KEY POINTS:
As the good Lord said, "Man cannot live by bread alone", but for this foodie anyway it remains the staff of life.
And good bread is hard to find. The multiplicity of commercial brands in the supermarket, with their additives to make them keep longer, really don't cut it for me.
In Auckland the proliferation of hot bread shops and bakeries provides a much better product, often at less than half the price, but they are at a premium down here in Rotorua and the prices are not much different from those which supermarkets charge for the commercial product.
A week or so ago, when in Harvey Norman looking for a hard-drive DVD recorder to replace a defunct video machine, I spotted a display of breadmakers, and after due but brief consideration bought one.
What a delight it is when you find that an appliance actually lives up to your expectations of it, engendered by the advertising you've read or heard. Things like "simple to operate" and "wake up in the morning to the aroma of fresh-baked bread".
I wish I'd bought one years ago.
And what puts the jam on the bread and butter, so to speak, is that the product it produces is as good as, if not better, than even the bread I remember we used to get when I was a kid.
There was no such thing as wrapped or sliced bread in those days. You bought a loaf, a half-loaf or a quarter-loaf, raised pan or steam pan, and that was it.
And I recall holding my breath to see whether the half loaf the grocer broke off contained a convex or concave end.
If it was concave I was out of luck; if convex then I could have a feast of that end bit, picking off succulent pieces on the way home, leaving it exactly level.
The bread I make in my new machine is even tastier than that, I suppose because of advances in the quality of the ingredients - water, oil (or margarine or butter), sugar, salt, skim milk powder, a "bread improver" called Surebake, flour and dry yeast.
All I have to do is tip specified quantities of all the above into the pan in the order specified - a task that takes all of five minutes. And the machine, amazingly, does the rest. That is a mystery to me because all there is to achieve the whole process is a smallish stirring gizmo in the bottom of the bread pan and a heating element.
Plus, of course, the electronics which govern the type of bread to be made, the size of the loaf, the crust colour and the cooking time.
And the time delay which makes it possible indeed to wake up to the wonderful aroma of fresh-baked bread. Even that is dead simple. You just enter the number of hours ahead you want the bread to be cooked and, hey presto, it is.
While this is probably old hat to many readers who have owned breadmakers for years, as you can see I'm like a kid with a new toy.
The machine is programmed to make all sorts of breads and other baked products, but since I believe that if it isn't white, it's not really bread, the basic 1kg white loaf is my favourite.
Fresh it's like manna from heaven; toasted it is sublime.
Another thing that's hard to find these days is a really good pie, and a decent feed of fish and chips.
But in respect of these two favourite foods of mine, I have really fallen on my feet in buying the house in Rotorua which will be my home, I hope, until they cart me off to the old folks' home or the cemetery.
Within hours of moving in I discovered, just two minutes' walk away, an award-winning hot pie shop, whose various meaty products have since provided me with lunch but never, unfortunately, more than once a week.
There was a time when I ate a pie for lunch at least three times a week, but the uncomfortable and unsightly pot gut that comes with advancing age led me to cut back. The same with fish and chips, which these days are a rare treat but always much appreciated. Lo and behold, right next door to the pie shop is a fish and chippery which produces the best newspaper-wrapped fish and chips I have ever had the privilege of eating.
And on the other side of the pie shop is a Chinese takeaway which serves succulent helpings of chow mein (and other Oriental goodies) that leave no room for dessert.
Life is bliss.
