Monthly archive: April, 2009

My husband is 6 feet 3 inches tall. Most Ticos are short, which is why we bought a certain American Standard toilet. It is called The Elderly Cadet and is a couple inches taller than your average toilet.

I was appalled by the name and almost refused to buy it. I feel about it the way I feel about certain candy bars I refuse to buy because of their names. I don’t want to say to the store clerk, for example: “I’d like a Big Daddy, please.” I just can’t bring myself to do it. And these days it seems a person might get into bit of trouble, depending on the inclinations of the clerk.

In my youth I stuck to Hershey chocolate bars or Hershey with almonds or Fire Stix (those lovely hot cinnamon hard candies with plastic wrap that invariably failed to come off, allowing the purchaser to eat that too). When feeling adventurous I’d have a Mounds or an Almond Joy, (because sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you don’t). I realize that my world was made all that much smaller by not trying the others but I maintained my dignity.

Now I find myself doing my daily business on something called The Elderly Cadet.

Let us reflect upon the meaning here for a moment, (as I have done while sitting on this throne of ours). The word cadet means, according to my American Oxford: 1) a young trainee in the armed services or police force, or 2) archaic. A younger son or daughter.

We all know what elderly means and some of us are becoming uncomfortably familiar with not only its definition but how it feels on a cellular level.

So here is my question: what exactly is an elderly cadet? Does this imply that we are getting a bit old to call ourselves cadets any longer, or–– what I think it means–– that we are cadets in the ever-growing army of ancients. Recruits, if you will. Not exactly old yet, but still not wanting to bend the knees quite that far to reach the seat.

However, cadet also stems from early 17th Century French and specifically from Gascon dialect capdet, a diminutive based on Latin caput–– ‘head.’ The notion “little head” or “inferior head” gave rise to that of [younger, junior.]

So maybe this is simply humor from a toilet designer at American Standard, and we actually have a toilet called The Elderly Head. If so, the person who named it probably used to have a job naming candy bars. The ones I refused to buy!

There are a lot of them



My mother introduced me to Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day a month or so ago, and it has now become affectionately known in our family as ABIFMAD. I gather the authors, Zoe Francois and Jeff Hertzberg, refer to it as AB-in-5. It really doesn’t matter what anyone calls it, the important thing is that this bread is fantastic.

Fantastic and simple.

I love bread. I love good bread and was paying a whopping $8 a loaf when Alan and I lived in the States. And that was several years ago. God only knows what it’s going for now. Since moving here I have made bread and bagels but could never accomplish what I used to buy in the artisan bakeries up north. But it was either make it or do without.

Costa Rica is a wonderful country for many things, but bread isn’t one of them. In fact, their bread stinks. My mother once described it as feeling and tasting like “blown up soda crackers.” To be fair, the last few years have shown a bit of improvement but only because of all the Italian expats here. There are places to find a decent baguette, but the vast majority of Costa Rican bread remains the infamous Bimbo– the Latin version of Wonder Bread–or the blown-up-soda-cracker bread my mother remembers so fondly.

Because of her, and the authors of ABIFMAD, I am now making wonderful artisan bread. It is chewy and fragrant, and the crust, as my father likes to say, fights back. It wasn’t an instantaneous success story, but that is only because I cannot locate (easily) unbleached flour, which absorbs water at a different rate than bleached flour, and I had to adjust a bit because of the humidity here. But my third batch came out perfectly, and I might add that none of my efforts have been throw-aways. By perfect I mean that the crumb was light and shot with air holes, the crust crackly and crunchy, and the flavor yeasty and full-bodied. BREAD!

The recipe is so easy it’s ridiculous and everyone should be baking their own bread from now on. Essentially, the discoverer of this method, Jeff Hertzberg, a doctor, is lazy–by his own admission– and he was looking for a way to bake bread without all the fuss. He mixed all the ingredients together threw it in a container and let it rise for two hours and stuck it in the fridge. When he wanted to bake a loaf he simply pulled off a wad of dough, let it rise, and then baked it on a pizza stone in a very hot oven, Voila!

One batch makes four loaves and will sit in the fridge for up to two weeks, When you want bread pull off a wad and bake it. I’m sure he had failures before this incredible discovery, but we are all now the beneficiaries of his efforts.

I have improvised a bit. I have no pizza stone, so I use a cast iron skillet. My dough tends to spread rather that rise in this humid climate so I put it on parchment paper and let it rise inside a proper sized pot; now it goes up instead of out. Then I transfer it to the skillet when it’s time to bake.

Today for lunch we had a roasted tomato slice and mozzarella cheese with pesto drizzled over it, a tossed salad with romaine lettuce and arugula, and a small fillet of salmon…

And bread!