On Sunday, we invited our friends Jim and Dawna Leavitt over for one of our simple suppers of soup, bread, and salad. In the freezer, I had a turkey carcass leftover from Thanksgiving, which would be the base of a soup that would also include potatoes, carrots, and additional meat from roasted chicken thighs. The carcass was huge so I made a lot of stock—this meant we had plenty of soup for our supper as well as enough to send some home with Dawna and Jim.

I also made bread. In December, our old stand mixer stopped working, and we ordered a new one from Westinghouse. The old stand mixer was not a very good one—it didn’t have much power—but I had learned how to make good bread with it. The new stand mixer is much better, but my technique has had to change. In addition, since it is more powerful, I have changed recipes so that my loaves are bigger. (I now use the recipe from King Arthur’s Flour.) As a result, it has taken me a couple of months to adapt to the new mixer and to make decent bread with it. Funny yet instructive to think of how someone who has made over 100 loaves of bread last year would have a learning curve with a new mixer, but that’s the way it worked.

After two months of using the new stand mixer and getting used to the King Arthur recipe, I have pretty much gotten it down, and yesterday’s dough came out especially well, moist and perfectly spongy and rising just the way it ought to. I had high hopes for that bread.

Sunday ticked by as my husband, Clif, and I got ready for Jim and Dawna. By 4:30, the soup was all done and simmering on the stove. It had been deemed “Not bad,” by Clif, which in his Yankee parlance is high praise. All the components of the salad were prepared so that putting it together at the last minute would be easy, and I had timed the making of the bread so that it would be baking while we all had wine and cheese and crackers.

The Leavitts came over, and as soon as they were settled in the living room with their wine, I preheated the oven, put in the bread, set the timer for 30 minutes, and went to join the others in the living room. When the timer went off, I checked the bread, and to my horror I saw that the tops were burnt.

“What’s up with the oven?” I said to myself, trying not panic as I removed the bread from the oven.

I popped one of the loaves out of the pan, flipped it over, and it proceeded to sink lower than chapati. As it turned out, the top might have been burnt but the bottom was underdone. I popped the other one out but left it upside down. It did not sink—not right off anyway—but its bottom was as underdone as the first, and I did not have a good feeling about it.

What could be wrong with that oven?, I asked myself again, and I begin fiddling with the temperature dial to see if somehow it was out of whack. It wasn’t. Then I looked at the dial where you select bake, except it wasn’t on bake. It was on broil, and sure enough, when I opened the oven I could feel the heat coming from above rather than below. (Now, why hadn’t I noticed that error when I put the bread in to bake? The simple answer is that I just wasn’t paying attention.)

For five minutes, I tried baking the second loaf that hadn’t fallen, but the damage was done, and it, too, fell. I had to face facts—I would not be serving that bread with supper. What to do? Soup without some kind of bread just didn’t seem right to me. Luckily, the solution came quickly—ordinarily I am not a quick thinker—and that solution was biscuits.

I explained the bread situation to Clif, Jim, and Dawna, and the Leavitts were their usual gracious selves. “Oh, don’t make biscuits. We’re fine with just soup.”

Nevertheless, I made biscuits, and they came out exactly the way they should—light and fluffy and perfectly cooked. (And I managed not to broil them.)

As we sat down to eat, I thought about the broiled bread disaster. I had never done such a thing before, and I hope I will never do it again, that’s for sure. Yet, in a way, I was lucky our guests were Jim and Dawna. We’ve been friends for so long—nearly 30 years—and we are so comfortable with each other that the bread debacle was less of a horror with them than it would have been with guests we hadn’t known as long.

How wonderful to have such friends! But next time they come over, I’ll be especially careful not to broil the bread.