Two Christmases ago, I gave my mother a copy of Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day by Jeff Hertzberg and Zoe Francois. I’ve written about this marvelous bread-baking book before. It is truly one of my favorites and one of the most used in my cookbook collection.

My mom has never been much into baking, except during the holidays. She loves freshly baked bread, but doesn’t have the patience to make her own from scratch. I just knew that having Zoe and Jeff’s book would make her a bread-baking convert. And, it did.

The other day, Mom told me that she had a yen for raisin bread and was planning to make some using one of the recipes from the book. Well, as soon as I hung up the phone, all I could think about was eating hot, fresh from the oven raisin bread! I tried to distract myself with other things, but I couldn’t. It was ridiculous! I was absolutely obsessing over that damn raisin bread!

This article appears in Feb 17-23, 2010.