A Very Old Post

Something stinky got into my computer and while cleaning it up I came across this post. It’s something I wrote a few years ago while I was on sabbatical, living on an island off the coast of Maine, doing my best to get over losing my son.  It’s about baking, and reading it brought back many memories, not just of roadside wild Maine blueberries and stormy island days, but of just how far I have come since then and how difficult it was to get here.

And where am I?  I’m in a happy place, and my life is once again filled with hope and love even with all that is going on in this crazy world.  This is a world I want to live in, where all life has value, even mine.

Originally written in 2010

 

It started with a batch of blueberry muffins with the intent of getting rid of some of these blueberries I have a compulsion to buy every time I see them.  From there I went to a banana-nut bread, again to get rid of some bananas that were going south on the counter. But why the almond hot-milk cake?  Where did that come from?  It’s in the oven now, and when I take it out there will be approximately 2,483,971 calories sitting on my counter cooling and looking for a home.  Thank God I don’t have any brown sugar because there are Nestle’s chippies in my freezer and I can almost smell the chocolate-chip cookies they would make.  I’m going to have to introduce myself to more neighbors to get rid of this stuff.  Otherwise I will be in deep diet trouble.

Baking orients me.  I’ve been baking forever.  Besides how it makes the house smell, even mixed with the salty smell of the ocean that’s ever-present in this place, it is fun. I’m at that stage in my life where I have just as much fun baking as I have eating, and it’s even more fun to give it away and see the appreciation in the beneficiary’s eyes.  It would appear few people bake any more.  And I’m not talking about Rice Krispy treats that do nothing more than send your child into a diabetic coma, but real baking.  Nut breads, and streusels, and, for instance, this almost hot-milk cake.  I particularly like this recipe because I’m inclined to add fruit to it for a sweeter taste.  It’s the perfect base for strawberry shortcake, even with the almond flavor.

Baking also takes me back to a time when cookies in a box were a rarity in my house.  If my mother, or I, didn’t make it, it didn’t exist.  My mom made homemade fudge and even had the thermometer to do so.  It was like a science project and we’d stand in the kitchen watching and waiting for the thermometer to get to the exact temperature to stop the cooking process.  Otherwise the fudge would do something whacky; what I don’t know because we never let that happen.

I used to bake my own bread, and weird breads with herbs in them.  My son loved a meal that was a loaf of homemade bread and a crock pot of stew.  We called it “Rip and Dip.” The loaf would be in the middle of the table and we’d each grab a chunk (no civilized slicing of this bread) and just dip it into the stew until the juice was gone, then go for the vegetables and meat because I wouldn’t let anyone leave the table until they’d done so.    I don’t bake breads anymore because I’ve removed bread, and thus sandwiches, from my diet.  If I’m going to eat unbleached, processed, non-nutritional flour, it’s got to have a sweet bang to it, not just plain calories.

So it’s still raining and I see frontal clouds over the ocean, I believe heading east.  I hope so.  I’m ready to get out of here and stop baking.  If nothing else, I’m going to the store for some groceries, perhaps even some brown sugar.