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

Seeing differently

I used my recent birthday money to buy a new camera. The stock lens that came with it has a wide field of view (14mm, 28 mm film equivalent). Up until now, my favorite lens has been a zoomed in, portrait lens (85mm, 136mm film equivalent). I love being able to stand across the room and catch the private expressions of my kids doing their thing. I love being able to focus on little nuances. But that's not what a wide angle lens gives you.

With this new camera and lens, in addition to getting beautiful color which is why I got the camera, I'm being forced to see differently. This lens captures the background environment even when I'm inches away from my kids. So I'm finding that this lens is forcing me to tell situated stories, layering what's happening in the foreground with what's in the middle ground and background. Now that I have more than one child, this is become quite useful and more interesting. It's a lens much more suitable for capturing context and interactions.

The dramatic life changes I've experienced these past several years has also forced me to see differently. As excitingly diverse my fields of intellectual interest were in graduate school, my life was extremely contained in specific spaces with specific kinds of people. Now as a new-ish mom, in a new neighborhood, mostly out of academia, I'm encountering a much broader variety of people, something I didn't expect when I moved out to the burbs.

I have relationships across more socio-economic strata and education levels than before; high school graduates with solid middle class incomes, college and post-college educated folk on the poverty line, the more usual college educated, middle to upper-middle class, the blue collar lower-middle class, etc. As I get to know these folk, life gets more complicated and less complicated.

More complicated is how people navigate their worlds: health care, government services and bureaucracy, family and friend obligations and needs. Things I've only read about I now hear about first hand. Less complicated are basic needs and general wisdom. Everyone wants loving, harmonious relationships. Nobody is sheltered from having family issues. Spending more than you have leads to problems. Being healthy is a blessing. Having friends in times of need is critical for physical, spiritual, and emotional well-being.

The academic life for all its goodness can easily be one of myopic theory. Out here in the everyday life, people have substance, and they don't fit in boxes. They are unique individuals, made in the image of and specifically loved by our Creator. While I may one day get to spend more time in academia or more time with my favorite zoom lens, I'm glad to be in this season learning to see in these ways.