chasing pavements

I’ve come to a very clear realization in the past few days: I am terrible at interpersonal relationships. I think I get it, but I don’t. I think I am doing the right thing, but I’m not. People confound me. I certainly don’t believe things are in black and white, but I have a clear sense of my motivations, and I try to be transparent about my intent, and act accordingly. Either I am also wrong about myself, or my sometimes painful self awareness obscures knowledge of others. This, L would say, is my 4ness manifesting.
—
so much depends
upon

a wooden rolling
pin

glazed with pale
butter

beside the white
apron.

Let Them Make Bread

When friends learn that I bake my own bread, they are awed. Something that was being made in homes before the extreme kitchen conveniences we know today surely can’t be so difficult, but people are skeptical. The process looks daunting, professional. Because there is a deeply prideful part of me that revels in doing what others can’t or won’t, I love making bread. But here’s the truth: it’s easy, requiring nothing more than a handful of ingredients, and time. And perhaps that’s why it seems an admirable home adventure; most bread recipes I’ve seen require approximately 3 hours, and although most of that time is spent waiting out the first and second rise, and then waiting out the baking, the time commitment for a society consumed with it’s own busyness looks wasteful.

The trick to bread is in its details. While baking is not the meticulous monster pastry chefs would have you believe, a certain attention to what might be minute is ultimately useful. As far as I’m concerned, there are three key criteria that are completely within the bakers control, and when done correctly, positively ensure a tasty loaf. In order of occurence:

1. Ingredients: Since bread only uses the most basic elements of a pantry, the quality of those elements really stands out in the finished product. There’s no masking dryness with a fancy sauce, or fixing texture with a last minute addition of croutons or crisped bacon. There is just flour, salt, sugar, yeast, milk, and butter. Sometimes people substitute other liquids, or other fats, add spices, but the truth is, a creamy delicious bread requires little to nothing else. Given the sparsity, it’s worth it to step up the pantry: use unbleached flour, or bread flour, real butter. And most most most importantly–fresh yeast. Everything else is for naught if the yeast isn’t decent.

2. Temperature: Perhaps the finickiest part of bread making is making sure the dough rises. There are a few ways to mess this up, but they all come back to temperature. The liquid added to the yeast has to be hot enough to activate it, but not so hot to kill it, ideally 115-120 degrees. I don’t know what this feels like, so I use a meat thermometer (the only kind I have handy) to make sure. You’ll know that the yeast is working when the dough feels like it’s just slightly throbbing in your fingers, elastic and happy. Then, as the dough rises the first and the second time, it needs to be in a warm, draft free place. I generally pre-heat my oven while I’m bringing the dough together, and then set it in a glass bowl covered by plastic wrap and a towel to rise. Put the bowl on top of the stove. It stays warm enough but doesn’t begin to bake. You have to pre-heat the oven anyway, so why not? Also, if you are baking in winter, there is nothing quite like the oven going in the kitchen to make your sad, grey world a little warmer.

3. Kneading: I love kneading. I love the flour between my fingers, the texture of the dough as it changes from seperate ingredients to a sticky and bumpy mass, and finally, so a satiny smooth whole body. My upper body strength leaves a lot to be desired, so what I can’t do with strength, I have to make up for with speed. You don’t want to be working the dough too long, it will become gummy. And if you work it for too little, the texture will be inconsistent in its heart. But the texture always tells: when you’re working the dough in your hands, and it feels soft and malleable, neither wet nor dry, but moist enough to be one cushiony mass without big lumps, then you know. It’s ready to rise. Sometimes when my back is especially bothersome, I’ll let the KitchenAid do the mixing after I’ve done the first knead that combines the ingredients. Or, if I’m baking with a friend (like Kristopher) I make him muscle through it. That way I still get my fix, but don’t sacrifice the quality of the product.

There are other things that must be done, of course, but these are the staples in any loaf, and are the most likely to affect the outcome. I find I’m most compelled to make bread when I feel at ends, unproductive and unable to pull myself together. The bread is something I can control, something simple and lovely that reminds me that my world isn’t spinning recklessly. There’s a reason for this, a purpose for that, and a way to handle myself so that I don’t interrupt its narrative, but facilitate it. I am soothed by the process, by the attention. And because I’m all about the cheeky metaphor, bread is perfect. A microcosm of my insecurities satisfied by my distinct and identifiable capabilities. There are so few at times, but in this instance, they are hugely rewarding.

song of herself

I rescued the bananas. They were so sad, sitting on the top of the garbage in my friends’ kitchen, tossed before their time, to accommodate their purchaser’s week long absence. I didn’t want to take them–I didn’t. Already beginning to turn brown, what could I do for them? Wait for the winter of their life, before resentfully forcing them into some banana muffin scenario. For now they sit coyly on my table, in a bowl I threw for the very purpose of housing fruit. The bananas tricked me, made me accountable and my guilt over their presence is disproportionately huge. I didn’t even buy them. Why should I care?

