No Carb Santa

January 24, 2022

Today’s cake begins last fall, with pancakes. More precisely, our five year old son’s desire to share the joy of pancakes with his soccer team. Our pre-soccer Saturday morning tradition, in addition to those glorious morning snuggles, is sourdough discard pancakes, made from the gloppy, sour mash leftover from feeding my sourdough starter. Yet another beautiful thing from something that seems spent; redemption is everywhere when you’re looking for it. 

But during the soccer season, we’re shuttling off to five-a-side, no-goalie games at 9 AM and there’s barely time for toast. We’ve been promising the return of the beloved pancakes once the season ends. But my son will not be satisfied enjoying pancakes alone; only a team brunch will do. And so, the Saturday after the last game, families we know mostly from the sidelines stream into our home to carb-load and become a little more neighborly. 

Turns out, one of the soccer families bid, and beat us out, on the first house we looked at in this neighborhood. We were left with a seemingly useless detailed report on everything we’d have needed to fix in the house we wouldn’t own, the work product of the robustly eager inspector we’d paid for prior to submitting an offer. Tight market, you do what you can. Would the new buyers want to know what they’re getting into? We would, in their shoes. So my kind, practical husband offers to share our findings by way of a postcard sent to the address. Too weird? When we never heard back, we figured as much. But now, riddle solved. “NO! Not weird,” they insist, “we loved it, it was so thoughtful. We just lost the postcard and didn’t know how to find you.” But here we are, brought together by pancakes and my son’s impulse to invite others into his delight. 

Joy wants to expand–when unencumbered by the weight of shame, worries about how you will appear, whether someone cares as much as you do. Join the party, sit at my table, come on in and have a pancake. “I was born to love, I’m gonna learn to love without fear,” my favorite band sings. My children are mostly too young and lucky enough to be attuned to all the fear that can come with loving, and offer it generously, with ease–as if they were born to. When I was in my 20s, before kids, before marriage, before I’d ever had anything resembling a functioning romantic relationship, I had two cats who would, born to love, curl into my lap with no apparent pride, brazenly requesting the affection they desired. They made vulnerability look easy and I was in awe. I couldn’t imagine being so bold. I may have been born to love but I had a lot to learn, or unlearn, to get past the fear. 

I’ve heard it said that before time, God existed as a trinity of three distinct but united persons, interconnected in a delighted dance of perfect love. Yet God was not content merely to revel in that love within itself, but was compelled by sheer joy to expand the circle of love, and thus created humanity. I exist because of God’s uncontainable desire to extend God’s own perfect love outward. And if that is the God in whose image we are made, a God inherently in relationship, perpetually giving and receiving within God’s very self, we are indeed born to love. Like cats, like kids. Who sometimes provide necessary reminders of what that looks like without letting fear get in the way.

The soccer mom hands me a bunch of rhubarb, from her garden–in November! “It’s prolific,” she shrugs. “This is the last of it. I figured with all the baking you do, you can use it.” I most certainly can. In the hectic weeks leading up to our west coast holiday visit, it slips too far down the priority list, laying in wait in the fridge while we’re gone. Now that we’re back I’m determined to salvage it. Heady with my “house label” concept for homemade specialty foods, which I absolutely have gobs of spare time to undertake, I put in motion an experimental rhubarb rose shrub. Sounds fancy, cooks simply: chop the fruit, cook down briefly with sugar, sprinkle dried rose petals saved from last summer, cover with vinegar, refrigerate semi-indefinitely. 

A few weeks later the rhubarb chunks remain marvelously intact. I’ve made shrubs with other fruits–apples, pears, berries–and even without heat, their cellular structure succumbs within a week into a mush I compost after straining off the liquid. But rhubarb has resolve! After straining and bottling the 80s-pink liquid, what shall I do with the spent fruit? It’s too peppy to waste on compost. A jam? Why not? I re-invigorate the fruit with a little more sugar, and on a whim toss in ten Costco-sized frozen strawberries. It simmers all afternoon, the sharpest notes of vinegar evaporating and the enormous strawberries breaking down into a syrupy pink sauce. It looks like it wants to be on a cake.

