I've Written A Doughnut Essay

My second publication of the year, Confessions Of A Doughnut Eater, is what I call an eating essay. My eating essays tend to be memoirish. We could call it a doughnut memoir, inspired by my children who were both burning up our family text one weekend with news about their doughnut excursions. They inspired some of my earliest work and continue to do so. 

Interested in literature? This piece has a couple of references for you. There's one to Jane Eyre, and the title is a shoutout to Thomas de Quincey's 1821 classic Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. Everyone loves Thomas de Quincey, right?

Time To Push Some Old Essay/Memoirs Onto The Reading Public

Yes, I'm in this picture

While on X/Twitter today, I noticed that it is now Bread Loaf Writers' Conference time. What a great excuse to remind the world about my old memoirish essay My Bread Loaf published long ago at The
Millions. It's about my even longer ago experience at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference where I...worked in the kitchen for three summers! At the time I wrote it, I thought my Bread Loaf experience was so unique and unusual because, as a general rule, when you hear about someone going there, they go on about how meaningful and literary and artie their experience there was. There are often pictures of the beautiful mountain scenery. I thought my kitchen pictures and experience were fascinating because they were so different.

I am alone in that, by the way. This memoir doesn't get a lot of attention when I toss it out into the world again.

These days, the incongruity factor of my Bread Loaf experience doesn't interest me as much as it used to. Now that I'm interested in writing about eating, the kitchen is far more meaningful to me. I was the pastry assistant to Aggie, the chain-smoking baker, and it was with her I learned about oatmeal bread. That was way too exotic for my family.

By the way, I'm working on a bread baking essay.

I used my Bread Loaf experience in another memoirish essay, not about bread baking, called Blackened Pans, published at The Bigger Picture. My time in the Bread Loaf kitchen has had a bigger impact on my writing than anything else I saw or did there.

A Bizarre Experience Related To Eating And Tim Ferris

I ate this.

For years I've been interested in doing some short-form writing about eating. I'm not talking about food writing, because you need to know something to do that and it tends to be about kinds of food my people don't eat. I've been interested in writing about eating, the kind of eating my people do versus the kind of eating Food Network people and New York Times reading people do.

Eating had a significant role in my very first book, My Life Among the Aliens, and its follow-up, Club Earth. Eating and its connection to social class makes an appearance in The Hero of Ticonderoga. I've done a couple of real eating articles for a publication at Medium, Enough and Mac and Me, both in Kitchen Tales. And then there are some eating adjacent pieces, such as Blackened Pans at The Bigger Picture, which touches upon my time working in a professional, though not restaurant, kitchen.

So the whole eating writing business is a thing for me.

Enough Of The Eating. What About This Tim Ferris Person?

I've been thinking about writing about bread baking for a long time. Last week, while looking for one of my old blog posts to use in a new blog post, I came upon one about bread that I thought I could rework for a submission to one of the Medium publications. That led me to go looking around on my hard drive for bread material that I'd started. And that led me to a link I had kept to How to Become a Great (Food) Writer: The Big Secret even though, as I've already said, I'm not interested in being a food writer, great or otherwise, just an eating writer. 

I will admit I have not yet read every word in this article, because it's interesting and has links I want to follow. It looks good. I need some time. I also got distracted.

I got distracted because of the splendor of the website it was on, which belongs to the Tim Ferris you've been waiting for me to get to. It is difficult for me to be able to say who or what Tim Ferris is, because he's done and does a lot. He appears to be a productivity writer/speaker/podcaster/blogger/what have you, with his productivity interests spread over many things, like cooking, and his productivity ideas, perhaps, evolving. I was overwhelmed by his post on creating a viral book trailer. I was intimidated by his description of marketing for his book The 4 Hour Chef, which appears to be about more than cooking.

So What? There Is A So What, Right?

I have not done much about time management here for quite a while. I use "time management" as an umbrella term for all kinds of things that can impact time. That may be what I'll find at Tim Ferris's site. If so, I may be fired up about time management again.

In the meantime, I have to do some managing and find time to finishing reading his post on how to be a great (food) writer. 

