Cleverest Housewife

My flour--hence, the title of today's post! I can't think of any better way to advertise your brand of flour actually. If only I could be a clever housewife someday!!! ;)

The wait begins

My first bubble appears!!!!

The dough rises.

My finished product!

After baking the bread, I got allll biblical and wanted to have a meal to match it: so I made lentil soup (a la Jacob and Esau) and a warm potato salad (which isn't from the Book--but tastes good!). Katera, Jesse and Michael came over and we all feasted OT/NT style!

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And so it came upon me one day that I wanted to be a baker of bread. I don't know how or where the whole idea began--it was inspired--Creationist--something: out of nothing. Baking Bread.

There's just something so romantic about the idea of it all. Perhaps this talk of the looming and morbid economic downturn that has befallen America has me thinking of those sepia toned portraits of the Depression--wrinkled old women in a kitchen of orange formica and linoleum with flour dusting their checked aprons. 

Or maybe it's because real bread is so difficult to come by here in China. There seem to be two options at the bakery on my market street: 1) over-processed sweet breads or 2) bread with particles of ground pork mixed into the dough. Neither are very appealing (to me). There's a French boulangerie across the Yangtze--but it takes 2 hours and 3 modes of transportation to get there and I'm usually just not up for it.

When I was a child we lived for a brief time on a hill overlooking a Kern's Bread Factory. There was a florescent sign out front of a loaf of bread with the final piece falling away from it: first at a 5 degree angle, then 25, then 50, then 90. In the mornings, the air smelled like yeast. We'd sit on our grassy hill and watch the 18 wheelers roll in and out of the place with Kern's logo on the sides. Now, the factory is gone and a strip mall is in it's place--the strip is called something like "ol factory square" or something that makes me, at the age of 24, one of the "ol-timers" who remembers the town before "commercialism" hit. 

So I decided, for whatever reason, to be a bread baker. It's not like other actions in the world that are just mundane extensions of our daily journey: when you go buy groceries, you don't become a "buyer of groceries" in the same way that you become a "baker of bread" when you undertake that task. It seems that baking bread is a holy thing--a thing that connects you to all other bakers of bread that have gone before--a thing that is a moment in life that is pure and essential, elemental.

I think I've been reading too much during the past few days.

Anyway--so I set out to bake this bread. A friend had an extra jar of yeast that she shared when she found that I was asking around about it. I found a recipe on the NYT that seemed simple enough (because, of course, when you want to learn how to bake bread--you turn to the New York Times??).  This recipe is contingent on allowing the yeast to do all the work: you must let the dough sit and ferment/rise for 18 hours after the initial mixing of ingredients.

The waiting was the best part for me. According to the recipe, when the dough was ready it would have little bubbles all over the surface. After I mixed everything--I was supposed to go on with my life. I couldn't. A few hours later, passing by the room, I peeked in and checked on it. Nothing. During the night, when I got up for water or whatever, I paused by the dough. Still nothing. This was fascinating to me. There, in that lump of flour, yeast, salt and water--something was happening. Something was going to make bubbles appear. Something was going to make the dough get larger. 

It's something that even JC took note of. During His 33 or so years on earth, when he knew that nearly every word he chose would be referenced for the next 2000 years (at least), he mentioned the workings of yeast. Twice in Matthew, He used yeast to explain himself and the Big Picture. I thought of Him as I waited to see signs that the yeast was working. This is probably a trend for me. I know that it will--I know that it takes so little--one eighth of a teaspoon--to work its way through the dough--but I wait anxiously for hours wanting to see the signs that it's working.

It was the tenth hour when the first bubble appeared. I saw it before I went to teach class that morning. I had nearly begun to despair--worrying that maybe I had used dead yeast (does it die?) or that the room had become too cold in the night. But there it was, one tiny little bubble, reminding me that biology and chemistry and everything else was taking place inside that bowl--just like JC said it would. 

I've been guilty of looking too closely for the bubbles here in China. There is so little I can do in some of my classes--at best--it's injecting just a tiny bit of yeast into our lessons. I teach English and try to improve their conversational skills and if I'm lucky, there's maybe one eighth of yeast added to the class during the whole semester. This is my second year and I get worried sometimes that there will be no bubbles. That the bread won't rise. That it will all just remain flour and salt and water and nouns and verbs and idioms.

And then in the tenth hour--a tiny bubble appears. We are promised that a word from Him will not return to Him empty, that the Big Picture is like a mustard seed or a tiny bit of yeast and that it will work. It turns out, that this week, I've seen a couple of bubbles. One is a bubble from someone else's batch of dough--another from mine. It's been really neat.

I guess I'm just glad that in all of it--though I aspire to be a Baker of Bread--it's really the yeast that does the work--just like he said it would.