Soufflé Days

Last night, I started thinking about home. Really, it was one of those nights when I felt like being in the kitchen, wanted my hands in the dough, wanted to be pulling cookie sheets out of the oven, one by one. Craved the slow, repetitive process, the Norah Jones soundtrack that has become a mainstay in our kitchen, and my little brother crooning along. But since I am living on my own right now, the kitchen is, quite typically, devoid of groceries. The flour bin is empty, the fridge is barren. So no baking was to happen last night.

But it got me thinking about making dinner, something that rarely happens when I am alone. It got me thinking about pizza dough, and fresh pasta, and my dad fussing over my food pictures (the top one is his work by the way), and shopping at Bi-Rite every couple of days, pulling ripe melons from the shelves, skirting around people similarly excited about the produce. It got me thinking about standing in ice cream lines with my brother and some of my favorite places in San Francisco, feeling like I should go through the archives of everything I made in the days leading up to my departure, and about how long we have been talking about taking a family vacation to Italy only to have it come down to me going alone for the whole month of August.

And even though my little brother likes to hold it over my head that his Italian is so much better than mine, it would have been nice to have him along. At least then he could order gelato for me! As it is, it looks like I am landing in Rome and making my way up the western shore to Gaeta and then on through Torino to my farming adventure. After so much time spent surrounded by people here in Prague and the last two weeks with some of my best friends from home, it will be interesting to go back to traveling on my own.

In the middle of July, the air turns frigid and the clouds open up their pearly gates and outside the living room window, the sky darkens and I no longer feel the urge to crawl up onto the roof. The rain followed us through Paris and Ghent, to Amsterdam, and after a brief let-up, came down with us to Prague. So instead of casually wandering the canals of Amsterdam, I sprinted from store to store, doing shopping that I really didn’t need to do. We managed a brief, but rewarding picnic of baguette, goat cheese and rosé (plus Nutella, were you really expecting otherwise?) on the Seine, but otherwise sought shelter in the corner cafés. Being in Paris was disconcerting, my fingers remembered the code to the courtyard outside of my old flat and we ran in one day and peered at my old front door.

Something about seeing Paris made the homesick bug set in a bit. I have one and a half weeks left in Prague (crazy right) and then it’s off to Italy. Despite the quickly closing time period in this city, I am not consumed with the desperate realization that I have seen nothing of it, as I felt as I was about to leave Paris. When people ask me if Prague is like how I imagined it would be before coming here, I really struggle to come up with a reply; no one seems to believe me when I say I arrived here with zero expectations, but I can honestly say I wasn’t expecting anything specific. When people ask how I came to Prague of all places, the honest response is that it was random. I wanted to be abroad and I ended up in the most beautiful city I have ever been to in Europe.

But after a week of traveling and a week of entertaining, the exhaustion has set in. Our sleeping schedule has basically become 6 a.m. to noon, with a tired zone out around 5 p.m. It’s time to sit still, lie in bed, stare out the window, and process, process, process. As this whole year is coming to an end, it’s strange to think about going back to the U.S. for good, going back to school and leaving this part of me behind. But it’s also been good for me to accept that parts of your life come to an end, people come and go and a lack of expectations is actually a good thing to carry with you.

So here’s to a million loads of laundry and packing up my Eurotrip backpack!

A pot of English Breakfast tea steeps on the countertop, covered in a dull flowered tea cozy. I’m always amazed at how warm the tea cozy keeps the tea, as I’m curled up on the leather sofa, under a hand-crocheted blanket. The blanket is a dusty purple, interspersed with green and white squares, and they seem to me like flowers in a field of lavender. I’ve opened the linen curtains to let the light come in and am watching raindrops fall on the canoe outside. They hit with a little, echoing patter and slip to the ground, covering the grass with a sheet of frosty water. It’s chilly here near the ocean, the wind brings in large gusts of frozen air, that swell the lungs. You can smell the briny seaweed dying on the stone beach, turn over minuscule, red crabs amongst the rocks in your bare hands, and trace the smooth, water-worn edges of driftwood washed up on shore.

