The case of the butch who was reluctant to bake.

I limped back into the city under the cover of darkness one night in early November and retreated to the sanctuary of my apartment. For the first 3 weeks I didn’t want to talk to anyone, I didn’t want to do anything, and I didn’t want to think.

In a city of 9 million people it’s hard to not talk to anyone. I did a pretty good job of not doing anything and not thinking for about a week. Then it was time to head back into the workforce and sadly, thinking became a large part of waking life.

As I emerged from my stupor (brought on by 8 months of organic vegetable farming) it seemed that time was moving faster than it had been in the past and that I wasn’t living a full-enough life. I started to look at my weaknesses and decided to challenge myself. There were 2 areas that needed to be addressed: my heart and my stomach.

To strengthen my heart I started to look at where I was being hard on myself or other people and then I made myself back off.

When it came time to strengthen my stomach I realized that there were skills in the kitchen that I had been purposefully neglecting for decades. As a young butch, way back in junior high school, when faced with the choice between taking Shop or Home Ec – you guessed it -- I took shop. Making spice racks and turning brass on a lathe to make a replica canon was much preferred to sewing and baking.

For me Home Ec was way too girly. What’s odd is that in my household if there was any baking or serious cooking to be done, it was done by my father. He baked everything from whole wheat bread and granola to Christmas cookies and puddings. When we lived in New Mexico he became an amazing cook of Tex Mex dishes. But as I’ve got this lily white palette (more on that later) I refused to eat most of this food, especially his enchiladas which were the equivalent of a three alarm blaze inside my body.

My mother had my brother and I cooking at very early ages. When I was 7 I checked a cookbook for kids out of the Los Alamos Public Library and begged my parents to let me cook Sunday night dinner which consisted of hamburgers and baked potatoes. At the time I wanted to cook because I’ve always been very independent and had a hankering to leave home from as early as I could remember and knew that I had to be able to cook dinner if I left home and planned to survive. Later when cooking dinner meant that I couldn’t stay out until dark and play in the canyons I began to resent cooking.

Fast forward four decades later and I found myself thinking that it was time to start baking. What’s a bit odd is that I’m usually on a wheat-fast and yet I wanted to learn the classics. I don’t want to make gluten free vegan cupcakes. Not that I have anything against them, but I wanted to go in search of some part of yesterday that I’d never bothered to include in my personal development. As with all things Ilsa I didn’t decide to read anything or do any study I just decided to do.

Last Friday I went to the Food Emporium on 60^th and 2^nd Ave, the first neighborhood I moved to when Donzie and I were together way back when. I bought all the necessary ingredients to make a chocolate cake, 2 cake pans, and headed home. When I got home I found a classic rock station (I’m not sure why but I like to cook and bake to classic rock) and set myself to the task of making my first cake.

I don’t now if I’ve got a serious case of beginner’s luck but this cake came out frighteningly good. Carly who never addresses me by full name, after her first bite said in a solemn tone, “Ilsa this is delicious.”

Then on Sunday I ended up making short-bread walnut crescents. This was the first time I baked cookies and I baked them as a trial run for the batch I plan to bring into the office for the Holiday Cookie Exchange. A lot of people liked them but they didn’t rock my world and I’m hoping to improve upon them this weekend.

My next stop on the cookie trail was chocolate chunk cookies.

It was during the mixing and baking of the chocolate chip cookies that I started to learn about myself even more. Baking requires patience. I am usually in very short supply of that substance and so it’s interesting to re-wire my brain. But when I come up with the equation “patience = cookies”, this reward system begins to work. Over the past couple of years I’ve hammered away at myself to acquire more patience and I’ve made small steps in the right direction. But it’s in my nature to rev the throttle and hit mach 2. Mach 2 is not the speed at which cookies are baked.

But what I like about baking is that it’s a process. And it’s a lot like solving a problem. And in the future I will strive for consistency and perhaps one day the first batch will resemble the next. All of this is worth looking forward to. And someday I might actually bake in the presence in someone’s company. Right now it’s all about being by myself in the kitchen and pushing myself to hit a certain mark. I like the physicality of chopping, mixing, blending. I like the precision. In making chocolate chunk cookies I realized that it was better to rely on my nose than the timer to sense, rather than know, when the cookies were done. Baking is a sensual experience and there’s not a lot of pleasure to be derived in rushing sensual experiences.

I’m still not sure if baking cookies is girly and I’m glad that there’s a straight man at work who’s going to contribute cookies to the cookie exchange. In some way all this baking is almost like a course in queer studies at the undergraduate level. My butchness couldn’t handle baking which meant that I’d found a chink in my masculinity which is actually kind of cool because I love to call myself out on my shortcomings even if it is in the privacy of my own mind.