Mom is Just a Nickname

I’ve been making bread at home more often than I usually do. I use my bread machine, so it’s really a matter of dumping in the right ingredients and hitting some buttons. No big deal. It is amazing to me how a few hours later, my whole house smells of yeasty goodness though.

Then I think of when I have made Easter Bread. It’s a whole different process. Things have to be the right temperature, you have to know the right textures of the dough at certain points in the process, you have to know if it’s risen enough or not enough…the list goes on. It’s so much more involved. It’s so much more satisfying to eat the rolls at the end of the process!

On the other side of the spectrum is buying a bag of bread at the grocery store. No work involved, right? Just shell out some cash and pick your loaf. There’s a wide range of choices for size, taste, and texture. No muss, no fuss, no real thought or effort involved.

No muss…no fuss…no real thought or effort…That applies to a lot of modern convenience foods. We no longer have to think about dinner too far ahead of time. Even something as easy to make as a pasta sauce comes in a jar. Salad comes ready in a bag!

But consider what we lose when we use these foods of convenience. We lose the connection with our food. We lose the knowledge of the steps that food took, from raw to edible. We lose the anticipation that builds as that product goes from many individual ingredients to one cohesive, aromatic whole. We lose the magic of every day creation.

“Every Day Creation.” To take some tomatoes, some spices, some herbs, maybe some veggies and/or meat and combine it into a pot. To let the contents of that pot simmer on the stove all day, stopping to stir it occasionally as if you were a witch stirring the contents of your cauldron. To see those ingredients meld into a spicy, aromatic sauce fixed just the way you like it: chunky or smooth? Lots of garlic or none at all? Onions?

“Every Day Creation.” To take some flour, yeast, milk, an egg, some honey, some salt and combine it all into a lump of unappetizing dough. To knead it, to let it rest and rise as it fills the air with rich, yeasty delight, to shape it into a loaf and then bake it….it’s magic. To take such ordinary ingredients and have a perfectly shaped loaf of bread at the end. What else could it be, but magic?

I love making food “from scratch”. It puts me at the heart of the creation process and makes me feel powerful, like a Goddess in my kitchen, putting order into my world. How powerful we humans can be when we put our minds to it…to use this magic of every day creation.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008 at 7:00 pm and is filed under environment, food, green living. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.