interest.  And, of course, interest them in my own writing so they want to read my books.

One of the things many Twitter experts say is that you shouldn’t constantly spam Twitter with links to your book.  This makes perfect sense: if my only experience of you is you stuffing a book in my face, saying, “LIKE HORROR? READ THIS IT WILL SCARE THE DICK RIGHT OUT OF YOUR PANTS” over and over again, I will get the impression that you’re not interested in anything else, and will just mute you from the timeline.  However, there’s not a lot of air between constantly spamming links to your book and constantly spamming links to your writing blog, especially when the articles you’re linking to are a few years old.  It’s still spamming.

Many authors on Twitter do this.  I don’t understand it.  Why follow someone if all they do is try to sell you something, especially if it’s a book you’ve already read?

One of the most off-putting things I’ve experienced is getting direct messages from people I’ve just followed, asking me to buy their books or like their Facebook pages.  So it’s not enough that your typical public communication is “BUY MY BOOK”, but you also sidle up to everyone you meet and say, “Buy my book.”  Don’t…don’t do that.

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Louis Awerbuck

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Typically, I reserve Friday posts for my hobby, which is baking bread.  I’m brooming that this week because this is the last month Louis Awerbuck’s column will be running in SWAT Magazine.  Louis died on June 24, 2014.

His friend Robbie Barrkman wrote a moving tribute to him that you can read here.

If you’ve never heard of him, it wouldn’t be a surprise, and Louis himself wouldn’t have cared one way or the other.  He didn’t seek the spotlight.  To call him a firearms and tactics instructor would be technically correct, but they’re labels, and labels are necessarily limiting.  For the straight biography, visit his website.

I worked with Louis (pronounced “Louie”) on two instructional video projects in the early 2000’s: Only Hits Count, a combat shooting video, and Safe at Home, a home defense video.  The leather-jacketed villain holding the hammer on the cover of Safe at Home is me (with hair).

Simply put, Louis was a man of respect.  A brilliant tactician with real world experience that he never boasted about: it just informed what he taught and how he taught it.  Self-effacing almost to a fault, and had an incredibly dry, clever sense of humor.  His delivery was deadpan in a way you’ve never heard before.  Sere.  Arid.  I can’t claim him as a friend, but I really quite liked and admired him.  During my time in publishing, I’d worked with many, many combat shooting experts.  Some good, some great, some mediocre.

Louis was in a class by himself.  I wish I’d known him better.  It would have made me better.

Requiescat in pace, Louis.

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Hope

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I’m going to tell you a secret that I hope you won’t tell anybody else.  Keep it on the QT, if you please.

You ready?  Here it is:

I hate hope.  I absolutely loathe it.  I work hard to eradicate it from my personal lexicon, and when I find myself using it, I feel embarrassed.

Hope is helplessness elevated to virtue.  Hoping is everything you’re not doing when you want to make a change.  Hoping doesn’t get you what you want.  Hoping something happens or doesn’t happen has never made something happen or not happen at any time in the history of the universe.

At least with worry, you’re thinking about possibilities, and if possible, planning contingencies to mitigate that worry.  With prayer, you’re acting positively according to the tenets of your faith.

If you’re down to hope, you’ve got nothing left.  The quiver is empty.  That’s not a place to be.

Obviously, there are certain things we can’t change: the weather, the outcome of a sporting event, the success of a surgery, etc.  Things entirely outside of our control.  In that case, what’s better: hoping, or planning?

Success means eliminating the requirement of hope in one’s plans.  Success requires work.  Hope requires helplessness.

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Breadhead Friday: Ciabatta

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My go-to bread recipe is Jason’s Quick Coccodrillo Ciabatta bread.  The term “quick” can be a bit of a misnomer in our gotta-have-it-now society, as it takes more than three hours to make, but compared to other breads with overnight rises and a dozen ingredients, it can’t be beat.

Puffy, wobbly, but on the peel
The simplicity of it is incredible.  It’s only made of four things: flour, water, salt, and yeast.  And somehow it provides flavor that’s way beyond what you’d expect for something so basic.  The crumb is pleasantly chewy, and the inside is almost creamy in texture, full of those big holes that artisan bakers love to achieve.
Goodness baked right in
This is the bread my favorite pizza crust recipe is based on.  There are a few tricks to it, like placing the fragile, wobbly loaves onto a peel without ruining the air pockets, but once you have that down, you have bread that truly unlocks the flavors trapped in the wheat.
Your obligatory cross-section
The dough’s terribly wet and sticky, and doesn’t behave the way you’d like it to.  You can’t really shape it, but if you wanted, you could put it on a parchment-lined French bread pan and make a cylinder out of it.  It needs the flour to grab onto, so you can’t just oil everything for this one: you need to dust the parchment and the dough with plenty of flour to get it right.
Look, look!  I got the big holes!
If you like good, simple bread, make this ciabatta.  I’ve done a little experimenting with putting herbs and powdered garlic into the dough, but the best treat is just eating it straight.  You would not believe that plain white flour, salt, water, and yeast could taste so good.
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Robin Williams, My Mother, and Me

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Like most people old enough to remember the 1970’s and 80’s, my first memories of Robin Williams were of his role in Mork & Mindy.  I loved the show; my favorite episode was the one where Mork, through the use of over-the-counter cold medication, accidentally shrank himself out of our universe and into a parallel one.  To a nine-year-old, this was mind-ripping stuff.

