Make Something Happen
even if it's just curdling milk
I made yogurt for the first time this week.
Generally speaking, I’m not a particularly ambitious cook: while my husband collects cookbooks and gleefully makes the America’s Test Kitchen meatballs that take over an hour, I spent my 20s subsisting on “boxed rice and lentils mix with chopped veggies thrown in.” When we moved in together, we quickly found our division of labor; he cooks the festival foods, he cooks when company comes over, he cooks on the weekend. I cook during the week, when the main objective is to get the kids fed and to bed without any of us having a meltdown.
But there is a particular kind of cooking I not only enjoy but turn to in times of stress: for lack of a better term, I’d call it Little House on the Prairie cooking. The stuff that gives me a thriftiness and “lookit-me-making-food-from-scratch” good-housewife dopamine hit. The stuff that might make a respectable project for a Waldorf kindergarten classroom (if you’re not familiar with the Waldorf kindergarten curriculum, hooo boy is that a topic for another post!)
This impulse is why we have this butter maker in the back of a pantry drawer (mixed results: it makes for a fun little project but the butter isn’t as tasty as store butter). It’s why we have one of those apple peeler/corer that looks like a medieval torture device (well, also because we have a 50-year-old apple tree out back that probably drops 200 pounds of apples most years). It’s why, during the early pandemic, I decided to try sprouting dried chickpeas and lentils from the pantry (and they grew! At least, until my 4-year-old cut them all to pieces… but that’s another story.)
I’m in possession of supplies for cheese-making (though we’ve only done feta so far, because it doesn’t require months of aging); I’ve made bread from scratch many times, though my husband’s is better. I’ve got far more books on permaculture design and gardening than the size of my garden actually warrants, but I can tell you my kids and I have successfully grown and eaten potatoes, and cucumbers, and tomatoes and radishes and green beans and snap peas. For a while this summer, when R was having a particularly hard moment, “hey let’s go check on the cucumber plant!” was a guaranteed way to break him out of a loop.
In addition to the apple tree, for which I can take absolutely no credit, I’ve planted a fig and a persimmon and an olive tree on my property, and have three blueberry bushes in my front yard. None produce any fruit to speak of yet (though we did get about a dozen olives off the tree this year, carefully salt-fermented on the counter for about a month and then dismissed by S as “too slimy and don’t taste like anything.” She wasn’t wrong.) Our Whole Foods-purchased sprig of rosemary, on the other hand, purchased around 2012 and planted in the ground when we bought this house—he’s blossomed into a giant bush that is a dominant feature of the front yard. His name is Herbert.
I enjoy the idea of being more locally focused, more self- and community-reliant. Having options feels good; having skills feels good. It’s the same reason I’ve started buying my eggs from a neighbor, and why I’ve got books on foraging California native plants and have made acorn bread and bay nut cookies.
I don’t anticipate my family will be reducing our reliance on the grocery store much any time soon. But I do have prepper tendencies enough that knowing how we *could* do it is comforting. And so, this week, I made yogurt, using this fabulous and super simple recipe from another Hannah.
I did it because my kids eat a lot of it (and I do mean a LOT; it’s about the only thing I can pretty much guarantee R will eat on any given day); because I was curious to see how the would work; and because, in between calling my Congressman about Medicaid and signal-boosting about the SAVE Act and preparing to participate in the economic blackout on Friday, it was something I could do that would have a small, positive effect on the world. Which, by the way—doing something, anything, to effect positive change in your environment is clinically proven to reduce your anxiety and overall feelings of helplessness. Which is kinda the norm for a lot of people right now.
And so I got my dopamine, and my sense of accomplishment, and there’s a gallon of yogurt in my fridge for the price of a gallon of whole milk and one tiny yogurt cup. And, mixed with honey or maple syrup or jam, it’s delicious.
And who knows? Depending on the news cycle, maybe next week I’ll try the butter again. Or maybe it’s time to grow some more potatoes.
What are your small positive effect coping strategies?