Preserved

Yesterday I burnt two wonderfully orange persimmons to a brown crisp in the oven. I had sliced them into thin circles, laid them on a baking tray in an oven turned to 200 degrees and guided them towards a sweet dried crunch as they slowly lost their moisture in the oven. But somewhere along the way, a good two hours into the process, i got lost in my statistics homework and forgot about the persimmons in the over. I rose myself from the delirium of linear regressions to find the persimmons nearly blackened producing a bitter sweet smoke. I was unduly disappointed in myself. Drying persimmons is culinary simplicity. All i had to do was slice and wait. But i got distracted. I found myself completely consumed by the tedium of a subject i have minimal use for. The burnt persimmons were just one more reason to resent what had been a horrible re-entry into the academic world.
So today, when i finally handed in that statistics lab, the final piece of work for my first semester of an unfulfilling graduate program, i baked bread. I used an old favorite challah recipe from a childhood babysitter who was the first person to teach me to make bread. When the challah had risen perfectly, when the egg wash i had brushed on had left the baked challah a shiny golden crust, i left the bread to cool and went to the bookstore and bought a cookbook. It is called Preserved, and i am determined that over this winter break (when i have immediately come to love being a student again...) I am going to dive head long into the world of preserving, of baking bread, of exploring the intricacies of persian cuisine (thanks to a wonderful slew of Armenian grocery stores in nearby watertown that provide me with everything from dried barberries to pomegranate molasses). This is what i have missed. It has been a busy semester, and i have made excuses, and i have complained about my classes and i have complained about my professors, but i think what has truly bothered me the most is how i have strayed from the kitchen. I am in a program that is supposed to be about "Agriculture, Food and the Environment," but somehow, by immersing myself in this program I have lost the intimate relationship i used to have with food. I used to cook for a living. I woke every day to a full day of work in the kitchen. I chopped 50 lbs of green beans at a time and catered dinners for 300. And i left that job because it was not the relationship I wanted to have with food. I left because I lost the passion i had had for cooking when i was forced to do it every day for people i did not know and often did not like. And this semester, i once again lost that passion for food. And i refuse to let it stay lost. I'm still looking for the right balance. So this winter i will preserve lemons, dry chiles in my oven, start a window of potted herbs in my sunny study, and I will cook. Food sustains our bodies, but there is something else in me i haven't yet identify that it sustains as well. Without good time in the kitchen i become agitated, feel unfulfilled. I know that it is not the right season to start preserving, but last week i ate the last of the peaches I froze in august. The blueberries from june are almost gone, and i have just one last jar of raspberry jam on the shelf. I did not preserve enough last summer. The growing season is short in new england and the winters are long and cold, it's never too early to start preserving.