Sometimes the do-it-yourself bug strikes because of a great interest in a particular craft; other times, it’s just the money. I am susceptible to both urges, as in a newfound passion for making crackers. It went like this:
Some weeks ago, an entire box of black pepper rice crackers disappeared. No mystery, though, they went into my mouth; only thing, they weren’t mine. Feeling guilty, I had a look in the cracker aisle at the I.G.A. Ouch. Eight bucks for the box, and not all that big a box at that.
It turns out that cracker recipes are not as plentiful as one might assume. Having found only a handful in my somewhat dated cookbook collection, there was only one thing left to do — to the internet!
As such things go, it was several more days before I got around to actually doing anything other than what we call these days “research.” You know, that endless noodling around on the computer, going down one rathole or another until you find yourself somehow on Facebook looking at pictures of kittens. All roads on the web eventually lead to kittens, don’t they? At least for me they do, unless I am 49 pages deep among the used sailboat parts on eBay.
It has been said that the internet is how the human race goes fully and finally insane. When that day comes, they’ll find me in a kitchen somewhere murmuring nearly incomprehensibly about buckwheat flour.
Assembling the ingredients was the other problem. Though Bob’s Ubiquitous Red Mill bags of lord knows what filled the shelves at the I.G.A., it took several more stops until I had what I needed.
Crackers are easy enough to make and take relatively little time once the oven is preheated. It’s just getting to that point that is the challenge.