Baking

Posted on December 22, 2006
Filed Under River Notes |

Carole is at a holiday party with her girlfriends tonight & while they would have allowed me to be an honorary girl for purposes of the party, I decided to stay home & catch up on work. Except that instead of working on the syllabus for that new course I’m teaching next semester, I’m baking bread. Over the last few years I have developed a fairly reliable recipe for a rustic white bread that uses a sourdough starter. (I keep two different starters stashed at the back of the fridge.) Tonight, though, I’m making a whole wheat bread with sunflower & pumpkin seeds. Festive, no? When I was growing up, Christmas was a time of high anxiety in my family & the whole xmas / holiday thing now leaves me pretty much unmoved. What I do enjoy is the celebration of the hearth & so the solstice — well, the day after — seems an appropriate time to bake bread, which has to be the most fundamental act of domesticity there is.