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.

the re-return

I am skilled at leaving. I left Michigan when I was 10, Palestine when I was 14. I left Michigan again when I was 24, Ohio at 26. Over the years, I’ve dropped many schools, ended friendships, forgotten names and erased the banal minutiae that make up the everyday of places behind me. It’s easy now, the process of moving on, packing up, starting over. So few things and people have survived these overhauls, their staying power a sign that perhaps I am not as strong as I wish I were. Or if holding on is harder, stronger than I know.

My last day in Ma’in is also my last day in Jordan. We awake early, per my mother’s request, and go to the main fall before it’s open to the public. The water is steaming, pungent with the smell of minerals. Against my back the fall is the strongest, hardest shower I’ve ever taken, times 100, but more erratically distributed. Sometimes a shot of cool water makes it through, shocking and a pleasant change. It’s exhausting, the lap of the water against your body, the effort exerted to stay vertical against the pressure. We stay for an hour, slowly make our way back to the resort for breakfast, where a lush-lipped beady-eyed cook stalks me around the dining hall and all the way out to the pool. I ignore him, but even my mother notices. On this trip she is realizing something she never imagined: some people actually find me attractive, charming.

From Ma’in we make our way back to Amman, where I spend the afternoon with my family and relatives,  packing my suitcases. By some miracle (my mother) everything fits, under the weight limit and then I am just left with waiting. My relatives re-emerge, playing cards on the Veranda. Mina has found three more figs on the very top of the tree, and he saves them for me, so I eat them, thank him. By now I have won him over, and as he helps me lug my bags up the stairs, he implores me, “Stay a while longer.” I say so many goodbyes. Some heartfelt–because it was good to see you, meet you, be with you. Some perfunctory, for my presence or absence means nothing in your world. At the airport, farewells abound, and we are a tiny scene in Love Actually. I pass through inspection, get my tickets, check my bags, and now I am no longer we, I am just me, going.

The hour is late, my body and brain exhausted from simply everything, so I fall asleep before the plane even takes off. I am asleep the whole way to Paris. I appreciate the beauty of the Charles De Gaulle airport before I am sleeping again, from Paris to Amsterdam. I move through customs, get questioned about traveling from Palestine to Jordan by a curious security agent, and then I am aboard a third plane, my last, from Amsterdam to Detroit. By now I have my fill of sleep, so I subtly fight with my seatmate over the armrest, watch two movies which leave me feeling desolate and convinced I will never be in love again. Never feel loved again. I try hard to focus on leaving, but it’s all ambivalent, my real feelings projected away from myself and onto the heroines cheeky faces in forgettable romantic comedies.

When I watch the little digital plane hover and land in Detroit on the small screen in front of me, I finally feel excited. I am so close, so close. The plane lands, and I make the arduous rounds of US customs, where I lie about having food in my luggage, evade search, and walk outside into the heavy Detroit air. A friend picks me up from the airport, and I feel so strange, speaking entirely in English, peppering my language with curse words, which had been excised for most of my trip. There is no hitch here but I sound foreign to my own ears. Who has this pitch? Who has this inflection? The feeling fades quickly, and by the time I am at my apartment, I am marveling at how easy it was to come back, to remember, to fall into patterns of my life, with nothing visible to suggest a change but the suntan that will surely fade by winter.

In the next few days, I will pick up my parts that fractured, reassemble them: here is my sister, here is my niece, here is my friend, my cat, my car, my beer, my mail, my Meijer. Everything is in place, everything is slightly askew. I will wonder what Rachel is doing, and remember I left her. I will wake thinking about my mother’s tea, and there will be coffee. I will go to flush the toilet, but the lever is on the front of the tank, not the top. I will field questions about my trip, speak in the past tense. I will ache in my back, my throat, my heart. I will ache, divert my attention with work, crushes, laundry, the quest for my missing tank tops. I will fret over paying rent next month, I will consider cutting groceries from the budget. I will long for the figs, for the fackoose, for Mina’s smile, for Bishara’s laugh, for Yazin’s chubby little arms, his songs. I will drive and praise higher powers for lanes. I will wake early, sleep early as my  body copes with jet lag.

