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Hello, good people.

Well, it was too good a streak to remain unbroken.  After 15 days of unbroken longwindedness (heh heh, you said broke wind, heh heh), I have been advised that I should not miss LutherCorp’s Christmas party tonight.  “But...but...what about Prepare to Meet Your Bakerina?” said I.  “How about if I start posting comments to Prepare to Meet Your Bakerina, so that people can reeeeeeeally get to know you?” said my office buddy who will probably be making her presence known here any day now.  Do not pay attention to a word she says, for it is her life’s mission to reduce me to blushiness.  It’s all lies, damnable lies.

So tonight I am indulging in the time-honored Pasting in of the Words of Others, hoping that this constitutes fair use and not an egregious violation of copyright.  Since I had so much fun writing last night’s valentine to hot cereal, here are two stories from one of the books I mentioned, Oats! A Book of Whimsy, by Shirley and Maria Streshinsky.  If you think that this is the last word on oatmeal from me, keep dreaming, pally.  In the meantime, I am off to engage in a little cheer with my fellow monkeys.  Pictures will be taken.  If any of them depict me as the pre-Raphaelite goddess of my hopes, rather than the gin-blossomed nightmare of my fears, then pictures may even be shared.

As a wee lad of eight, growing up in the small Irish town of Belleck, in the county Fermanagh, Ireland, I shared a fairly modest home with my family, including the aunt who raised me, a sister, a variety of dogs, a pony, and a beloved donkey named Rufus.  I woke up one morning with a notion that I was not going to school that day and decided to convince my aunt that I was truly sick—not well enough for school, mind you, but not sick enough to see the local pharmacist (the closet doctor was in the next county).  Since my aunt was a firm believer that our daily oats (which I loved eating with Mother Kelly’s Double Cream when we could afford it) were a cure-all, she decided to stir up a batch in the great black kettle that hung over the peat fire.  She and I sat with our feet in front of the fireplace, warming our hands on the large steaming porcelain bowls of oatmeal.  But after a few bites, Auntie thought something was missing. She opened the pantry door, and from behind the lovely Bellock china she retrieved a bottle of her favorite Irish whiskey, pouring a dram on her oatmeal and, winking at me, a bit less in mine.  “Irish whiskey and oatmeal, that’s the stuff,” she proclaimed boldly as the aroma entered my nasal passages and I was filled with a warm glow.  Mixed with brown sugar, warmed heavy cream, and that Irish amber fluid, my oatmeal had never tasted so good, and now I knew why Auntie believed so strongly in the curative power of oats.

-- Jon Brenneis is a photographer/raconteur.  On the Salt Lake City trip where he met the Oatmeal Cowboy he was on assignment for Life Magazine.  A few years later, finding himself in the early morning in yet another airport in another part of the country, he requested of the waitress:  “Oatmeal, please, with a few raisins mixed in and some brown sugar sprinkled on top, if you will...” To which the waitress responded:  “And I suppose you want a nickel in the bottom of the bowl?”

Although it doesn’t happen much anymore, one of the most frequent topics of “you know what you should do?” conversation was the one on which I solicited the least advice: dieting. I never knew whether it was because I was, once upon a time, an easy and obvious candidate for weight loss, being much more of a muchacha than I am now, or whether diet regimes are so embedded in the landscape that it has become expected of all of us. I will never forget the look on Lloyd’s face when I told him that a friend and co-worker, a stunning 23-year-old Taiwanese woman, already a hardcore gym rat, decided to go on Atkins. At least in New York, or at least in the circles in which I work, there is an idea that it is somewhat immoral not to be on something. If you are not in need of dimunition, then maybe you need to do something about your triglycerides, or your HDL/LDL ratios, or your insulin resistance, or maybe all of these are fine but you want to know how to make them better.

In my case, though, no one would have looked twice at me if I announced that I was going on Atkins, because once upon a time there was much more to this bakerina than meets the eye. (There also used to be less than meets the eye, but that is for once and future times.) What garnered looks was my polite thanks for the advice, but no thanks, I’ll figure it out for myself. I could see the unspoken assumption in their eyes: but wasn’t it figuring it out for yourself that got you fat in the first place, dear? Depending on the receptiveness of the friend in question, I would explain that I had spent years taking similar advice from people who knew the trick, who had the key, and all I needed to do was follow their path. I spent years on Pritikin and Atkins and Stillman and a particularly wiggy diet by a particularly wiggy female bariatrician who was famous in the late 70’s/early 80’s, a woman who regularly wrote diets for Teen magazine and counseled us that there was no reason for a fat teenager to eat more than 850 calories a day. I tried Weight Watchers, safest of the bunch, which gave me an excuse to obsess over every blessed thing that went into my mouth. I even tried a regime of, shall we say, disordered eating, the kind favored by ancient sybarites and frightened college girls. I was rewarded for my efforts by losing 5 pounds, then gaining a minimum of 10, yearly, for 10 years. You can do the math.

