Posted by Loulou on May 25, 2013 | 0 comments

I just wandered in from the garden, and there was this smell…I can only describe it as the smell of home.

Mama was baking bread.

She makes this flat, golden focaccia when company is coming and it only takes a few minutes to stir up the dough (I watch, fascinated, but she won’t let me help because paws and bread dough don’t mix that well, so to speak), and then she puts it in a bowl to rise and in about 45 minutes, she gets the oven real hot, pours the dough (it’s a soft dough, soft as my rat from Ikea) onto a big sheet (not a bed sheet, a metal sheet used in the kitchen) that’s brushed with olive oil.

(Yes, the same olive oil she dribbles over my food and without which I now cannot function—how about that sentence structure? Hey, I’m a literate kitty, and not as in ‘litter’).

I try to use my paw to help her stretch the dough out to the sides of the bake sheet but I get nowhere…

When the dough is stretched thin with holes in it from OUR fingers/paws, she brushes it with more olive oil and snips some green stuff on it that grows next to my catnip—called rosemary, I think, although it doesn’t make roses and who the heck is Mary?

Then she throws some salt on top—the kind that comes in big grains, not that fine stuff (that I spilled all over the floor yesterday) and then she bakes it until the smell starts attracting the neighbors and papa and me, far away in the garden but with a pretty good sense of when focaccia is baking!

The bread gets all toasty golden and when it’s cool, I get little bites cut up in tiny pieces to go with my chicken dinner (not as in southern fried or KFC but poulet en gelée, as they call it here in France. The gelatine is good for my nails, I think.

Mama says that if you want to sell your house, bake a focaccia before the buyers arrive…

Mama’s mama’s mama made tender little dinner rolls all shiny with butter and mama’s papa’s mama made kolaches, which are Bohemian (when Bohemia was Bohemia long ago) and might even turn up in the Kitty Food section one day. All these mamas and papas are confusing, I know, but just be glad I’m not doing ”begets”–that’s begets as in Biblical, not baguettes!

She also says that there is a secret ingredient in every loaf of her bread—a nice big pinch of love, and this kitty knows all about that.