Perils of baking

Tags

apples, baking, burns, caramel, cuts, galette, hot oven, postaday2012

Today I spent my time making my family’s favorite cookies, palmiers or elephant ears, the dough is time consuming but only in the sense that the dough needs to rest in the refrigerator for an hour in between each time you roll it out and fold it two turns. Once the dough has rested three separate times it is ready to be fashioned into what ever pastry you want. I made the dough because besides making the cookies; I was also planning to make an apple galette. An apple galette is a French tart made with the thinnest, flakiest pastry dough.

As I’m writing this post the apple galette is done for tomorrow and the palmier cookies are all baked into golden caramel lacquered buttery, flaky, crispy cookies. I am resting on the couch nursing a deep cut on my left thumb and two painful burns on the same left hand. My right hand is unscathed which I am very much appreciative because I am lost without my right hand. I am pretty sure that my left hand always bears the brunt of the injuries because it is weaker and slower. My cut was very embarrassing just in how stupidly I handled the knife while I was slicing up the butter into small pieces to put into the freezer before combining the butter with the flour. Whenever you work pastry dough you need the ingredients to be as cold as possible, especially when working with butter. The cut went fairly deep as my thumb got in the way of the blade as I was pushing the butter off onto the plate. I don’t know why my thumb was there, it wasn’t really doing anything besides get in the way.

My two burns were stupidly gotten as well. For once I didn’t burn my fingers getting the cookie sheets out of the oven. This time I burned the front of my hand, right on top of my bulging vein, pulling the oven door down, I think, or that may be the time that I burned my inner wrist right by the small tendons; either way fragile skin feels the pain much more acutely than my work hardened fingertips.

Everything came out looking quite yummy so the results are worth the pain. My mother used to say that excellence came from suffering or pain, she used to say the same about beauty; you have to suffer to be beautiful. I am really happy with my day’s work and that’s what counts.

Eat to live, live to eat

Tags

denial, eating, food, living, postaday2012, weight

Some people eat to live, while others live to eat. What about you? How far would you travel for the best meal of your life?

Humans don’t have a choice, we must eat to live which is why anyone with any type of eating disorder has the worst time dealing with their disorder; you cannot escape having to eat.

I can only address this question within the lens of my own experiences growing up in a culinary obsessed family and also recovering from my own eating disorder. Ever since I can remember, what we were going to eat at the next meal was always the question of the moment. It was a question that my mother asked after breakfast, after lunch and after dinner in order to plan sufficiently and well for the next meal no matter if it were for one, two or ten people, knowing what was coming next was always of vital importance. My mother wasn’t the only one, all of the cooks in my family always had that same question on their mind as soon as the last bite of their breakfast, lunch or dinner was had. I was conditioned to consider the whole meal as something that greatly mattered; it had to be healthy, nutritious, not too fattening, vegetables were incredibly important and everyone’s tastes needed to be accommodated. Staying at the table after everyone was finished and brainstorming over what was next to be prepared was a normal after eating conversation. I always enjoyed planning and searching for something new and exciting to prepare, something to challenge my culinary skills and something new to learn from, cooking is another way to visit the world and learn about different customs, practices and philosophies.

Part of this food conditioning served me well in my anorexic heyday. What I mean by serving me well is that I used some of these tools to become a very adroite anorexic which are two words that should never be used together. I used the word adriote because for a long enough while I was able to hide my disease, if I had been truly successful, I would have died. Subconsciously that is what the anorexic is looking for, the ultimate way to erase herself from the world. But the tools that were instrumental in controlling my eating was the detailed food planning, the research and the discipline that comes from any scholarly endeavor. The inconvenient truth of being human and requiring food to live was an annoyance and I was striving to find ways to eat as little as possible to live; so I was definitely not living to eat, I was barley hanging on. Nowadays, I still struggle with my body image not on the same level as when I was younger but it still gives me a challenge.

I am happy to say that I do live to eat even if I am not indulging, rather I am sustaining; but I love cooking and planning for others; what delicious morsels I can prepare for them that will make them happy. I have found that you can live to eat and maintain a good weight as long as you get equally excited about fruits, vegetables and whole grains as you do about protein and sweet things. I have also found that Michael Pollan had the best advice for anyone who loves to indulge in food such as cakes and french fries; as long as you make it from scratch and do all of the clean up yourself, have at it. The process of making things from scratch and cleaning up afterwards does put a limit on how many times a week you will eat desserts and fried foods.

So in the end I am getting to a better place with how I address food in general and my relationship with it. Being honest about my eating disorder has helped me greatly, it certainly helps the soul when you do away with the stigma of having a disorder. There is no need for shame, it’s a cross to bear but everyone has one. There doesn’t exist, in the entire world, a person who can honestly state that they are cross free. It isn’t human.