Inextricable

Inextricable

It's all tangled up. The roads that led us to where we are now, were riddled with clues of what was to come. A book given to me in my teen years,unbeknownst to me at that time, was one of those clues.

This New Year's Eve, the kids tasked me with making a "fun treat". Being that I'm an optimizer, the leftover ingredients sitting around the farmhouse kitchen and cooler are my greatest muses. Fine dark chocolate and cream were leftover from Christmas baking, and our girls in the henhouse are laying golden-yolked eggs. So my mind conjured up eclairs. Eclairs...pastries made of choux dough: flavorful, moist, puffy and in our case strikingly yellow due to the richness of the eggs. I hadn't made eclairs since back in my culinary school days. Of all the baking I do, eclairs, which should be eaten within hours of being made, haven't been in the rotation. I most often bake for practical reasons, for our farmers market booth and for catering gigs. And such time-sensitive goodness does not bode well with traveling and hours sitting in wait on our table out in the open air.

It's high time I bake spontaneously, those special recipes just for our house :). I dug out my oldest cookbook to recall the ratio for choux and the pastry cream which fills the pocket formed during baking in the log-like eclairs. The book is worn, taped on the binding, and loved on, as a child's stuffed animal is adored or your trustiest pair of sneakers are kept around for projects because you just don't want to bid them farewell. Inside the cover is a handwritten inscription. It had been a while since I took the time to read it, but it was New Year's Eve, a sentimental time. The book was a Christmas gift from my Dad when I was a teenager discovering my first passion, and maybe my oldest (other than animals and the great outdoors and also talking too much). How did my dad happen to choose a book by two of the greatest culinary practicioners around? The book was obscure, technical, and certainly not on Oprah's reading list. I didn't know then how significant the authors/bakers behind the book were.

Sentimental in my thoughtfulness, I reminisced over the history this book has seen me through. I was transported back to an afternoon in high school, uniformed in my Catholic school get up. On that day, I got home from school, untucked my shirt and barreled through my mom's store of eggs, fashioning a piping bag out of a ziploc baggie and tackling the ambitious eclair recipe for the first time. I failed to follow the suggestion of poking holes in the ends of the eclairs to let steam escape while cooling, and they deflated into lifeless piles. Angsting and embarassed, I began again, polishing off the egg supply, dishes piled high in the sink. God love my mom. Between the tension and the mess in the kitchen, the making of dinner would be delayed. The choux was prepared again, cooked on the stovetop before being piped and then baked in the oven. The intrigue of the process is where my passion lies. Making with my hands, step by step incorporating this and that in a bowl just so, to have something to show for it on the other side. Something to be given or enjoyed. Immediately gratifying, outright satisfying. Perhaps something to make a life out of?

Later on in culinary school during a lonely and challenging new beginning in New York, I kept the book on my dormitory desk. The warmth in the inscription, and the reminder of the spark that lit this fire stoked it again. I learned the names of the bakers behind the book in one of my classes and smiled to think of my dad, a person so uninterested in food, happening to gift me such a suitable book. These were people shaping the culinary scene, and teaching many others who would go on to do the same.

Just a few short years later, I was to meet Rich, the Rich while transitioning into farming. Rich, another person endlessly curious about the tangible work of his hands, was also discovering farming. We fell into this thing, this entanglement in which we still find ourselves :). And two years into it, Rich was infected with a curiosity for breadmaking, fermentation and sourdough bread to be specific. One day, I found Rich diving deep into a certain baker's philosophy and process online. This was the baker who became his unofficial mentor and who shaped the way that Rich bakes. Who could this person who Rich found his way to be, but the very same mind and baker behind my book. The interconnectedness of it all boggles my mind, making me feel as if I peeked behind destiny's curtain.

And presently, back at my bookshelf, the book lives to see another day, with more love shown to its pages. That book is a little bit of evidence of the great, mysterious way of the world and of how we perhaps found ourselves here, inextricably connected.


Thank you for reading.

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