Please don't do this to me!

Foodies beware!

I love food. Not all food, but lots of different foods.

I also love to make food.

Granted, I'm not great with fussy, complicated dishes (I tend to get distracted) or with "presentation." I like my food hearty, simple and filling.

That said, I do tend to be a bit more willing to experiment with breads -- fussy ones, hearty ones, ones with interesting shapes or tetures or flavors.

But, see, here's the thing: Even the easiest, quickest, least hands-on recipes take, at a minimum, two hours from pulling out your materials and ingredients to pulling it out of the oven and letting it cool for a few minutes before you start cutting.

So when an author writes a character who's a "foodie" I will NOTICE. When a character first spends the night at someone else's place, they don't usually go check out the kitchen for bread-baking staples before heading back to bed. Yet the next day (or later that same day, depending when they're gettin' it on) Foodie will make a quick store run, come back, and, in the time it takes to make a fresh pot of coffee, have a complicated meal, including fresh, homemade yeast bread, on the table and ready to eat.

I call bullshit.

Unless you're making it from a mix, soup is gonna take at LEAST half an hour, minimum, to wash, chop, saute, and simmer everything.

And the bread? Well, mixing and kneading and measuring is gonna be at least a good 15-20 minutes, unless you're using a mixer with a dough-hook attachment, and no one in books uses one of those, because, let's face it -- your new flame back there in the bedroom isn't gonna have one if he isn't into cooking, too. Or if he does, it's gonna be super-loud & it'll wake him up Too Soon. Then, there's the 45 min to an hour the dough's going to need to double in bulk. Punch it down, shape it, put it in or on the appropriate baking container, and give it another half-hour or so to proof (and don't forget to start warming up your oven!). Then 20 minutes to an hour to bake, and then it needs to cool for a while before you can even start slicing it and we're already up to, what, 2.5 hours, MINIMUM.

Now, there are a few recipes which skip the kneading step, and even a couple which skip the proofing, but really, that only knock maybe 45 minutes or so off the length of time needed. And some of those recipes call for sponging the dough, which means instead of that initial one hour rise, you may be waiting for three or more.

And even with frozen dough, you need to wait for it to come to room temperature and double in bulk before you can start baking it, and that takes a good hour or so.

So, no, unless it's a pretty damn complicated soup recipe, you're not going to be starting the soup first; your bed-buddy's probably NOT going have live yeast just lying around, (let's face it; probably not the appropriate cooking pans, either)... and, no, you're not going to have fresh, homemade bread in under an hour.

Unless, of course, you're God (in which case, come see me.)

Therefor: Unless you have baked bread and know how long it's gonna take, unless you're going to reflect that in your text, please, please don't write characters who can do it in less than a third of the time it takes to make your average pot of soup.