high-bar baking

It’s a little crazy how progress is often invisible. 

You would swear that nothing of significance has happened. Then you look up one day and your basil plant has eight new leaves and your feet are a whole shoe size bigger. You could explain to novice how to make that whole cookbook, you actually do know what’s going on at your job, your heartbreak is nearly repaired. Strangers are friends, pizzas are cooked, and entire evenings of line dances are in your repertoire. And you can’t say how it happened. 

No one stood you up next to your childhood doorframe and marked off the growth. If you haven’t thought to do it yourself, it didn’t happen. A series of steps turns all of sudden into a giant leap for mankind in the moment that you notice. 

I don’t remember the point when I decided it was ok to play around with recipes. By-the-books me would never have done it growing up, and I didn’t. But now I do. Nothing dramatic, but still. This recipe allegedly only makes 14 cookies (it makes at least a couple more than that, but not many), and I needed the cookies to work for two different gatherings. I had the zest for these, and I wanted lemon. So I made the dough balls smaller and adjusted the bake time (weirdly, didn’t really need to?). 

It sounds like nothing, but I can tell that’s progress for me. I’m different, and I can’t point to when that change happened. Wild how that works. 

I suppose the logical extension is to extrapolate that forward, right? To draw hope from it? That today I must be getting a little-bit-better enough that I’ll notice eventually. That has to be the case. Right?

The secret to every citrus recipe is to start with the sugar and zest in a bowl. Work it through your fingers until you end up with clumpy sand. The sugar shards help release the oils in the zest. As an added bonus, your hands will smell amazing.

My favourite line from one of my favourite movies, The A-Team, “Give me a minute, I’m good. If I’ve got an hour, I’m great. You give me six months? I’m unbeatable.”