April Fool's Day

Yesterday, I was quaffing my first morning cup of coffee in a desperate attempt to wake up and face my usual Thursday marathon. It's a killer--I bake challohs and cakes and still have to generate food for my brood and slug through the laundry. That would be fine except that I also work for a living. I try to churn out at least 3 articles a day.

So there I was dosing myself with caffeine and going through my inbox when I came upon a digest from one of my yahoo groups: the Israel-food list. It is rare for me to weigh in on threads there or pose questions. It's just not my focus these days and I've been thinking about setting this group to "no mail."

But I made a quick scan of this particular digest and something truly weird caught my eye: a thread that began with Mirj Weiss' request for recipes to trick her husband on April Fool's Day.

The suggestions were DISGUSTING and I found myself rolling my eyes. Meatloaf with a hotdog in the center so that each slice came out with a neat little round of frankfurter in the middle. Meatloaf "cupcakes" with mashed potato icing. FEH. I was SO grossed out.

At any rate, I finally moved my duff out of my office chair and into the kitchen to put up my challoh dough. I was slugging through my cooking tasks (when will I ever be able to just take my time cooking and really enjoy it instead of rushing through things and feeling pressured to get to something else??) and got to the point where I was grating garlic cloves on my microplane for our lunchtime meal of chicken fajitas when I grated my thumb.

Nothing new. I'm a klutz, pure and simple, and I'm always cutting and grating myself, sometimes to the point of needing stitches. I managed to bandage my thumb which was bleeding like a stuck pig, but we had these really low-quality bandaids (won't buy those again) and they kept falling off every time I washed my hands.

Now one cannot cook without washing hands. It won't work. And I really don't want to have rubber-glove flavored fajitas which would be the likely result were I to wear gloves to cover my bandaged thumb. Besides, I was in too much of a hurry to stop and put on a glove. I was cooking with grease by now, well-caffeinated and in the groove (if a very klutzy groove).

So I got up, put on a new bandaid, and went on to mixing the batter for my Peanut Buddy Bars, or as we call these chocolate-iced peanut butter brownies: Nutty Buddy Bars. I was adding the eggs and vanilla to the creamed margarine, peanut butter, and sugar mixture when I realized my thumb was no longer bandaged.

EEK! Did it fall into the batter?? I looked around. No sign of a bandage on the kitchen counter where I was working. Not on the floor. GAWD! It must be in the batter.

I looked in the bowl, but couldn't find anything that looked bandaid-like in the mass of bandaid-colored batter. I dug out a wooden spoon and moved the mixture around in an attempt to spot the bandaid and fish it out, but nothing doing: I couldn't find the darned thing.

Then I remembered the thread on the Israel-Food list and things went from bad to worse. You know those cartoons where the good conscience and the bad conscience whisper in the character's ears: "Do it, they'll never know, MWUHAHAHAHAHAHA!" and "Don't do it, Varda. Don't listen to him!"

I thought: "I'll just bake the batter anyway, as is, and when someone finds my bloody bandaid, I'll say, 'April Fool's!'"

I even imagined posting this to the Israel-Food list and the laughs this note would surely generate.

Then I shook my head. HARD. And came back to reality.

Taking a deep breath, I plunged my hand (not the bloody-thumbed one) into the batter and felt around until I found the darned thing. I waved it in the air for an invisible audience, thinking, "SUCCESS!"

Of course, someone else would have deemed the batter unsanitary by now, thrown out the batter, and begun again. But I'm not someone else.

April Fool's!


Chocolate Peanut Buddy Bars

1 cup peanut butter
1/2 cup butter or margarine, softened
1 ¼ cups sugar
3 large eggs
1 t. vanilla
1 cup all-purpose flour
¼ t. salt
2 cups chocolate chips, divided

Preheat oven to 350.

In large mixer bowl, beat peanut butter and butter or margarine until smooth, about 1 minute.

Add sugar, eggs and vanilla extract; beat until creamy.

Blend in flour and salt.

Stir in 1 cup chocolate chips.

Spread into ungreased 13x9 inch baking pan.

Bake 25-30 minutes, or until edges begin to brown.

Immediately, sprinkle remaining chocolate chips over cookie layer.

Let stand 5 minutes until chips become shiny and soft.

Spread melted chips evenly over top. Cool completely. Cut into 1 ½ inch bars. Makes 48 bars.

They Paved Paradise

This morning, I was standing at my kitchen counter, kneading sourdough for my weekly double batch of Challoh. As I knead, I always keep an eye on the display of my oven, which is situated to my left. Watching my oven clock that way lets me know that ten minutes have elapsed and I can now put my dough to rest, covered with a warm, damp all-cotton dish towel, for a couple of hours before shaping.

I was in the thick of my kneading and if you've never kneaded dough, I can tell you that it's about as physical an activity as is possible to perform. I'm not a physical sort of person, but my arms and hands are very strong from years of piano playing. I really do enjoy the workout I get from kneading dough, even though it leaves me as quivering and breathless as my bread dough.

I am not the first person to suggest that making bread is therapeutic and brings peace of mind. Once I'm into the rhythm, the thrust and parry of the at first uncooperative mass of dough, my mind travels to a place where there is no thought. There is only the hard, manual labor of creating art in the form of a homely loaf of bread. Bread, the act of making it as well as the act of eating the finished product, feels to me about as elemental as, well, giving birth. So nothing much is in my mind as I knead. It's just me and the dough, and a sense of purpose.

All at once, the motor of my refrigerator stopped cold, jolting me out of my bread-making induced mental coma/revery. The quiet was so sudden I glanced at the display of my oven to see if the electricity had gone out. But no. It was just my refrigerator motor, at rest. It occurred to me then that the motor makes a background noise I never notice until it ceases it's electronic grumbling.

That got me thinking, even though I was still kneading. I thought: this situation is ripe for a quotable quote.

So I mulled it over: when I knead bread, I realize that I am content. Even though I may moan about being overloaded with work and housework, I am happy to be at my work. It feels right. Maybe, I thought, my contentment is like that refrigerator motor: I don't notice my contentment until something in my life goes south--goes crazy, haywire wrong. Then I look back and think, "What happened to the normalcy of yesterday? Where did it go?"

So here it is: Contentment is like a noisy refrigerator motor. It's background noise until it stalls.
Of course, this thought was immediately followed by, "Nah. Someone must have already written a quote like that."

Yup. It didn't even take long for me to figure it out. It was Joni Mitchell: "Don't it always seem to go, that you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone."

Trumped again.

At least it was Joni.