Inside Great Harvest Bread Co.

One of my many food fantasies is that I’ll someday own a small cafe—just a breakfast great harvest 15and lunch joint where your coffee mug is topped off every three seconds and the food is unpretentious and comforting.  At Mary’s Cafe we’ll do all the baking in house.  There will be homemade bagels slathered in cream cheese, scratch english muffins topped with melting butter and blackberry jam, and piping hot paninis made from homemade focaccia.  For dessert?  Triple chocolate cake, and flourless chocolate cake, and molten chocolate cake topped with chocolate fudge and homemade ice cream…  oh, and maybe a chocolate chip cookie or two.

Granted this fantasy hinges on my baking experience, which consists primarily of baking the cookie recipe on the back of the Nestle chocolate chips bag a thousand times or two.  (I don’t care what people say—it’s ok to use the recipe on the back of the bag.)

Fresh-baked bread is one of the simple pleasures in life.  I consider myself a free-basket-of-bread connoisseur, but I’ve never been behind the scenes at a cafe (or a bakery for that matter).  That is until last month, when I got the opportunity to knead some dough at the Great Harvest Bread Co. in North Charlotte.

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Chicken Pesto Paninis

It’s Thursday–the day I spend approximately two to three hours scouring the internet, flipping through cookbooks, and rifling through my big black book in search of amazing recipes and/or inspiration for things to cook this weekend.  It’s a ritual that borders somewhere between dedication and obsession.

Nothing cheeses me off more than spending all those hours (HOURS!) researching on top of shelling out my hard earned moo-lah on ingredients, taking the time to cook the darned thing, and having it turn out to be a flop.  After trying one-too-many frown-evoking recipes, I adopted a new blog bylaw in 2012:  only post recipes that I would recommend (without hesitation) to a friend.  Even though I painstakingly snap photos of everything I cook, if it ain’t delicious, it ain’t going on the blog.  Jarrod knows exactly what I mean when I ask if a dish is “blog worthy,” and he’s pretty truthful about so-so meals (in a I’m-just-glad-you-cooked-please-don’t-make-me-do-this sort of way).

When he REALLY likes something, he doesn’t hesitate to let me know.  Like this Chicken Pesto Panini, for instance, which he declared the BEST SANDWICH OF HIS LIFE.

If those aren’t fighting words, I don’t know what are.

Chicken Pesto Panini (8 of 10)

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