Kitchen clean-up

From upstairs, I could smell the rich sweet aroma of chocolate chips in the oven, and I was a little bit afraid to finish brushing my teeth and head down to the kitchen.

After dinner, Holly had asked me if she could make Seven-Layer Bars, and with a healthy dose of trepidation, I said yes.

Rick is always encouraging me to let the kids do more in the kitchen. His theory is that if I say yes when they want to bake cookies (Holly) or fry French fries (Tim), the same skills will eventually compel them to make their own breakfasts and lunches. And that, I sometimes imagine, could add years to my life.

But it takes a big leap of faith, because although I suspect they do have the culinary abilities to scramble eggs or make sandwiches, it’s the clean-up where they still fall short.

Still, when Holly asked to make Seven-Layer Bars last night, I couldn’t really justify turning her down. I started baking when I was just a little bit younger than she is now; I still love baking to this day.

But I also learned to clean up at around that time, and that’s a skill that seems to have eluded my kids so far. Sure, they understand the basics. They put ingredients away and stack mixing bowls in the sink. 

But they always leave copious amounts of flour drifting across the countertops, and they never remember to fill dirty bowls with hot soapy water so that they’ll be easier to wash later on.

When I finished brushing my teeth and apprehensively headed down to check Holly’s progress, however, I was pleasantly surprised. Granted, it’s a pretty easy recipe – especially since her Seven-Layer Bars are only Five-Layer Bars because she doesn’t like nuts or butterscotch chips – but the mess I expected was absent. She’d wiped down the countertops and put away everything she’d taken out. 

No butter wrappers, stray chocolate chips, or coconut shreds remained to be seen. I was impressed.

Apparently all my pleas to clean up after herself had finally paid off, and it reminded me not to give up so easily. Sure, the kids used to be rather negligent when it came to kitchen tidiness, but as they grow older, I can expect more. If I’m patient and remember to show them how I want things done, they’ll gradually learn to do it. Holly’s Seven-Layer Bars came out of the oven looking lightly browned, bubbly, chewy and delicious – and we had a nice clean kitchen in which to savor the first warm bites.

Not that she crossed every t and dotted every i. The pan in which she’d mixed the melted butter and graham cracker crumbs was in the sink….but not soaking. At first I sighed, discouraged. But then I remember that my feeling discouraged wouldn’t help for next time. Only showing her what to do would be likely to lead to improvement.

So I reminded her to squirt some detergent into the pan and fill it with warm water, and a few minutes after that I showed her how to scrub the pan and put it in the dishwasher. Maybe next time she’ll do it herself.

And in the meantime, we have a really delicious dessert to enjoy.

Christmas candies and cakes and more

What I like least about Christmas: the pervasive awareness that for so many people, Christmas is not what they wish it was. It’s hard to celebrate wholeheartedly knowing how many people are unable to celebrate the way they would like to – and the way that so many marketing messages tell us we all should – because they are hobbled by illness or financial woes or physical distance from loved ones.

But there are many things I do like about the holiday season: the parties, the decorations, the special concerts and performances.

Way up at the top of the list of what I like about the holidays, though, is the food. Every year, the list of foods I traditionally make for the holiday season seems to grow. When we were in our twenties, Rick and I developed the habit of making truffles for gifts, and that was our sole holiday cooking ritual for years. But now the roster has expanded. The candy we make for gift-giving includes the original truffles but also peppermint bark, toffee, peanut brittle, and peanut butter balls. For entertaining, we make chocolate mousse pies, eggnog cheesecakes, peppermint chocolate layer cakes, at least two or three of each every season. For parties, we buy specialty cheeses and dips.

Sometimes I almost regret the fact that we eat so well all year long, diminishing the specialness of fine food on holidays, but we purposely avoid these special Christmas foods the other eleven months of the year so that they always seem like a novelty when their time comes around. It’s true that eating large and rich meals is not a luxury reserved for holidays, as it must have been for almost everyone centuries ago when a Thanksgiving or Christmas feast stood out markedly from the menus of the rest of the year. But the candies and eggnog cheesecake and peppermint layer cake are always something I’ve gone eleven months without, and the return to those savored treats are among my favorite things about the holiday season.

