What To Eat When Your Heart Is Empty

Golden foods: brioche, roast chicken, yukon golds, pumpkin curry, yellow tomatoes fat in the sun, olive oil, salted butter, sweet corn bread a little north of pudding.

Tea: Bracing black tea mellowed with milk. African rooibos tea sweetened with raw honey. Chai, peppermint, licorice. If times are really rough, honey vanilla chamomile.

Homemade hot cocoa with a shot of whiskey.

Foods that smell good; that wrap you in their scents like a fog of comfort: Cinnamon, baked apples, burnt cheddar, mushrooms cooking in butter, garlic, meat simmering all day in a bottle of wine, freshly ground coffee, chocolate, bread baking, red wine hitting a hot pan, truffles, tomato sauce, my mom's gingersnap cookies.

Macaroni and cheese. Grilled cheese with chili sauce. Nachos with cheese. Feta cheese sauteed in olive oil with lemon juice and artichoke hearts. Cheese.

Standing in the kitchen, stirring a pot.

Big Bread for the Sweetest Little Whorehouse in Portland

Perhaps in an effort to compensate for the whore-y-ness coming out of me at rehearsal this morning, I have decided to bake an enormous loaf of herb bread. The Hulk Hogan loaf, rising precipitously in the oven, overshadows the swearing, vomiting, sluttish and otherwise charming characteristics of Doll Tearsheet, restoring my sense of self as a nice girl more accustomed to book lights than red lights. The fact that I went to Octoberfest this afternoon with a group of strange men, acquaintances of T's, and proceeded to get drunk is completely besides the point. The gargantuan bread is a towering paean to domesticity that amends my momentary lapses in gentility.

Ah, Doll! The biggest acting challenge I've encountered since deciding to write and perform a one-woman amalgam of Euripidean tragedy my senior year of college. (Really, where do I get these ideas? And why do they seem so good at the time?) She's really tough. A drunken whore--literally--with a mercurial temper that swings from tender to hallucinatory in 30-second intervals. My first line is "hem," Shakespearean for "very big vomit, upstage right." I've been prepping for the role by recalling encounters with drug addicts and listening to Amy Winehouse's "Back to Black." I really like the title track, but the music conveys less heroin-laced insanity than I was hoping for. The music's bluesy, but too triumphantly so, with horns and sass, to be representative of Winehouse's problems. But that's off subject.

Anyway, hollering Doll's lines and embodying her sadness is more upsetting than I'd anticipated. She inhabits such a tawdry, hopeless world--the only whore in a flopsy tavern on a dirty street in London, with an impotent fat man as her only glimpse of the kind life--that it's hard not to leave rehearsal a little ickier than I walked in (not to mention much hoarser). It's good, because the worse I feel the better the character is, but I've never felt so emotionally depleted by a part. Or, not depleted. More impacted: I feel like a dirty whore onstage and am embarrassed by myself.

See why I need to bake bread? Floury, crunchy, salty, aromatic piles of flatbread for dinner (tonight with butternut squash, red onions and stinky blue cheese); giant crusty, herby loaves of white crumb; whole wheat and walnut rounds laced dark with grain. Too much bread to eat, and so bread to freeze, alongside our beef and pork and voluminous bags of ice (T!). Bread to assuage the stress in my shoulders and the inky worm of self-doubt and loathing creeping toward my heart each day at rehearsal's end.

Bread for life. Bread for happiness. Bread for me.

The Zen of Some Butter, Sugar and a Little H2O

The calm before the storm. The island lull before the big kahuna. The deep lungful of oxygen before the plunge from the plank.

It is my last day before the 100-hour work weeks begin.

It's time to bake pie.

I'm not amazing at baking pie, but I love every minute of it. Pie baking is therapeutic, maybe even more so than bread making, because your standing mixer can't pound and smooth the dough, and it doesn't have the eyes to gauge the length and thickness of the butter smears traveling the length of the round. Mixers don't have the hands to appreciate the velvet smoothness of a rich crust, or to delicately pinch the pie into a picture-perfect crinkle (okay, neither do I, but go with me here). More than anything, baking pie is an old domestic art that fills the house with the aromatics of hominess, and ties us to the histories of people who have also spent afternoons in the warmth of kitchens, rolling dough and peeling apples. It's hard to explain, and sounds silly, but when I bake pie I feel like a woman. The rolling scent of my pie is like a maternal caress of all the people I love; warm pie from the kitchen is a kiss and a hug and a premonition of safety.

