Channeling Grandma

I don’t blog very often. With my goofy work schedule (and impending grand jury service—more on that later), it’s hard for me to find the uninterrupted time I need to focus on writing. (Ask Isaac. Real Energy might have been finished four months earlier or be a hundred pages longer if I had more adaptable work habits.) But today is a day off, I have a little space to myself, and I woke up thinking about Grandma Heyman.

I’m a lot like Grandma in ways I’d never imagined growing up. For all my gypsy ways, I’m probably the most domestic of Mom’s three girls. I cook, I sew, I do artsy-craftsy stuff, I go on crochet binges and Christopher Lowell jags. (He’s got a book on de-cluttering; I wonder if it would help?) The one I do most consistently (hint: it’s not de-cluttering) is cooking.

Grandma Heyman used to cook (and sew and crochet). I’d sit at the table, watching her bake bread with something like awe as she’d measure with the palm of her hand or off-handedly try different ingredients. “The instant oatmeal works better in the bread than regular oatmeal,” she’d tell me, tearing open a packet. How’d she decide that, I wondered. Never, I thought, would I be able to bake bread by just eye-balling the ingredients.

I did get pretty good at muffins (my favorite), maybe not the measuring by eye, but the experimenting with abandon. What happens if I use pumpkin instead of banana? What if I increase the proportion of whole-wheat flour? Nuts are good, raisins nasty, dried cranberries excellent. But bread, mostly, I left alone. All that kneading and raising (what’s too little? what’s too much?) gave me anxiety attacks. And it took too long. I’d have to be fussing with it all day. Other baking had more immediate gratification.

But I love bread. I really love rich, grainy loaves from the crunchy-granola bakeries, sharp pumpernickels in thin slices, crisp baguettes, hot dogs on buttery poppy-seed buns, deli meats on a hard roll – damn, makes me hungry! But I did not bake bread.

Then they invented bread machines. I longed for a bread machine. They were sleek and shiny. They had cute little pans and recipe books. They were expensive, by my budget. But finally, in my forties, one turned up under the Yule tree.

For the first six months to a year, I followed the recipes religiously. The bread was good, but predictably mundane. So I started experimenting – just a little. Just a little different proportion of flours. Just a little different sweetener. A little more liquid; I could watch the kneading cycle to see if it was too much. Just a little more flour so the consistency was right.

Six months later, I was making bread by eye-balling the ingredients. I called it channeling Grandma.

Then, last year, after decades of post-nasal drip, nighttime coughing fits, and intermittent migraines, I finally went to an allergist. Mold, tree pollen – the usual, the expected – and wheat.

Wheat! No bread, no pasta, no cookies, no crackers, no muffins! No pies or cakes or quiches. Dairy, the doctor said was also on the list. No pizza, not even with my carefully developed whole-wheat crust baked on the cherished pizza stone.

Why, yes, it was a traumatic diagnosis. I miss my wheat. However, I do not miss the coughing or the migraines, so there you are.

The bread machine is looking forlorn. I tried wheat-free bread in it, but it is just not the same. I know I have to completely change my techniques, but, unfortunately, Grandma is no help with this one.

For the moment, I’m switching to corn breads. No yeast, faster gratification, and no allergens. Last night’s batch with the fine-ground corn flour in the cast-iron pan, was just about perfect. Next step is muffins, with different flour additions, and maybe add ins … maybe tonight after the laundry is finished.

I hope Grandma Heyman would be proud.