Robin Williams – Live at the Met remains one of my all-time favorite stand-up routines, right next to Eddie Murphy – Delirious.  Thank you, HBO and PRISM, for broadcasting those laughs a dozen times a day.
I never saw Dead Poets Society, Mrs. Doubtfire, Good Will Hunting, Patch Adams, or several other of the movies that made Williams so beloved and famous.  I liked What Dreams May Come, despite its somewhat maudlin tone.  And he was quite good in The Final Cut; as a former video editor, the film struck a real chord with me.  
That’s pretty much the extent of my experience with his work.  I’m really quite unsentimental when it comes to actors.  I respect what they do, and most of them live lives that are entirely irrelevant to mine.
In the wake of his death, there are renewed calls for a “national conversation” about mental illness, including clinical depression, and I understand.  We all want to make sense of terrible things (most of the time we can’t), and we all want to make sure they don’t happen again (ditto).  The problem is that a national conversation won’t help anyone.
A national conversation wouldn’t have helped my mother, who committed suicide a little over a year ago.
She had been a substance abuser her entire adult life.  Pills, alcohol, you name it.  I suffered abuse from her in ways that I’m quite unable to discuss with anyone.  When my father was dying of cancer, she would steal some of his pain and sleep medications for her own use.  That was what her mental illness, her addiction, made her into.
And none of us ever discussed it.  Not when we were kids, and very little when we became adults.  We didn’t discuss it with her, my father, or anyone else.  Denial comes in many forms, and not talking about something is vastly easier than talking about it.  
Becoming a father myself and watching my wife become a loving mother to our little boy forced me to confront a lot of the unresolved issues related to my mother’s substance abuse.  Mainly, I resolved to give my son a different set of childhood experiences from mine.  That will redound to his benefit, I’m certain.
About a year and a half after my father died, my mother ended her own life.  This is the eulogy I wrote for her funeral:
What my mother did to herself is a dark, terrible thing, but it would be worse if we didn’t learn anything from it.  She suffered greatly from mental illness, and a symptom of that was her substance abuse.  It was, unfortunately, one of the more significant elements of her character, and all of my memories of her are colored by it.

What made her illness all the more cruel was that she was capable of good things, and I know that she wanted to be better than she was.  She just couldn’t.

Substance abuse is very easily denied, both by the abuser and the people around the abuser.  The problem is that denying it doesn’t make it go away.  As difficult as it is, it has to be confronted and acknowledged.  Only then can it be treated.

With my mother, that didn’t happen.  

She won’t get to see her grandchildren grow up and become successful.  She won’t get to visit her husband’s gravesite and reminisce.  She didn’t get the treatment she needed, nor would she have accepted it if it were offered.  Her last days involved intolerable suffering.  

If we can learn from that, perhaps she didn’t die in vain.  
My intent here is not to bleed all over Williams’s casket.  His death isn’t about me or my mother.  Everyone reading this very likely has good memories associated with watching him, and that’s a nice thing.  He’d have liked that, I’m sure.  But as loved a figure as he was, it wasn’t enough.
My mother, who in her later years became a more and more vitriolic, divisive character, didn’t stand a chance.  
I can’t pretend to know what life was like in the Williams household, nor would I presume to.  But, like everything, it’s vital that we take what happened and learn from it.  Don’t just have a national conversation.  Have a personal conversation.

Perhaps they talked about it all day long, and Williams got so sick of it, he had to find a permanent way out.  I don’t know.  Just don’t sweep it under the rug.  Such concealed monsters don’t stay under there, and they don’t get smaller from concealment: quite the opposite.  They tend to take over the whole house.

So we’ll grieve now, and for the lucky majority of us, the grief will be short-lived.  Questions of “why” and “what should I have done differently” are for others to ask, which is a blessing.  We’re spared the pain his closest associates and family must feel, and my sympathies lie with them.  
Whether depressives self-medicate through alcohol or alcoholics are depressed because of their addiction is immaterial: the point is that denying a family problem never solves it.  As ugly and terrible and uncomfortable as it is, you must acknowledge it; only then can treatment begin.

Rest in peace, Robin.  I wish that you hadn’t done what you did.
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