I will, willing myself to be here, to be happy, to be OK, to be something besides sad and lonely and aching. I will the ache to linger, proof I went, that I cared, that I didn’t already forget. I forget what I wanted, if I ever knew. At the end, there is no answer, no conclusion, no neat tidy understanding or lesson learned. There is just me, moving along, getting on, pushing through to something I can’t foresee.

Arrival and Affect in Amman

Sitting on the plane as it descends into Amman, I can’t believe I’m so close. In the monitor nested in the back of the seat before me, I am watching a small digital rendition of the plane making it’s voyage, but somewhere the connection is faulty because my plane hovers an inch to the West of Amman, even as we are taxiing on the runway. The visual suggestion of the stalled trip is so convincing it anchors my disbelief. Passengers bolt up before we barely touch the ground. Their impatience comforts me; this is how Arabs do. We’re not going to take the pilot’s admonition or the fasten seat belts sign very seriously. What could possibly happen now that the wheels are on the ground? I peer out the window to find grapevines climbing their way up the sides of plane garages. I smile. I am beginning to believe.

The triggers are little. The chaos of the baggage check as you leave Queen Alia’s airport. The black and yellow checked curbs barely containing drivers who treat the roads as a competition, aggressively cutting across lanes—how many are there? Used to the regimented lines of the States, I couldn’t tell you. I look for more familiarity in the crowd, and my heart jerks a little when I realize for the first time in any memory, I won’t see my Ammo Manawail at the airport, waving vigorously. He is fine, just away at the moment, but the dissonance of my arrival mirrors my feelings. Everything is familiar. Everything is not.

My third uncle, Ammo Afif, picks me up in his red Toyota instead, which he bought the same year I was born. The car is spacious, and has held up exceedingly well over the years. I find myself thinking it’s aging more gracefully than I have. But then, I’ve become overly sentimental sometime between the stone facades of buildings and the rickety fruit stands scattered on the side of the road and am thinking everything here ages better. A fine mist of dust travels with us, and it functions like rose colored lenses. Everything here is beautiful. Everything is grand.

When we arrive at Ammo’s house, it’s the scent that clinches it. As soon as I open the car door, I smell Jasmine. I didn’t know I missed it. I didn’t know I loved it. It carries me into the house, mingles with the scent of stuffed grape leaves. It’s not long before other family members begin to arrive, kissing both my cheeks, thanking god for my safe arrival, asking about the welfare of the people I left behind. The greetings roll off my tongues deceptively easily, as later I will coax out casual language slowly, my mouth and brain stubbornly refusing to recall the right words, place them in the correct order. I’m forced to choose my sentences carefully, and alter meaning according to capability. The stiltedness of my speech makes me feel less like myself, and I spend the evening hugging my own shoulders, crossing my arms against my chest. I’m sure my posture speaks my discomfort, but my relatives here are unfailingly kind, and if they are thinking cruel thoughts, they’ve chosen not to voice them. I see messages in their eyes, glances to each other, but that language is something else I’m not fluent in. Better and fair, I suppose. I share these same intimacies with my sisters and close friends, and can’t wait until I see Lubnah again to begin exchanging them.

The evening winds on. Some of my relatives play cards at the square table while others chat over tea, then coffee, then chocolates. The thing I want the most, a cigarette, eludes me. I can’t bring myself to smoke in front of these folks, because I know it’s not done by women in public, and I know it’ll get back to my Dad. 27 and still put in my place by custom. It’s not like he doesn’t know. It’s just a courtesy, I suppose. When everyone heads home, I return to my room. The bed is hard, and the screen on the window won’t budge. I’ll have my cigarette tomorrow. I hope.

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.”