This is NOT where I tell stories

I wish I'd bought this a year ago. 

I apologize for my absence. The minute I started thinking of this as my storytelling space, I was in deep trouble. Instead of the Blogger template into which I've been merrily typing for years while drinking coffee on the sofa, the blog became a platform for storytelling, like I think I'm Ira Glass or Jonathan Ames or something. It froze me right up. I wrote some blog posts. They weren't good enough. Every day it got a little harder. This morning I was lying in the dark in bed thinking, how am I ever going to post on the blog again? 

Type type type, press publish, go buy yourself a frozen custard. That's how. That's the plan, anyway.

Have you read this excellent piece by Sarah Miller about why she decided to stop cooking?  In the growing body of cooking backlash literature (see this and this), it’s the smartest thing I’ve read, mordant and full of truth, though not quite as much truth as I thought on first reading. Miller has such a crisp and decisive voice that it took me a few days to disentangle her truths from my own. I’ll limit myself to this pretty big difference: I do plenty of stupid things trying to get people to notice and love me, but cooking isn’t one of them. 

I also liked this essay by Miller and have found myself thinking about it hourly.

Here’s a little anecdote. Not a story. Definitely not a story. Last week I made banana blondies with brazil nut toffee from Dan Lepard’s Short and Sweet, a gem of a cookbook. I’ve made these blondies a bunch of times before and they are, in my view, outstanding -- sticky, golden, a little crunchy, perfumed with banana. As with about half the things I bake, no one in the household touched them but me. There was even some jesting about Mom's banana blondies. I expected this. I'm used to it.

On Saturday, Owen spent the day at his friend Max’s house. On Saturday night, Max’s father dropped Owen off while Mark and I were out. Max’s father doesn’t like to drive up our street, which is extremely narrow and steep, so he leaves Owen at the bottom of the hill. This is totally fine with me. I mention it only because no one in his right mind would choose to walk up our hill without a really good reason.

When Mark and I came in later, Owen said, “Mom, Max really liked your blondies.” 

I said, “Max was here?”

Owen: “Yeah, he walked all the way up the hill in the dark and made his dad wait just so he could see what kinds of cookies we had. I told him the blondies were weird and really bad and he probably wouldn’t like them (emphases mine). But he liked them.”

I was starting to glow. I said, “So he came up just to see what we had in the cookie tin?”

Owen: “Yeah, he’s always searching around to see what kinds of things you’ve baked.”

I couldn't care less what Max thinks of me and I don't want him to love me, but it's gratifying when someone actually eats the stuff you bake. I was so pleased! I told Owen how pleased I was and he quickly tried to paint Max as selfish, greedy, and rude, referring to his behavior with indignation as "making raids on our cookie tins." 

Does he think I care? The idea that Max might one day walk up the hill and find the cookie tins empty is now unthinkable.