Food

[mrissa]

So hungry tonight. I had wild mushroom lasagna and carrots at dinner, and just now I've added a pluot and some cheese. (Mmmmm. Cheeeeeeese.) So much food. Every once in awhile I get ravenous, ready to eat not a horse but an entire stables compared to my usual amount. It's, as far as I can tell, entirely hormonal. (You other female types have this?) That doesn't seem to make it less real.

The problem is that I hate the feeling of having eaten too much. Hate. Hatehatehate. Would rather be -- not in unlimited amounts of pain, surely, but in minor pain, yes. I would rather have a headache than a too-full stomach, but not a migraine, to place it on that scale. (timprov thinks this is possibly abnormal. I think it's more likely unusual.) The other problem is that I'm hypoglycemic, tend to pass out when insufficiently fueled. So the edge between the two is thinner than perhaps it ought to be.

It leads to nights like last night, when I woke up at 2 a.m. too hungry to sleep and too tired to get up and eat. That was not so good. Shaky by the time I got up at 6. Hence the pluot and the cheese. Fingers crossed.

I made peanut butter fudge tonight, and the cake but not yet the frosting. I'll do that in the morning. And the rhubarb custard. And the rosemary buns. And maybe some gingerbread or banana bread or something for mornings at WorldCon, if I get really ambitious. And then the rest of the grocery shopping (the Byerly's and wine/beer run to go with today's Cub run), and those bits of the cooking that are up to me. Which is not as many of them as first planned, since T. looked at my mental state and said a great big "NO" to putting me in charge of more stuff.

Here's what I like about baking: I feel competent at it. It's concrete. If I do it right, it always comes out the same way. People's reaction to it is almost always straightforward. I don't always have to concentrate on it. Once I've done the first bit, there's nothing to do but wait and read my book and go on with my life.

Here's what I like about writing: I'm always running into ways I don't really know what I'm doing (but could maybe learn). It's abstract. If I do it right, it never comes out the same way twice. People's reaction to it is complicated. I always have to concentrate on it. Once I've done the first bit, there may be nothing to do but wait and read my book and go on with my life, but there's almost always a next bit and a next.

I don't think I would like baking so much if I didn't have writing in my life. On the other hand, I don't think I'd get by writing if I didn't have something like baking I could just do every once in awhile as an anchor. It's not the same as cat-vacuuming (no, really, it's not!). It's grounding. Very different. Sort of.

Comments

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

No double boiler! I believe the food processor will be employed twice. But no double boiler. Just a saucepan and the oven and so on.

The rhubarb, however, has been melting all over hell's half-acre. We froze some, which works fine as long as you drain it, and it's draining itself through whatever miniscule hole in the plastic bag. Sigh.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I agree with you. Baking is a grounding activity.

And it offers the opportunity to take a finite and not very large lump of time and use it to produce an actual thing, with heft and depth, which then both you yourself and those around you can appreciate.

Stories and bread (which is the only thing I bake--or do in the kitchen at all, for that matter) use very different parts of the interface between mind and body.

[pameladean]

It's perfectly real. Many women's basal metabolic rate goes up sometime just before their period. We burn more calories suddenly. I discovered this fact in, of all the icky places, a diet book for women that gushed and squeeed about how lucky this circumstanvce was because you could eat just the same amount and burn more calories! Morons. (I verified the assertion in a more scientific place, but I don't actually know whether science has since moved on to some other notion about the matter.)

Pamela

Double boiler, etc

[(Anonymous)]

I always used to think you needed a double boiler when they say to use one, but you can make your own very easily. Just use a pot that you can fit a heat tolerant bowl onto. Boil a small amount of water in the pot and put the bowl over the top and you have a double boiler. My understanding for why you use one is that the indirect heat from the boiling water will cook the entire exposed area of a food more evenly and gently and prevent scalding.

As far as baking being relaxing, I have to agree with the notion, but say that I believe my reasons for it have more to do with the amount of satisfaction I derive from eating good deserts. I've become more picky about it as I bake more, which leads to more baking to satisfy my pickiness. At any rate, I hope you enjoy your party, M'ris, and have a wonderful time at WorldCon.

Heathah

[seagrit.livejournal.com]

Cat vacuuming? Just try and get the cat to stay in the same room with the vacuum cleaner (not even running...).

I'm assuming this is a metaphor of some type, but actually, a kirby salesperson (yes, we let him in, *sigh*) actually suggested using one of thier attachments to the vacuum cleaner to groom our cats. Ummmm. No. Just No.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Cat-vacuuming or cat-waxing is a term a lot of us use for the useless, time-consuming things we so busily do instead of writing. Making livejournal icons, reorganizing your jewelry box, checking old journal entries for how frequently you used the word "lambswool": cat-vacuuming. Making sure the pens in your desk cup are grouped by color and age. Testing them all for ink. Etc. etc. etc. Some writers get very good at this.