The Isolation Journals - Day 11

I tried to make Dalgona coffee this morning and made a royal mess instead.  One corner of my kitchen is giving me flashbacks to my first job scooping ice cream at Brownie's, where I was once made to clean up an explosive bowel movement that somehow ended up on the wall opposite the toilet.  Good morning!  How are you?

More like diarrhea coffee, amirite?

It's Day 11 of The Isolation Journals and today's prompt comes from Marissa Mullen, someone who is, amazingly, internet famous for cheese plating.

Prompt:  Reflect on a moment where you did something that left you feeling nourished and sated. Where hours passed, yet you didn’t even know it. When you were right where you needed to be. Maybe it’s a memory of spending time with a loved one, or a long discarded childhood activity—dancing, drawing, shooting hoops in the driveway. Maybe it’s a more recent hobby—kneading sourdough or, like me, making elaborate cheese plates. Write about this experience. Write about being nourished and what it means to you.

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We introverts have been training for social distancing our whole lives.  This is our time to shine.  I feel fortunate that while life outside my four walls is largely a steaming cesspool, I can still carry out my hobbies unimpeded.  

Reading, writing, yoga, listening to podcasts, baking, drawing, running (and doing the latter three while listening to podcasts).  I even tried my hand at knotting friendship bracelets, but there was a cruel irony to that.  I have not endured one second of boredom over the last month.  Panic, yes.  Anxiety, sure.  Never boredom. 

Some hobbies require more forced concentration to get my head in the right space these days, but baking bread is a guaranteed way get me in the zone, to a state of flow.  It engages the whole body and mind.  It is at once a scientific and sensory process.  You start with strict measurements and procedures, but if your dough doesn't feel correct, you adjust by instinct.  There's a metaphor for life and listening to your own body in there, I'm sure of it.

There's a special bread I make for my family each Christmas.  Since time is proving to be an arbitrary construct, I may make it in the coming days.  We call our bread Finnish Bread, though its proper name is pulla.  It's similar to challah, sweet and eggy braided loaves, and loaded with cardamom.  

My great-grandmother learned to make it for her Finnish husband.  As her six children started families of their own, she baked a loaf for each of them every Christmas.  Of those six children, only my grandmother kept the tradition, baking loaves each year for her family to eat on Christmas morning.

I grew up watching this alchemy, salivating at the aroma of cardamom and sugar dissolving in the copper saucepan of milk and melted butter.  My grandmother taught me how knead, then to braid the dough.  Each year I took over more of the process, and with two cooks in the kitchen sometimes it was a comedy of errors.  If the bread was ever too salty one year, it was from tears of laughter dripping into the bowl of her KitchenAid mixer.  

For years, baking the Finnish Bread with Grandmom was a holiday unto itself.  Every December 23rd, we would spend the better part of the day baking loaves that were not to be eaten until Christmas morning.  The first time my grandmother admitted to sneaking a slice on Christmas Eve, it was as if she had told me she occasionally streaks down Main Street.  You can do that?  And get away with it?  My whole worldview opened up.

Now, I am the baker of the Finnish Bread.  Sometimes I'm with my family for Christmas, and I bake in my grandmother's kitchen.  Other years, I spend an outrageous sum to overnight the dense loaves to my mom so they arrive fresh.  Last Christmas I flew home with an enormous, elaborately wrapped, frozen rectangle on my lap so it wouldn't get crushed in the overhead bin.  This bread is precious cargo.

Right now, when I'm missing my family the most through all of this danger and uncertainty, I can't think of a better way to commune with them.  A hot thick slab of buttered bread and black coffee.  We don't have to wait until Christmas morning; Grandmom said it's okay.