“I cannot count the good people I know who, to my mind, would be even better if they bent their spirits to the study of their own hungers.”
Like most people in America right now, I am being “forced” to stay home, cook every single meal for my family, and entertain myself with what is available to me in my immediate surroundings thanks to the Covid-19 threat and social distancing guidelines. This reality is not a far stretch for the average primary care giver to young children, and I must admit it has been a little humorous watching the normally free-to-engage-in-whatever crowd attempt to adapt to this lifestyle.
“You mean I can’t go out when my cbd insused wine supply is dwindling?”
“I have to come prepared to the grocery store with wipes and hand sanitzer and a mask?”
“I am expected to fully engage with my loved ones 24 hours a day??”
For most parents to toddlers, the wine supply is always dwindling and most often is an inconvenience to get more. You can’t leave the kids in the car. Instead you must bear the dirty looks from the other patrons of the spirit store when you come in with your three kids jammed in one of those mini carts, while also toting a book bag that has baby wipes and half-eaten cracker packs bursting from the barely intact zipper seams. Try to convince someone who has seen you in that setting that you’re not an alcoholic- go on, Ill wait.
The grocery store trip is ALWAYS a scheduled, planned activity with kids. # 1-Cart has to be sanitized because yes, the first thing any child under 8 will do is suck on the handle bar. #2- pick the right time of day- there is a perfect sweet spot to find when the food you need will be fully stocked (because hell-to-the-no I am not coming back here this week) and when the store will be least crowded. #3- Load that cart up and plan for the Apocalypse because again, hell-to-the-no I am not coming back here this week.
And finally, the constant expectation of happily and enthusiastically communicating with only a handful (if that) of other people for the near future. Any parent who has had their eyeball forcefully opened by a dirty, grimy, little toddler paw (imagine something with the dexterity of a raccoon as well as the curious smell) can attest to this as probably being the hardest thing. Everyone loves their kids, and their need to always be supervised (MAMA LOOK IT!!!) is actually very endearing. But, sometimes Mama wants to LOOK IT at anything else. Maybe even engage in conversation with someone who doesn’t need to point out every time something or someone farted.
All of us coming to the middle of the road in terms of what our daily experience is like is doing wonders for our sense of community. It seems as if the hamster wheel in our minds of wake up, do what I need to do today, go to sleep, has been interrupted. For the majority of us that have been told “thanks, but no thanks” to being out in the world, we get to actually live in our homes. Now whenever anyone gets that “ my mind is wandering I must go absentmindedly buy things from that fill-in-the-blank box store”, we CAN’T indulge that impulse.
Well, I guess Ill call my grandma and talk about life then…
Does anyone else feel that this is doing a bit of good? No, I am not on the front lines of the hospital watching the horrors of this virus first hand, and no I have not been directly impacted by this outside of annoyance of being told what to do. So I am admitting it is easier for me to see the bright side of all this. But there is a bright side in all of this.
With that said, I have been most struck by the rise of interest in bread making, Online baking websites have become over burdened by visitors and flour of any kind is in the highest demand in grocery stores- competing in scarcity with toilet paper. The toilet paper thing doesn’t make sense to me. But, the bread thing does. I think we all get it.
There is something fundamentally human about baking from scratch, especially bread. And things that are fundamentally human are most appealing to us in times of crisis. Making a fresh loaf of bread is cathartic. It takes work. It most often doesn’t neatly come together, and it takes intuition. The temperature and the humidity inside your house alter even the most fool proof bread recipe. Bread begs you to pay attention to it. And right about now there is a lot of attention to go around.
As the interest in baking has increased, the amount of commercially manufactured instant yeast has decreased . Instant dry yeast that most of us have come accustom to seeing in the dairy aisle of the grocery store in those little foil packets is now extremely hard to find. A few friends of mine working in the grocery stores have said customers are asking for when the shipment of yeast is arriving and and then they are coming back at said date and time. Yeast isn’t even making it to the shelf before it is sold out for the week.
Enter: The Sourdough Starter, Wild Yeast, etc. Craze.
(for those who don’t know- Sourdough Starter at its most basic is a mixture of flour and water left to sit at room temperature for days, creating an hospitable environment for wild yeast to take over and grow in. Free Yeast, yay! This wild yeast can live for many years as long is it is continuously fed and rejuvenated. It has a more pungent sour flavor than commercially produced dry yeast and lends that flavor to anything you make with it. )
I love this fad. I really do. It is not white noise to me in the slightest. I think it is encouraging that people with little to no experience are forcing themselves to try one of the truest and most difficult forms of bread baking. And for all those people out there belittling it by saying “its how EVERYONE used to bake, its only hard because you are over complicating it, wild yeast is readily available and hard to kill!, use your intuition”, and blah, blah, blah, you obviously are too far removed from the level of confidence the average person has in their abilities in the kitchen. There are plenty of food preparation methods that have been around forever and at their core SHOULD be easy to figure out. That doesn’t change the fact that grocery store shelves are loaded with time saving alternatives that have become part of life, or that we are a few generations in now of having these conveniences available to us, and we are slowly losing our grip on cooking anything from scratch.
That is why the sourdough craze gives me faith in humanity. Our resilience is showing in a food related way. Its inspiring and I like it.
I am so inspired that I am going to begin highlighting some of my favorite recipes using off cuts from my starter. I have made a slew of baked goods as well as savory foods. Most of these recipes are born from my inability to “throw away” any of the starter when I go to feed it. I have now come to accept the fact that if I don’t need a loaf of bread baked and it is feeding time, that I must use it for something else. Its a fun creative outlet, and I hope you enjoy following along!
First up: DOUGHNUTS! (mmm, doughnuts)