Yes, I Am Attracted To Descriptions Of Food

Criativithy@unsplash

I didn't eat Chinese food while growing up in Vermont, though there was a Chinese restaurant in neighboring Rutland that had been there at least a generation, so Vermonters did eat it. Just not us. Then I saw The Misfortune Cookie episode of The New Twilight Zone. Not the Jordan Peel Twilight Zone, the one before that. The one very few people saw or know about. Anyway, The Misfortune Cookie which led me to try an egg roll offered as an appetizer in a nonChinese restaurant. And that was my gateway to Chinese food. I have some left over shrimp chow fun in the freezer now.

I can be enticed by food that isn't right in front of me.

So you can understand why I was interested in Betsy Bird's The Top Ten Most Disappointing Edibles And Potables Of Children's Literature in School Library Journal. And surprise! I have tried a couple of the foods she lists, because I'd read about them in a book.

Raspberry Cordial--I tried this while doing the Anne of Green Gables thing, because I was vacationing on Prince Edward Island. It was in the Anne of Green Gables bottle, which I kept for a little while. I actually did like it, but, yes, it was raspberry juice.

Turkish Delight--I know that at some point here at Original Content I have to have mentioned my long and not very stellar career as a Sunday school teacher. Toward the end of it, I was teaching a fifth- or sixth-grade class, which was like junior and senior year at our church. I decided I was going to enrich these kids' spiritual lives by bringing literature to them. I was going to read a bit of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis to them the weeks I taught, because I had read there was supposed to be something very Christian about the book.

Then I decided I would enrich the story I was reading them to enrich their spiritual lives by making them some Turkish Delight. I got done, looked at it, and said, "This can't be right."

I brought it into class, anyway. We all experienced a religious mystery.

I didn't get far with The Lion, the Witch, and The Wardrobe reading, because I didn't understand what the big deal was. A girl in my class, whose mother was the director of Christian Education for our church so she knew things other kids, and maybe adults, didn't, explained to me that the lion is Jesus. Nonetheless, I quit the readings and nobody missed them.

My First Publication Of The Year Is About...Macaroni And Cheese!

As I was just saying a couple of days ago, I am focusing on writing for adults this year. One of the things I'm interested in writing about for adults is eating. I do not mean I'm interested in food writing. For food writing, you need to know something. I'm interested in writing about eating.

My first publication for 2023 is, indeed, about eating. Mac and Me: A personal history of macaroni and cheese was published yesterday at Kitchen Tales.  

While writing eating essays for adults is new for me, writing about eating is not.

My first book, My Life Among the Aliens, was built around the premise that a mom's healthy, wholegrain cooking was drawing alien life forms to the family home, which her kids than had to deal with. In the follow-up book, Club Earth, Will and Rob come up with a sugar- and additive-laden dinner that drives away the aliens using their house as a resort.

My fourth book, The Hero of Ticonderoga, includes a meal of French Canadian treats loved by the main character, but not by her guest. And food plays a big role in Saving the Planet & Stuff. 

So it's not at all out of character for me to be writing about eating. I'm just doing it now for adults.

I Read It For The Bread

You know those books about women going to Europe on their own and having some kind of meaningful life improvement thing happen there? Yeah, I haven't read any of those, but I imagine All You Knead Is Love by Tanya Guerrero may be a middle grade version of those. 

Twelve-year-old Alba is sent off to Barcelona from New York to live with her Spanish grandmother who she doesn't know well, because her well-to-do father in America is physically abusive. The abuse primarily involves her mother, and mom gets Alba out of this mess by sending her off to her own mother. Alba isn't crazy about this plan, and she's angry with both her parents--her father for being what he is and her mother for putting up with it. But Alba is won over by life in Barcelona, because her grandmother is a lovely woman, there's a male mild romantic interest, a girl best friend, and an old friend of Mom's who runs a bakery specializing in bread.

Some Basics About The Book

I don't think I've read many middle grade books that begin with an escape from abuse or that include mom being on the receiving end to this extent. I found that interesting. I would have liked more of that. I wanted to see evil Dad, see mom standing up to him, and see Alba respond to that situation. There was also an issue with Alba's appearance--she likes to wear her hair very short and wear boyish clothes. This ticks Dad off. I thought we were going to see some kind of gender situation here, but it never came to that.

