{"id":74,"date":"2020-04-04T04:57:49","date_gmt":"2020-04-04T04:57:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wordpress.kpu.ca\/arley\/?p=74"},"modified":"2020-04-04T05:00:06","modified_gmt":"2020-04-04T05:00:06","slug":"friday-april-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wordpress.kpu.ca\/arley\/2020\/04\/04\/friday-april-3\/","title":{"rendered":"Friday, April 3"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Today I made chicken pot pie in the slow cooker. I love using the slow cooker because the scents of whatever you’re making sneak up on you. You throw the ingredients in, turn it on, go about your day, and just when you forget about it: bam! Rosemary, thyme, and sage! A far better scent than our place’s usual melange of ‘apartment that 3 people and a cat have been cooped up in for 3 weeks straight.’<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When my husband took the toddler out for her walk this afternoon, I decided to make an Irish soda bread to go along with the chicken pot pie. I love to bake, but I’ve never tackled bread. I’m not a very patient person, and bread takes time. You have to coax it to rise, knead it (not too much!), let it rise again. Not like muffins, which you can have in the oven in 10 minutes. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But I’ve been told that quick bread is easy, and we’re officially at the stage of self-isolation when I’m moodily baking to Townes van Zandt. (“Living’s mostly wasting time. I waste my share of mine. But it never feels too good, so let’s don’t take too long.”)<\/em> I’d prepared the dry ingredients and was waiting for the buttermilk to curdle, when I startled out of my folk-music-induced reverie. I was slathering my hands in margarine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hands have long memories. As a child, I baked a lot of bread with my grandma. She’d make me roll up my sleeves, then slick on butter so the dough wouldn’t stick to my hands. As she did, she’d look at my palms and say that I had old hands: a sign that I’m an old soul. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then, as she prepared the loaves, my siblings and I would make little people out of the bread dough scraps, or roll them in cinnamon and sugar and eat them raw. (Far more dough landed in our mouths than on the baking sheet). Sometimes, my grandma would place her hands over mine to show me how to knead the dough: pressing with your palm, folding. Her rough hands were soft on bread-making day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"An
Nana Elsie<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

My grandma’s been dead for over a decade, and I probably haven’t made bread in 20 years, but I can still remember her kitchen: her spoon collection in its display case on the wall, the mug full of even more teaspoons, her brown teapot with a crocheted cozy over it, the glass-front cabinets full of trinkets and the good china: all of it labeled in blue felt pen with the name of the person who would get it after she died. You’d have a snack at her house, bring a dish to the sink and realize that it had “To Susie When I Die” written in blue ink on the bottom. And you’d feel a brief pang at the reminder that one day your grandma would die, and the plate in your hand would be Susie’s, and you would get the china doll with the sailor suit, and a little china jewelry box with painted roses. (My grandma lived next door to a graveyard, so you were always reminded of your own mortality).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’s an extinct smell now: the odour of her kitchen, the rising bread — which smelled of butter and yeast but also faintly of dill — the tea with milk (Tilk, she would call it) cooling in the cups, her Neutrogena hand cream. And my craggy little lump of dough heaped on the baking sheet is not in the same universe as her uniform golden loaves in their heavy square pans. But my hands — soft with margarine — remembered what to do. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And the bread was delicious, in its own way. I forgot to grease the baking sheet, so the bottom came off. But we ate it warm slathered in butter. Dot liked it so much that when I had my back turned, she snatched the remaining 1\/4 loaf off the table. I found her sitting at her play kitchen, putting the bread in the oven, humming to herself, taking it out, checking it, putting it back in. When she decided the bread was ready, she turned on some rocking tune on her drum set and sat thoughtfully picking little morsels of white bread out of the middle of the loaf and chewing them and bopping up and down to the beat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While we’re still at the wait-and-see part of the curve, knowing worse days are ahead, knowing that loss is coming, it is good to focus on new beginnings, and to think of the people who fed you when you were young. Maybe I could be good at bread. Maybe I could get better at waiting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Dots<\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"Chicken<\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today I made chicken pot pie in the slow cooker. I love using the slow cooker because the scents of whatever you’re making sneak up on you. You throw the ingredients in, turn it on, go about your day, and just when you forget about it: bam! Rosemary, thyme, and sage! A far better scent […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-74","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.kpu.ca\/arley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.kpu.ca\/arley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.kpu.ca\/arley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.kpu.ca\/arley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.kpu.ca\/arley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=74"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.kpu.ca\/arley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":80,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.kpu.ca\/arley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74\/revisions\/80"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.kpu.ca\/arley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=74"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.kpu.ca\/arley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=74"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.kpu.ca\/arley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=74"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}