It’s been four weeks since my return to the States. Everything is my apartment is bananas: the books I bought for school but haven’t read; the rugs in the bathroom I keep forgetting to wash; the MacBook that taunts me with its light-up keyboard, begging to be put to better use than Facebook status updates.  I have sat down to write hundreds of times since coming back. I blink at the screen. I look at my nails. I eat a snack. I eat twenty. But there is no story to be told, and I learned my writing lessons well. What is the narrative arc? Who are the characters? It can’t just be a free-fall of feelings, an avalanche of emotion.

And then I chide myself, because I have *done* things since coming back. Surely I have. I drove 3 hours to celebrate a friend’s birthday at a gay resort. I baked muffins, crumb cakes, pies. I watched Eclipse, Jersey Shore. I clocked hours on my RA position. I caught up with some of the amazing, important women in my life. I mailed packages. I went to a party where five minutes into meeting her, a woman informed me of her support and affection for the IDF. But these things are unrelated, no consistent strand but the overbearing “I” of it all. So I decide to be less like myself, challenge myself to ignore my overly rational tendencies and do the opposite of the thing I think I should do. I go out when I want to stay home, I go to my favorite bar when I should work. I flirt with people who are vulnerable, I have sex with an old friend and enjoy it. I research publishing companies that work with creative non-fiction, and imagine ways to take a year off from graduate school.

And when I convince myself that perhaps I can be less like me, more like someone interesting, someone with a story, someone adventurous and lovable and unpredictable rather than reliable and boring,  I rescue the bananas. It seems like such a small thing, doesn’t it? Practical and unemotional, but it’s so like me, I hate it. I hate their stupid curved bodies in my beautiful round bowl, which previously housed Sour Patch kids and the cord for my external hard drive. Now that they are here, I can’t possibly turn away from them, let them rot without some kind of resolution. I owe them my time, attention, as I owe all things: the books, the rugs,  the blog, the friend, the graduate school.

And because in all of this, what I want most is for someone to rescue me, take me home, make me safe and loved and beautiful and wanted, I envy them even as I loathe them. And because I hate that I have wants and needs I can’t fulfill on my own, I will take care of the bananas and books. I will deny the wasteful desire to throw them out, the selfish desire to put off my life and my inevitable boring self for a little longer. I come back to me, indulgent but uninspired, efficient but exacting. Sure, I hate the bananas. But ultimately it’s me I can barely look at.

Clean Squeek

i love my apartment. the spacious dining room that doubles as study space; the color coded bookshelves; the double closets in the bedroom; the lamps i bought at TJMaxx; the quiet of the complex; the sun in the morning through the patio doors (that don’t actually lead to a patio-alas). i forget how lucky i am to have this serene, private space. i forget how much i love it until i spend significant time away from it. and i am always reminded when i come home. i am reminded when i clean it, and everything sparkles–looking almost as fresh and lovely as the day i moved in (remember, i have cats, so everything deteriorates eventually).

i cleaned it top to bottom today because i was having guests for a potluck. when i say top to bottom, i mean i actually vacuumed, dusted, and wiped down the bathroom. three tasks, that because i live alone, i feel no compulsion to do. and when i say potluck, i mean a hodgepodge dinner of egg rolls, spinach and artichoke dip with homemade bread, spinach salad with tahini sauce, and sour patch kids. for dessert i made an apple crumb pie, served warm with vanilla ice cream and cool whip. it was divine. there was also a nice selection of wines, and the company of fun friends, and DVRed episodes of Community. yes. i am lucky for the apartment, the means that allow me to live as i do, the cool people in my life.

so why the melancholy? the end of the semester left a big gap, but i should enjoy it. it should feel like breathing room instead of existential crisis. i woke up today ready to work. well, my brain did. my body went back to bed until noon. lucky, still. tomorrow i’ll try again. and if i fail, there is still the apartment, the DVR, the people. the research certainly isn’t going anywhere.

In the Kitchen with My Mother

The second time I make bread, I recognize the yeasty smell as one associated with my mother, who made pita bread at home when we were young. Older now, her hands hurt from the kneading and she no longer does it by hand.  Instead, she combines all the ingredients in her Kitchen Aid (a gift from her daughters a couple mother’s days ago) and let’s its sleek “S” hook do the hard work.

My relationship with my mother is strained for any number of trivial reasons, but it’s always been the kitchen that brings us together. Whether rolling grape leaves or making Easter cookies or meat pies, my sisters and I would gather around the largest counter and work in assembly line fashion under our mother’s direction.

Under her tutelage, we created delicious things. Under the guise of cooking, we created bonds and memories not so easily forsaken. When I think of what it might be like to be without my family, I recognize the moments in the kitchen, the sultry smell of bread baking as the ones I would miss most.

Like so many families, my family sees food as love.  Perhaps it’s this emotion and connectivity that draws me to baking and cooking now. There’s no reward like the meal enjoyed, or the pastry savored.  Perhaps, like my mother who cooked everyday for years, I make bread or cupcakes or lasagna as a way of saying “Yes. I love you. Yes.”