In the end I decided that I couldn’t do any worse for myself than I had allowed the experts to do for me, so I started making sneaky little changes, the kind where every time you find yourself with a craving for stale candy from a vending machine, you force yourself to have a cup of tea instead. (The stale candy habit is gone, but now I have a wicked tea habit.) Last February, when I suspected that I was pregnant, I started eating a lot of broccoli and craving foods with a lot of sesame in them, like hummus and halvah. The pregnancy turned out to be a false alarm, but the broc habit stayed, and I remain staggered by how much halvah I can put away. Most importantly, though, I decided that I was not going to cut anything out. More vegetables? Why, yes, thank you. Lean meats? Mais oui, bien sur. But I am not going to panic if I go to Zarela for dinner and the gallon of mole sauce her chef made that afternoon contains a teaspoon of lard in it. I will give up the stale vending-machine chocolate, but if someone offers me a brown-butter-flavored ganache from La Maison du Chocolat, I am going to thank that person profusely, and possibly plant an open-mouth kiss on him/her. And I am not, not, not going to give up starches.

Yes, I know that you lost 50 pounds. I know that you have more energy. I know that our ancestors were hunter/gatherers, more suited to hunting mastodons than cultivating grain. I have heard it all, and I’m glad that it works for you, but if you tell me one more time that our wee baby little intestinal tracts were not designed to eat that big bad bowl of oatmeal, I am taking that oatmeal, and the little pitcher of heavy cream and the brown sugar and the wee dram of Macallan 18 that accompanies every proper bowl of oatmeal in my house, and I am going home. And before you make some well-meaning comment about how much faster I would get thinner if I just gave up all of that oatmeal and millet and amaranth and barley and polenta on which I warm up during the winter, let me remind you that there was 37 pounds more of me to tell this to when I did it your way. Pardon me while I add one more dram of Macallan 18 to my oatmeal.

If you are not a fan of oats but you still like the idea of a hot breakfast to power you through a cold morning, any good cookbook on grains can give you instructions on how to cook them and what to serve on/in/with them.  One of the best is Mollie Katzen’s Sunlight Cafe.  It is an all-purpose breakfast cookbook, filled with recipes for eggs and potatoes and breakfast puddings and pancakes and waffles and muffins, but for me the crowning glory is the comprehensive grains chapter, filled with clear, friendly instructions on how to cook and serve them.  One of my new breakfast staples is amaranth wafers, made by patting cooked amaranth into silver dollars and pan-frying them at a high temperature in high-oleic safflower oil.  Because the oil can be heated to high temperatures without smoking, the wafers stay crisp even at room temperature.  Lloyd likes his as a sweet, with maple syrup.  I prefer mine savory, with tiny dabs of sour cream and a little Maldon salt.  There are recipes for oatmeal cooked in sweetened milk with chai spices, couscous with dried fruit and yogurt, barley cooked in apple juice, and my very favorite, Orange-Pecan Skillet Millet, made by cooking millet risotto-style in vanilla-spiked orange juice.  I love it like mad, and Lloyd does too, even though every time I make it, he crows “who’s a pretty boy?” in a spookily-accurate parrot voice.

If you are a fan of oats, you may want to try to procure a copy of this.  It is out of print, but copies pop up here and there.  I got mine from my home away from home, Kitchen Arts & Letters (212-876-5550).  If you buy it, be prepared:  People will look at you oddly, wondering at you as you chuckle over this little book of whimsy.  Let them look.  You and I know good stuff when we see it.

If you are thinking that tonight’s observations are a touch eccentric, you have Dream Company to thank for that.  Dream Company (not its real name) is based in Vermont, and this afternoon two people from the company interviewed me over the phone for a job.  Dream Company has a baking school, one that teaches both professional and avocational bakers, and they are looking for someone to teach some avocational classes, assist in the professional classes, write the curriculum for new classes and tweak the curriculum for the old ones.  There will also be some writing required, as well as regular meetings with Dream Company’s mail-order catalog staff, to determine which of the new products can be used successfully in class.  I am on a shortlist, hoping that my lack of provable foodwriting skills and teaching experience will be compensated by the fact that I have taken just about every professional class they offer, that I live on their message board (or at least I did before I started PTMYB), and that I have been buying their flour and baking equipment on a nearly bi-weekly basis for 10 years.

