BISCUITS

I dreamt that I was making biscuits, but not the ordinary kind. These biscuits were going to be like the ones that come in the can that are all layered. I believe the process is called lamination, where you roll and layer the dough over and over again. This was the part where I was stuck. I just kept rolling out dough and folding it over, turning and shaping it before more rolling and folding. I never made it to the part where I actually cut out circular bits of dough and when I attempted to pre-heat an oven, there was not an oven to be found. I was working in a kitchen without a working oven.

This is better than the dream I had last week where I was trying to run two different time lapse experiments on the same microscope at the same time.

I am not a baker. I have baked. I can bake. I just don’t bake. It is a task that seems like it always requires more effort than I am willing to spend in my tiny kitchen. I’m not one of those who find it a joyful hobby. Yes, I know I am keeping a sourdough starter alive in my fridge, but this is mostly for pizza and sometimes ciabatta. Both of those things require minimal effort. You stir together some stuff and poke at the dough ever so often before forming it into a shape and placing it into the oven. This for sure doesn’t happen in the summer months when turning on an oven is just irresponsible. So I don’t know why I’m dreaming of baking. The dream was probably sparked by a TikTok I watched recently of nothing but various breads rising and baking in an oven.

It was fairly hypnotic.

My dad was the biscuit maker in our house. My mother has a superstitious streak in her and declared that she had lost the ability to make biscuits the day her mother died. Every attempt yielded a dry crumbling wet puck of dough. Her biscuits became a joke Dad and I would giggle about at breakfast times. Her cornbread, though, was top notch and legit. I learned most of my kitchen skills through osmosis while standing next to Mom in the kitchen, but making a good biscuit was never a lesson. That was a skill learned from countless hours of practicing a demonstration speech for 4-H on the wonders and values of Master Mix, basically homemade Bisquik. It was a team demonstration and we made biscuits and blueberry muffins. Except, now that I think about it, we didn’t bake anything. There wasn’t a portable oven at the speech competitions. We added ingredients together and spooned wet dough into muffin tins, but had pre-baked goods to show at the end. Like TV. Or my dream.

Maybe the biscuit dream is leftover trauma from speech competitions.

I think about calling my mom and asking her for specific recipes. “Hey Mom, I’m trying to make pimento and cheese and I don’t know what I’m doing?” This is true. We bought some ‘homemade’ pimento and cheese from a specific cheese store and I was so disappointed. It most certainly did not taste like my mother’s. In fact, it went straight into the garbage after we all agreed that this did not taste like my mom’s pimento and cheese. Her version has ruined all of us who have eaten it. I did not absorb the knowledge of the pimento and cheese in all the years of standing next to her in the kitchen. There’s a number of things like that. Banana Pudding. The pea-pickin’ cake, a cake that does not have anything to do peas. Her cornbread recipe even if contains lard. But I don’t ask for these recipes because I am afraid of the answers I’ll get from her. Maybe it’s just easier to not know.

I’m thinking of all of this now because I know where I was in that dream. I know the kitchen without the working oven. I know I was in my mother’s kitchen or at least a collaged version of the different kitchens she has had over the years. The one she has now doesn’t have a stove or oven. It is a kitchenette, meaning there’s a small dorm fridge and a microwave. The tiny counter is already cluttered with a coffee maker and kitchen things she has yet to put into the cabinets. The last time I was there, she had a plastic grocery bag filled with the dishes we had gathered for her to take with her. I know we put those away, but Mom is in a constant state of packing and unpacking. This bag was probably a leftover from the last time she packed up all her things and waited for one of us to go get her. It’s fine really. She doesn’t actually need those dishes anyway. I spy on her through the Facebook page for her assisted living place. I notice what activities she’s participating in and when she’s participating. I know she has a regular table group at meal times and that she attends bible study classes held by one of the other people that live there. I know she’s enjoying herself more than she wants to let on to any of us or even herself.

I didn’t know that when I sat down to write about my dream that I’d end up writing about my mother, but this is how the therapy works. It’s why so many of us sit down and put pen to pages, so to speak.

THANKFUL FRIDAY

When you wake up and decide to make blueberry muffins.

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I am not much of a baker. There was a time in my youth when I did a whole lot of baking, often for 4-H related events. Mom always had a pantry stocked with cookie ingredients so that chocolate chip cookies could be whipped together at a moment’s notice. Over the years though, baking has fallen into the bucket of things that I used to do mostly because I had to do them, but now I don’t have to do anymore. Like singing on a stage in front of an audience. I rarely have a pantry stocked with the things one would need to bake a cookie or a cake or even cornbread. The few baking tins that I have yet to donate to Goodwill are all crammed into the cabinet above the refrigerator. In order to access them, I have to stand on a step stool and pull down all the wine boxes/bottles just to open the cabinet door. I have a sourdough starter that I feed irregularly sitting in my refrigerator that I mostly only use for making pizza crust.