I’m flipping through my grandmother’s recipe box, pulling out yellowed newspaper cutouts and handwritten notes on scraps of paper. I’m milling through recipes that are as familiar as many in my own recipe collection, and others that I have never seen her make (Cherry Delight?). I pass over the first fruit pie I had ever tasted, back when I still believed cooked fruit was “ew, gross,” which is written on the card as a rhubarb pie, but was often made with the raspberries and blackberries picked in the backyard. In August, I would clamber through the screen door at the back of the house, hands full of containers filled to the brim with berries, fingers stained with juices of berries that I had…um, already eaten. As a child, I was known for putting a raspberry on each of my fingers and gently plucking them off one by one with my mouth. I say that it’s a testament to how many raspberries I ate before I was ten, that they are now my least favorite berries.

Since those days, my grandparents have moved up-island to a small town called Comox, in the valley at the base of Mount Washington. The blackberry bramble has been traded in for the rugged coastline and proximity to the ski hill. But all the jams are still made in house, the blueberries picked right down the street and the rhubarb from the newly planted backyard. There are still jars of summer peaches canned at the peak of the summer heat, and cherries that burst with syrup when you bite into them. I don’t remember ever helping much with the canning; I think I was bored by the monotony of it, the hours spent standing over the stovetop, the constant stirring and the repetition of chopping stone fruits. I much preferred playing the hunter-gatherer in the gardens, crawling under the thorny blackberry bushes, stretching off the ladder to reach the top branch of the plum tree where all the best-looking fruit was (disappointingly, I would often grasp the plum, only to discover it half eaten by birds on the unseen side) and playing with the neighbors’ cat Smokey.

But recently I’ve quite enjoyed standing over the stove, peering over the bubbling pot, stirring to keep the thickening liquid from boiling up and over the rim. It requires getting hot and sticky and staying alert, but I took great pleasure in the thickening of my cream and sugar mixture, watching it slowly melt to a deep amber, and then spooning my dulce de leche into a small glass jar at the end. While certainly not what usually comes off of my grandmother’s stovetop, it was smooth and melding-to-the-tongue sweet. It played well off of a crumbly, barely-sweet shortbread. Despite the flakiness of the cookies and the tendency of sandwich cookies to quickly become a fragmented mess, they held up well on the way up North. As the tiny twenty-person plane shook with turbulence in the coastal winds and the over-worked engine roared next to my window, I felt like there still might exist a frontier left to be discovered in this world.

You can find the recipe for dulce de leche here and the recipe for the cookies here.

If you could count the hours that I’m spent with the window of a coffee shop between me and the downpour outside…well let’s just say that’s near impossible. It’s poured for days on end, wild winds have whipped down trees into the roads, and then for one day, the clouds drift by and the skies clear and we have one lonely day of peace. People come out of hiding in flocks, line-up in front of the awnings of popular brunch spots (or drunkenly mill around on the sidewalk, pushing each other into other people and pole dancing on top of cars until the police hop out of their car, all in celebration of Britney Spears’ visit to town), and make a run for ice cream before the downpour starts again in full force. The desire to be on the road again becomes more and more urgent. And so I’ve been making cookies. Cookies to convince myself that home is where I’m meant to be.

The funny thing about baking is that you can’t really do it on the road. It’s one activity that is, practically by definition, tied to the home. Sure you might be able to bake a batch of cookies under the glaring hot desert sun (p.s. have you seen my Civil Eats article on solar cooking?) but if you want to do anything more than that, you basically have to sit still for awhile. I’ve never been very good at that. But I’ll be doing that for the next two months, so I guess I’m going to have to start practicing.

Looking at these pictures of cookies, you likely don’t believe that they’re all the same cookies. And they’re not. The coffee shop syndrome has set in, alongside the urgent need to produce that perfect, chewy, with slightly crispy edges, hard on the outside, soft on the inside, chocolate chip cookies that every coffee shop seems privy to but the home baker cannot replicate without mild cursing. This is actually two sets of cookies made with two different recipes, one new, one tried-and-true, and a couple of similar tricks and alterations. The nuts are cropped finely so as not to interrupt the chocolate chip cookies experience a la Smitten Kitchen. The flour is whole wheat a la Kim Boyce after her whole-wheat chocolate chip cookies won me over with their salty-nutty graininess. The butter is browned in one, creamed in the other. While I would normally bow to the browned butter, I would actually say creaming is the way to go with these. And so, finally, I’m back to my family’s original chocolate chip cookie. Just with whole-wheat flour. Who knew it was that simple.