Daily Bread

My Challah does not look like this. I've never mastered the braiding thing.

This weekend, I spent part of my Saturday (in between the parts where I was addressing my save-the-dates) baking Challah bread for Easter. It's a traditional Passover bread, although I think the recipe I use must have been heavily edited from the original, because it contains large amounts of yeast, sugar, eggs, and butter - I'm pretty sure at least some of those things aren't Passover-approved.

Baking is one of those things that just takes me to a warm, happy place mentally and spiritually. I love the simplicity of baking, that you put what's right into the bowl, that you make it into dough or batter, that it comes out of the oven sweet (or savory) and warm and delicious. I love that it's honest - you know what went into that bowl, and you know what you're putting inside your body. And even if what's in it isn't the most nutritious, you can still use good, honest, whole ingredients like real flour, real butter, real milk. No preservatives here.

I find baking to be soothing mentally. I like to experiment and try new recipes, and I like the recipes I've always made. I love the enjoyment that others get from what I make. It's nice to just tune everything else out and bring your world down to one lump of dough and what you're creating from it. And, most significantly, I bake because it reminds my of my mother.

Some people get scared off by complicated things like bread - I don't own a breadmaker - but that's never really bothered me. I think it's because, as in the case of the Challah, I bake from the recipe I saw my mother use for years, and it always came out right. I watched for a while, and then when I was old enough I helped. And then when she passed away, it was natural, and necessary, for me to step into that role. Someone had to make the caramel pecan rolls for Thanksgiving and Christmas. Someone had to make the Challah for Easter. Someone had to make the chocolate chip cookies, because what is a house with three girls and no cookies? I know someone else would have made these things if I didn't, but I did what I had to do to be where I needed to be. I needed to carry on the traditions that she started, to affirm her memory and honor her through mixing the yeast and the flour and the eggs and the butter, as she had done for so many years. And now, baking brings me back there, to a memory of a woman who put love into every single thing she made, including her daughters.

That's why every Thanksgiving, every Christmas, every Easter, and pretty much every weekend in between, I'm spending time in the kitchen, making something full of carbs and love. It may be for a holiday that I'm not even spending with my family. It may be a recipe so full of fat and sugar that I'll barely eat any myself. But it doesn't matter. The joy is in the process and the completion, and the watching of others enjoy what my hands made, not in eating it myself. The joy is in the memory of the best woman I ever knew, pouring herself into the bread she was kneading in her hands for the love of the ones who would eat it.