I am trying, really trying, to maintain an aura of Zenlike detachment over this adventure, trying not to remember how I fell in love with Vermont and New Hampshire from the moment I watched the sun rise from my hotel room last October, looking at how beautiful it was in the daylight.  I try not to think of the pleasure I took in finding a place to have a nice breakfast and a really damn fine cup of coffee, and in discovering the co-op supermarket next to my hotel, which rivals the best supermarket, the best health food store and the best gourmet market here in New York.  I don’t remind myself that liquor stores in New Hampshire are open on Sunday.  I try to find neither good nor bad in my quoting a salary two-thirds of my current one when they asked for a salary requirement, simply because I knew it was the only way to keep myself in the running.  Most of all, I try to not think of this as anything but an option, one of many before me, just an option like the Egg Board Fellowship in Arkansas that I now know is not mine to have, or like another job here in New York, another packaging desk monkey job, only with a better salary and bonus plan, for which I interviewed in September but which may not become available until January, if it becomes available at all.  These are options, not heartbreakers; no job, no fellowship, should be enough to break one’s heart, even though they may make that heart race like a hummingbird.  I will not think of what it would feel like to get up and teach people to bake all day long, and to write about it, lest that little star of hope get snatched away the second I reach for it, much as Mary Fisher’s was snatched away by Ruth Patchett in The Life and Loves of a She-Devil.

I will have at least 2 1/2 weeks not to think of this, as I have been told that the shortlist won’t even be whittled down until after the Christmas holidays.  On the phone I said oh, that’s fine, I’ll be in Philadelphia over Christmas, so I can wait until after January 1, even though on the inside I was hollering are you kidding?  Don’t you know that I have all the patience of a toddler hopped up on high-fructose corn syrup?  You know that I won’t be able to close my eyes and relax for the next two weeks, right?  Right?  Right?  I mean, fine, I’ll talk to you sometime after Christmas.

After this conversation, which rendered me unfit for anything but staring into space for the last hour and 15 minutes of my day, there was nothing for me but to come home and bake off the test fruitcakes.  As cakes go, it is a labor-intensive one:  Measure the dry ingredients (flour, baking powder, salt, cinnamon, ginger, mace).  Grind cashews fine and add them to dry ingredients.  Chop some more cashews and pistachios.  Peel a fresh pear and add it to the dried fruit and bourbon, which smells so wonderful, like a birthday present.  Beat butter and sugar together, add eggs one at a time, add flour and nuts alternately with sour cream, add lemon juice and vanilla, fold in cashews and pistachios and fruit and mix it all together and pour it into loaf pans and stick them in a 300-degree oven for an hour and 45 minutes, until you have a pair of perfect, golden, beautiful fruitcakes and a bowl for licking.  Even though I felt worn out and broody when I got home, I worked happily on this cake, thinking that I could do this every night, following the rhythms I know so well, creaming butter and sugar, alternating dry and liquid, knowing that when I can smell the cake baking, it’s about 3/4 of the way done.

Dear friends, please disregard all of the above.  It’s a good thing these are test cakes, because when I went to the kitchen to turn the cakes out of the tins, what should I spy with my little eye but my chopped cashews and pistachios, which never made it into the cake.  They are still sitting in the Cuisinart.  When I realized this, I smacked my head on the fridge in frustration.  It was supposed to be a broad comic gesture, and it would have been if I had not caught my forehead on the corner of the fridge.  I look like Gorbachev now.  Thank you for not telling Dream Company.

A public service announcement from PTMYB:  If you are brokenhearted in any way, for whatever reason; if you find yourself subject to December blues (or June blues, if you live in the Southern Hemisphere); if someone you love died this year and this is your first Christmas without them; if someone you love is going through something painful and your heart is bleeding at the pain they are in; in other words, if you are in even the slightest of emotional dire straits, do not, under any circumstances, watch Punch-Drunk Love.

