May 25, 2011

The meditative cherry crisp: A photo essay

Baking helps me think more clearly. Something about the way the chemistry has to be precise--everything patiently measured, leveled off, rolled, kneaded--calms my brain and forces it to slow down.

Lately I have been seeing beautiful, sweet red cherries popping up at produce markets so I bought an assload* of them (*actual unit of measurement). I settled in to bake a cherry crisp with approximately half the assload I had purchased.

The cherries were ripe and lovely and stained my fingers with crimson juice. But I needed a glass of wine after pitting all the goddamned things.



I hadn't had the occasion to use my pastry blender for awhile. I happily pulled it out of the difficult silverware drawer and started to use it to cut the butter into the flour, oats, and brown sugar--all the while admiring that I *owned* a pastry blender--when the damn thing bit the dust and snapped in half.

Notice a significant portion of the wine had been drunk at this point.



Apparently, I have to add 'pastry blender' to the existing list of ladle and whisk as kitchen utensils to be purchased.

Due to the setback/technical failure, I found it easiest to get my hands in there and mix it together the old fashioned way. I didn't take a picture of that because I had poured another glass of wine and was temporarily over the picture-taking thing at that point.

But it did come out very nicely.



And it made me feel cozy.



In hindsight, I shouldn't have used the chipped bowl in the picture. But I love these delicately-shaded purple bowls and, well, fuck it.

3 comments:

- said...

Something about this post had me envisioning a Julie Child/SNL skit moment...prepare, drink wine, measure, drink wine, break something or set something on fire, more wine. :-) But I still desperately want some of the beautiful resulting cherry crisp. -tk

Toad's Lair said...

How about I make another and we meet up with a carton of good vanilla ice cream and two spoons?

Carrie Robinson said...

There is definitely something therapeutic in cooking and baking... Altough, I usually prefer chopping things & improving my knife skills when I happen to be upset. I guess pitting cherries could definitely have the same affect though. ;)