That same weekend we discover that workers have inadvertently leaked concrete down our unassuming basement drain. Which, I learn, turns out to have the mission-critical role of draining the washing machine, among other things. The overflowing piles of laundry we’ve been accumulating, waiting to wash til the workers leave, will not yet be washed, at least not in our home. But our kids are already in weird, bottom-of-the-barrel-outfits, pants that barely snap shut at the waist–hey, look how much he’s grown since we bought those last year!–skirts that don’t exactly suit the January cold. And no one is thrilled about hand-washing a week’s worth of undies.

Our next door neighbor comes to the rescue, lets us use her machine. The same neighbor whose house plants I watered while she was away, who once turned off our oven when we realized we’d left without switching it off, whose yard I’ve helped landscape. We’re friendly but not quite friends, at least not in the what are you up to this weekend, let’s have brunch, I’m having a rough day can I talk about it? sense of the word. We’re in different life stages and have different backgrounds, but we’re neighbors and we try to be there for each other accordingly. After I finish lugging home the last of the laundry, I put together two little olive oil polenta cakes, going off-recipe to line the bottom of my springform pan with the impromptu strawberry rhubarb compote, and drop one off for our neighbor: thank you.

My dad, a small-town doctor, was known for sharing amaryllis plants with members of our community every Christmas. I am trying to carry on the tradition, but while he potted and delivered 200+ bulbs each year, I can just get my act together to gift ten. But plants are not my primary love language; that would be carbs. And long before the pandemic, but especially during the pandemic, I have methodically turned hundreds of pounds of flour into a parade of breads, muffins, cakes, focaccia, experimental bakes of all kinds, and of course, pancakes. I ordered 55 pounds of specialty flour from a miller in November, and even being gone for the holidays, I’ve already baked over half of it, just two months later. I may not have potted plants to pass out in droves, but stop by our place, you’ll leave with carbs. Let’s share a meal, I’ll bring the carbs. If you’re sick, heart-broken, or have a new baby, there will be carbs on your doorstep.

January 10: Six sourdough baguettes. My first try at baguettes, and they’re wildly misshapen. I imprudently attempt to bake too many baguettes at once, cramming them in so tightly that one log of dough jams against the oven door and curls under the oven rack, hardening into a disheveled candy cane. Margins are not my strong suit. But they are plenty tasty, and just gift-sized. I hand off the more coherent baguettes to a friend whose whole family has Covid. 

January 14: Sourdough Pan Gallego, a quirky little loaf speckled with rye and crowned with a topknot. I’m not sure what the knot’s purpose is, other than to show off: hey, my dough is so flexible it can tie itself in knots! An attempt last year wound up rather flat and sticky, but this time the knot turns out, more or less, and the bread has nice tension and oven spring. We eat one loaf, slicing our way awkwardly around the topknot, and gift one to our three-year old’s teacher, home sick. 

January 15: Onion and caramelized garlic focaccia, a short-hand version with a smidge of yeast that converts a 24+ hour process into an afternoon accomplishment. Misjudging the volume, I bake in a square pan what could have filled a rectangle, and it poofs up, almost a focaccia cube, fluffy and satisfyingly salty. We share some with a friend who stops by to help clear out our dreaded black hole of basement before we get new flooring, and bring the rest to neighborhood friends who have invited us for dinner. 

January 18: My standard sourdough, one loaf for us and one for neighbors with a new baby.

