I baked four loaves of bread yesterday. Two in standard baking pans and two in mica clay blessing bowls. What a lovely globe of golden bread emerged from each of the bowls! A bowl for baking bread? Yes! Because mica clay is ovenware, you may bake bread in mica pottery bowls. And so I did, using an heirloom Sonoma whole wheat flour grown locally at the Huasna Valley Farm, owned by my friends Ron and Jen. I consulted my favorite bread recipe of all time from the Tassajara Bread Book by Ed Espe Brown, a Zen monk. If you have a desire to learn to mix, fold, knead, shape and bake exquisite breads, this is the book for you. The basic bread recipe has 14 pages of clear instructions, each step illustrated with pen and ink drawings. It will teach anybody to bake bread. Try it! http://www.shambhala.com/html/catalog/items/isbn/978-1-59030-704-5.cfm
Recently I had the good fortune to meet Ed at a book signing of his reprinted Tassajara Bread Book. I brought my battered (literally!) book for him to sign, and bought the new edition as well. When I asked him what the difference was between the two editions, he said with great solemnity "The new one has chocolate (pointing to the new hardcover) and this one doesn't (pointing to my antique, bedraggled paperback from 1970)". But he signed each book with a tender personal message in a slow and mindful penmanship, careful loops, full of grace. I felt a dharma transmission from my bread baking guru that night as his pen slowly formed each letter in his notes to a stranger.
Here's one of Ed's poems:
The truth is you're already a cook.
Nobody teaches you anything,
but you can be touched, you can be awakened.
Put down the book and start asking,
"What have we here?"
Though recipes abound, for soups and salads,
breads and entrées, for getting enlightened
and perfecting the moment, still
the unique flavor of Reality
appears in each breath, each bite,
each step, unbounded and undirected.
Each thing just as it is,
What do you make of it?
Edward Espe Brown
~~
About my Mica Blessing Bowls:
Food can be a sacrament when baked with Love, and served in Beauty. Holy Food deserves a mica clay blessing bowl. An elegantly shaped bowl luminous with mica and blessed with magnificent fire clouds, where no glaze chemicals were used. The clay is a tawny russet, infused with a constellation of mica stars. The smoke patterns from the final pit fire, are called fire clouds. A mica blessing bowl is mesmerizing as you gaze into the starry universe of its interior curve.
The Sacred Heart Cafe has two of these bowls suitable for baking tasty loaves:
"Magma" http://www.1000markets.com/users/pattymara/collections/3076/products/71014
"Calico" http://www.1000markets.com/users/pattymara/collections/11631/products/114421
They are kiln mates, born from the same litter of New Mexico clay.
I paint silk, throw pots, fuse glass and collage poems in my enchanted DolphinSmile Studio on the central California coast. The spirits of the land and the devas in my garden keep me company.
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