Saying that I don’t bake is not the same as saying I can’t bake. Pies are generally my specialty and about twice a year I will make some sort of fruit or lemon meringue pie. I do this to only to keep my crust making skills honed, because I might only eat a small sliver of the pie before I take the rest to work for my coworkers to devour. Cakes and pies go to waste in this house. They just don’t get eaten. Michael is not big on baked goods and the Cabbage only likes six things (poptarts, cherry tomatoes, cheese pizza, refried (no spices!) beans, mac-n-cheese, candy). I don’t bake for people who will not eat the things I bake or who complain about the thing I have chosen to make. But like many of us during this pandemic, I have discovered a renewed joy in creating a baked good. It started with an angel food cake a few weeks ago. I had purchased a large carton of strawberries meant for snacking, but thought about how much better they would taste on top of a fluffy slice of angel food cake. We had two dozen eggs sitting on the counter that needed to be used up and for once, I had all of the things in my pantry for baking except the cream of tartar, which was easy enough to get ahold of. I carefully separated ten eggs to make this cake, knowing that the tiniest bit of yolk contaminate would prevent the egg whites from whipping up into soft white peaks. That was the only time consuming part of the recipe and the truest act of mindfulness because I do not have an egg separator. The result of that mindfulness was a mixing bowl filled with beautiful, soft white fluff. That fluff was folded into dry ingredients and then baked, creating a cake so light that when it was done I was surprised it didn’t float out of the pan on it’s own. For a whole week, we ate angel food cake topped with fresh strawberries and whipped cream. Or at least I did.

Tuesday night, as I sat on the couch, I started thinking about the blueberries I had purchased that I knew where not going to get eaten. I thought “blueberry muffins sound nice.” The last time I made blueberry muffins, I used Bisquick and used the recipe on the back of the box which is basically just add sugar, milk and egg and blueberries. This was years and years ago. I can’t even tell you the last time I bought a box of Bisquick. I looked up a recipe for blueberry muffins online and ended up using one from the food section in The New York Times. It was simple: mix flour, baking powder, salt, in separate bowl cream butter with sugar and then add two eggs and vanilla, stir into dry ingredients with a half cup of milk, fold in blueberries, bake. Wednesday morning, while everyone else was still sleeping, I spent my morning meditation following that recipe and making blueberry muffins. As I spooned the batter into the muffin tins, I knew that these muffins would not get eaten. The Cabbage might eat one. Michael might eat one, but the rest of them would sit in a container until I threw them out. None of this seemed to matter to me because I realized as I slid the muffin tin into the oven that I was not doing this for any one else but me.

I’ve eaten six blueberry muffins since Wednesday.

No…maybe, but I didn’t make those muffins so that I could eat a blueberry muffin every other hour. I made them for the shear joy of baking, the mindful process of blending ingredients to make something lovely. I think I have started baking again for the satisfaction that comes from doing something well. It is a way to compensate for not being well adjusted to working from home. I can’t solve any problems on a microscope today, but I can bake a beautiful and delicious angel food cake or soft and lovely blueberry muffins. This is something I can put on my list as something I can do well right now.

That’s all I need for today.

COOKIES

I made cookies

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Saturday, Michael and I went to IKEA because we have an illness. No really. IKEA is the best place to buy picture frames and we needed some last minute gift picture frames. They are not paying me to say that. They have a wide variety of reasonably priced frames. Some might even go as far as to say cheap. Depends on your idea of cheap. Any hoo...Micheal parked the car and I looked at him and said "We are going straight to picture frames. We don't need anything else. Picture frames. That's it." He nodded his head in agreement and we walked into IKEA. We only briefly browsed the kitchen area because Michael wanted to replace his old lunch box. They did not have a replacement that he liked, so we quickly moved on straight over to frames.

Okay... we made another stop in the new pet area and almost bought a retractable leash for Josephine. Then we went over to frames.

The tricky part of IKEA is getting out of the store with only the things you went in there for in the first place. I have yet to succeed at this. We picked up the picture frames we needed. I wanted to look at Christmas wrapping paper. Michael wanted to look around the second chance area. He found a giant map of the world and I found Christmas cookie cutters. I just want to put it on the record here that my impulse buy was way cheaper than his impulse buy. Though I will say that the giant map of the world does look nice behind our TV. I saw those cookie cutters and all I wanted to do was go home and make pretty cookies. Which is strange because I am not the type of person who makes pretty cookies. But I saw those cookie cutters and imagined making beautiful, lightly frosted bears, moose, wolves and snowflakes.

