When you can't see anymore

I did not grow up with a lot of baking. My mom did bake some, but mostly I remember the comforting clang of the wok and the bubbling of our rice cooker.

But then I married my Anglo husband and shortly thereafter discovered I was gluten sensitive. And when we moved away from California to Austin, my husband's beloved sourdough bread became harder to find. All of this gave me a lot of motivation to learn to bake.

I started with gluten-free baking to satisfy my occassional cravings for bready type foods--pancakes and muffins and such. Then a few years later, when we moved to Austin, I started learning how to make sourdough bread for N.  As I become more comfortable with the oven, I also started to learn to roast meats and vegetables in the oven. 

Now, 5 years in, I've got my own rhythms down. With meat, I am big on using a probe thermometer. No more guessing about done-ness, just look at the temp. With gluten free baking, I use almond meal with various cheaper flours I can get at Asian stores (rice flour, sticky rice flour, tapioca starch). I weigh my ingredients on a kitchen scale allowing me to scale proportions easily. 
The result of this internalizing is that someone asked for my cobbler recipe and I wrote:

The 'biscuit' topping was 2 parts almond meal, 1 part corn flour, 2 parts milk, 1 part cold butter, baking powder, salt, sugar

Now, that actually works GREAT for me. But it's a pretty horrible recipe for most people and especially this friend.

For my everyday life, it's good and appropriate to develop rhythms and habits so that I'm not having to think about every. single. thing. But the trade off is that it becomes harder to not think in those ways, but it's vitally important to do so for other people.

I am realizing that when I quickly dismiss something as "dumb"--another political view, another way of  parenting, another way of organizing life--I'm using my built in heuristics. My habitual way of thinking and making decisions is preventing me from seeing the other considerations people have. What I fear is that some of my habits of thought are so ingrained that I'm truly blind, unable to even realize I have a blind spot, and thus unable to back up and try again.

My cobbler recipe take II:

Peach cobbler--
FRUIT INNARDS
6 cups peaches, sliced & peeled
1/2 c sugar
1 tbsp cornstarch
1 tbsp lemon
1/4 tsp cinnamon
--Over med-low heat, stirring frequently, bring to a boil, after 1 min pour into 9" pie pan or 8" square pan
--pre-heat oven to 400 dgr

BISCUIT TOPPING
6 oz almond meal
3 oz corn flour (the kind used to make tortillas)
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1 tbsp sugar
 3 oz (6 tbsp) cold butter 
6 oz milk

--whisk together dry ingredients
--cut or pinch in butter
--add milk and stir together til everything is wet, will be pretty goopy and wet
--scoop lumps over the peach mix (I had about 8-9 lumps)
--for a decorative touch sprinkle with sugar crystals

--bake at 400 dgr for 20 minutes or until brown on top
--serve warm with vanilla ice cream

Super Mom breaks a leg

At 4:45PM last Monday, I had homemade granola about to burn in the oven, a roast on the grill, a house that needed tidying for guests, a sticky almost-3 year old, and a fussy baby.

In a fit of SheerGenius(tm) while I had my son on the changing table I thought, "He's half undressed anyways, I should bathe the kids." And then in a moment of UtterStupidity(tm), I left him on the table to turn on the hot water.

In the interim, my daughter wet her underwear, and my son fell on the changing table and started screaming his head off.

Two days, many miles on the road, many interviews with nurses, doctors, social workers, a blood draw, urine sample and several dozen xrays later, my son's broken leg was in a cast and we were done with the "suspected non-accidental tauma" protocol.

I had a lot of time to review how we got to the fall. At the end of the day, I'd say it was 2 parts pride and 1 part selfishness.

I like having guests and I really like playing with meats on a grill. And then there's MyAgenda which includes baths for the kids on Mondays, making more granola when I run out like I had that morning--even though I certainly could have had something else for breakfast and could have made more another day, and having a basically presentable house by 6:30 on Mondays when friends come over for dinner or church small group.

I knew when I decided to do bath time right then, that I was trying to be Super Mom. For that matter, I knew when I started doing the granola that I was being a little crazier than I needed to be. But I wanted to be super. To have a list that I could show my husband, "See I do cool stuff with my day too!"

It's pretty devastating to realize that pride can literally come before a fall. Especially when the faller is your cute little boy who has no business bearing the brunt of your inner ugliness.

What is amazing, however, is that I don't have to live in mom guilt. My pastor likes to use the phrase "standing under the waterfall of grace". It's a pretty phrase, but it should be offensive too. The apostle Paul wrote, "there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus."

That means that even though I screwed up, and I really did screw up, Jesus is not holding a stick over me and I'm not either. I am receiving a forgiveness I don't deserve; it's both-and. I don't deserve it and I am receiving it. I hope that kind of ticks you off.

We're about half way through Lent, charging our way to Easter where Jesus dies for the wretchedly ungodly and buys freedom for prisoners who deserve their sentences.

Hallelujah!