This week, I’ll start baking in earnest: for our annual cookie exchange party tonight among a small group of friends, for gifts for the kids’ teachers and our neighbors and other friends; later for Christmas Eve dinner and Christmas Day brunch. I could happily live without ever hearing another Christmas TV ad from Target or another story about Black Friday shoppers gone mad, and I wouldn’t even mind a ban on inflatable ten-foot-tall Santas in people’s front yards. But the tastes of Christmastime bring back all the best of the season to me, and I’m looking forward to the kitchen soon filling up with the aromas of chocolate and butter once again.

Birthday cake

Late yesterday afternoon, I made a chocolate cake.

For many reasons, that act felt like a luxury. I had worked hard throughout my regular workday to finish a draft of a story so that I would feel justified in not working any more after three o’clock. And the house was empty, which was unusual for that time of day. Rick and Tim were at a baseball practice; Holly was at her pottery class, and since I’d driven her and two friends to the studio, one of the other mothers would drive her home, so I didn’t even need to watch the clock.

With All Things Considered as my soundtrack (and Nina Totenberg warning listeners, just as she did nineteen years ago, that content regarding her story on Clarence Thomas might not be appropriate for all audiences), I melted chocolate, measured flour, greased a cake pan. Atypical for me, who usually rushes to get everything done, I’d remembered to take the butter out of the fridge hours earlier, so it had reached the perfect consistency for creaming with sugar and eggs. I whipped egg whites, all with a somewhat dreamy sense of decadence.

Usually I rush; yesterday I had time, and no distractions. It was a more complicated recipe than I generally use. I bake a lot, but normally if I make a cake it’s a traditional layer cake with soft moist crumbs and creamy frosting. This recipe called for crumbled almond paste and stiffly whipped egg whites that then had to be folded into the butter/sugar/chocolate mixture. I’m not very good at folding batter at all. And I wasn’t sure I’d greased the cake pan sufficiently for when it came time to unmold the finished product.

It didn’t matter. I was immersed in the task at hand and thoroughly content to be doing it. The cake was for my father’s birthday dinner; I would be taking it next door to my parents’ house in another hour or so. The recipe I was using is his favorite, and normally my mother makes it for him, but she was taking care of the rest of the dinner so I’d offered to take on this responsibility.

Two months ago, I didn’t really expect my father to have another birthday. He was recovering from surgery but not very well, and the thought that by mid-fall not only would we be having a birthday dinner but that we’d have to schedule it in between his stints out on the tractor mowing the fields and volunteering at the prison would have seemed utterly improbable. But here I was, glazing the cake and wrapping his present.

Dad shares a birthday with my niece, Hannah, who turned eight yesterday. I hoped that turning eight would be easier on her than the beginning of being seven was. A year ago, she ended her own party with a trip to Children’s Hospital in Washington, D.C., where she was hospitalized for a week with H1N1. She missed out on Halloween, but made a good strong recovery; her birthday celebration this year will include her first sleepover party.

It wasn’t a sure thing that either of yesterday’s celebrants in my family would get to this next birthday, but of course, it never is, for anyone. Yesterday morning when I dropped Holly off at school, I ran into my friend Lisa, who said she’d had dinner the night before with a friend of hers who was mourning her own mother whose birthday it was that day. A year ago, Lisa’s friend’s mother, who was several years younger than my dad, had no reason to think she wouldn’t be around for another birthday, but as we all know, these things happen. Her death was sudden and unanticipated.

Dad’s birthday was a very happy day for all of us. We were glad he was there to celebrate with us; I could easily imagine spending the day under other circumstances. But in fact, I always feel this way on my parents’ birthdays, and my husband’s and children’s too: just glad they’re around for another yearly milestone.

The cake didn’t come out as nice as when my mother makes it. It stuck to the pan a little bit, and I had to reconstruct it somewhat on the cake plate and then slather glaze over the many cracks. But no one complained as they ate it, and I certainly didn’t complain when I made it. Baking a birthday cake yesterday felt like a privilege. I had the time; I had the right ingredients – even a tube of almond paste, which I dug out from the depths of the freezer -- and I had my dad to bake for. It was a happy birthday all around.

