Easy Bake

I've recently taken an interest in baking. Mind you, it's not elaborate, mostly muffins and quick breads, some pizza dough or scones. But I've come to realize that the art of baking is incredibly handy when you're raising a family.

For one thing, it's a way to get healthy snacks into these gross (in more ways than one) consumers I call my kids.  Boy Wonder can shove a whole mini-muffin in his mouth and not end up spitting it back out at me, as he would with a "whole" of anything else--and there's no halfway for the little man.  Bites?  Forget it, so passe.  I can throw a container of them in the passenger's seat and hand them out in the car, then savor the blissful silence of full mouths.

It's also a great way to tackle projects with kids.  My kids know the drill: they get their step stools (this has backfired on me a bit, since Boy Wonder likes to get his whenever he feels like it and use it to help himself to my electronics, which I've oh-so-cleverly kept out of reach); we all don our aprons (Sis: pink cat ala Hello Kitty, Lil Bro: trucks, me: Rosie the Riveter); we put on some great music (whatever is the favorite of the moment--right now it's Into the Woods, the perfect blend of Sondheim, Peters, and Gleason to get our spirits, vocabularies, and imagination pumping); I've generally already spent about a day trying to clear off counter space in the kitchen for us to mess up again; and they prepare themselves to take turns dumping cups and teaspoons of ingredients while we watch the magic of sifting, cutting, mixing, stirring, pouring, baking goodness amass itself into something hopefully divine, or at least palatable.

And the kids?  They're learning!  I've started talking to Spitfire about measurements and fractions.  She's excited to learn to read over the next year or two so she can be in charge of reading the recipe.  Besides these obvious lessons, they are also learning how to take care of themselves in later life, how to feed themselves something healthy and be independent from the "food machine."  They know where real food comes from and what it's made of.  They experience the chemistry that takes place when you mix or change the temperature of different elements.  They've watched yeast activate and dough rise.  In short, this is one of the best activities the kids and I undertake together.  And while it might occasionally throw some zingers of stress my way (I prefer, for instance, to bake without eggs because Boy Wonder cannot be dissuaded from putting every utensil and measuring cup in his mouth--the kid eats flour, baking soda, baking powder, you name it, straight up, and dissolves into a pool of wailing if I try to convince him otherwise), if I manage to keep my cool it's one of their favorite parts of the week.

But I've also realized over time how versatile and economical it is.  If I keep a couple of kinds of bulk flour in the pantry, I can feed the family in conjunction with whatever else I happen to have on hand: over-ripe or dried fruit, perfect for muffins; applesauce, yogurt, eggs, all great filler for quick breads; cheese and leftover pasta sauce magically become pizza.  If I can't get to the grocery store, I can pull something together; and on those occasions when grocery money is lacking, I fall back on my "bulk strategy" of baked goods and other grains and dry goods I can store in quantity (rice, couscous, beans).  Funny how after so many decades of "progress" we discover that our forebears probably had it right to begin with--cooking whole foods.

But here's my strategy's Achilles heel: when we bought our house six years ago, the house came with a stove-slash-oven that has certainly not weathered time as well as our historic house itself has.  We noticed a couple of years ago that the outside of the oven was getting really hot.  Now it appears that the whole top heating element is not working, so it heats up the stove and kitchen far more than the food inside (which just compounds the fact that our kitchen is on the west side of the house and it's 110 outside).  Luckily, the bottom coil still works, and I've learned to time my creations so they're nearly, almost, hinting at browning on top, but still not burned on the bottom.  I have, for all intents and purposes, the equivalent of an Easy Bake oven--I've learned that my baked goods will not brown if I don't have the oven light on.  (Perhaps time for a new oven?  Yes, we've been saying that for a while.)

I've never been big into cooking--though I have tried to get more into it since I'm at home with the kids and in charge of most dinners, and I've got a penchant for farmers' markets--but I've realized after baking for a while what the difference is, for me.  Cooking stresses me out because everything has to be timed appropriately, and I never feel like it's coming together when it should be--some veggies are overcooked, some still rather hard, the sauce isn't put together in time to add it to the cooking veggies, etc.  But baking is so much more zen, in my opinion: you do things at your own pace, the oven is preheating and will stay at whatever temp you ascribe until you're ready for it.  The oven waits for you, the stove does not.  So the kids and I can take as long as we wish to dance in the flour, and lick the applesauce spoon, and try to stick our hands in the soft butter when Mama's not looking, and it will all be okay.  We can have our Old-Fashioned Coffee Cake, and eat it too.