Woodlea

Here's to nostalgia..Today, en route to my mom's cardiologist appointment, we stopped for lunch at a little cafe in Bel Air. We've been there many times before, but this time, I took a seat looking out toward the rest of the shopping center, and saw...Woodlea Bakery. Now, if you grew up in Gardenville --or anywhere near Belair Road--in Baltimore, or went to St. Anthony of Padua School, you'd know the Woodlea Bakery. That was where you went after church on Sunday to buy a bag of doughnuts, or rolls to have with breakfast, or a cheesecake..or just about any baked goods that your mom didn't make. Forget this business of buying birthday cakes at the supermarket. Back then, it came from Woodlea's.

Beyond that, I went to school with one of the Hergenroeders--the family who owned the bakery. Almost everybody could say that because there were lots of Hergenroeders, and they lived in an apartment above the bakery. This was all rather exotic for me, as almost everyone I knew lived in a house with a yard and a sidewalk; certainly not above a shop.

But back to the important stuff. Seeing the sign, I asked my mom (who is not very dependable for information nowadays) if that was the same as the Woodlea Bakery I knew . When she claimed ignorance, I said I would just stop there after lunch if there was time and ask. Which I did, although it was unnecessary. When I stepped through the door and looked at the glass cases inside, I knew.

There were the doughnuts, the cakes, the lemon bars, the cookies...all the things I remembered and hadn't seen in forty years. I lapsed back into bakery nirvana, which generally means that I buy more than anyone could possibly eat while fresh. Cheesecake unlike the current two-inch-thick commercial versions with fruit toppings.. Woodlea's take has always had a bread-like crust, a layer of filling, and comes sprinkled with cinnamon. Doughnuts, marshmallow doughnuts. They were always my favorite--almost pure sugar. Honey-dips--now known as plain glazed doughnuts. Fat in its larval form. Bread and rolls and cakes of all sorts, looking just as they did when I could barely see into the glass cases.

I exercised great self-control. The visual was enough, really. I did get a bag of doughnuts for old times' sake, however. Two of the half-dozen were marshmallow.

Decisions, Decisions

I make a lot of decisions--of varying degrees of importance. It requires a certain amount of energy to decide how to order my day, to line up my agenda, to keep track of where I'm supposed to be and when. I have to decide every day what's for dinner and how long it will take to prepare, and whether I have all the ingredients necessary to do so. Not momentous fare, I'll grant you, but coupled with the bigger life decisions we all make every day, every week, every year, it's enough. And that's my problem: decisions.

What good is a blog if you can't use it to exercise your pet peeves? Right. I went shopping today for staples--you know? Those things that are far cheaper at a big box store than at your local supermarket; things you don't buy that often, but have to have on hand: paper towels, toilet paper, soap, laundry detergent...that sort of stuff. Perhaps you see my gripe coming...

I am tired of spending 10-15 minutes in the paper goods aisle, trying to calculate the best deal in paper towels and/or toilet paper. It is impossible. I am not even a math-phobe. I actually like math, and enjoy challenging myself on mental calculations of price per ounce or cost per sheet. Weird, I know--and supermarkets have taken a lot of the fun out of it by doing the math for you and recording the unit price. However, even these unit price stickers fail utterly when it comes to toilet paper. No two packages are alike, and therefore, you can't compare them. Ultra-soft, Ultra-Strong, Huge rolls, Mega rolls, Single rolls, Double rolls, Triple rolls: 8 rolls equivalent to 16 rolls, 5 rolls equivalent to 15 rolls. Or so they say. Then when you factor in the fact that at least one of the packages is on sale, and the unit price stickers are applied randomly to shelves with no regard for what is actually ON the shelf--you have a recipe for total mathematical meltdown, right there in the Target aisle. It isn't pretty.

Paper towels are no better. Single strength, double-strength, select-a-size, single rolls, double rolls, quilted vs. non-quilted, printed vs. white, recycled vs. regular. And then, the various brands vs. the generic models. There is no hope of figuring out the best buy in this case.

I'd like to say that these are the only situations that baffle me, but I am overwhelmed by choices in the supermarket as often as in the Target aisle. It's not even the esoteric items that bother me: it's the everyday stuff. Bread. Milk. Orange juice. Canned tomatoes. WATER!!! All in infinite variety. Literally. I have seriously considered mapping out the dairy case: Fat-free, skim, reduced fat, low fat, whole, soy...and that's before you even think about the size of the container. Orange juice? It should just be orange juice, but no. We have to decide the level of pulp we want and what additives we want--calcium, perhaps? extra vitamin D? Bread comes in wheat, honey wheat, white, white whole wheat, not to mention the rye and pumpernickle options. And what ever happened to canned tomatoes? Now we have whole, diced, diced with onion, petite diced, Mexican style, Italian style, packed in juice, large, small, Roma, with chiles or without. Even water, for heaven's sake, comes with or without flavors, vitamins, or carbonation, with a pop-up or screw-down top, and from a variety of springs, mountain streams or filters.

I am all in favor of open markets and competition. I know it's good for business to build better mousetraps and to seek out and cater to new markets. But when carried to this extreme, product proliferation is driving me back to the time when I bought solely by brand name, and usually the brand name that I saw in my mother's pantry. Vermont Maid syrup, McCormick's teabags, Minute Maid orange juice, Quaker Oats. Distrustful of the myriad of products, I retreat toward the tried-and-true basic versions of the familiar. There's a reason I only buy Pepperidge Farm white sandwich bread. It's one less conscious decision I have to make.

Winter Doldrums

Can I blame the weather for the fact that I've not posted anything since....well, since longer ago than I can remember quickly? There comes a time in the year when everything is old and tired and boring--including me. January seems to be that time for me: the post-Christmas letdown, the re-packing of all the stuff that comes out for the holidays, the search for the everyday stuff that I had to put away...After a while, you get the feeling no one would notice anyway if you left a few things out all year. (Come to think of it, the Nativity set that I was keeping out till after Epiphany is still on the shelf for Lent. Yikes!)

Anyway, three weeks in San Diego cured at least a portion of my January ennui--or at least pushed it farther back in my mind. It's now March, which is only a hop, skip and a jump till spring.