Rafael Alves is a featherweight MMA fighter. When he weighed in this afternoon in advance of his scheduled bout tomorrow with Patrick Sabatini, he needed to come in at 146 pounds. To paraphrase the great Bob Uecker, he was juuuuust a bit overweight. 11.5 pounds overweight, to be precise. Alves weighed in at 157.5 pounds.
For the record, I would've made weight.
Alves blamed bad salmon for making him ill and compromising his pre-bout routine. I think that's a bunch of nonsense.
The actual culprit, as it will be when I fail to make my next fight, is kouign amman.
In the town where I live, there's a bakery named Dolce & Ciabatta. Clever, no? My wife loves it. Most weekends, she gets up early and heads there to pick up pastries and a good cuppa. And most weekends, I don't partake.
But two weekends ago, she brought home one of these beauties.
That's a kouign-amman pastry. In the Breton language (local to Brittany, where the pastry was originated), it means "butter cake". It's made by layering impossibly thin layers of crossaint-like pastry and butter and topping the dough with enough sugar to create a shiny, crackling crust of caramel.
The bites of the outside of the pastry are sweet and crunchy, with the caramelized sugar picking up just enough butter in a rich melange. The inside of the kouign amman is *almost* savory, reversing the sugar/butter mix in favor of the latter.
The whole experience is enough to make a strong man exclaim with each bite. Me, too. Done well, it's an amazing culinary experience.
And Dolce & Ciabatta does it well.
Like Rafael Alves, I'll be moving up a weight class soon.
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