What I learned last night March 17, Seattle

What I Learned Last Night: How to Bake Your Own Bread and acknowledging your scarred heart.

To Bake your own Bread
1) Mix:
2 cups flour
1 cup water
1 packet yeast
2 teaspoons salt
2) Knead. Knead the dough. Need the dough. Knead the dough only by hand. Appreciate the feeling of making something by hand, something real, something that can be more easily made with a machine but won't taste or feel nearly as good. Knead the dough like you’re making love for your last time. Don’t be intimated. Knead it some more and remember what it felt like to make love your first time, but this time don’t hold back. Own it. Knead it... turn it... press it until your muscles ache with soreness.

While kneading remeber the time you beat those eggwhites by hand with the wire whisk into stiff gleaming peaks, and then gently folded into your souffle base, hoping your signif other will appreciate the graceful dish and effort and savor your souffle, beautifully risen, then falling into its inevitable decline. But this is another story.

Continuing kneading your dough. Cry into your dough. Cry into your dough, remembering what it feels like to touch someone you love. And remember what it feels like to touch someone you love where few touch them. Knead it.
Cry salty tears. Your bread will taste better.

3) Knead into a ball.
4) Place in bowl. Cover with a fresh kitchen towel. A kitchen towel from the set your mother gave you and your ex-fiancé as a gift. This is pronounced “i-ro-ny”.
5) Rise. Allow dough to raise to double its volume.
Knead it again. Allow your cried, salty, ironic bread, and your heart to double in volume again.
6) Set oven to 350 degrees. While oven warms shape your dough into something beautifully simple. Maybe just a round ball. When oven is nice and hot, take a sharp blade, and gash your irony dough across the top as many times as your therapist recommends. A Crisscross does nicely, and is a doughy scar that, with a caring hand, will bake into something lovely and tasty.
7) Place dough into oven upon a well-oiled pan. Don’t want irony bread to stick.
8) Bake for half an hour.
While your irony bread goes about its business of baking and driving you mad with its wonderfully warming and intoxicating aroma, and while your new boy toy (smoking chef) drives you insane with his wonderfully warming and intoxicating pheromones, think about all the ways you want to eat your bread... and new boy toy. Tearing it apart, piece by piece. Ravishing it... with crumbs flying. Or eat it slowly acknowledging that both good bread and new relationships take time to rise into beauty, require a slow gentle hand, that takes the time to knead it and need it and both taste better and are more satisfying when given time to rise and develop.
9) Take bread out. Eat your bread. Enjoy. Relish your new boy toy and new feelings. I mean bread…. Savor. Savor its humbleness. Savor its whimsy. Stretch it out. Make it last. Cover it in butter that melts warmed against fresh new bread. Savor that this doesn’t happen often. Appreciate that it is rare in life to find such beauty. I mean bread. Appreciate it is rare you make bread and appreciate that it’s rare you find something so simple and easy to be around. Something you can just sit and be still with. Something gentle. Something kind. I mean it’s rare you make your own bread.