"Just Right"
Aug. 23rd, 2004 03:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
butterflydreamingOriginal fiction
PG
Sad, excessively though not entirely autobiographical, f-f pairing. Might make you hungry.
(note: Banana bunches, on the tree, look like they are upside down.)
. . .
-Just Right-
It’s supposed to be pure, but the vanilla extract that you buy at the supermarket cannot compare to the gloriously fragrant liquid that my girlfriend made two or three years ago, when she was going through the phase of making her own liqueurs and infusions. It went into its brown bottle as middle-grade bourbon with a couple of split vanilla beans in it, but it has undergone a metamorphasis over time, changing into an elixer with a perfume that could take over your life. It’s one of the things that makes my banana bread come out just right, like the local honey and eggs from the Farmer’s Market. I like the fruit to be really ripe, too, but that’s hard to come by, this far north. The bananas tend to keep their hard ridges even when they’ve gone to the “full freckle” stage, the point at which I can’t eat them anymore and they go into the freezer, waiting for me to have the time to bake. The state of the bananas, and the avocados, too, is one of the things that has maintained in me a discontent for living here; I press their hard flesh, which will never ripen right because it was never meant to travel the long distance to the territory of blackberries, and think about the warmer climates where perfectly yellow fruit and vanilla beans hang from their respective trees, in opposite directions.
Unlike my mother, whose empanadas de platano can make a non-Latino cry with simple joy (I’ve seen it happen), I’m an okay cook; and unlike my mother, I’m a wizard with cakes and cookies, anything with sugar and leavening. Being better than my mom at something: that’s my secret agent, the special ingredient that everyone’s always asking about. I put good ingredients in, to start with, like good butter and unbleached organic flour, but no one ever realizes that it’s my pride that they are tasting. I use a basic recipe like Tollhouse (for cookies) as a starting point, but the rest is all me.
It’s been raining out, today, not unusual for the end of summer, and the air coming in through the open deck door is rich and wet. I’ve left the windows open while I’ve been in the kitchen because, with two cats, the house always needs fresh air, and I find that the mixing smells of summer rain, cinnamon, and the orange that I’m peeling for zest are doing wonders to even out my mood. I seem to have developed manic-depression, in this last year, and it’s been hard to keep myself in equilibrium, hard to get it just right.
The house is going to smell good when Julie gets home. I know how she likes banana bread, simple, the way I’ve been making it to please her up until the last few months, when she stopped eating butter, honey, and eggs. I’ve split the recipe into two steel bowls. Today, in half of the batter, I’m sprinkling in an eighth-teaspoon of cloves, after the orange zest, along with three colors of raisins, a handful of walnuts, and a whisper of ground ginger. I don’t follow recipes. Those ingredients were in the cupboard. There are rows of spice jars, with everything from turmeric to sage, in the cupboards, too, but Julie cooks with spices more than I do, so I consider those hers. I’ll take the lavender sugar, though, and leave her the herbs de
I spill the contents of the first bowl, the pure recipe, into the loaf pan that she brought with her when we moved into our first apartment together. I pour the contents of the second bowl, my exotically fragrant adulteration, into one of my round cake pans. I’ve lined both of them, carefully, with baking parchment. It saves a lot of messy cleaning up, afterward.
The pans go into the oven, jostling for space on the same self. They can’t both fit on the baking stone. I leave the round pan on, and place the loaf pan on the bare rack. When I come back to check on how they are baking, I can switch their positions. I double check the temperature on the oven, set the timer, and start cleaning up the kitchen. Once the bowl are washed, and I’ve made sure that they are properly dry, I stow them in one of the cardboard boxes that has space. There aren’t very many of them, the boxes of my possessions, even though the house has always been cluttered, with very little space to move around in. Over the week that Julie has been away, I’ve disposed of all my still-born artwork, sold my books and my CDs, and donated my cold-weather clothes to the thriftstore. It looks like, for the second time in my life, I will be able to fit the all contents of my life into my car; it looks like I’ve returned to traveling light. I look around and realize that the house still looks full; you wouldn’t see anything missing. Every time I culled my belongings, trying to make us fit in a space that seemed to small, Julie’s projects expanded to fill the vacancies. She had gradually taken over the house. Gradually -- the way that she had gradually gone from vegetarian to vegan, and I had gradually started eating meat more often in the meals that I took alone.
