From Scratch

Lately I have been making things from scratch:  bread, pizza dough, marinara sauce, birthday cards, Hallowe’en decorations.  As a little girl I would sit on the high green stool beside my grandmother’s stove and watch her make everything from scratch:  cookies, rolls, pies, cakes, bread, shirts, skirts, aprons.  Each week when my grandfather put the garbage out there were two recycling boxes and one small garbage bag.  Some weeks there wasn’t even a garbage bag for them to put out, they produced such little amounts of waste.

When my grandmother entered her nineties she stopped making bread from scratch, opting instead to buy frozen, unbaked loaves that would rise as they thawed and bake up into what appeared to be homemade loaves.  They even tasted delicious.  But in my mid-twenties-naiveté I always felt sad that she’d had to give up on making everything from hand.  It seemed like the end of an era, a good era where things were simple and straightforward.

In my thirties I sometimes made homemade bread.  I used a recipe from a bread book that my sister and I had given my grandma in 1977.  She had written “Dana’s favourite, July 1988” above the title of the recipe.  We had made it together that summer.  I loved making this recipe in the years to come because I was good at it and it produced two basically flawless loaves with only ten minutes of dedicated kneading.  But I also loved seeing my grandma’s handwriting on the page as I followed the directions, which I actually knew by heart.  It struck me that my grandma was completely present to my delight when making that bread in July of 1988.  So much so that she decided to document the moment in her own writing.

Once I had children I stopped making things from scratch.  Too busy, too harried, too consumed with small children and a house and a full-time outside-the-home job.  I’d read articles in parenting magazines or overhear infinitely more put together moms at the park tout the virtues of homemade baby food and shampoo and play dough.  And of course I agreed, homemade WAS better but it just wasn’t something I could make happen on the frontlines of my frantic life.  I’d slam the magazine shut or walk away from the mom huddle feeling justified in my self-righteous anger: I was busier than these parenting experts or obviously stay-at-home-moms-with-full-time-nannies who have the luxury of pureeing steamed veggies in expensive blenders all day.

In the past year, however, I have made “from scratch” an intended way of living.  One Tuesday about a year ago I was putting out the recycling bins and the garbage can in the early morning gray and was disheartened by the take-out pizza boxes, plastic wrappers, Styrofoam trays and coffee cups.  It seemed to be a metaphor for my life:  too much was becoming disposable in the rush of the day-to-day crammed-packedness of my life, moments I was actually meant to be present to were piling up like as many cast-off plastic wrappers in the recycling bin.  The pizza boxes seemed to be saying, “You aren’t taking the time.  You are grabbing and going, grabbing and going.”

I see a popular quote often on the Internet:  We all have the same 24 hours as [insert name of whatever celebrity female you think embodies the notion of having it all and looking darn good as she does it here] have the same 24 hours.  Yeah, but she has a chef and assistant and nanny and personal trainer and can book a weekend away in the Napa Valley whenever the mood strikes her, I think.  My 24 hours would sure feel like a lot more hours if I had a staff.

What I have discovered, though, is that making things from scratch is simpler and seems to give me more time, paradoxically.  It’s become an invitation for me to be present to my own life.  I have to think about what I want to create.  I have to procure all the ingredients.  I have to make the time in my 24 hour precious allotment to make the thing I desire to make.  And while I make it, I must be present in that moment of making it, or it won’t turn out.

Most mornings I meditate. My kids are a bit older now and they wake up a teeny bit later in the morning.  But I don’t always get to it because in some ways I am still living that hectic, sometimes too harried life.  Later in the day as I fold yeast, warm water, sugar, salt, oil and flour together to make a dough, I get the kind of moment I endeavor to experience during meditation:  full presence in MY life.  To my hands in the soft dough.  To the shimmer of the candle burning on my windowsill that I lit for myself, for my own comfort as I knead.  To the delight on my kids’ faces when they find out the pizza or bread isn’t out of a wrapper.  They, and me, truly find life more delicious this way.