Baking: Gluttony? or Sabbath Practice?

I've been on a baking binge this week. I've made three loaves of rosemary foccacia bread (the bread my niece and nephew call "Aunt Laura Bread"), three loaves of ciabatta bread, three dozen chocolate chip cookies, one batch of my new favorite "Tuscan Short Bread" (with rosemary and walnuts), and a huge batch of amazingly delicious and decadent cinnamon rolls.

While we do have relatives coming to visit this weekend, I'd be lying if I said that were my motivation for all this baking activity. A friend of ours once told my husband, "You know what you've got? A 'Liberated Woman' who wants to be 'Homemaker of the Century,'" and while I must admit there's some truth to that statment, God help me, that wasn't my motivation either. It was, pure and simple, my desire to satisfy the cravings of my heart, not to mention my mouth and my nose! I guess I'm giving away that I didn't give up sweets for Lent as I have attempted to do in the past. I didn't give up anything. I "flunked" Lent this year, I guess (Here's a great post on this subject: http://ekklesiaproject.blogspot.com/2009/03/flunking-lent.html). I'm a glutton.

But the delight I have found in kneading bread dough from rumpled and messy to smooth and elastic, and the satisfaction I have found in the scent of buttery shortbread, and the rest I have found in waiting on bread to rise...These lead me to think of baking as a practice which helps me to "sanctify time," as I was talking about in last week's post. Certainly, if I were an Orthodox Jew, it wouldn't work as a Sabbath practice, because baking is clearly a form of labor. And yet, for me, while the bread is in the oven, I sit in my rocking chair and inhale the aroma, and I relax into the warm presence of it, and I'm held in God's hand.

And there's nothing quite liked baked goods for bringing together a community! I bake almost every week for our Sunday school class, and I think they know now that the muffins I bring are a form of my love for them. I'm also trying to bake for the garden workdays, with the same idea in mind. Where there's bread, there's community. I learned it from Jesus himself.

Here's the most delicious and easiest bread recipe I know, which I got from No Need to Knead by Suzanne Dunaway( http://www.buonaforchetta.com/noneed.html).

Rosemary Foccacia Bread (Dunaway via Hudson)

• 2 cups luke-warm water
• 2 tsp. yeast (or one envelope)
• 4 cups unbleached bread flour
• 2-3 tsp. salt
• Chopped fresh rosemary (can use dried, but fresh tastes better)
• kosher or sea salt
• olive oil

1. Pour water in a large bowl. Sprinkle yeast into water and stir until dissolved. Add two cups of flour, and stir until smooth. Add two more cups of flour and salt, and stir until the flour is incorporated. The dough will be pretty wet and sticky. Cover and let rise 40 mins or so. (You can also cover it and let it rise overnight in the fridge. Just let it come to room temp. before continuing).

2. Oil a large skillet (cast iron works great), and pour the risen dough into it. Brush olive oil on top, sprinkle with chopped rosemary and salt. Let rise again, 20-30 mins.

3. Heat oven to 500. Bake bread for 10-15 mins at this temp, and then turn it down to 400 for 10-15 mins. more. Try to wait to break into into until it has cooled completely on a rack!

In and out of time

Clearly, I have yet to establish a rhythm for blogging. I hear tell that it's blogging practice to neglect one's blog for very long, that one of the marks of the genre is to keep it current. But I haven't gotten into a regular "updating" habit yet, and so here we are, two weeks later.

However, this is just another minute episode (if you will) in my life of attempting to live in multiple kinds of time all at once. Blogging time. The liturgical calendar (it's Lent, after all). Lucas time. Keith time. Spring garden planting time. The seminary calendar. Taxation time (April 15th on its way).

I preached on the Ten Commandments this past Sunday in church. Out all of the commandments, the one with which people in our world seem to have the most difficulty accepting is the commandment to "Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy." This is where we Protestant Christians like to drag in the justification by faith argument, and claim that the "old law" has passed in Jesus. (They don't call it the "Protestant Work Ethic" for nothing). I'm pretty sure that my sermon opened up this can of worms for some people, as they looked at the commandments and thought, "No murder, check. No stealing, check. But how can I possible keep the Sabbath? How can I possibly stop working, for even one day?"

Sabbath is about resting from work. But I think it is also about how we approach time in general. One of my seminary professors talked about how following the commandments in Judaism (including Sabbath) is actually about "sanctifying time." What would it be like to live in sanctified time, I wonder?

In the past, I've had fantasies of following a pseudo-monastic daily prayer pattern, praying the hours (Here's a website which lists them http://palm.philippians-1-20.us/hours.htm). A momentary glance at the number of online pages that come up and the number of book titles on prayer available demonstrates to me that I am not alone in this. What is it that I hope for, what is it that I long for in dreaming of holy time?

I long for childhood time, the kind of time I see Lucas inhabiting more and more, where he is so deeply engrossed in his play (and I'm so engrossed in him) that an hour passes without either of us noticing. Is that what holy time is like?

Garden Dreams and Garden Practicality

My husband Keith went and bought some seeds for our community garden plot. He bought seeds for two kinds of tomatoes, squash, beans, spinach, and peppers. I'm already dreaming ways to eat the produce, and we haven't even planted yet. Typical.

I'm not really a gardener. My Mom is, and I remember her coercing my sisters and me out to weed the garden behind our house. Hot hours crouched down in the humid Indiana summer, pulling weeds, didn't inspire my enthusiasm. I didn't make the connection between those hard hours of work and the food on our table. It seemed much easier to go to the grocery store to pick up carrots. As an adult, I've begun to find grocery shopping for produce grown in Chile or Australia or some other far off place bewildering and disturbing. I can't look at it anymore without wondering, what is the price in travel and labor for this food, so neatly piled up in the store? How much pesticide residue will my family and I consume, eating it? And, admittedly most compelling, will it even taste good?

When I lived in Guatemala, my host family had enough small plots of land to cultivate all of the corn they consumed in a year, and let me tell you, Guatemalans eat a lot of corn. They call themselves "the people of corn" and much of their culture revolves around the corn planting and harvest. As I lived with them and experienced their life, the corn tortillas and tamales we ate almost every day tasted better and better. All that hard work, all that loving and personal care for plants and the earth, I believe it tranfers to the food and the communion around the table.

I've come to regret that I didn't attend more closely to my mother's gardening, or other handy skills she wanted to teach me, like canning or sewing. In our current economic situation, I think such skills, the ones our grandparents knew well because they had to, are going to become vital again. I think that one of the best things we can do for future generations is teach them to garden, even as we teach them to use a computer. Here's a great article in Orion Magazine about this very issue: "A Bunny Runs Around a Tree," by Sandra Steingraber (http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/4259/).