January 20: I start sourdough Choco Pan do Coco, another round of standard sourdough, sourdough bagels for the weekend. I’m on a sourdough bender! I mix up all three levain at once, but after the initial push, the doughs have such different schedules there’s never much to do at one time. We devour half the bread in one sitting when friends come for dinner Friday night and a roasting chicken takes hours to get to temperature. Nevermind, just spread more bread with the fatty cheese they picked up on the way over and no one is complaining. The bagels replace our usual Saturday pancakes, fat little orbs with barely any hole surviving the prooving, but addictive, especially decked with a smattering of choose-your-own-toppings. Our three year old, who eats shredded cheese scattered on yogurt (!), wisely covers a few bagels with an excess of mozzarella, which browns and crisps in the most perfect way. We work through most of the still-hot batch in one sitting, saving enough to share with our laundry neighbor.

The pan de coco, on the other hand, confuses me. Rich brown from Valrhona cocoa, it looks like a fudgy cake, but slices like bread, and isn’t particularly sweet or soft. But good enough to slather in butter and serve with tea for our friend, who has returned this weekend with his lovely fiance to help re-order our basement now that the flooring is complete, when we sit around the kitchen and catch-up when the work is done.

January 26: A beautiful standard loaf, perfect accompaniment to a weeknight dinner with a neighborhood friend, our daughter’s godmother. She lugs over a tote bag with meatballs and homemade sauce, we supply the bread to mop it up with.

January 28: I start a chocolate cherry loaf recipe, thinking it might be a good Valentine’s Day option. The recipe touts the aroma that will fill my house while it bakes, and it does not disappoint. There’s plenty of levain, so I start another project, a sweet dough with lots of butter mixed in one pat at a time by the hardworking Kitchen aide. It ferments untouched overnight, in the fridge, ready to be smeared with a chocolatey cinnamon spread I concoct, rolled up and slashed down the middle length-wise, and braided into a little crown, a spectacularly beautiful bake, looking much fancier that it is difficult,

January 29: Lazy afternoon, snow day, I’m snuggled up with our three year old watching Great British Baking Show. She’s smitten with the mats of cake rolled up into swirls with cream or jam, roulades, they’re called. Let’s make one! She dons her pink polka dot apron, selects a recipe from a Google image search line-up, and perseveres long enough to lick the wire whisk and smear chocolate all over her face. I mix up some ricotta and goat cheese, orange blossom water and zest to fill our thin layer of cake, but the cake is too sticky and rather than roll, it collapses, looking more like a garden bed tilled and ready for planting than cake. “I’m a little nervous about the rolling part,” I confide in my sister. “I’ve never done this before, and on the show they make such a thing about how the bake has to be perfect.” “It won’t matter when it’s in your mouth,” she replies, sagely. She’s right. This ugly cake is to die for. We wrap up slices in take-out containers and package cake and the chocolate cinnamon crown and hunks of the Valentine’s loaf, then bundle up in boots and snowpants and trudge around the ice-shrouded neighborhood in a merry carb parade, dropping off bags for a handful of people we know who could use some ugly delicious cake. 

Like my dad, but with carbs.

I’m no carb-santa, dropping off deposits like a benefactress and receiving nothing in return. Well, not in return exactly. Carbs are one stream into a broader river of neighborly acts of kindness, fostering a community that’s more than the sum of its parts. In our collective mythology, it’s small towns that get the credit for barn-raising neighborly kindness. Big cities are decried as dens of evil and concrete, where everyone toils through soul-crushing hours to get by or climb a ladder, where you’re crushed in elbow to elbow crowds, yet unknown and unseen. 

But all of us are wired for connection, born to love. And one comparative advantage of the city is the vast array of humans: all those images of God in cramped living quarters with adjoining walls and postage-stamp yards–more souls per mile, as my husband likes to say–all longing to be known, to belong, to love, to matter. We try to invest in deeper connections with the humans in proximity, one loaf of bread at a time. And we shouldn’t be surprised when those humans respond in kind. Fresh rhubarb, laundry next door, help with the basement, a shared meal–to say nothing of the joy of mutual affection. It’s not a series of exact exchanges, or a running debt to be paid off. It’s a perpetual giving and receiving, like a big extended family at its best, a faint glimmer of the trinity in its dance of perfect love.