wildflower sunshine

Or alternatively titled, “The Year I Fell in Love With My Oven.”

I didn’t grow up loving to cook. Cooking wasn’t actually much of a thing in our house. My dad had health issues and a different diet than the rest of us, and my mom had a handful of vegan meals she rotated through for us kids. Steamed broccoli and tofu with rice, spaghetti, potato soup. I know there were others, but those are the ones I remember best. Needless to say, I didn’t exactly grow up with culinary skills to speak of. I could follow a recipe, but I couldn’t cook from scratch.

At 16 a dear old German lady from church hired me to help her with house and kitchen work a few hours a week, and then began my journey of joy in the kitchen. I sometimes wonder if she hired me as a charity case because she could tell I couldn’t cook. (I doubt that was the case at first, but who knows!) I remember the look on her face when she learned that my family bought canned beans instead of buying dry bulk beans and cooking them from scratch.

In her kitchen I learned basics of good Adventist cooking. We boiled beans and made vegetable soup. She taught me the art of the cashew sauce and we even made tortilla chips. Obviously nothing we made was Michelin Star worthy, but I was learning how to take the ingredients on hand and turn them into a hearty, healthy meal filled with love.

While I’d been doing most of my own cooking for a few years, at 19 I moved out on my own and began to think more seriously about nutrition. Food prices and value became even more important to me and I began eating simpler, more whole foods. I was working to support myself, but I would often make a pot of soup on the weekends to be my lunches all week. Sometimes I would experiment, but those often ended sadly.

After I was married, my cooking skills were honed much quicker. Practice makes perfect, and having the time to practice, along with a loving and honest critic counting on me for meals helped!

I still didn’t love baking. Soups and stews made sense to me at this point. I could make a decent curry from scratch using ingredients in my kitchen. (I also had learned how to keep a kitchen stocked with necessary ingredients for many recipes.) I’d even developed a few “recipes” of my own. Chili, baked spaghetti, scrambled tofu…

But baking? I made our own bread, and I’d occasionally bake brownies. All the measuring overwhelmed me. The difference that humidity or the time of year would make confused me! I didn’t have a feel for what good dough should look or feel like.

Fast forward to this year. I spent most of the year pregnant. About halfway through my pregnancy I discovered that to keep my blood sugars at healthy levels, I was going to have to be much more intentional with my diet. We ate pretty healthy overall, but I had to get more and more creative with my cooking. At 35 weeks we had a scare where we thought I had ICP. In addition to an already mostly whole grain, balanced diet, I cut out all processed food. Thankfully I did not have ICP and was able to relax a bit more the last couple weeks of pregnancy, but it allowed me to be so creative!

As autumn was arriving, so was the desire for sweet, yummy baked treats. I was nesting like crazy, trying to get all the food in the freezer for postpartum. So what could I do? Every time I had a craving for some yummy baked good, I would make it and stick it in the freezer! Somehow baking was clicking. I finally had a feeling for what a good dough or batter should look like. I was baking our whole wheat bread. I made muffins and blueberry bagels for the freezer. I found a good recipe for whole wheat bagels and then tweaked it to fit our liking. (We really like bagels in our family!)

Barely a couple weeks postpartum, my sweet husband gifted me a KitchenAid mixer! I had been talking about wanting one for months, or maybe even years, and I was so excited to feel up to being in the kitchen again and using it. Already it has been such a blessing for our family. Kneading bread is difficult with a newborn and a toddler, but now the little ones and I can just pour the ingredients in and have such fun watching it mix away! (And lots of dishes can be washed in the minutes it’s kneading!)

Baking for my family is satisfying to my heart, and it satisfies my family’s tummies, too. It reminds me of the ultimate Bread, Jesus. John 6:35 says, “And Jesus said unto them, I am the bread of life: he that cometh to me shall never hunger; and he that believeth on me shall never thirst.”