It has been a long time since I blogged last. Sorry. I wish I could say that I was too busy doing something important, but I can't. I should be as busy as humanly possible studying for my comprehensive exams, but I have found myself resentful of having to do schoolwork during the summer vacation (I know, PhD students have no vacations, only more time during the day to get work done since there are no classes to take up time. @#^@%! [fill in whatever expletive you deem appropriate]).
While I have been slacking somewhat on my reading (not entirely, I am still getting schoolwork done, just not as much as a full-time schedule of study would call for) I have been slowly rediscovering the world and its pleasures outside of schoolwork. Raven and I have started having "date nights" once a week, a time to go out together just for the fun of it and enjoy being married again. We've gone to the movies, played pool, gone out to dinner, you know, date night things. Being comfortably married and sharing each other's daily worries and frustrations, it is easy to forget that you can still have fun together and take pleasure in each other's company, and that you are still allowed to take time to love and enjoy your spouse [in more than 30-second increments] without any outside motive or purpose.
I have also rediscovered the kitchen and am actually starting to enjoy cooking and baking again. I have worked as a cook at several restaurants from Oregon to Montana to Virginia, but my experience with cooking and baking then was for the job, not for myself, my loved ones, and the simple joy of the act itself. I remember enjoying being in the kitchen before, but generally only for brief flings with large breaks between forays into the joy (rather than just the necessity) of cooking and baking. I have, however, had a longstanding desire to have a romance with using ingredients and crafting homemade food.
I found a pair of cast iron skillets in the things that were packed away from The Move while I was going though boxes in the garage. There is an 8-inch skillet and a 9-inch skillet (or thereabout, their bottom stamps are rather unreadable, so I am guessing that is what they say). No one who would have had such implements prior to The Move recognizes them, so I have claimed them for my own.
Raven has lots of cast iron cookware that he emphatically tells me I can use, but somehow having these as my own has given me the permission to use them and play with them however I want. Not that I have any plans to abuse them, just the comfort of knowing that they are mine to ruin if I happen to do so on accident. So far my newfound pans have served wonderfully to make scrambled eggs, a stone-fruit cobbler, and a frittata.
Not knowing the history of the two pans, the first thing I did was scrub both pans vigorously with lots of soap and hot water, then re-season them according to the instructions in one of my cast iron cookbooks. They have behaved beautifully and nothing has really stuck, and nothing at all has burned or failed. Fingers crossed that my success with these pans will continue.
Baking is teaching me greater patience than I have had to practice in the kitchen before without getting paid for it. I am learning to bake breads that take days from start to finish: breads that rest overnight, pizza dough that should rest for two or three days to build flavor, sourdough breads that take multiple days from beginning the starter (which I have actually not yet begun) to feeding that starter to actually making the bread. In a work kitchen, there is always something else to do, something to make you forget about whatever you've made and are waiting on until it needs to be addressed again. In my home kitchen, I do not forget about the waiting, and I am trying to convince myself to look on it with anticipation rather than irritation at the delay. Part of this is telling myself (repeatedly) that it is not a delay, the wait is part of the process, and the result will be much the better for the time it takes.
Today I made two different pizza doughs with recipes from the blog Farm Fresh Feasts; one is for Buttermilk Crust Pizza and the other is for Roasted Garlic Herb Pizza Dough. Raven sent me a link to the buttermilk pizza dough to make for him while he was at work, and I enjoyed reading author Kirsten Madaus' post so much I poked around on her site and found the other recipe and ended up making both doughs (and of course following the blog). I already have a pizza stone, so in a day or two it will finally get a real homemade pizza baked on it (Raven might have made one or two, but the poor thing is only lightly used as yet).
I am terrible at remembering to take pictures for my blog. I am trying to work on that (Raven and my mom even got me a great camera so I could take awesome pictures!), but I forgot to take pictures of the pizza dough I made. I will post pictures of it before we build and bake the pizza though, I promise!
