A Baking Life

A colleague of mine once looked around her messy, busy classroom, where the bell had just rung.   Her noisy. boisterous high school students, who had been preparing for a debate, finishing research papers and sharing their favorite books with each other began to pack up to leave for the day.  The walls were filled with student work, pictures of far-away places, maps, and quotations on large sheets of colored paper.  She sighed contentedly as she looked at a huge stack of reading journals and writing notebooks on her desk.  "The teaching life is a good life," she said. 

Most of the very good life that I lead is a teaching life, but among some of my other lives is just a little bit of a baking life.  I don't bake professionally, nor do I spend significant daily time near an oven.  But most weeks will see me bake something, or several somethings -- a couple of loaves of bread, some cornbread or popovers or muffins, a cake or two, perhaps a batch of cookies or brownies.  Often I use the excuse of a work/family/social event to indulge my love of baking. 

On Saturday, however, I was able to luxuriate in baking -- along with talking, eating, walking, and general carousing.  I had the pleasure and privilege of a day spent with the glorious and well-named Bakerina.   Jealous yet?  You know you are, and you're going to be even more so if you read on. We've had a number of pleasureable jaunts together, but this was to be our first baking day.  Bakerina, aka Jen, doesn't get to spend as much time around the oven as she might like, either, although I think it's certainly more of a regularity for her than it is for me.  If you're one of her readers (and you should be, really you should), you'll know that she spends her weekday work time in the corporate jungle.  This I must say -- if there's anyone who would both like to and should be baking for a living, that someone is my chum, Bakerina.  She's at home with the accoutrements of baking in a way that I probably will never be.  She's incredibly knowledgeable, not to say scholarly, about food in general -- the history and provenance and science of foodstuffs is part of her daily argot.  And she's a hoot, as well -- funny, charming, easy to spend time with and provides lots of laughs.  I'm sure her all-around delightfulness is what makes her focaccia (pictured above) taste so good.   Someday her bakery will open, and wherever it's located, I, for one, will be there.  So, too, will anyone who loves and respects good bread, cakes, pies, and all the stuffs of the oven that glorify our lives.   Anyone who likes good jam will be there as well -- but more on that later. 

We took a little roam around Astoria on Saturday, buying and sampling various and sundry of its delights, and made plans for a return date to the neighborhood.  We barely scratched the surface of the culinary wonders on Jen's home turf, since we were eager to get back to her kitchen and start baking.   Lloyd, Jen's charming male counterpart, cheerfully put up with having his Saturday intruded upon as we embarked upon her signature white-wine focaccia, the bizarre but delightful olive cookie known as scourtins, and chocolate ginger cake.  Truthfully, most of the baking was done by Jen.  I was busy doing things like knocking over racks of cooling scourtins, and pretending to bake the chocolate cake for which Jen had already done all the mise-en-place while I was making a run for more muscovado sugar.  Sometime during all of this, Jen opened the glorious bottle of champagne she'd extravagantly insisted upon for our delectation.  The day became rosier and rosier -- clearly not due to just the heat of the oven.  All afternoon, Jen kept tucking more goodies in my take-home bags -- a pound of dark Wilbur chocolate, a half-loaf of Greek Tsoureki bread, all kinds of things.

When it came time to leave (or rather when G had finally negotiated the dubious glories of driving to Queens in order to pick me up), I schlepped downstairs with bag upon bag.  Not just the provender of our shopping trip, nor simply the spoils of our glorious baking were weighing upon me.  You see, I am one of the very lucky customers of Bakerina Kitchens, and I used this opportunity to go pick up my order of luscious homemade preserves from the source itself.  Much of her stock of wares sold within hours of going live. Your fingers should run, not walk, to Bakerina Kitchens, where there are still a few jars of jelly as well as light apple butter for sale.  I have it on good authority that other lovelies will be available just as soon as they've been preserved.  I got my reserved Paradise jelly, Damson butter and received a lagniappe of glorious Damson jam. 

The remainder of my weekend was set off delightfully by all of these goodies.  Last night and tonight our dinners were accompanied by what was simply the best focaccia either G or I have ever tasted, and then there was lovely chocolate ginger cake for dessert (thank goodness for all this great stuff, since I did have to make a really good dinner tonight: potato-leek soup, roast chicken, salad and focaccia and chocolate ginger cake.  After all, Tony's in the hospital -- we have to keep up our strength).  My hunch about the scourtins making a great biscuit for cheese proved correct.  And this morning's fresh hot popovers were accompanied by Damson jam -- at least they were until I abandoned the popovers altogether and began to spoon jam into my mouth, directly from the jar. 

