Enjoy

Enjoy (5 minute prompt)

I wrote this while the kids were asleep and Blake watched a show.

I have a long list of things I enjoy: reading, writing, laying in bed, Dr Pepper, brownies and ice cream, hugs, crafts, gardening and on and on. But recently, as in the last two days, it’s been baking. I have baked bread, blueberry muffins, granola, pita chips, and tomorrow cookies.  And I have cooked chili and I guess it’s not cooking really, but fruit smoothie popsicles.  It has made a ton of dishes and it has kept my sanity going. It has been negative degrees for a week or so. Who knows? After a day or two of it, you lose count and then you start imagining those hundred bulbs you planted in the spring coming up.  Hello, tulips, I am talking to you.  You better do you work come April!  Anyway, I enjoy baking and I always have.  The first thing I remember baking that was really “mine”, was brown sugar muffins.  They were a recipe from a family cookbook by my Aunt Becky.  I made them pretty much every week when my parents were on their weekly date.  My siblings would ask me to make them and bug me till I did.  So, we had tuna casserole, brown sugar muffins and peas.  Always, peas.  My favorite veggie back then, so I got to choose because I was the cook.  And now I have baked so many different things and tried recipes I never thought I would.  I have made gigantic cinnamon rolls that freeze perfectly.  I have made cream cheese banana bread, which is now my trademark in my little town and quoted as “the best banana bread I ever had”.  Streusel topping is the secret, people.  And I have made rolls and bread and applesauce muffins and brownies and brookie cookies and cinnamon bread and more.  And I love it. I love making pretty food. I love making it more than eating it.  There is something so gratifying about creating something delicious and passing it out to neighbors on a cold day or on their birthday or just because I like you.  And when the kids come home from school or Blake comes home from work and they breathe in that fragrant air and ask what that smell is.  I have mountains of recipes yet to try.  A binder full of recipes torn from magazines at doctor’s offices (shhhh), from church cookbooks, from friends.  I want to make some kind of goal to make them all but the list just keeps growing longer and longer! And who will eat all that food?  My kids won’t try “weird” stuff and you can only freeze so much!  So, I will cook and bake and pass it on to neighbors and friends.  I will cook that soup that only adults like and feed my 80 year old neighbor, Tom who will really appreciate it.  And I will keep doing what I enjoy.  Even If it is just to get me through the winter or so I can start my bakery someday.  Ahh, bakery.

Food photography is not my special talent but these are definitely the best chocolate chip cookies I've ever had. Ever.  It was the first time I browned butter approximately six years ago. They'll definitely be in my bakery.