My year of obsessive, indifferent baking

[marmar]

My year of obsessive, indifferent baking
I've never needed my kitchen, and needed to get away from it, more

By MARY ELIZABETH WILLIAMS
DECEMBER 26, 2020 10:30PM


(Salon) The baking started immediately. My eldest daughter, arriving home from college for what was supposed to be spring break — but we all knew was an indefinite campus shutdown — dropped her bags near the door and requested chocolate chip cookies. It was March 13. I haven't taken my apron off since. I'm not unique in baking my way through this dumpster fire of a year. But what has surprised me in all of this has been discovering the limits of even the most consoling of rituals.

I don't know how I thought this was going to go — it's my first pandemic. However, I can say that I definitely overestimated my own degree of "Keep calm and carry on" competence. In other times, getting food on the table was a pleasant occupation, a daily ritual built on equal parts muscle memory and creative expression. In other times, though, there weren't four full-sized individuals doing their jobs and school work and managing a full slate of new, suddenly life-and-death routines all day long in the confines of one tiny, inescapable New York apartment.

The clock and the calendar, abruptly bereft of events to fill them, have contorted themselves in peculiar ways. There have been sleepless nights that felt endless. There have been many, many weekends worked straight through. There have been days when I looked up that had somehow turned into evenings. Always, there has been the need to keep everyone fed, a seemingly round the clock, out-of-tune drumbeat.

The kitchen has long been my chief place of solace and joy. It still is — It's just also now my prison, too. How, at the end of a day filled with grim news and constant interruptions — a delivery of groceries once easily purchased in person, a new COVID-19 case at a parent's nursing home — does one balance the need to feel reassured, to feel civilized with the bone-weary desire to do absolutely zilch? How does one create comfort, while simultaneously feeling so afflicted? My therapist told me I needed to create more routines. But in the chaos, where does one find them? ...........(more)

https://www.salon.com/2020/12/26/my-year-of-obsessive-indifferent-baking/

[msongs]

1. a college age woman can bake her own frigging cookies. relax mom nt

[Skittles]

3. exactly what I was thinking

do something to help other people

[Hortensis]

2. You don't always react as you expect. I don't love to cook

enough for it to be a hobby, but I do love to eat and so I typically cook from scratch and enjoy trying new recipes. My reaction to Covid was of course to get caught up in the sourdough bread craze -- not. I actually started buying prepared foods that could just be nuked and became less adventurous, fewer new recipes, more old comfort food ones.

Reminds me of when 1960s cool-mod me moved from Nevada to West Hollywood at 19 and the huge change caused me to take a totally WTF liking to the clunky midcentury-colonial furniture my new MIL gave us. That stuff was less cool than an old poodle skirt, and if she'd had an old one of those to offload on me maybe I'd have taken a fancy to it also.