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.

Resolution time.

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In December, I always think: I'll start off the new year with a bang!  I'll leap out of the gate and get myself organized, gym-going and writing and tidying up a storm.

And inevitably, in January, I'm in a panic, still trying to catch up with leftover work or errands from December, mired in frustration (and often self-pity), wishing I could throw it all away and start fresh again next year.

Can you guess what's coming?

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.

In defense of inactivity.

Pin It Sooo.... I know I haven't posted in a really long time.  And I feel bad for that, I do.  Especially when every other blog I follow seems to have like 6 million readers a day and at least one 2010 Bloggie nomination, and I'm so consumed with envy at their success that I'm tempted to be ultra-petty and make a point of not visiting said blogs just to cut their stats down by one.  BUT I'm not quite that much of an asshole.  Slash I'm too obsessed with their amazing blogs to stop.  Slash I fully realize, in the logical, non-green parts of my brain, that their blogs rock and mine are just ok.  There are some reasons for this, some of which are admittedly all my bad, and some of which are not.

First, my bad: I don't write nearly often enough.  I mean, not even once or twice a week.  WHAT IS THAT?  You would never see a Bloggie nominee who posts as sporadically as I do.  So on that note I'm a bad bad blogger.  And I'm sorry.  I'M SORRY.  Really!  Yeesh, you guys are tough.

Now, onto happier complaints, the things that AREN'T my fault: