Bread

Iva Thorpe from Headland, Ala., was looking for a recipe for a sweet potato cake or bread that had crushed pineapple and nuts in it. I did not receive any responses from readers to Thorpe's query, but I thought a sweet potato bread sounded perfect for this time of year and was worth doing a little research. I found several quick bread recipes on the Web and decided to test one from the Ontario sweet-potato growers' website, http://www.ontariosweetpotato.com. The recipe comes from Bob and Juli Proracki , the owners of Round Plains Plantation, growers of sweet potatoes near Waterford, Ontario.

My mostly love/sometimes-hate relationship with bread baking began at age 14 with a loaf of the best-tasting cheese bread I ever made, though maddeningly, I could never duplicate the results. Maybe it was beginner's luck, or maybe I was just thrilled to get bread and not a giant cheddar pancake. Nonetheless, I got hooked on bread baking and have kept at it. It brings a sense of great accomplishment and an adrenaline rush to unearth a quintessential and/or never-fail recipe. Sometimes I turn to bread baking for what Alison Furbish, web media coordinator for King Arthur Flour, calls a "comforting activity with an emotional component.

The crouton in Marie Louise Bistro's duck salad became key evidence in a mystery that, if anything, made remarkable lunch fare that much more intriguing. 12:40 p.m. The bistro has four outdoor tables we passed on because of the heat. The door opens to a cafe setting with a case displaying pasta and pastries and other goodies that we lingered over for a minute before we were greeted and seated in the first floor dining area. Above us, a loft with bar is the fourth distinct section.

Just as the Sunday morning Baltimore Farmers' Market underneath the Jones Falls Expressway was winding down, Arthur G. Morgan was gearing up for action. At noon Morgan hustled around the market picking up blue plastic bins filled with donated produce. Exchanging pleasantries with the merchants, he collected mounds of carrots, baskets of cucumbers, mountains of greens, a bin of apples, some herbs and several boxes of ripe Eastern Shore tomatoes. He piled the goods into the back of his aged Silverado and drove a few blocks up the Fallsway to Our Daily Bread.

It was a grim morning recently when the toaster broke, but it pushed me to find new twists on the morning munch and to examine the habits of my fellow toast eaters. I chatted up supervisors at two area strongholds of browned bread, Nona Nielsen-Parker, the co-general manager of Atwater's at Belvedere Square Market, and Cris Janoff at the Stone Mill Bakery in Green Spring Station, to get the latest on toast. They informed me that organic honey is making a run at raspberry jam as the toast topping of choice.

When John Long was a child, there were minnows in Bread and Cheese Creek, a stream that wandered by his grandfather's house in Dundalk. Long lives in that house now, and the stream named for the rations consumed by British and American troops on its shores during the War of 1812 is now clogged with debris - everything from shopping carts to refrigerators, tires and automobile doors. Long, his wife, Erin, and 11-year-old daughter Tamsyn, plus nearly 100 volunteers, cleared out about a mile of the creek Saturday.

One recent morning in Catonsville, Ned Atwater was wielding his bench knife, cutting lumps of dough and shaping them into the two types of bread, Irish brown and Irish soda, that he will offer to Baltimore-area bread eaters on St. Patrick's Day. Like many things Irish, there is a lively debate about what goes in their breads. For example, one traditional version of an Irish brown bread calls for oatmeal. For some, this bread offers a hearty taste of the old country. For others, like Atwater, the loaf can be leaden.

After two back-to-back storms that left Baltimore struggling under a double layer of snow, several city residents said they were grateful to have access to some basic resources - even if they could not call them their own. Alvesta Williamson, 41, has been staying at Baltimore's 24-hour shelter for about five months, after a short detour in Oklahoma. "It could be a lot worse," he said. "People could be on the street." The city's 24-hour, year-round homeless shelter, which has about 350 beds at 210 Guilford Ave. and an 80-bed overflow location, welcomed anyone who came in through the storm, said Diane Glauber, president of Baltimore Homeless Services.