{"id":129,"date":"2007-01-05T12:11:37","date_gmt":"2007-01-05T17:11:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/neopagan.net\/blog\/?p=129"},"modified":"2007-01-05T12:12:52","modified_gmt":"2007-01-05T17:12:52","slug":"channeling-grandma","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/neopagan.net\/blog\/2007\/01\/05\/channeling-grandma\/","title":{"rendered":"Channeling Grandma"},"content":{"rendered":"

I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t blog very often. With my goofy work schedule (and impending grand jury service\u00e2\u20ac\u201dmore on that later), it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s hard for me to find the uninterrupted time I need to focus on writing. (Ask Isaac. Real Energy<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m a lot like Grandma in ways I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d never imagined growing up. For all my gypsy ways, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m probably the most domestic of Mom\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s three girls. I cook, I sew, I do artsy-craftsy stuff, I go on crochet binges and Christopher Lowell<\/a> jags. (He\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s got a book on de-cluttering<\/a>; I wonder if it would help?) The one I do most consistently (hint: it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not de-cluttering) is cooking.<\/p>\n

Grandma Heyman used to cook (and sew and crochet). I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d sit at the table, watching her bake bread with something like awe as she\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d measure with the palm of her hand or off-handedly try different ingredients. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The instant oatmeal works better in the bread than regular oatmeal,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d she\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d tell me, tearing open a packet. How\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d she decide that, I wondered. Never, I thought, would I be able to bake bread by just eye-balling the ingredients.<\/p>\n

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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s too little? what\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s too much?) gave me anxiety attacks. And it took too long. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d have to be fussing with it all day. Other baking had more immediate gratification.<\/p>\n

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 \u00e2\u20ac\u201c damn, makes me hungry! But I did not bake bread.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

For the first six months to a year, I followed the recipes religiously. The bread was good, but predictably mundane. So I started experimenting \u00e2\u20ac\u201c 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.<\/p>\n

Six months later, I was making bread by eye-balling the ingredients. I called it channeling Grandma.<\/p>\n

Then, last year, after decades of post-nasal drip, nighttime coughing fits, and intermittent migraines, I finally went to an allergist. Mold, tree pollen \u00e2\u20ac\u201c the usual, the expected \u00e2\u20ac\u201c and wheat.<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

For the moment, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m switching to corn breads. No yeast, faster gratification, and no allergens. Last night\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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 \u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 maybe tonight after the laundry is finished.<\/p>\n

I hope Grandma Heyman would be proud.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t blog very often. With my goofy work schedule (and impending grand jury service\u00e2\u20ac\u201dmore on that later), it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s hard for me to find the uninterrupted time I need to focus on writing. (Ask Isaac. Real Energy might have been … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-129","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-personal-happenings"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/neopagan.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/neopagan.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/neopagan.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neopagan.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neopagan.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=129"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/neopagan.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/neopagan.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=129"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neopagan.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=129"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neopagan.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=129"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}