It’s the semester break at last, and we are in Istanbul for a few days. We did a bit of running around today, in the faintly carnival atmosphere of the first day of the hols, and Baki encountered a personal hero:

His report card was full of good news, which was a pleasant surprise. I have to say, though, that although Baki has worked really hard and learned a lot (cursive!), I feel like if I were to get a report card, it would be full of disappointments.
I know that on some level, disappointment in myself is inevitable as a parent (please just don’t tell me if I’m wrong). But it did get me thinking about all those times when I fail as a mom, friend, daughter, wife, gardener, you name it.
Amazingly, Baki still comes to me with his heart and arms wide open. That is a testament to his sweet heart (or maybe he knows he’s stuck with me). And I know I’ll get what’s coming to me when he gets a little older. As to why anyone who knew me in high school would want to have anything to do with me anymore, that remains a mystery.
I suppose there is something about how friends and family stay by my side in spite of my shortcomings that makes them all the dearer. In return, I can only say how grateful I am, and I promise to always try to do better. There is, after all, never a lack of room for improvement in life.

We’re in the midst of a stormy weekend out in the garden. It has been raining all day with the occasional downpour and one or two mad hail showers, with little white hailstones bouncing about everywhere. Tonight there is wind, great gusts of it. There are times when the wind is so strong that the whole house shudders, but it is not so bad out tonight. There is just the continuous patter of the rain on the roof and the odd lightning bolt.
This is not great weather for garden work, but it is wonderful weather for being curled up in bed as I am now, listening to the rhythmic breathing of my sleeping family. And what does any of this have to do with the photo of bread?
A while back, I tried a no-knead bread recipe from the New York Times. Yes, that one. It always came out okay, but my dough was sort of flabby and lifeless after the first rise, so I didn’t consider my efforts a great success. For Christmas this year, my mother gave me Jim Lahey’s book, My Bread. I love reading books about baking bread, so I eagerly dove in, despite my past failures. Well, the crucial difference is that in the book the measurements are given in weights as well as by volume. I guess I’m sloppy with a measuring cup, because when I used the weights (by far my preferred way to measure when I cook anyway, particularly for bread and jam) it turned out beautifully. My first truly successful loaf came out of the oven minutes before we left for the garden.
We wrapped the loaf in a towel and loaded up the car.
Getting out of the house is a lengthy process, and there is always at least one thing left behind. This time it was Baki’s headphones. I had the bread in my hands and had set it on the top of the truck when the wail came from inside. So off I went to fetch the headphones. Once I had them, we were off. Except that I had forgotten the bread on top of the truck. “Stop the car!” I said, and ran to the back of the truck. It’s a pickup, so I thought maybe the bread had just dropped into the back. Naturally, it had not. We doubled back. No bread.
This bread is literally effortless to make, so when we got home I started another one and the happy result is pictured above. We sat on our hands until it cooled and then ate the lion’s share of it, with generous portions of quince jam, sitting on the terrace drinking tea and watching the rain.

Before Baki was born, I had lots of lofty ideals about feeding him. I remember when Jessica Seinfeld’s cookbook, Deceptively Delicious came out, I sniffed and thought, “My kid is going to look vegetables in the face and love them.” It used to be true. I looked back at an old blog I wrote about Baki’s first year or so, and he was eating all sorts of things – pumpkin, brown rice, avocado – some of the staples of Kaya’s diet today. Somehow, though, he has evolved into a kid who will reject certain things on sight, including most cooked vegetables (although to be fair, he does like a fair number of raw ones). I own that cookbook now, and regularly sneak chickpeas into Baki via chocolate chip cookies, or pumpkin via chocolate cupcakes. I was very happy, then, when I found an interesting recipe for chocolate cake with beets. It is good! Baki lunged for them when he got home, and wasn’t even suspicious when I stood by smiling while he wolfed down a cupcake before dinner. Oh how I have fallen from those lofty, early days.

Luckily, Kaya loves his vegetables, and happily eats lentils, never turning his nose up when I add flax seed oil or wheat germ to his food. I haven’t ruined this one yet, in other words. Eating and drinking are discoveries for him, and his latest finding occurred while having a drink of water. I usually let him drink from a glass at the table since he is not really that into sippy cups. He is getting the hang of sipping, but what is sipping compared to blowing bubbles?

He will do it for as long as I let him, and is furious when I take the glass away. It’s a bit messy– there is a puddle of water by the end of it. But it gives him tremendous satisfaction.

That reminds me of something that I just read. As a rule, I do not like to write in books (although I like to read other people’s margin notes) but this is a sentence that made me want to grab a pencil:

Wherever a process of life communicates an eagerness to him who lives it, there the life becomes genuinely significant.

It’s from an essay by William James, “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings.” For Christmas, my mother gave Ali and me two slim volumes from Penguin’s Great Ideas series: this book and a George Orwell book called Some Thoughts on the Common Toad. That is also a wonderful read and I appreciated for the first time what a good writer George Orwell was (1984 was a long time ago). I do not think, after reading his descriptions of toads, that I will ever look at our resident toads in quite the same way. I was never dismissive towards them, and the discovery of tiny baby toads is a particular delight, but they seemed the noblest of creatures when so eloquently described. Reading these two books, I marveled at how some people have ideas so good they’re worth committing to paper and binding together.

Ali is resolute in not showing any favoritism among the days of the year, so for New Year’s Eve we did precisely nothing. Baki was sick — he had woken up with a fever, and as we were still in the city, I took him to the hospital in the morning. They said he had tonsillitis (a sign of changes to come? Time will tell…), and he is on antibiotics. I was fighting something off, so all day I fell asleep the minute I sat down. I probably napped for a total of 45 minutes all day, but by the end of the day I was left feeling that all I had done was sleep. This is probably because it was so rainy that it wasn’t really possible to do any work in the garden once we got out there. When we went to bed, at about 9 I was so grateful for sleep, and the bed was positively heavenly.

Having slept my way into 2012, I rang in the new year the following morning, and I although it wasn’t very sunny, it was lovely in its own way. It had been raining all night, and everything glistened, bejeweled with rain drops. As I went down to feed the chickens, the air smelled of wet leaves and wintersweet (Chimonanthus Praecox) shrubs, which have flowered really profusely for the first time this year. In the distance, I could hear the roar of the river that had, overnight, swollen to consume our road again. At least we made it across beforehand, and have a way back down, I thought to myself.

I’ve been a bit of a grump about moving back and forth between the garden and the city. The seasons seem to lurch along without my noticing. Instead of seeing fruit pickers gathering pomegranates from our neighbors’ orchards, I saw the odd pomegranate dimly silhouetted on the side of the road as we drove by in the semi-darkness. Flowers were tightly wrapped buds one week, and loose bunches of wilted petals the next. I was not around to do a lot of the work, and by the same token I was not able to reap the rewards (and in fact in the garden, the work itself is a large part of the reward).

Buoyed by the loveliness of the morning, I began making promises to myself. My new year’s resolution, therefore, is to make the best of it. Instead of moaning, I will try to appreciate what time I have and get as much done as possible. It helps, of course, that Baki has a two week semester break coming up, right when we need to be starting seeds in earnest. My other resolution is to write more often, and I have not gotten off to the most stellar start, but it is never too late, I hope, to improve.