I made doughnuts yesterday, which was a lot of fun in that "I AM NOT DOING THIS AGAIN FOR A YEAR" sort of way – I like rolling out the dough and cutting out the doughnuts and watching them puff up fat and golden in the bubbling oil and then dipping them in sugar afterward, hot and fragrant. It was a grand time, although I’m not exactly recommending you rush out and try making doughnuts since it’s probably the most dangerous thing I do in my kitchen, what with the boiling oil and all.
My hands bear witness that I like to cook – my right hand is spotted with small red burns today, just one of the side effects of making doughnuts yesterday. (another one? Fatness.) Old small scars mark the many times I grated my knuckles absent-mindedly, mistook my thumb for an onion, bumped my hand against the top of the oven. And yet I DO love to cook most of the time, although right now I feel dried up and barren, out of ideas and out of hunger. I wake up from dreams of lemons, wanting something fresh and tart in my mouth while my hands ache with their reminders of the costs of winter’s heavy food.
I’m making pierogies tonight – how’s that for fresh and light? – and I love the soothing mindlessness of rolling out the big sheets of dough, filling them up with potatoes and onions and cheese. I flipped idly through a magazine article on dumplings last night, and was startled by how global they are, that every culture seems to have something women made from dough and modest fillings – although gluten-free pierogie-making has been a big failure so far. The little packages disintegrated as soon as they hit the water, which was also the fate with my experimental gluten-free doughnuts yesterday, too.
I did make a batch of baked gluten-free doughnuts last summer and they were happily received – look how little The Baby is there! Sheesh! – but I don’t know, they don’t feel like the REAL thing. And tonight, I’m just going to bake her a potato, these half-measures that are both enough and not enough, this once a year treat that I cannot give her, no matter how hard I try.