The need to knead: The primal pleasure of baking bread

I was on the library’s waiting list for six weeks before I finally had my hands on the newest, best, state-of-the-art, bestselling book on bread-baking.

It sat in my kitchen for three weeks and then it was due back at the library. Renewing it was not an option; this book was so popular someone else was waiting with bated breath.

Whoever he or she is, I hope that patron made better use of the bread book than I did.

But I didn’t learn my lesson then. A week later, a different, brand-new, state-of-the-art bread baking book – this one actually had the irresistibly alluring word “artisan” in the title – on display at the library caught my eye. And since this one was in regular circulation and not on the reserve list, after I’d had it for three weeks, I was able to renew it for another three.

But still, it sat untouched in my kitchen, like its predecessor. Only for twice as long.

Of course I want to bake artisan bread…in theory. No Atkins dieter I, I love fresh-baked bread. Grains, sprouted wheats, seeds, crusty heels, tender center pieces. Bread delights me, and the idea of baking it myself is eternally enticing.
And yet I hardly ever do it.

It’s not that I don’t know how. I grew up watching my mom bake bread, and my sister has one of the most well-organized bread routines I’ve ever seen: her kitchen is never without a loaf of her special whole-grain boule, which she makes through a complicated multi-day process that involves every member of her family being called into service at some point during the process to spray water into the hot oven to make steam.

But I know it doesn’t have to be that complicated. I’ve made bread plenty of times throughout my life. It’s just that those times are far between, because most of the time I like the idea of making bread so much more than the reality.

It’s true that almost nothing is easier to make in the kitchen than bread, as my mother has always pointed out. It usually has no more than a half-dozen ingredients at most and involves nothing more than stirring and kneading.

But the waiting is what gets me. The first rise; the second rise, the baking. I feel chained to the house when I’m making bread. As one of my favorite food writers, the late Laurie Colwin, once wrote, I don’t think it’s practical to make bread and try to raise children at the same time.

And yet the allure of baking one’s own bread is timeless. The proofing of the yeast; the mixing of the flour: it makes me feel deliberate and attentive, and the meditative aspect of kneading dough is undeniable.

The problem is just that it takes so long from beginning to end. This afternoon, after intending for about three months to make some bread, I finally caved. I started the task at 3:00 and didn’t have bread out of the oven until 8 PM. For a baker who is accustomed to mixing up a batch of cookie dough in under ten minutes and having hot baked cookies emerging from the oven just another ten after that, five hours is quite a lot of time to devote to a baking project, even if it wasn’t five hours of nonstop effort.

But the bigger detriment is the nagging suspicion, behind the earthy satisfaction of taking part in one of humankind’s oldest culinary rituals, that it just doesn’t matter that much whether I bake my own bread. It really might not be worth the effort. Unlike some edibles, I find the bread I can buy at Whole Foods or from a number of local cottage industries just as good as the bread I make myself.

There are quite a lot of food items I’d much rather make myself than buy. Cookies, coffee, tomato sauce and scones all fall into this category. But bread is one thing I firmly believe other people can produce a lot more admirably than I can. Pad Thai also fits into that category, but at least I have a little bit more of an excuse for that, not being Thai.

It’s true that the kids love my homemade bread, and that’s often a good incentive to me. Hot bread from the oven with butter melting on it is one of their favorite snacks. But hot fresh bread is like puppies: it grows up. The same bread they couldn’t get enough of the day I made it often ends up molding in the breadbox after a few days, or fading into anonymity in the back of the freezer.

Still, yesterday I took the time, and I’m glad. As always, it was a pleasing process. Making bread is a primal activity: you feel connected with thousands of years of women providing sustenance to their families. The kids will both have bread-and-butter in their backpacks for school snacktime tomorrow, and I’ll know they’re eating better than they sometimes do.

But unless this turns out to be the best loaf of bread I’ve ever tasted, I’ll probably go back to Nashoba Brook bakery brand for the next loaf. Baking bread is fun, but I have a family to raise and a variety of hobbies. Maybe in retirement I’ll find it to be the perfect match for me, but for now I know it will likely be a new season before I once again submit to the need to knead.