Leiden celebrates its liberation...
from the Spanish forces in 1574. I ought to make Leiden hotchpotch for dinner tonight - essentially mashed potatoes and carrots with bits of bacon (tastier than one would assume from this description) but instead I'm baking raisin bread today, or at least planning on it; because I left almost all my recipes at home, I've had to turn to the Internet for help.
My Google results for "cinnamon raisin bread" lead into this question, seemingly rhetorical but at second glance pernicious in its complexity: WHAT VILENESS AND SLOTH HAS OVERTAKEN MODERN SOCIETY? I've found loads of recipes that involve dumping the "above ingredients" into a bread machines and waiting for the timer to ring so that you can open the lid and pull out a steaming loaf without any personality at all. People who engage in such behaviour are missing crucial aspects of bread-baking enjoyment - namely, the kneading of the dough, when I imagine that I'm slagging the White Capitalist Patriarchy half to death...then after an hour or so, it rises, and once again, I, with an arcane laugh, punch it down...
Baking conjures up memories at Our Lady, where I indulged fiendishly. It seems that I never studied; cinnamon raisin bread, Dutch farmers' bread, and braided Swiss loaves bore witness to my grand ability to procrastinate. So because I took up bread-baking in New Mexico, it also reminds me of Luc; I'd bring him half a loaf to eat with his girlfriend. And from there I untangle a reminiscence not only of Luc, but of Maxwell, Ewan (Luc's roommate, and the only reason that I met Luc in the first place), Michaela, and Tanja, and Zoe and Simona too, all of whom held me back from the edge of insanity and self-mutilation when my adoration of that boy (for he was not yet a man) carried me beyond caring. And Luc hunched over his desk, reading Kissinger.
Luc. I can't stop thinking of him now, not since yesterday when he spat at me, "Idoya is out of my life!" Personally, I thought her a schemer who considered his god-like good looks a trophy on a shelf of her orderly and fast-track life, but I also knew enough to appreciate the softness and sweetness that she provided him to temper his inclination to ruthlessness. I wonder if he knows enough to even miss that feminine influence; I used to crack hard-boiled eggs on his forehead, no joke.
But back to life at Our Lady of Perpetual Motion (though often I dubbed it the more traditional "Our Lady of Sorrows). It never relented, like electroshock waves that just keep coming regardless of whether one has already succumbed or not. Baking bread gave me a way to channel all that energy as it sought somewhere to ground itself outside my body - and my grief and sorrow at Luc's lack of love fell from my fingertips into the flour. Today I will bake for the first time in almost three years, and for an entirely different reason than in New Mexico (and happily more mundane): Zoe and Simona are coming for dinner and we have a summer's worth of gossip to catch up on!!! :-)
My Google results for "cinnamon raisin bread" lead into this question, seemingly rhetorical but at second glance pernicious in its complexity: WHAT VILENESS AND SLOTH HAS OVERTAKEN MODERN SOCIETY? I've found loads of recipes that involve dumping the "above ingredients" into a bread machines and waiting for the timer to ring so that you can open the lid and pull out a steaming loaf without any personality at all. People who engage in such behaviour are missing crucial aspects of bread-baking enjoyment - namely, the kneading of the dough, when I imagine that I'm slagging the White Capitalist Patriarchy half to death...then after an hour or so, it rises, and once again, I, with an arcane laugh, punch it down...
Baking conjures up memories at Our Lady, where I indulged fiendishly. It seems that I never studied; cinnamon raisin bread, Dutch farmers' bread, and braided Swiss loaves bore witness to my grand ability to procrastinate. So because I took up bread-baking in New Mexico, it also reminds me of Luc; I'd bring him half a loaf to eat with his girlfriend. And from there I untangle a reminiscence not only of Luc, but of Maxwell, Ewan (Luc's roommate, and the only reason that I met Luc in the first place), Michaela, and Tanja, and Zoe and Simona too, all of whom held me back from the edge of insanity and self-mutilation when my adoration of that boy (for he was not yet a man) carried me beyond caring. And Luc hunched over his desk, reading Kissinger.
Luc. I can't stop thinking of him now, not since yesterday when he spat at me, "Idoya is out of my life!" Personally, I thought her a schemer who considered his god-like good looks a trophy on a shelf of her orderly and fast-track life, but I also knew enough to appreciate the softness and sweetness that she provided him to temper his inclination to ruthlessness. I wonder if he knows enough to even miss that feminine influence; I used to crack hard-boiled eggs on his forehead, no joke.
But back to life at Our Lady of Perpetual Motion (though often I dubbed it the more traditional "Our Lady of Sorrows). It never relented, like electroshock waves that just keep coming regardless of whether one has already succumbed or not. Baking bread gave me a way to channel all that energy as it sought somewhere to ground itself outside my body - and my grief and sorrow at Luc's lack of love fell from my fingertips into the flour. Today I will bake for the first time in almost three years, and for an entirely different reason than in New Mexico (and happily more mundane): Zoe and Simona are coming for dinner and we have a summer's worth of gossip to catch up on!!! :-)