Being broken by bread

When I posted my French bread success story recently on Facebook, a good friend of mine commented that she had fallen in love with a recipe from Tartine Bread by Chad Robertson.  I looked it up at my local library, and sure enough, they had a copy.  The book is beautiful, but what I love the most is the story of how Robertson found bread making, and his ultimate recipe for a sourdough country bread that requires no yeast.

Now I’ll admit, I have yet to try this, but I want to.  As I mentioned before, yeast breads can seem daunting to many.  But when you take it to the level of using the natural yeast in the air to get your dough going, you truly are launching off into authentic bread-making land.

The stories of his bread recipe testers were even more inspiring.  They focused on how the testers worked the sequence of the recipe into the rhythm of their lives, and sometimes, even worked their lives around their bread making.  It is so easy to encounter this sort of thing and think, “Wow, that sounds so inconvenient – I have no room to move my life around anything.”  But the reality is, we all “inconvenience” ourselves for things and people in our lives, whether it’s going somewhere to get food that’s prepared for us, or learn a new rhythm of life once a baby (or two or three) is added to the mix.

When I worked in Uzbekistan for five years, I went through quite a number of inconveniences.  I lived with a local Muslim family in a village for my first year that spoke very little English, had no running water, and had hundreds of new ways of living that I had to adjust to.  On top of that, I had gone from working as a research assistant at an economic consulting firm to homeschooling five kids across several grade levels.  I went through identity crisis after identity crisis.  It wasn’t easy always feeling like you were a preschooler in terms of your language speaking ability, and there were no Starbucks to escape to when times got tough.

But after awhile, especially once I had gone on vacation after my first year there, I realized how much I had changed.  I realized that after all of that immersion, some of the culture was finally soaking into me.

Whether it is bread making or living cross-culturally or any other difficult thing in your life, it’s important to ask not how convenient it will be, but who you will become in the process.

It’s not all beans and rice

I just found out recently that we are officially living below the Federal poverty line for a family of five – woohoo! :)  Seriously, though, while it’s not always fun to not really have much disposable income on a law school budget, it’s also not terrible.  Just this morning, I whipped up a batch of Belgian waffles with a new waffle iron I bought with Christmas money, topped them with pureed strawberries from the freezer and freshly whipped cream.  For dinner, we spent approximately $3.50 on a large baking sheetful of roasted potatoes, carrots, onions, and chicken thighs, and supplemented them with pumpkin rolls from the freezer.

And there were still enough leftovers for lunch tomorrow, so I think we’re doing fine.  The beauty about making foods from scratch is that it really does allow you to do more with the dollars you have.

I need a reset button for my day

I had a rough morning today, and I’m not quite sure why.  I woke up feeling rested.  I had finished the dishes and cleaned up our family room last night, so the house wasn’t a total wreck.  But for whatever reason, my patience was thin with the boys.  It was a stretch to make it till naptime, but they are sleeping now.

The funny thing is, the first thing that popped into my mind to do about it was not to “rest” in the sense of sitting down, but to make some pizza dough.  I’m starting to get into the idea that you can start something in the morning or the middle of the day when you only have five or ten minutes, and then let nature take its course as you finish off other things the rest of the day.  I have started to fall into this rhythm of making dough in the morning (sometimes with the boys), and then letting it rise in the afternoon while they nap, so that we can bake it in the late afternoon or early evening.  Eli has grown so accustomed to this routine that when I ask him what makes the dough rise (I’m trying to explain the power of yeast or leaven) he says, “It rises when we take our nappies.”

Making dough with yeast can sound daunting to many – it takes time, planning, and there are some failures along the way.  But I like that it requires something of me that goes beyond just opening a can or bag.  I like that it asks me to be patient, to persist when there are kitchen failures, to analyze and research when something has gone wrong, and to rejoice when something turns out really well.  In return for the time and effort I put in, I get a sense of accomplishment and confidence.  And saving money is not a bad benefit, either :).

 

 

A yo-yo a day keeps the crazies away

While I am trying to improve how I do things in my primary sphere of influence, I don’t really have many big goals written down for this year.  I really should, I know, but I still feel like I’m in that zone where “big hairy audacious goals” will only make me feel bad about what little I can accomplish.

On the other hand, it is worth considering that maybe sometimes, if you start out with a little fuzzy assertive goal, it will eventually grow into a big hairy one.

So.

I really want to sew and create things.  But I don’t always have time for a major project.  This led me to start thinking small – really small.  As in a yo-yo a day.

For those of you unfamiliar with yo-yos, they are little discs of fabric that are stitched with a running stitch around the edge, then gathered up into a little pouch.  They were all the rage a long time ago, and they are really cute, plus they fall into the category of “round things that make me happy.”

This is my little fuzzy assertive goal:  to sew one yo-yo a day.  They take about five minutes per yo-yo, so I think it’s doable.  They help me feel a little saner, because there’s something calming about stitching quietly and having something to show for it (which is quite different from the daily grind of boys and repeated cleaning/cooking).

By the end of the year, I should have 365 yo-yo’s.  I’m hoping to string them into a garland for the Christmas tree, and they will serve as a reminder of how little things done daily can add up to something significant.

Good thoughts: Of soil and seed

Once when I was processing through some things with a counselor after working for five years in Uzbekistan, I mentioned that I wasn’t much of a brainy person.  She started to laugh.  “Are you kidding?” she asked, “you have more thoughts running through your head in ten minutes than most people.”

That may or may not be a good thing . . . after all, just because you’re thinking doesn’t mean that you’re thinking good thoughts.  You could be worrying (guilty here) or doubting (guilty again) or a doing a host of other things.

But let’s assume the best and say that you’ve come across a few thoughts this week that made you stop and wonder.  Thoughts that encouraged you, or inspired you, or even compelled you to live differently.  For me, here are a few that caught my eye this week:

From the Prudent Homemaker:

“If you have $1 to spend on a garden, spend 90 cents on dirt and 10 cents on seeds, and your yield will be so much higher!”

How true this is not only in gardening, but in life as well.  A lot of what we become or produce is related to the soil we’ve cultivated for ourselves.  We inherited two garden plots with the house we are renting, and I’ve cleared the soil, but have yet to do the hard, and seemingly unglamorous step of prepping it for future plantings.  I spent quite a bit of time this month organizing and clearing things out in our basement – it too was kind of like a soil preparation, because it cleared the path for seeing what we could do with the space down there.

From Miss Mustard Seed: 

“I had a plan for my life and it changed. . . I want to share it because you may have had a plan for your life and it had to go on a shelf and God may have something for you that is so much better . . .”

I loved this story – you really should click over on the link above and read it yourself.  I resonated with it because I had a plan out of college to go into public policy, and ended up homeschooling five kids for five years instead.  Now I am in a new role as mother and wife in the Midwest – it doesn’t feel as glamorous as the previous one, but this post reminded me that God’s story never ends, and can often spring up out of the most humblest of circumstances.