Some Favorite Parts

I have never been that interested in Spain, but Guerrero makes Barcelona sound fantastic. The book isn't enough to get me onto a plane, but I certainly would watch a  movie or TV series set in Barcelona, or even Spain, after reading it. 

And then there is the bread. I sought out this book because  the the word "knead" is in the title and there are loaves of bread on the cover.

I Was The Bread Person

I have been baking bread, and bread-like things, since I was a teenager. All this stuff about yeast shortages during the pandemic, because people who had never baked bread were taking it up while they were stuck at home? That set me off. Those Johnny-come-latelies were taking my yeast. And I'm somebody who buys it by the bottle and usually am one bottle ahead.

Back in the day, I made bread in the shape of Christmas trees, braids with white, whole wheat, and something else strands, braids stuffed with pastes made of walnuts or almonds, Easter braids with colored eggs. Sadly, I do not have pictorial evidence of any of that. You'll have to take my word for it. I cut back on the fancy stuff, because I'm surrounded by Philistines who prefer brown-and-serve rolls, which I will not have in my house. I'm not even sure what they are.

A friend up the street once said, "Whenever it rains, I know that Joan is making cookies, and Gail is making bread." I was famous for bread, people. Famous, I tell you.

So you can see why I had to read All You Knead Is Love. 

Sadly, the bread making in All You Knead Is Love is way, way beyond my clearance level. However, I loved that the bakery in the book expanded to making gluten-free breads, since I'm doing that, too, now. After several years, I'm just tinkering with a recipe I really like. I have no pictures of that, either.

All You Knead Is Love is more than a travel and food book, but it should be a nice introduction to those types of reads. 

 

Combining Two of The Best Things About Life, Bread And Books

I made my first loaf of bread when I was a teenager. Bread baking was not something I learned at my mother's knee. She didn't make bread. None of my relatives made bread. I didn't know anyone who made bread. This was just before making bread became a thing. You couldn't walk into a library back then and pick up something like "The Big Book of Baking Bread." I must have just found a recipe in my mother's one cookbook. I think she only had a bread pan because she used it to make meatloaf that I wasn't fond of.

I have no idea what I was thinking. Why did I make my first quilt back then, too? I don't know. My guess is that I read about baking bread and making quilts in books. Novels.

I have baked a lot of bread over the years. In college I worked summers in a kitchen, for the baker. Later, I baked elaborate tree-shaped and teddy bear-shaped bears at Christmas time. The braided bread with with hard boiled eggs at Easter. Cinnamon rolls. Sticky buns. Lots of those. I made stuffed sandwiches of various kinds. Yes, stromboli. I worked out how to let bread rise overnight so I didn't have to do the kneading and some of the rising the day I wanted to serve the bread to guests. (I didn't want to bake the day before, because, you know, day-old bread.) I've done Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day. I have a stone for baking. I have  peels for getting bread into and out of the oven. I'm on my third bread machine. I have a baguette pan.

Which brings me to my point.

Baguettes And Books

I was walking through my local grocery store last spring and passed the book section where some children's books were prominently displayed. What do I see, but Nanette's Baguette by Mo Willems? I see that it's a beautiful book. It's shockingly cheap. And it's about bread!

Well, right away, I mean in...stan...taneously, I knew I could do things with that book.

As it turns out, Nanette's Baguette is a terrific story about a trip to a bakery to buy a baguette and the tempting splendors of this marvelous bread. It's a really fun read, particularly if, while reading it, you're eating baguettes. And you have a guest to eat them with.

With the help of that bread machine I mentioned earlier (and my baguette pan) I made baguettes the morning I was expecting company for dinner.

The baguettes were a big hit with my visitor, as was Nanette's Baguette. So much so that I froze the leftover bread, brought out it out the next time he came, and, since the book was still in the dining room, he ate bread, and we read again. (Frozen, reheated baguette is a little limp. Still.)

Love baguettes. Love Nanette.

Today I'm taking part in Weekend Cooking at Beth Fish Reads.