You may already be one step ahead of me on this.  You may have already decided not to see it due to a loathing of Adam Sandler, or Paul Thomas Anderson.  You may have already seen it, and regretted it.  You may have already seen it and loved it, and since you are made of stronger stuff than I am, you are smart enough to know that it’s just a movie.  In that case, please feel free to skip ahead.  But if you are like me, if you haven’t seen Punch-Drunk Love and you are intrigued by the decent reviews Adam Sandler got for it, then please do watch it, as it is a fascinating movie and the entire cast acquits themselves well.  Just be sure that you are in the best emotional health you have ever been in, because Punch-Drunk Love is a painful movie to watch.  Adam Sandler is a jangle of exposed nerve endings in every single scene, roiling with self-consciousness, sadness and rage.  I haven’t been so exhausted by a movie since we received our Stanley Kubrick box set and had the bright idea to watch The Shining, A Clockwork Orange and Full Metal Jacket on the same day.

If, like me, you did not take my advice and watched Punch-Drunk Love anyway, you will probably need some very specific music to cheer yourself up.  Some of the best-loved albums I own, beautiful music for a Sunday, I had to jettison today, lest I find myself headed back to bed for the rest of the day.  My beloved Magnetic Fields, usually correct for any occasion, I could not listen to them today, for fear that my heart would break all over again.  Flaming Lips, who never fail to put a smile on my face, today made me tear up.  Any beautiful plaintive voice, Neil Young singing “Helpless,” Dawn Upshaw singing “He Was Too Good For Me,” Rufus Wainwright singing “Beauty Mark,” Elisabeth Fraser singing “Aloysius,” Stacey Kent singing anything, no, no, no.  Maybe the solution is noise, I said to myself, and and broke out the KMFDM I usually play at the gym.  Nope.  In the end, embarrassing as it is to admit, the album that did the trick, the one who undid my Punch-Drunk Love damage, was The People Who Grinned Themselves to Death by the Housemartins.  Sometimes what you really need are mean, angry lyrics set to the jauntiest, poppiest music you can find.

Fortunately, we are eating well today.  We started the day with a hot cereal I’ve had my eye on for a while, a Mollie Katzen recipe for a Turkish breakfast called anooshavoor, in which you cook pearl barley in apple juice and top it with dried apricots and yogurt.  If I were living alone, I could easily eat it for three meals a day.  One of my dearest pals, a cook, eater and wine lover extraordinaire, sent me a recipe for a Greek stew called stifado, which I figured would be just the thing for a day filled with snow, rain and wind.  It was a lovely stew indeed, and I know it will be even better when we have the leftovers for dinner tomorrow.  And we have a good news/bad news/good news situation with the rice flour-cardamom shortbreads I baked off this afternoon.  The good news is that these cookies are some of the sexiest things I’ve ever made, buttery and sweet and loaded with cardamom, the official house spice of PTMYB, with a short, crispy, grainy, melting texture that makes my toes curl.  The bad news is that these are fragile beauties, and I can’t figure out how to mail them without their dissolving into the world’s best crumbs.  The other good news is that now Lloyd and I have a nice airtight Rubbermaid tub full of these cookies, and, heck, somebody has to eat them.  (evil grin) Okay, okay.  Anyone who can tell me how to mail these, there’s a fresh batch of them with your name on it.

Today I went to the farmer’s market and the health food store, as I do every Saturday, to pick up the various things for us to eat over the course of the week, as well as more supplies for this year’s procrastinated holiday bake.  At the farmer’s market I poked around looking for the guys who sell me my broccoli, cauliflower and cabbage.  No luck; the season is over, time now to get my broccoli from California and South America, my cabbage from one of the other market guys.  Squash are still to be found, good ones, Hokkaido and Blue Hubbard and cheese pumpkins and my favorite, Delicatas, the sweetest, finest squash ever to hit the inside of a 500-degree roasting pan.  Tubers and root vegetables are still around, and plentiful:  turnips and rutabagas, somehow more delicious when you throw a lot of cream into them; celery root, which I use for making remoulade on Thanksgiving Day, wondering as I lick the plate clean why I don’t make it more often; potatoes in more flavors and hues than seem possible, including a pink-fleshed one labelled helpfully as “new potatoes $1.50”, which brings a deep buttery flavor to the frittata I will make with it; Brussels sprouts still attached to the stalk; carrots, carrots, carrots.  One stand has a bin of fat, muted, mottled carrots with a sign bearing the legend “Vole-Uptuous Carrots (Taste Tested by Voles!) $1.00/lb.” Since I believe in the Italian maxim that states if the bugs won’t eat your produce it’s no good, I buy a nice big bag of vole-uptuous carrots for my favorite beef stew, made with lean stewing meat, carrots, prunes, onions, flour seasoned with salt and mustard powder, and as much Guinness as it takes to cover the whole thing.