Today's pie is of apples, scarlett pears and dried cranberries from the farmer's market. The fruit's ensconced in a butter crust heady with lemon zest and brushed with egg yolk and cream to make it golden. I even cut out some sweet little hearts with the extra dough to garnish the top, which I was very proud of until T criticized them as girly. (No matter. Who wants a masculine pie? Should it be covered in soccer balls and naked women? Or for T-Money, a foxy Blood Elf from WOW?) The best part is that the pie is in our gorgeous Italian copper gratin dish, which we've never used and makes it look so rustic and lovely. Even if it tastes bad it looks pretty.

So will tomorrow and the next day and the day after that be a madhouse of grading, shelving and memorizing lines? Yes. But is today filled with pie? Yes.

And for the moment that is enough.

Sola

T's out of town and I'm constructing a perfect bachelorette Sunday. So far it has involved tea drinking on the couch while catching up on food blogs. I should go look at the NYT, but I've been finding American politics increasingly frustrating, polarized and transparently ineffective (these last two qualities work in tandem). Even the mystery novel appearance of Iran's nuclear letter failed to do anything but trigger my inner skeptic. Is John Le Carre is running the world now?

So rather than be a responsible patriot and dwell of the show trial of American politics, I'm going to visit the Irvington Farmer's Market, meet a friend for coffee, and cook dinner with another friend this evening (butternut squash gnocchi in sage brown butter). I may also make an amazing brunch for one with my market finds, some concoction with fresh cheese and heirloom tomatoes and local sausage and my homemade broa.

Ah broa! I've just discovered it; I baked it by accident. Broa is what happens when you combine regular flour with fine cornmeal, add yeast, salt and water, and bake it into a fine crusty wheel. It's a South American bread, I believe, and its barely sweet, slightly salty, moist, dense crumb is perfect for cheese or sopping in stews. It would be equally good flattened into a pizza crust or studded with salami, sharp cheese and olives. I've just made my last loaf from the dough and can't decide whether or not to bake it right up again, or go back to my challah, which was such a resounding success last week for Rosh Hashanah that my parents abducted the second loaf and left T and I crumbless.

Tomorrow is Yom Kippur, day of atonement, so baking challah or bagels today would be appropriate. My family and I will be fasting all day tomorrow and the knowledge that homemade carbohydrates await at the end of the tunnel of atonement might make the day less dreadful. It's not that we're religious Jews (my father announced that he was a pagan several Hannukahs ago, and we have Christmas stockings, if that helps clarify our collective divinity), but the one day of fasting is a cultural reminder that most Jews (my great-grandparents included) grew up poor and hungry in the old country, and that many non-Jews in America today will "fast" tomorrow because they have no cash for food. Here I am rhapsodizing about heirloom tomatoes and someone next door could be dreaming about having enough food to feed her kids this week. I don't think it's bad for me to care about food, perhaps especially because it's wrapped up in an interest in community, farming and environmentalism (or is that just a self-gratifying excuse?), but sometimes I think T and I should turn our once-yearly contribution to the Oregon Food Bank into a monthly thing. I mean, we don't have much, but we have much more than others. Yom Kippur makes you think like that.

But I've gotten away from my Sola Sunday. It's 9am and high time I trek to the market. After all, I have a busy day of relaxing ahead of me. Time to get started!

Eat this Roasted Tomato and Onion Tart

Roast cherry (or other small sweet tomatoes) and sliced sweet onion in some olive oil and sea salt in the oven at 375-425 degrees until soft, browned and slightly blistered.

Meanwhile, brush sheets of fillo dough with olive oil, and drape over a tart or pie pan, layering as you go, until you achive your desired thickness.