So I'll live on these goodies for a while -- but Jen and I have promised each other a further joint foray into the baking life, to take place in my kitchen.  I won't have to wait that long for more of the wonderful baking of Bakerina, however.  There was this chocolate kuchen (the famed Fanny's Special Chocolate Kuchen, from Lora Brody's Growing Up on the Chocolate Diet) that we'd planned to bake on Saturday, but didn't quite get around to, what with the champagne and the gabbing and all.  It was a bit sad, since the mere description of this kuchen made my mouth water.   Jen apparently got busy after I left, and has promised me that if I meet her after work tomorrow, some kuchen will be mine.   I told you you'd be jealous. 

Comments

[Ivonne]

Ok ... I'm very jealous!

Julie, what a lovely post! It sounds like you and Bakerina had a tremendous time together. And you described what is my idea of the perfect day: time with friends, lots of eating and laughing and a little baking and cooking thrown in.

Lovely!

[Bakerina]

Hmmmm. You must have been baking with my doppelganger, because this person you describe is much too nice and on-the-ball to be me. I'd say that you met my evil twin, except that I think I'm the evil twin in this relationship.

All kidding aside, thank you, dearest, for the kind words and the beautiful post. I'm all verklempt here. :) It really was a superb day, and hey, doesn't that slice o'cake look pretty? I'm thinking that maybe Ginger-Glazed Chocolate Cupcakes are in our not-too-distant future. ;)

Your kuchen is sitting nicely atop my stray FedEx airbill containment unit at LuthorCorp. Lloyd and I cut into the other one. If I had kept it in the oven about seven minutes past Lora Brody's window of oven time, it would have been absolutely perfect. As it is, it's very, very, very, very, very, very, very close to perfect. Be sure you heat it up a little before you eat it, but be careful not to burn your mouth!

[Joe C]

What should make everyone jealous is that you're MY sister. Let them taste that German chocolate you made for my birthday -- to name just one among many triumphs -- and then they will surely weep...

[Bakerina]

Joe, you raise a good point, one that I neglected to acknowledge in my last comment. All that stuff she said about "oh, most of the baking was done by Jen; all I did was knock over scourtins, etc., etc." are the only words of pure, unadulterated nonsense I have ever heard from the mouth of our lovely and sage Julie. She made a brilliant cake, AND she made it look beautiful in the photograph, and yet she still persists in this silly modesty. This is not correct behavior. Since you're her brother, would you mind giving her noogies, or following her around repeating every word she says, until she finally gives in and admits that she is a bakerina without peer?

[Joe C]

I can't risk losing that chunk of frozen homemade lasagna she promised me, Jen.

[Kimberly]

OK, I'm envious... not just because you have jam from Bakerina Kitchens (though I have tasted her damson jam, and know it to be heavenly), nor because of the yummy baked goods, but because you live in NYC, and can therefore plan a day of strollng, shopping and baking with Jen that does not involve airplanes. Not that I'd turn down the focaccia or that lovely cake, but the company strikes me as the best part of the day -- for both of you.

[lindy]

Yeah, like Kimberly said.....

[Julie]

Ivonne, you're right -- there's nothing like a great food crawl, talking, baking etc. with someone like the Bakerina...

Missy Jen, Missy Jen -- No doppelganger, just you, the one and only Bakerina. And that kuchen! I haven't posted a postscript just because I don't want to make the whole readership fall off their deskchairs with envy. Who's being too modest now, eh?

Hmm, brother mine. I didn't realize that the piece of lasagna that awaits you in my freezer gave me such leverage. I'm going to have to utilize it more carefully, I think.

Kimberley and Lindy, I do know I have the advantage of proximity. All I can say is this: were you to get on a plane to hie yourselves in this general direction, I know of several folks who'd make sure you weren't sorry to have done so.

[bcinfrance]

Teaching is indeed a good life, whether it be in the Pacific Northwest or in Southwest France, and I've done both. But I find it doesn't leave quite enough time for the cooking life...