I don't bake. It's not that I can't bake. It's that I don't bake. My kitchen is small with limited counter space. Making pretty cookies means making a mess. Also we do not need cookies in this house. I might eat one cookie and then I'm good on my cookie intake for a half a year. Pretty cookies require work and weekends are for not working. The internal struggle of wanting to make cookies versus my laziness is real. Finally I decided to make the cookies because I knew I could take them to work and it would be a nice treat. My first cookie cutter attempts did not turn out well. The cookie dough stuck to the inside of the moose and wolf cookie cutters. I sprayed all of the cutters with cooking spray. This worked for the bear and the snowflake, but I had to give up on the moose and the wolf. Moose are mythical creatures any way and probably jerks.

I made a few bears and a lot of snowflake chocolate sugar cookies and then delicately piped icing onto each one. And you know what? They all turned out just as I had imagined. They weren't perfect, but they were very pretty and tasty. The people at work loved them. I almost want to make and decorate more cookies. 

Almost. 

A LISA SIMPSON STORY

Bread making

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Sunday morning I woke up wedged between a dog and a cat. From my view point, I could see through a crack in the blinds that it was still overcast and dreary outside. We had an odd unseasonably cool Fourth of July weekend with lots of rain. Any way, I'm laying there trying to decide which animal to shove over first, knowing that disturbing the cat will incite Josephine to chew on the cat, when I think "I should bake a loaf of bread!" I know. Just wait until I reach about seventy four when the gaps in my brain are even bigger. I managed to shimmy out of bed without disturbing the animals, slid into a house dress and made my way to the kitchen.

I first made sure that I had all of the ingredients before heading over to the cookbook stack to retrieve my bread recipe. My bread recipe is written on an old scrap of paper that is worn and brown around the edges. It is the recipe I have always used to make bread ever since I started making bread and I made A LOT of bread. I'm going to tell you why I made loads of bread. It's a full confession of my absolute nerdery. Are you ready? Back in my early teens, I was a member of the Food and Fiber Group. It was a 4-H program designed to promote and educate people about Oklahoma agriculture. I think there was like six of us or something and we each had a table. Someone told the story of cotton. There was a table on pecans. Jessica Worstell had a table on dairy because her grandparents owned the local dairy. I don't remember all of the tables, but my table was all about wheat. I grew wheat. I milled wheat. I turned wheat into flour and I made whole wheat bread to hand out as samples. It worked really well when Jessica would make butter with my mom's little butter churn. Then we'd have bread and butter. We all wore matching denim dresses with green bandanas. Our tablecloths matched our dresses. 

Yes. I recognize that this was full on dorkery. Say what you want. I learned the value of getting a loaf of bread to the table and a little bit of scholarship money. In those days, I pimped myself out for scholarship money. So yeah, I'd wear that awful denim dress and do my whole song and dance about wheat a million times if I had to. I also became very adept at bread making, but for some reason, mostly because I got lazy, I stopped making bread. It just seemed like it was an unnecessary task, which is why I was a little surprised I woke up wanting to do it. In retrospect, I should have made an apple pie, because of America, but no. I wanted bread with flaxseeds and sunflower seeds. I am pretty sure that I had tucked that scrap of paper containing my tried and true bread recipe into one of the cookbooks in my collection. At least I was pretty sure. Turns out I may have stuck that recipe into a three ring binder that contained recipes torn from magazines; the very three ring binder that I threw away during one of my cleaning fits. 

That's right people. I've lost or thrown away the National Treasure of a bread recipe. I even called Mom to see if she had a copy and she said "nope!" There's no copy! I guess it's not really that big of a deal, because a bread recipe is a bread recipe. They all contain flour, yeast and maybe honey. Except that this was the bread recipe that I learned on. This was the recipe that I knew. When I was being taught to kneed dough, I was told to think of the dough as a punching bag. My Mom had just been fired from her job. Her supervisor, who was a real jerk, came up with some cockamamie reason to fire my mom. I used to imagine that dough was Mom's supervisor. Later that dough would become other mean hateful people that would skirt on the edges of my life, but the point is that I could take out all my frustrations on this lump of flour, yeast and water. Then I could bake it and turn it into something delicious. 

I ended up using some random bread recipe that I found online that seemed pretty close to the one I used to use. I'm out of practice. The bread turned out good, but dense and not as fluffy as it should be. It still makes great toast though and maybe this will become a regular Sunday thing. Baking bread could go on the list with CBS Sunday Morning, laundry and waiting until late afternoon to brush my teeth. Maybe I had some frustrations that needed to be turned into something delicious and that's why I got all obsessed about baking bread. Maybe it is just a good idea to practice releasing frustrations every week by pounding a lump of dough with my fists.