A few updates:
It continues to be a super demanding season of life. We’ve had schedule changes and childcare changes, and I hardly have time to write, but I’m committed to staying in the habit because as soon as there is time, I have ideas.
I pulled the old Breville juicer out of retirement this week to see if I really want to make juice, or if I’ve just been reading too many vegan cookbooks from the early 2010s. It was wasteful and messy. Will report more at a later date.
I’ve have had this Tartine Country Bread recipe on repeat for three weeks.
My children, my aunt, my sourdough pizza dough, and I were scrambling to get out of the house yesterday morning, as we do every morning. I was throwing homeschooling supplies, and beach towels, and laptop bags into the car while making it known that we were running five minutes late for swimming lessons.
I ducked out of swimming lessons for a few minutes to stretch and fold my dough in the car. We went abuela’s house for school. We laughed, we cried, we packed up our supplies and our pizza dough, and we headed home to finish making dinner. Margot whined the whole way home. She whined while I stretched the dough into a rectangle. She whined as she topped the pizza with fistfuls of spinach. She whined as I put it in the oven. I begged her to stop.
In my final attempt to put an end to the hysteria, I told them we were having a special dinner. I took the picnic blanket to the backyard and I set up the floor table on top of it. I put out plates of pizza and juice cups filled with bright orange carrot and sweet potato juice, because I am evangelical about produce like that.
When my daughters walked out of the house, they squealed with delight. The whining stopped. They grabbed their puffy slices of homemade sourdough pizza and shoveled them into their mouths. They sipped their bright orange juice and asked me how I made it. I explained to them the process by which I soaked and cut the root vegetables and painstakingly pushed them into the pulverization chamber. They listened and nodded, and then Vivienne asked, “And are you so happy, mamá?”
And I thought, yes. I am so happy. I spent the better part of the day driving around with fermenting flour in my car, and I have neither the time nor the undivided attention to string together sentences for the essays cartwheeling across my corpus callosum, but at this moment I am so happy. My kids are adorable, the food is good, and the construction on the neighbor’s house is almost finished. What else is there to live for?