One of the good things about a poetry writing class is that you write a lot of poetry. One of the bad things is that a lot of poetry is not necessarily a good thing.
Heir Apparent
Cleopatra passed all she knows
about de nial to me
her daughter
though I cannot lie to save
my life my powers of self-deception
verge on the supernatural
If I ever started a blog about cooking, I would name it the same as this post. I like to cook and bake, and do both quite a lot. Unfortunately for my family, I’m very open to new things and willing to experiment with weird ingredients and techniques. To make matters more interesting, I almost never follow a recipe exactly.
As an over-educated liberal arts major with anarchistic tendencies, I see recipes as texts to be interpreted rather than prescriptions to be followed. This may be an admirable approach for cultural analysis, but it has serious drawbacks as a culinary philosophy. I do follow recommended measurements with baked goods, as the chemistry of baking allows a smaller margin of error than other forms of cooking, but most recipes serve me more as inspirational guidelines than as instructions.
Finding just such inspiration in a post by my dear friend Murphala at FlourWaterYeast&Salt, yesterday I made bread dough. From scratch. Yup. And I’m here to tell you it worked and was blissfully easy.
I cut the recipe she gave down to one-third, threw all the stuff in a bowl, covered it with a damp dish towel, and started making dinner. Things got busy after we finished eating – in addition to the usual chores and homework, we had to take down the tree (it was starting to get a little crispy) – and I forgot all about the dough until just before bed. I put a plate on top of the bowl and stuck it in the fridge.
Because of weather developments, we got an automated call from the school district at 5:45 informing us there would be a one hour delay. (I prefer the old method – just turn on the TV at my usual waking time – but I’m sure there are parents out there who really appreciated knowing about the delay at that hour.) I lay there trying to go back to sleep, and after a long while it occurred to me that I had both extra time and a bowl full of bread dough.
I rolled out of bed, turned on the oven to preheat, and pulled out my trusty Betty Crocker Cookbook. The cinnamon roll recipe gave me a general idea of how to proceed, and I was off. I dumped all the dough onto my pastry board and worked enough flour into it to keep it from sticking too badly. It was still pretty wet, so I flattened it by hand into a large rectangle rather than rolling it.
I slathered it with this too-soft buttery spread my sister left here at New Year’s, then sprinkled it with sugar and cinnamon. Then I rolled it up, starting from the long side, cut it into nine pieces, and placed them in a greased 9 x 9 pan.
I didn’t really have time to let it rise for 40 minutes and then bake for 30 minutes – I only had 60 extra minutes here, people! – so I reasoned that the dough, which was still quite cold, would rise okay in the oven. I turned the heat down from 375 F to 350 F until I saw it had doubled, at which point I turned it back up. It baked for a total of 45 minutes, until the tops split open and no longer looked wet inside.
For glaze, I took a little less than a cup of powdered sugar (all that was left in the box) and added enough sour cream to get the consistency I wanted. I spooned this over the hot rolls; it sizzled most delightfully when it touched the still-hot sides of the pan. By this point, the entire house smelled of warm cinnamon and the whole family was gathered in the kitchen, tongues lolling out of their mouths.
Here’s the post-mortem:
So that’s what happened. You can see from the picture that I’m not a very good food photographer, but the result of this spontaneous experiment was edible and quite tasty, if not exactly what everyone had in mind.
I’ve been told I can try again, which is the greatest affirmation this madwoman can hope for.
Alas, hunky actors did not likewise appear.
As bedtime approached last night, my son casually mentioned a story problem from his algebra homework that had stumped him. He related the problem to me, and it was like a scene from Numb3rs: I could SEE the variables and their relationships, as if they were floating in the air before me. (Note: this has never happened before. Ever.)
My son wandered off to brush his teeth, and I scrambled for paper and pencil and began frantically writing down mathematical equations, afraid I would somehow lose them. (This also has never happened before.) When he came back, I handed the paper to him and went to deal with some laundry. His father took an interest, and I could hear the two of them puzzling over what I had written. I called down the hall words that I swear have never before crossed my mind, let alone my lips: “You need to set up a binomial equation.”
Where the heck did THAT come from? I can’t remember where I put my keys not five minutes before, but stuff I all but flunked over 30 years ago spontaneously pops into my brain? As dementia closes in and other faculties fade, am I becoming some kind of mathematical idiot savant?
