Our Hourly Bread

Bread doesn’t demand much of you while it rises--just that you be home three or four hours ahead to get it started. If you don’t have that luxury, you can add club soda or beer to a package of Quick Loaf mix, stir it up, let it sit 10 minutes in a loaf pan and bake. The resulting loaf doesn’t have the chewy, elastic texture of kneaded bread, but it has a good fresh-baked aroma, and for home-made bread that’s ready one hour after you open the package, with essentially no work, that’s not bad. The cracked wheat and nine-grain flavors are particularly good, and there are also garlic, onion, oatmeal and cinnamon-raisin mixes. In supermarkets.

Swimming for the Halibut

Unlike other flatfish, halibut are swift swimmers and can easily rise to the surface to feed. In other words, they don’t, as it were, flounder.