Stress-baking
Stress-baking was the name of the game yesterday. When your wedding gets postponed for the second time in a matter of months and your job looks less and less likely to move forward and you have no control over the bad things happening in the lives of your friends and family, the only thing one can seem to control in the short window of a day is what one does with their hands. Rather, what I create and what flavors I can put together on a plate to consume.
Every time I cook an octopus, I send a photo to my mom without telling her what to anticipate, because I enjoy knowing that she will open her Whatsapp thinking she’s going to see a pleasant photo and then she ends up staring at a purple-pink cephalopod. And before you ask, yes, I did have to google that word and yes, I do know that octopi are meant to be some of the smartest creatures on the planet, but I’ve chosen to eat them anyway. Blame Europe and the previously-weird-to-me culinary choices that I have now incorporated into my tri-weekly home menu.
Dinner is served!
So I boiled this octopus in a bath of water, oil, salt, carrot, celery, onion, and a bay leaf. Feel very free to say that it sounds gross (my mother’s response to my message- a succinct “Ew.”), but the smell that fills our house is simply divine.
We then take our boiled friend and make a nice salad by cutting it into small pieces and tossing it with chopped boiled potato, parsley, lemon, and olive oil. It’s a yummy dish warm or cold, but with this summer heat and no AC, I like it cold.
I then strain the octopus bath and use it as a broth in seafood risotto, which is what I made yesterday for lunch. I told Massi recently that I don’t actually like risotto all that much, but that it’s one of my favorite things to make. I like the procedure of it and how you really have to commit to standing there and stirring for a good while, patiently adding broth only once the previous spoonful of broth has absorbed into the rice.
I like making something that is time-consuming but also a bit thoughtless at the same time, allowing me to zone out while I stir sizzling rice in figure-8 motions.
I’m afraid I may feel similarly about sourdough bread. I love the challenge of a sourdough bread. The sourness and the crunchiness I could probably live without, if I’m honest. But I like that it’s seen as the Mount Everest of bread-baking, only serious bakers dare mess with such a sticky mess as sourdough. Plus the challenge of getting those big sought-after air holes inside. The more height your bread gets and the more crunchy the crust, the more impressive the loaf. Instagram is full of proud Sourdough Parents holding their halved loaves with the kind of pride we really should only reserve for children. But honestly I really only like eating sourdough bread the day of, because what on earth is better than fresh bread right out of the oven? Massi asks me “do you want some prosciutto or cheese to put on that?”. Silly man. No, I just want to pour olive oil over it and let it drip down my face. He stares at me. “Do you at least want to eat off of a plate?”. Ugh, fine.
The other thing I like about the sourdough process is the discard. When your little sourdough pet gets hungry, she’ll need to be fed with a combination of flour and water. However, before you feed the little lady, you gotta take half of her, and just junk it. I spent months reading about sourdough and I’m still not sure I completely understand the science of why, but it has to do with exponential growth of the starter and if you feed the whole thing, you’ll soon end up doubling and tripling and so on the amount of flour and water your pet needs. So, throw out half, feed what’s left, and call it a day.
But some brilliant bakers started coming up with recipes that you can use with that junked sourdough starter instead of just throwing it away (“Or feed it to your chickens!” they say. Okay, I’m a crazy food person, but I’m not yet to the point where I want to justify CHICKENS to my fellow apartment building tenants). Yesterday I decided to use some of this starter discard to make some oatmeal chocolate chip pecan raisin cookies. It had SO MANY INGREDIENTS, probably more than necessary if you ask me, but they ended up being really delicious. And they’re as big as my hand which makes me wonder why I don’t make more cookies GIANT just for the sake of them being giant.
So, it’s true that making risotto and broth and whole wheat sourdough and oatmeal cookies did not change the fact that I won’t be getting hitched in the year of 2020 (which may be a blessing in disguise- can you imagine how much we’ll want this year OVER WITH by the time December comes?!) or the fact that I may not have a job much longer, but the process of making and sharing these foods makes me remember that life goes on, the world keeps spinning (and NOT around me), and that we can do hard things.
Plus, you gotta eat, right?