I walk from room to room, straightening the towels in the bathroom, giving it a general tidying up. The toothbrush rack looks unbalanced with just one brush in it, and it’s old anyway, so I toss it out and replace it with a water glass. I double check the drawers, making sure that none of her combs and brushes have caught one of my stray hairs, which are darker and shorter than Julie’s. They’re the kind of thing that make you cry, if you find them months later. Or if you’re me, throw a ceramic vase against a plaster wall.
Julie isn’t the kind of person who should share territory, and neither am I. It took months for us, trying to get it right, months where we squabbled over everything, constantly misunderstanding each other. We finally agreed that we were going to have to let the little things go, and that if something was important enough, then we would sit down over cups of tea and discuss it rationally. We’ve had, since then, six years hovering a few degrees above or below just right; it’s just in this last year that things have been swinging more wildly high and low.
I close the window in the bedroom, because the rain is starting to come in, and the cat wants to sit on the windowsill. She moves out of the nest she’s made of Julie’s clothes, piled on an armchair, and waits expectantly until I’ve made her place dry. I talk to her for a few minutes about how I’m going to be leaving, but she ignores me, staring out the window at the downpour instead. I stop, then go back to the kitchen and switch the arrangement in the oven. The loafs are taking on a lovely golden brown around the edges, and the scent that wafts out of the oven on a wave of heat rolls over me, and follows me into the second bedroom that we use as a studio. This is the only place where my lack of presence is more noticeable, the empty spaces on the bookshelf, my Singer and my Mac waiting in the other room. I’ve put everything back into drawers, and swept up the crumbles of eraser dust.
Harmony rests in this room. Even without lamps on, the light is diffused and white. The shadows of the rain hitting the glass are projected across the walls and bare floor; the smells of baking mingle with the light odor of paint and pencil. There is a whole drawer of virgin paper; there is an array of never-used drawing pencils in a paperboard box. There is the inclination to see what would happen in their joined future. I sit on one of the high stools, instead, and look out the window, and watch the progress of the rain.
It’s the sound of her steps on the front porch that wakes me from my daydreaming. With all else quiet, the sound carries all the way to the white room; I listen to her stop to pick up one of the cats. Slow steps carry me from the studio and back into the kitchen, and while her key is turning in the lock, I light a burner on the stove, and set the kettle on to boil water for tea.
. . .
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2004-08-23 03:56 pm (UTC)You're right, now I'm hungry. Will you give me your banana bread recipie?
no subject
Date: 2004-08-23 05:55 pm (UTC)3 or 4 very ripe bananas
1/3 Cup of butter, mashed up with the bananas
1/3 Cup of sugar
1/3 Cup (more or less) raw honey of choice, just not clover (or mesquite or mint!)
2 very good eggs
1 tsp vanilla
Stir that up.
Add on top, 2 Cups flour, 1/2 tsp salt, 1/4 tsp baking soda, and 2 tsp baking powder. Mix up the dry ingredients before stirring into the wet. (You can do this in a separate bowl, but why wash more?) Mix all together thoroughly.
You can then add whatever comes to hand: 1 tsp cinnamon, 1/2 Cup walnuts, 1/2 cup raisins, dried apples, pluots, anything. Made it with cashews, just recently (was okay). If you use chocolate or PB chips, nix the honey and use just 2/3 cup sugar.
I don't really use cloves. It's just a story.
Bake at 350 for 50 minutes. The reality is that you'll probably want to turn the temperature down to 275-300 (depending on your oven) at about 30 minutes, and give it a full hour. Stab it with a knife or a bamboo skewer to check the doneness.
You can bake it in whatever shaped pan you want, but thicker takes longer to bake, and thinner can get dry. (Loaf pan is really best.)
no subject
Date: 2004-08-24 08:58 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-10-13 02:16 pm (UTC):)
no subject
Date: 2005-10-13 06:45 pm (UTC)XD I feel so silly! Right under my nose... I'm definitely going to make some! Thank you so much!
no subject
Date: 2004-08-24 12:21 am (UTC)"It’s been raining out, today, not unusual for the end of summer, and the air coming in through the open deck door is rich and wet."
That's lovely.