If you have been following me through the years (and if you are new to this here little web log--this is will be news to you) you will know that I spend an awful lot of my time dealing with food. Cooking it, eating it, writing about it, thinking about it, planning vacations around it, etc.
For instance, you will remember my treatise on Gravy, my wonderful photoshoot with Eliza and subsequently wonderful thoughts on Basil, when I went into detail about why I think there will be blueberry pie in Heaven, and who can forget my ravenous novels I wrote about wild black raspberries TWO YEARS IN A ROW? I know you most certainly didn't.
Love it love it love it so much. And while this was not a reality that was "funly" won, it is where I most happily find myself currently.
That being said, I am at it now more than ever. Why, you might ask? Well, I have a husband who is not picky and also likes to eat just like I do, for one. Secondly, since I am not working outside of the home right now I have more time on my hands to try all kinds of kitchen experiments that I have wanted to for years. Ergo, I spend almost all of my days thinking about food now. I have watched every Tiny Paris Kitchen video there is, along with every video a certain Microbotic chef I have seen on TV has to offer. I have made oodles of cookies and cinnamon rolls for the neighbors. Hubbs, who loves ice cream dearly, thought it would be a wonderful idea to get a homemade ice cream maker.
It wasn't a good idea. Do you know how much of the most decadent, divine ice cream we have polished off in the last month?! I would have overwhelming fears of gaining twelve pounds a month if we didn't also have a gym membership, but now I just fear when the gym membership runs out. Please, Lord! Give us strength to resist the frozen cream delicacy!!!
And then of course there is this book I picked up at the library entitled simply, Cooked. Written by the same guy who wrote The Omnivore's Dilemma, he is, albeit, pretty liberal in all of his thinking, not connected to Christ in any obvious way, and believes the entire evolutionary process. Taking all of that with a grain of salt, however, he has some very interesting findings about the history of food and how we have gotten ourselves to be this irreversibly fast-food, pre-packaged society as a whole. It's just the sort of reading I devour (pun intended). I mean I read like 280 pages....this weekend.
Ravenous. Per usual.
One chapter in particular I literally could not put down.
Bread.
That's all he was talking about. Chalk it up to the fact that I have been dabbling in bread making for the first time in my entire life, it was so fascinating I couldn't stop thinking about it even after I could eventually put it down. Later that day Hubbs and I were on our way to the gym (to work of the ice cream) when he interrupts my silent reverie and says, "What are you thinking about?" to which I honestly had to reply "Wet dough theory."
Praise the Lord for this man. He gets answers like that all the time and they don't shock him, nor do they bore him.
Anyway. Wet Dough Theory. I will not go into it anymore than to say it's a completely different way of making bread (and heralded as the most nutritious way) involving whole grains and homemade sour dough.
Fascinating. The stuff dreams are made of to quirky gals like me.
Days later I was still thinking about it. Trying to prioritize how I would be able to fit a sour dough schedule into my life, will it be sustainable through the years to keep it up, how can I best maximize the nutrition for my family, etc etc etc ad nauseum. Couple that with my incessant thoughts about planting a garden when I get back to the Homeland this summer, and my permanent disdain for going to the grocery store and having to pay money for things like APPLESAUCE and FROZEN BERRIES. Tisk tisk. Such a thing is unheard of to this country girl.
So I plan and strategize all the time now about how I am going to conjure up all this food and not pay virtually any money for it (because I HATE paying for food---it makes me feel dependent).
And in this thinking about wet doughs and homegrown food and applesauce made by hand picked apples, I start this feel this sense of comfort......security.....come over me, knowing I will have the ability to provide for my family what it needs. "We will be ok," I comfort myself with, as I run through the rolodex in my brain of ways I can be self-sustainable. "We will be ok."
But then I start to feel a little brooding. As if some deep darkness is crawling up my throat.
And lines start to become blurred in my head.
And I feel my hand clenching just a little tighter around this dough that will bake into our daily bread.
In tandem with the now-in-place lump of darkness in my throat is this nagging realization I don't want to ponder: But what if this summer there is a drought and all my plants die?
Or what if there is exorbitant amounts of rain like two years ago....and all my plants DROWN? Or can't get planted at all? What if we get an early spring and a late frost and it kills all the apple blossoms resulting in no applesauce? What if my tomatoes get blight? Or slugs eats my cabbages? What if my sour dough starter collects the wrong bacteria from the air and we are left with no bread?
And the tighter I clench said dough....the more I feel it rushing through my fingers, as if I have no grasp on it at all.
The natural Bethany doesn't want to admit that things like Our Daily Bread and the best gardening weather and bugs or no bugs on the produce are....not up to me.
I want them to be up to me.
I want my plans to succeed. I want to be able to sustain my family, provide for them in my own way, take seriously the things that are going into our bodies, and not be dependent upon....THEM.
Who?
Whom?
*blast.
That's where the lines keep getting blurred.
WHO exactly is it I want to independent from?
I tell myself its because I want to do what I feel is best for us right now and I want to help provide, bear some of the burden.
But I know myself well enough to know that such a pure answer is probably not entirely from my heart at all.
I want to be independent. From the grocery stores. From the help of others. But worse still---from HIM.
It's the sin-nature-self coming up again.
I WANT TO DO IT MYSELF. And take pride in that, darn it!
I want to be able to tell the weather and the bugs and the bacteria where to go and what to do. I want to be able to make us OK. I want that power.
*sigh.
The only comfort I find at this point is knowing that the gut-check I just got means there has to be something more than the crawling darkness in me. Maybe my heart of stone is more like not-quite-dry-but-almost-dry-concrete right now instead of granite.
It's the age old problem. We all want to be little gods, don't we? We all want to take matters into our own hands. Have power to make us BE OK. Self-comfort. Self-secure. Self-sufficient.
Thousands of years ago there was this same exact situation:
"Beware that you do not forget the Lord your God by not keeping His commandments and His ordinances and His statutes which I am commanding you today; otherwise, when you have eaten and are satisfied, and have built good houses and lived in them, and when your herds and your flocks multiply, and your silver and gold multiply, and all that you have multiplies, then your heart will become proud and you will forget the Lord your God who brought you out from the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. He led you through the great and terrible wilderness, with its fiery serpents and scorpions and thirsty ground where there was no water; He brought water for you out of the rock of flint. In the wilderness He fed you manna which your fathers did not know, that He might humble you and that He might test you, to do good for you in the end. Otherwise, you may say in your heart, ‘My power and the strength of my hand made me this wealth.’ But you shall remember the Lord your God, for it is He who is giving you power to make wealth, that He may confirm His covenant which He swore to your fathers, as it is this day. It shall come about if you ever forget the Lord your God and go after other gods and serve them and worship them, I testify against you today that you will surely perish. Like the nations that the Lord makes to perish before you, so you shall perish; because you would not listen to the voice of the Lord your God."
(Deuteronomy 8:11-20)
That bit right there I know is where the slip up ALWAYS comes: "But you shall remember the LORD your God, for it is He who is giving you the power to make wealth...."
Gardens and wet doughs and paying for food or not paying for food and, for you, whatever it is you have put your hand to, today this is where I stand (and where I have to glue myself in place to remain): Do what I can with my hands, while ALWAYS remember----I did not give myself these hands.
"One plants. One waters. BUT GOD GIVES THE INCREASE." (I Cor 3:6)
Love you, Wolfies.
No comments:
Post a Comment