September 13, 2024 As I’ve simultaneously embarked on my sabbatical, which ought to make me rested, and my training to be a spiritual director, which ought to make me good, I’ve stumbled into an uncomfortable reality: I am often cranky. Angry, even. Without dwelling too long upon the actual anger and what to make of it, the subject of a longer essay I’m working on, suffice to say I don’t feel...
September 2, 2024 It’s the same joke every time: “to be alone in nature, we need all this?” This, followed by a sweeping gesture at the mounting stack of bags of equipment and bins of gear we assemble for our few days in the woods. In the bags and bins, a portable bedroom, kitchen, furniture, which we tote from our urban basement past the suburbs, up a mountain road, to a gravel covered square...
August 24, 2024
Not every beautiful thingmust be converted to use,to poetry, or post,to morality tale, or medicine.Some swaying, sunlit leaves can simply glimmer,Some sunsets are merely to behold,Some plump fruit, fall.
October 2003 I had forgotten my camera that day. I was disappointed I could not capture the beauty of the lake we visited, but, and it was probably a suggestion from someone in the group less brooding and with fewer visions of grandeur, the idea was raised to photograph it in my mind. To use the absence of a camera to force me to notice with greater focus what I was seeing. I thought of the...
April 15, 2024 We scoot down the neighborhood streets on our annual pilgrimage to the massive cherry tree from which are, generously, strung three swings. Opposite, someone has thoughtfully placed a bench for parents to sit and enjoy the scene. Every April these blossoms explode into magnificent pink pom poms, lush, fragile, effervescent. They are extravagant and short-lived, exploding from bare...
February 25-26, 2024 I habitually ask for bread when we eat out, which isn’t often, not because I want the bread as much as I do the sauce. It is not generally considered restaurant manners in our culture, although I’ve certainly done it, to full on lick a plate prior to it being cleared, but when so much of the flavor is trapped in streaks on the pottery set before me, one could be forgiven for...
February 4-5, 2024 Brioche is a physically and emotionally demanding project, a labor of love. I bequeath it upon my loved ones on special occasions, a long holiday weekend or a beloved teacher’s birthday. It’s what you do when you want to wow someone. I once blew my daughter’s friends’ minds when, on my turn in the gymnastics carpool, I doled out slices of freshly baked brioche to...
February 4, 2024 The bowl of my 2006 KitchenAid mixer is filled with flour, milk, sugar, levain. I turn the mix speed to “stir,” the lowest it can go, and it spurts to life. But brioche dough needs more than “stir” to past the windowpane test. When the mix speed passes 2, the machine begins jumping around the counter, making its way perilously close to the edge. The dough...
February 4, 2024 In my culture, you got married after college, and then you got a KitchenAid, the holy grail of kitchen implements reserved for those elevated to the status of wife. I did not follow this plan. I remember declaring defiantly that when I graduated from law school, I would buck the system and honor my achievement by buying my own. Several years out of college, and a law degree, but...
January 17, 2024 For years I said I was a cook, not a baker. I don’t do well with precision but I’m great with improvising. There you go. When did this change? I attribute it, at least the sourdough part, to Michael Pollan’s chapter on bread in Cooked, whose rapturous account of the glorious, almost holy, nature of the transformation of flour and water into bread gave me shivers...