Objectively, life has been difficult lately. We have joked that moving cursed us, but sometimes I feel there is actually something to that. If our lives looked too good to be true back in the summer (beach trip! UK trip! new house!), don’t worry; the universe has come back for us.
Since we have moved we have had to buy a new dishwasher, a new dryer, and a new car. The only one of those we were slightly expecting was the new car, but we had kind of hoped that Gerrit’s old beat up Jeep would last us until at least early spring.
Then Trump got elected president. Then I had my miscarriage.
And here have been a gazillion other little things that have made life stressful…like opening the freezer to snow and ice on Friday morning, or having our router die a few weeks ago, or the cat ripping a hole in our duvet cover. Since we have moved, I’m not sure there has been a single week in which something in our lives hasn’t broken.
All that to say, things have been a bit tough and I think it’s made it a bit harder to feel settled in this new lovely home. Psychologically, it makes me miss our old house (because it seems we never had such a string of bad luck when we lived there). But objectively I know that our old house would not bring happiness back. We made the happiness, and we are making happiness here, too. Eventually the bad luck season will be over (I’m hoping the miscarriage was the end of it) and things will be fine again.
I’m rambling a bit now, but the point I’m trying to get to is that in the midst of all of the upheaval and stress, I realized how uncomfortable I felt in my kitchen. The truth is, I haven’t done as much cooking in our new kitchen as I would have liked. Our fall schedule was weird, and it left me with menu plans that prioritized convenience over my love for food.
And last week I thought, I am sitting here in November and I haven’t even baked bread in my new kitchen.
Suddenly that seemed like such a necessary initiation for the kitchen, as if maybe a loaf of bread would unlock my discomfort and ease me back into things.
I’ve had this recipe bookmarked for a while now, but I had forgotten, when I had read it before, that it really is the most basic bread you could make because there is no kneading. There is simply mixing, dumping dough into pans, rising, and baking. And so while it wasn’t exactly what I had in mind for a loaf of bread, it seems appropriate considering life right now. And it really is so easy (and delicious–I made the best toast with it the other night, and a plain slice with just butter is fantastic) that it could be made very practically on a daily basis.
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