Sep 8th, 2007
Adventures for the domestically challenged
She burst in through my lowly front door with a basket full of ingredients, a wheat grinder and various empty baking pans.
I could see the driven look in her eye…she came to bake, and she came to bake hard. Had I known what was in store for me in the next 8 hours I may have run and hid in my bedroom locking the door behind me! In her basket of torturous items she pulled out a wheat grinder and a bucket of whole wheat. She began grinding the flour. Hers was a super-mega-ultra electric wheat grinder, and the noise that this machine made was deafening. But it didn’t stop there, she was not satisfied with the grade of wheat that had been ground. “Let’s run it through again!” she cried, with a torturous gleam in her eye. The second time around was even worse, as the machine struggled to refine what had already been done once before. It seemed to scream for mercy. She relentlessly forced the flour through with her hands. It seemed like hours before she would shut off the machine.
“Oh this flour is so luscious!” She said, giddy with the excitement of it.
We began the day with the first batch of bread. I carefully measured as she instructed. “Let the yeast mixture ferment for an hour…” the recipe read. Good. Fermentation takes time. Now was our chance to sit down and chat, I could definitely use some rest at this point in the day. It was then I noticed the time…lunch. I had four hungry children in my house. I threw together the old stand-by…the Mac and the Cheese…and silently prayed for some moments of rest.
“Oh good, now that the yeast is rising let’s get started on the cinnamon rolls!”
Cinnamon rolls? Is she serious?
On we worked, on and on into the evening. The cinnamon roll ingredients went into the bread maker. But we weren’t through yet. During the hour and a half they had to raise we made banana bread, and after that more whole wheat bread. She was relentless in her tasks and drove me forward in the baking effort.
For 8 hours we worked, stopping only to feed the children and put babies down for naps. The aroma of baked goods filled the house and drove us to a frenzied panic, waiting for the coveted cinnamon rolls to finish their raising, and baking. Then the frosting, the specially formulated frosting that took 30 minutes to mix at varying speeds. When it was finally done we could barely contain our emotions. Realizing the importance of the moment, we distracted the children with a short television program. We gently lifted the warm rolls from the pan. They were so light they practically floated on to our plates. Then we smothered them in the delicious frosting. We sat by the open window, watched the sun melt down across the horizon of trash cans placed on the street across from us, and we indulged.
I can say that we did enjoy the fruits of our labor that night, as we shed tears over the tender sweet flesh of those rolls. They were indeed the best I had ever partaken of. She called her husband and said “I can’t be with you. I’m with these cinnamon rolls now.”
We didn’t want to share them because they were so sumptuous, and yet we were so proud of our toils that we couldn’t help but share them with those that happened to smell the aromas and come by the house.
At the end of the night she left as quickly as she had come…taking with her the mammoth wheat grinder, the bread maker, the flour and the other sundries that were needed for our epicurean adventures.
I was left with two gorgeous loaves of whole wheat bread, a loaf of banana bread, and the leftover drippings on four empty pans where the cinnamon rolls had once tenderly been raised and baked and frosted.
The day took me a day to recover from. It was physically and emotionally draining.
And to Sarah, the author of the bread recipe, she asked whoever used it to contact her if they had any holes in their bread… Sarah, I think I found a hole!
Good Enough
