Cinnamon-Sugar Pull Apart Bread
I don’t have much to report, food-wise, this particular weekend. Friday we ate pizza. Saturday night we ate braised pulled pork sandwiches (made smoky with smoked paprika in the spice rub) and rented a movie. Halfway through said movie Lou expressed particular interest in going outside to investigate whatever was scurrying around under our back deck. Yes, it was a skunk. Yes, he bolted back inside, leaving the skunk to continue defending itself directly outside our sliding glass doors, which yes do open directly into the dining room/living room/kitchen of our small house. Yes, our niece ran out the front door with a pillow over her face.
Now, if you have not yet experienced direct, unadulterated, undiffused skunk spray, it’s nothing like the cloud of rotten egg smell you may have driven through on the highway, when everyone unanimously goes ew! a skunk! and plugs their noses and rolls up their windows. No. In its pure, straight-from-the-skunk form, it’s a smell of burning tires with the acridity of onions that crawls down your throat and into your eyes, and seeps into anything in its path that will hold onto smell. Including glass and stainless steel.
And so it came to be that at midnight I wrestled a reluctant 100 lb dog into the shower to wash him with dishsoap and vinegar, then drove to the late-night drugstore in a PigPenlike cloud of skunk to buy hydrogen peroxide (vet advice: mix with baking soda + dishsoap for dog cure) and extra-strength Febreeze. (Tomato juice, it turns out, is a myth. Thankfully, as I’m not sure I’m prepared to buy several dozen gallons of it to then bathe a large dog in. After seeing what Lou + water did to the bathroom, I can’t imagine what Lou + tomato juice would do.)
Have you smelled wet dog? How about skunked wet dog? Word on the street is we’ll have to now keep him out of the rain for, like, ever.
Today, the house smells of truck stop bathroom (all that Febreeze) with notes of skunk and vinegar. (So do we.) And so I baked a cinnamon pull-apart bread – what else could I do? – to offset the smell. It’s something I made last week that for some reason smelled more divine as it baked than cinnamon buns or scones or even a fully stuffed turkey. Nevermind incense or potpourri – I needed to bring out the big guns. It helped, and the warm cinnamon-sugar bread was a good consolation prize for those of us kept up all night by a smelly dog whining to go outside and play with his new BFF again. (Lesson not learned.)
Because I posted the over at the Family Kitchen I can’t post it here, but I thought you should know about it. It’s worth a click.
June 26 2011 | bread and Family Kitchen | 17 Comments »
