The staff of life

Family time is bread time

By Zanne Miller

October 31, 2007

Since they were old enough to know what we were doing, my daughters have always baked with me. Cakes in the shapes of cats and snowmen and hearts, depending on the holiday. Cupcakes decorated like bats and ghosts for Halloween. And Christmastime last year heralded a weeklong adventure of making cookie lists, buying supplies, choosing just the right fancy sugars and tins, and delivering the goodies to our friends.

Baking sweet treats is a frequently requested Saturday-afternoon or sleepover activity, and I try to say “yes” more often than “no.” But it’s a lot of work, a lot of shopping, and a lot of sugar. So my girls have learned not to ask that often.

I’m no Donna Reed or Martha Stewart. I can cook, and sometimes I do. But I’m also a single mom with a busy full-time job and active six-year-old twin girls. I’ve been known to go out of my way — and occasionally through a drive-through — to keep things simple at dinnertime.

Last year, shortly after beginning kindergarten, my daughter Julia brought home a book from the school library. The Cooking Book, read the childlike scrawl of the title. A happy-faced cupcake decorated the cover. I tried not to groan.

But the book — this unprepossessing, consciously naïve book — changed our lives.

The shift wasn’t immediate. I compromised my mother-of-the-year award (again) by hiding the book in the magazine rack, covering it with the newspaper, and pretending more than once not to know where it was when Julia asked to read it.

One Sunday morning — shortly after the arrival of the first overdue notice from the school library — she found it. “I know what we can do today,” she announced, pulling the book out from behind her back as a surprise. “Bake bread.”

And while I hesitated for a second, reviewing my mental list of excuses — too busy, out of ingredients, tired from working all week — it’s impossible to say no to a six-year-old who doesn’t want to watch TV on a Sunday morning, who wants to try something new and is standing in front of you looking very pleased with herself.

After a trip to the store for yeast, we got started. The bread — a simple mix of flour, water, salt, and oil — was like stringy play-dough. We made funny faces (imitating the ones in the book) and pretzels and tried a few cookie-cutter shapes. We brushed egg and butter on top of the shapes and baked them and ate them with even more butter. They were surprisingly good, if not a little odd-looking.

“Nothing like homemade bread!” my daughter Clio crowed. She sounded a lot like the little girl in the old commercial where the dad praises the yummy chicken dinner and the mom (dressed in ruffly apron) reveals her secret: “It’s Shake’n Bake.” I expected Julia to chime in with, “And I helped!”

My daughters told their teacher about it the next morning as if we’d been on vacation: “We baked homemade bread!” When I picked them up that night at childcare, they wanted to do it all over again. I hesitated at first, but then I remembered that packet of yeast I’d already opened, as well as the fun we’d had the night before. And really, it didn’t take that long. So I suggested pizza crust.

Since then, we’ve made some kind of bread at least once (and usually twice) a week. After all, I don’t usually need to go to the grocery store just for flour, yeast, salt, and water.

Our breadmaking has been the answer to the part of me that cries out for a simpler life, a life where weekdays don’t just mean rushing to and from school and childcare each day, a life that lets childhood be a little more of a meandering path rather than a forced march. In the middle of our busy weeks, we slow down and spend time together doing something other than playing (or working) on the computer. We form a team: You get out the ingredients while I find the measuring cups. The end result is nourishing in more ways than one.

“Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone,” the novelist Ursula K. LeGuin wrote in The Lathe of Heaven. “It has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.”