Maybe I should sign up for some math courses at the community college…
(By the way, they were able to solve the problem by following my suggestions, though they resorted to using a calculator. Wimps.)
Today is the first day of NaNoWriMo 2010 — National Novel Writing Month, although it is quite the international movement at this point. The idea is to complete the draft of a novel by the end of November: 50,000 words in 30 days. It’s fun, it’s insane…and it works. I’ve wanted to take part ever since I found out about it, but certain inconvenient facts stand in the way:
Fact 1: I work in short media/genres.
I’m a short-work writer: poetry, flash fiction, blurbs, reviews, letters. I don’t think I even have anything novel-length in me. That’s why blogging appeals to me and actually sort of works for me: it’s perfectly structured for shorter pieces. But even then I have difficulty showing up at times.
Fact 2: I work as an editor/proofreader.
That uses the same parts of my brain as writing. Today, for example, I easily wrote the daily NaNoWriMo target number of words (about 1600, as I recall) in comments, corrections, suggestions, and correspondence with clients. The written language portion of my brain is pretty tired right now. I love what I do, and my clients seem to love it, too; I don’t resent or regret that my work on other people’s writing makes it very difficult to work on my own writing. But it is a factor that affects my identity as a writer and my ability to pursue writing as an activity (let alone as a career).
So there they are, the facts that face me on this first day of one of the coolest celebrations of writing ever devised. I have to remember that I am a part of it; my part just comes after the drafting stage, and sometimes not until right before publication. And for right now, at this time and place in my life, that will have to suffice.
I somehow think it will.
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged drafting, editing, insanity, NaNoWriMo, proofreading, writing
Today I am celebrating my half-life birthday, the 45th anniversary of my arrival on this planet. (I figure 90 years is a reasonably optimistic goal to aim for, and it’s not as though I’ll get in trouble if I actually overshoot it.) The number and the birthday itself don’t bother me; as a matter of fact, I find it rather exhilarating to think of myself at the top of a long, steep slope: the going should be easier from here on out because I’ll have gravity in my favor.
No, the real struggle I have is with the midlife crisis that settled in on me a while ago like a dense, enervating fog. The first stage, which I have dubbed “The Year of Living Regretfully,” was spent in exhaustive (and exhausting) retrospection and analysis. During this discouraging period, I examined nearly every decision I ever made and found that I did rather poorly in all but a handful of instances. (There are reasons this kind of experience ought to be reserved for the dying: it just about does you in, and after you’ve been through it, death seems like it would be a welcome relief.)
Recently, I seem to have undergone a mysterious seismic shift into a more energetic phase, which has both good and bad points. Instead of poring over past actions or pondering future possibilities, I find myself wrangling with a “Damn the torpedoes—full speed ahead!” mentality that verges on the dangerous. I spend enormous time and energy dissuading myself from all sorts of crazy-stupid actions. A part of me has reverted to invincible adolescence, leaving the rest of me to ride herd on a bewildering progression of bizarre impulses and cockamamie ideas, all of which seem unbearably attractive when they cross my mind.
Remember the long, steep slope I mentioned above, the proverbial hill that I have now crested? Today I have the most insane urge to let go of the brakes and hurtle toward the bottom, hell-bent for leather. I just hope my wiser self will prevail enough that I wear a helmet.
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged anniversary, birthdays, crazy-stupid, fog, half-life, insanity, mental health, midlife, midlife crises, over the hill
I’m wondering whether I should have named this blog “The Lunatic Gardener” because now that spring is here with a vengeance, all I want to write about is gardening. Of course, all I really want to DO is garden, but writing/talking/thinking/reading about gardening will do in a pinch.
I spent a couple hours this afternoon planting bulbs. I didn’t get all the bulbs I overbought in the fall planted before an unexpectedly normal winter set in, causing the ground to freeze when it should rather than never, as has been the case in recent years. I tucked the poor things away in a cold, dark corner of the garage to await an auspicious alignment of weather, soil conditions, and free time. Today was that magical day, though I still didn’t get them all in the ground. I have determined to pot up the remainder and let them do their thing, then dump the pots in the fall and plant the bulbs in the ground where they belong. I may even give some of the pots away as gifts once the plants are up and ready to bloom, with an offer to come plant the bulbs — in the ground — when they are done.
It feels so good to have a plan for the little darlings! Now I can sleep at night.
The Daily Compost 