I've been making pumpernickel bread—in the bread machine (wouldn't want to give you false impressions of a modern-day Betty Crocker). I have a fondness for this dark German bread, and after failing to find a local bakery with an excellent concoction, or even a real  one, I now make my own. So many of them list their first ingredient as enriched flour, the second as wheat flour, and the third as molasses...rye flour being so far down on the list it might be eligible for unemployment in the bread-ingredients market. It looks like a duck, sure...it even quacks like a duck...but it's totally a pigeon.

Getting back on topic, I cut a slice of bread for toast each morning. I like my toast DARK. I mean, pumpernickel starts dark, but I want you to be able to tell it's been toasted—no easy feat, and particularly with such a dense bread. I once ordered my toast well done at a restaurant and received quite the look. I don't order toast in restaurants anymore.

I am not the only one who uses the toaster...surprised? Yeah, I bet. I am good at throwing curves your way...keeps you young. We have, however, three distinct preferences for bread. I run toward the hearty ryes and pumpernickel, Debbie toward whole wheat, and Brenda will only eat white. I, naturally, am the first awake, the first to use the toaster for the day. I slide the dial over to the darkest setting, and when the program completes, I flip the bread and let it run through again. Pumpernickel is not an easy bread to toast. It is rather resistant to the whole process, actually, and I'm considering the purchase of a hand torch.

It was the other day, as Brenda buttered her toast, that I noticed her looking somewhat surly. I am intelligent on many levels, but none so profoundly as knowing how to address my aunt when she has that set to her countenance. "What's wrong?" I questioned gently, unobtrusively.

"The toaster keeps getting bumped to the highest setting!" Guiltily, tellingly, I looked down from her gaze. "Is it YOU that keeps doing that!?" I nodded, knowing true fear. My knees began to knock together in terror, and my jaw trembled as my eyes pleaded for mercy. The latest reports read that white bread toasts quickly.