Internet is Life

I have all these idyllic ideas about agricultural life pre the industrial revolution.  It was a time when things were simpler, and everyone picked their own wheat and made their own bread and read books together at night like the Bennet's.  It all seems so much better than the industrialization of our modern Western world complete with the chemical fest that is commercial farming and Pokemon Go, which I have to say, is destroying my hope for humanity.  As I dodge the crowd of adolescent zombies walking through our downtown streets staring at their screens and running into me, I become worried that we are all that Ray Bradbury predicted and Pokemon Go is exposing this tragic truth.

Then I made my own bread. For weeks I woke up in the morning and scooped from my starter some globs of what looks like pancake batter and placed it in a new bowl with fresh flour and water, this is feeding my starter. Then I wash the bowl, which inevitably takes twenty minutes due to the concrete hold the starter has on the glass, but it’s the price I pay to be granola.  A quick note, it should be said that the term granola needs a positive connotation I am not ok with all the hate. Then the day came where I used a bit of my little starter I’ve been growing and added flour, water and salt to make my dough!

At this point the idea of bread making was still very romanticized, I was just a little 1950’s housewife swept off her feet by sourdough.  So every thirty minutes for four hours I went into the kitchen to turn my dough, which is sort of like kneading it.  After the four hours of rising I got to shape my dough into a round loaf. This is where things took a turn. I’m not going to try and explain the catastrophe that was the dough shaping, I would rather let you imagine pouring a bowl of thick pancake batter on your counter and trying to get it into a ball without it sticking to your hands. Trever happened to be munching on some chips standing dangerously close to the counter while I was in the middle of this process and asked innocent questions that almost made my head explode, so I held up my sticky batter hands and yelled, “no it’s not supposed to look like this.” Woah, I lost my 1950's housewife cool for a second.

Another four hours I waited until I got to transfer my globby sticky mess into my dutch oven where I was meant to cut small slices in the dough so it would rise properly. It was at this point I was fairly certain I had failed. Imagine again with me cutting slices into weak, wet, batter…it’s like, what’s the point? So I aggressively jammed the knife into the sorry lump and huffed at the calamity of it all. Then it baked and came out like a very heavy and dense ball that resembled, in some distant way, bread.  I think Trever felt a bit of panic over the failure of my day-long baking saga that went south.  I know this because when I squeezed the bread it’s supposed to make a crunching sound and when it kind of did he got ecstatically happy and congratulated me on my feat of accomplishment.  “Ooh yum, it tastes just like sourdough. No the texture is fine.  Ya it’s a little dense but I LIKE IT. Ironic how I just started a diet huh? No bread for me, but good job babe!”  What a dear.

I realize now, that if I were to somehow travel in time to the days prior to the fabulous and brilliant industrial revolution, I would have spent all my days surviving.  You just spend the whole day making bread, and then you eat it, and that’s it, because all you have time to do is make bread because it is so damn hard. 

But I do not give up quite so easily, so I made bread a second time and it was much better. I brought it to my sister’s house and we all ate it with cheese and celebrated the bread, something I will never again take for granted.  The irony is my dramatic improvement on round two was thanks to You Tube bakers who showed me what to do, thank God for the internet.  Ray Bradbury had no idea what he was missing. 

Bread is Life

A large part of my life consists of trying to be domestic and failing.  Due to said failure I have done deep seeded and irreparable damage to my self-confidence related to wife-ing. This is why it took me five years to start cooking. 

I once made Chili for a party we were hosting and charred the bottom of it. In a salvaging effort I thought it would be helpful to scrape the char from the bottom of the pan, not sure why that made sense at the time, but as you can assume the burn taste then permeated the whole pot of soup which we all ate anyways and called it, smokey. I also cooked in the oven smoked salmon, like it was fresh salmon, which is sort of like baking turkey sandwich meat and serving it for thanksgiving. I somehow missed the al dente lesson concerning pasta and boiled some spaghetti noodles until they were so overdone that they died and returned to their original state of wet formless flour. I cooked them into oblivion, as my mother would say. Because of these failures I quit, and for five years our fridge usually had an egg in it that was wildly passed its expiration date and probably some jar items that never really expire, like Dijon mustard.

Then one day I roasted some potatoes and they turned out good.  Trever gained a baby bit of confidence in me and thus, so did I. Slowly I started buying food and making salads, lots and lots of salads because they are very hard to mess up.  I made Vietnamese salad with napa cabbage, and Greek salad with feta cheese and crumbled pita chips, and a mixed grain salad with tomatoes and cucumbers. The first step into the wonderland of salads is making homemade dressing, which I did. Dressing by the way is much easier than one might think and far superior to the bottled super market version, which is just a cover for putting preserved sugar on salads. Blerg. Now at the ripe age of 29 I cook at home several nights a week and only fail miserably a couple of times a year. 

I do my best to cook healthy, which essentially means we eat a lot of vegetables. This works out well for me as I don’t eat meat and fortunately my skinny husband obliges my first-world eating preferences. I have however, inadvertently developed a reputation for myself that I am some sort of health nut. I know this because my friends moms always like to come up to me and tell me they were health nuts before it was cool and proceed to recite their health related fanaticism. I'm really not that extreme, I like to watch everyone get on and off bandwagons for what is and isn’t killing us all.  Starting with fat, then all carbohydrates, then sugar, now gluten, and on it goes. I just think we generally would do good to stop cutting out entire food groups and just eat fresh food (except vegetarians because we’re different, we cut out a food group in a stance against animal murder – virtual eye roll).

Also I think we should balance quality of life with our eating habits.  Friends of mine have become such health enthusiasts that they complain constantly about their weak stomach's inability to process pizza anymore and they wear it like a badge of honor.  Happiness is also very good for your body, pizza makes the world happy, in conclusion we should never stop eating pizza.  On that note, if our bodies can no longer process pizza we have done something terribly wrong and must retrace our steps to return ourselves to pizza, even if that means we eat it until it stops hurting.  Plus, if we just ate pizza with natural ingredients and cut out the chemicals and preservatives all the way from the farming of grain, to the raising of cows for milk, to the fermenting of bread, we would all be just fine!

Ok so we got to my point -fermenting bread.  You’ve seen cooked on Netflix right? Did you see the one about air? If you didn’t you should, but for now *spoiler alert* I will tell you that they interview a baker who goes through the history of bread and emphasizes the need for whole flour and natural yeast.  He convinced me of the need for fermenting our bread with natural yeast via our own starters.  BTW, my friend and farmer Bill Spencer at Windrose Farm makes his own starter and bread and it is the best bread, it is heaven in a crunchy little loaf. Because I will NEVER give up gluten, I am trying this whole homemade bread domestic wife thing.  This whole ramble was to convince you and me, that I can do it! I have begun my starter and it is sitting on top of my fridge stinking up my kitchen.  I have to feed it every day which essentially means throwing out half of what looks like pancake batter and adding more flour and water to allow it to keep growing.  Grow baby yeast grow! I might fail but I won’t tell you until I succeed because I prefer to parade my excellence to the world wide web as often as I can.  If I find the perfect recipe I might share, we’ll see.