A quick bread girl turns the page

Around the age of 9 or 10, I learned how to make pancakes.
I began a career of making "quick breads". I slowly perfected the pancake temperature, committed the recipe to memory. Now I make them once a week without blinking.

The role yeast plays in baking consistently did not get through to me.
Baking soda,baking powder, those were my leaveners of choice.
They were the ingredients that were accessible, uncomplicated and within my technical grasp.
If I did use yeast, which I occasionally felt compelled to do when I attempted pizza dough, it was yet another frustrated reason why I was not a yeast bread girl. I rushed it, I tried to make a "yeast bread" project into a "quick bread" project.

This summer, I finally decided to revive an old family recipe, my grandmother's french rolls. Their airiness still lingers on my tongue, 30 years after I last had one.

I googled a recipe and reluctantly invested in a whole bottle of yeast.

I faithfully followed the instructions. For once, I resisted making these rolls into quick (but not airy) rolls.

The yeast surprised me. As it first warmed, came to life, it frothed and multiplied. I enjoyed seeing it spread.

I heard someone say, "let the yeast do the work".

I kneaded it for the 8 minutes as they suggested, I let it sit for an hour, it doubled.

It pulled apart in a soft luscious way that quick breads never did.

The yeast indeed did the work.

The yeast reminded me that I don't have to do everything.

Comments

I entered August without you.

I won't visit you this month. You won't call. I will raid your garden and you won't get any of the vegetables. I will make plans without telling you about them. We'll go to the store and not buy you one single thing. Whole books will be read and I will not tell you which ones. I will watch movies and not inform you. The nasturiums will ripen. Last month was different. I changed my schedule and took time off work to be with you. I dropped all kinds of plans for us to be together. You sent me messages, I received them. I picked up food that I thought you would like at the store and sent you pictures of every beautiful thing I saw. I sang with you. We watched the Great Canadian Baking Show. You chose the recipe for the garlic scape pesto and gave me instructions for making the gooseberry jam. I am in August without you. You are in July.

Keep telling yourself that.

We talk to ourselves everyday, all day (and night) for the whole of our lives. We started talking to ourselves before we knew we were a self, we forget what we said because we forget everything from before...when we were too young and busy developing our brain to remember those early years. There is still lingering residue of long forgotten conversations I have had with myself as a toddler sitting around in the crevices...sloughing off occasionally into words I tell myself still. We talk non-stop, and not just with dialogue. Our goosebumps communicate to us, our tingly feelings, our neurons, our peripheal vision. They are all submitting data into our self and expecting us to react, respond or all to often, expecting what they are sending us will be ignored. After all that talking, you'd think we'd know what we think about most things, but occasionally we are stumped. Unless we stop what we are doing and really concentrate sometimes that voice(s) ...

the words fell out

Despite being an introvert, I do often process big life events (and many many small ones) out loud by verbally hashing out my thoughts with whoever will put up with me. But this morning when I woke up to the big red blotch on the U.S. map...all my /the words fell out. They fell out unsaid, unformed. Got to work and probably , in another time, would have annoyed my co-workers, dominating the conversation with my verbal extrusions, but not today. I just mutely stared across at them and nodded. My dad came for lunch. Normally, we relish a good political diatribe, especially when we feel sure of our perspective, but this time, all I could do was munch on fries and marvel at all the unarticulated thoughts that I was not even bothering to retrieve. The silence inside me was noticeable. Social media was awash with reactions and I just looked away. I couldn't bear to read one word about it. I was not receptive to any reactions, accusations, reflections, words...

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