Season the roasted veggies with crushed black pepper, and transfer to the tart pan, saving the juices (put this gorgeous broth aside for other uses: I combined it with some greek yogurt to make a dressing for a yellow potato and asparagus salad). Bake the tart in a 375 degree oven until lightly golden, crisp, and bubbling. You may raise the heat to quickly reduce liquid if the tart is too juicy.

Please note that you can first layer the fillo crust with pesto, goat cheese, ham, etc. I made my tart plain, but the beauty of tarts is that you can enrich them in a thousand ways.

Eat this tart. Enjoy the summer. It'll be fall soon!

The End of the Wedding Season

Home sweet home! By some miraculous happenstance the cats have not destroyed the plants, the laundry or each other, and I missed no important emails from school. No new organisms are growing in the fridge, and the apartment needs just a minimal clean-up to de-cat it. The kitten has developed a new taste for human flesh--mine, specifically--but I'm willing to roll with the punches. A few nips are well worth the fact that the little beasts finally managed not to barf all over the bedroom while we were gone.

Kate's wedding was wonderful. There were no hitches (the 5am thunderstorm simply added drama), the food was great, the bride looked beautiful, my toast went well, and the big band music got everyone dancing. Kate and Phil's ceremony was also very touching and personal; several members of the wedding party read poems, prayers and sang songs to supplement the couple's vows. I stood there trying hard not to cry, but I failed miserably. I also cried during my toast. I'm such a girl.

The best part was getting to meet so many of Kate's friends from graduate school, whom I've heard so much about. What a fun and interesting group of women! We had an unabashedly girly time, complete with a pajama dance party (well, by "dance" I mean "last minute seating chart session") and champagne by the pool (and champagne with breakfast, as an afternoon snack, late in the night...) and a bridal lingerie photo shoot. Plus, there was so much love for Kate! It made me really happy. It also made me wish that my best friends lived in Portland, as opposed to being scattered across the country. How do I live without them?

So now I'm back, and life has to resume its normal course. It's hard to gear myself up for what is going to be a hellacious fall of 80-hour work weeks and the opening of the theatre season, but I'm starting today, with an apartment clean-up and my last class of the summer term with what must be the world's most apathetic group of students. (I'm actually tempted to toss their final essays down the stairs, the essays are going to be so revolting.) But it won't be all bad: the autumn is my favorite season, and my birthday's only a couple of months away. And the wedding season, as glorious as it is, is over for another year. We can rest content that there is now more love in the world, and we no longer have to look at people's registries.

The Comos that Didn't

I have two Italian como breads baking into listless loaves in the oven right now. It's all my fault: I left the loaves rising for 10 hours, which might be okay for my slow rise wheat sandwich bread, but it doesn't fly with tempermental artisan breads. The worst part is that I knew this would happen when I patted my carefully tended dough into satisfying rounds before work this morning; two days of patient work from starter to oven, ruined because of impatience and a certain degree of culinary apathy. I have a ton of biga (starter) leftover, a relief since I promised fresh bread for Sunday dinner, but that's little salve for my irritated chef's heart.

When you let breads over-rise, you risk the chance of the yeast dying, which is exactly what I think happened today. My loaves smell lovely and look golden, but they haven't gained a milimeter in the oven and have the surface appearance of rumpled dress shirts (with our names emblazoned across the top--T had some fun while I was at work). Which means they'll probably be dense, doughy and overly crisp--okay for a bread salad or bread crumbs, or fresh from the oven (ALL bread is delicious hot, smeared with salty butter or drizzled with olive oil, or just consumed plain, in secret, in greedy bites)--but not acceptable for proud presentation to all and sundry who wander into the kitchen. (Which means T. But still.)

I think I'll use some of the remaining starter to make puccia, which are little olive-studded rolls from Puglia. I'm hanging out with my little brother Lukas on Sunday and he'll get a kick out of forming the dough balls. Not that I'm abandoning comos: once we eat these lame loaves, I'll be doing it again, and this time doing it right.

In other baking news, Fred, my father-in-law, and I are making croissants in the next few weeks. We've watched the old Julia Child PBS video and read up on the difficulties of creating flaky pastry. I'll keep you posted on the progress and success of our buttery adventure...if you've made croissants before, let me know what your experience was like.