Today’s bake is a trial run for the big-deal holiday bake I will do next weekend, although if everything turns out nicely tomorrow, I may just send them out as gifts after all.  The general gift this year (for all but a few people, namely children, who like homemade caramels as much as the next person but tend to want something a little splashier to open up on Christmas) is an assortment of the jams I’ve put up through the year—cherry and almond, strawberry with mint and black pepper, strawberry with tarragon, dried California apricot with hazelnuts and brandy, rhubarb with apples and Gewurztraminer, greengage plum, damson plum—plus some rice flour shortbread from the new Alford/Duguid book; malted milk brownies, which I made last year and have been informed must be included in every Christmas basket for the rest of my life; maybe some cornmeal shortbread, as you can never have too many shortbreads made from too many grains; the aforementioned caramels; something with chocolate in it, because hell, that’s the law; and the money dessert, a pound-cake style fruitcake.  Because I’ve heard all the usual jokes about fruitcake—although, by all means, feel free to send me some new ones if you’ve got them—I have switched to a blond fruitcake made with dried California apricots, raisins, stem ginger in syrup, soft soft sultanas and the best glaceed cherries I have ever tasted, made with care and still containing a taste memory of the original cherry.  I also put in some cashews and bright green Sicilian pistachios, which are so expensive they make my chest hurt when I pay for them, but if you can’t splurge on other people’s presents, then when can you?  I love cutting into the finished cake, which looks like stained glass.  No orange peel, no lemon peel, no citron, no angelica.  Even a little fresh orange peel, to me, tastes invasive in this cake.  Bourbon, on the other hand, does not, so I make sure to soak the fruit in plenty of it.  (grin)

While I am the first to admit that baking gives me something few other things in life do, I don’t want to overromanticize it, give it mythic status.  It is not a religion; it is a craft, and it is work, albeit work of the best kind, absorptive and creative and capable of taking you in interesting directions as long as you are mindful of what you are doing.  While I agree that you can learn things in baking, or cooking, that are helpful to know for life in general (as in “never fight with your ingredients, because your ingredients always win"), I get nervous when I hear too many transcendent, supraworldly, hyperextended-metaphor-senses-of-being attached to food and the preparation of it.  Sometimes it can be a way to get you out of yourself and into the world around you, or into the lives of those who preceded you, the cooks of another generation on whose shoulders you stand.  On the other hand, sometimes it is just cooking, just baking.  Sometimes it is unutterable boredom, or pressure.  Sometimes it keeps you too grounded in your life, your work, your kitchen, which was fine when you walked into it but now just annoys you.  You can feed your child a plate of the chicken and rice you ate as a child, and she smiles happily, and you think, this is the way foodways start. But you can also give that same child that same plate of rice the next week, and she will turn her beautiful nose up at it, and if you take it too personally, if you weigh that plate of rice down with too many signifiers, you find yourself treading on dangerous ground, giving food a power it should never have.  I love the idea of family dishes, and food memory; I love the ones that I got from my family, and I could easily spend weeks listening to other people’s from their families.  But as soon as I hear someone say, “I’m making this so that I can create this food memory in my children,” I sense trouble afoot.  I know a woman who actually does this.  She has written several cookbooks and has a television series and an army of admirers and a bad attitude toward anyone who makes the mistake of crossing her.  She talks a big game about making certain dishes for when she or her husband or kids are in certain emotional states, which strikes me as a little creepy, that she is organized enough about her own family’s emotions to plan food around them.  (To my pal H, with whom I’ve had this conversation before:  no, it’s not Lidia Bastianich.  Lidia is the real deal.  I think Lidia is a crackerjack chef, a tough cookie and a splendid role model.)

In the end, I don’t bake to divine the secrets of the universe, or to create certain emotional states in the people around me.  I do it because it is fun, it is compelling, and it feeds my senses.  It feels good.  It smells good.  It tastes good.  It is alchemy, and it is fun to watch.  I like knowing that when the bubbles in the caramel pot hit a certain size, it is almost time to pour the caramel onto the marble slab.  I like knowing that when your bread dough smells like *this*, it needs more time, and if it smells like *this*, it has overripened and started to overacidify, so what you want to do is get it when it smells like *this*, and knock it down, shape it, get it ready for the oven.  I like making ganache, that dizzying mix of bittersweet chocolate and heavy cream, and pouring it over a cake, knowing exactly how fast I have to pour it to create a smooth, shiny, even, glistening surface.  I like running cherries and sultanas and chopped apricots and bourbon through my fingers, and I love that anyone who comes near me for the rest of the day knows exactly what I’ve been doing.