Making my excuses, and hoping for the future

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I know it's been an inordinately long time since I've written, and I actually wish I didn't have such a good excuse.  But unfortunately I do.

My engagement fell apart (and with it all my happiness and stability and functionality) in a most spectacular and traumatic way back in June, after months of pain and torment – obviously, I wasn't doing much baking during that time, and the aftermath was too filled with tears and logistics and fleeing the country for me to be thinking much about food at all.  I was lucky if I could remember/force myself to eat one small meal a day.  Needless to say, there wasn't much I could say here that would be anything but depressing, so I stayed away while I tried to pick up the pieces of a life I no longer wanted to live.  I moved back to San Francisco and am currently living with my parents while I try to get through this extremely dark time.  It's been the most difficult few months of my entire life, and there have been days when, if Morpheus had offered me one pill to keep going and one to stop everything right then, I would certainly have taken the latter pill.

But, and this is important, there have been bright spots.  Hours, even a few hours in a row, when I forget how much pain I'm in.  And every month there have been more of those hours – this month there have been whole days.  It feels like nothing short of a miracle, and I spend a lot of my time waiting for the relapse (there have been many of those, some unbearably long and brutal), but it seems time is finally starting to heal me a little bit.

And then a few days ago, I baked a galette.  It hardly counts as baking, since the dough was given to us by a neighbor and my mother prepped the apple-pears, so I literally just tossed the fruit with some sugar and spices, rolled out the dough, and brushed melted butter over the top, but it was a start.  And I had a feeling that things might actually be okay one day, far off in the future.

So to thank you for sticking around through my long hiatus, and as I ask you to please bear with me as I continue to gather the shreds of my heart and paste them together with spit and mud – I'm not as sharp as I was before all this, but hopefully that's temporary – I offer you this 'recipe' for an easy free-form galette.  It may not be much of a project, but it lifted my spirits and made me believe for a moment that maybe I could patch my life back together with a little patience and melted butter.  I hope for you it's at least a semi-pretty and tasty solution to the question of what to serve after dinner with friends.

Gram's cookies– a major meltdown story

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This is what they're supposed to look like.  Buttery, powdered-sugar-y, fluffy-but-rich little drops of chocolate-chip heaven.  

These are the cookies that made a generation of wary grandchildren smile at the expectation of a visit from a somewhat dour, WASPy (if well-meaning), grandmother.  Gram's cookies.  Usually delivered in a Folgers coffee tin, along with what she called "the healthy cookies"– basically chocolate chip with oats (healthy!), and quite scrummy, but couldn't hold a candle to THE cookies.  Once I got the recipe from my Gram, these immediately became my go-to holiday cookies (especially cute with Martha Stewart packaging):

The Idiot Baker (or maybe just a shlimazel)

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It started so innocently.  A naive shiksa baker with a lotta chutzpah, a missed slice of challah at a friend's recent wedding, a craving, a dream...

But then it that dream turned to drek.

First came a strange, knead-less recipe that, while it seemed to work well for Rebecca, and while it made a pretty braid on the cold cookie sheet:

nonetheless led to a dense, bloblike 'loaf.'  Not exactly a mitzvah.  Although we did eat it all.

Next, I decided to really roll up my sleeves and get to work.  So I went back to a long-ago bookmarked recipe for a gorgeous challah from Deb.  I figured it would be complicated, but I told myself it was worth the extra effort to get it right.  I didn't have to be such a schlemiel, I just needed to focus.

The antidote to a meltdown: pumpkin pie bread!

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Last week, I made up my very own recipe for the first time!  Oh, yeah, I've fiddled with recipes before, adding deliciousness or subbing when necessary, but I'd never just straight-up made up a recipe!  It was a very exciting moment for me.

Butter cookie FAIL: "tastes just like butter" is not as delectable as it sounds.

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My consolation prize: delicious oaty raspberry bars.

It all seemed so simple.  Make this recipe from Smitten Kitchen, refrigerate the dough, then slice an bake, just like I did every weekend in college (with pillsbury, not pot, people)!  I even felt secure enough to be a little bit adventurous and divide the dough into 2 before adding the different flavors, thus creating more dishes (and work) for myself.  But hey, I thought, what's another dish or six when this recipe looks so simple?

We interrupt this scheduled post to bring you...

Pin It A PUPPY IN BATTER.

oh my goodness.

This is just what I needed to get over my recent mojo failings in the kitchen (more on that next post).