Cooking with Fire: Bittersweet Cookies
Have you ever experienced a habitual flaw in yourself again, with a beginner’s mind, as if you had come across it for the first time?
Since Russ and I enjoy a cookie or two with our morning cuppa, and given my aversion to eating numbers in my food and lack of true vibrancy in variety packs, I decided to start baking my own. Never known for my cookies before, I found that when I searched my mind for a recipe, only Anzacs would come up (my recipe books are still buried while we finished building!). So without further ado, or without any conscious ado, I bought the ‘necessary ingredients’ and found myself adding golden syrup, brown sugar, and white flour to the mix. I’m not going to lie and say there were no delicious cupcakes (isn’t the transformative power of cooking with love amazing?); however, what was interesting to note was how a predetermined pattern can temporarily erase conscious consideration. As I chewed a cookie in contemplation, I considered what I already knew: that golden syrup is a refined sweetener; brown sugar is also refined, albeit with a hint of molasses; and white flour, in addition to being refined, could be many things, including bleached and rancid. I was using unbleached stone-ground flour that I had milled myself so I was off to a better start than most, but why not use whole grain and why not some biodynamic spell to boot? Then molasses instead of golden syrup: Black molasses is also, yes, refined, but most of the sucrose is removed, and unlike refined sugars, it contains trace amounts of vitamins and minerals, including calcium, magnesium, potassium , zinc, copper and iron; which is a similar story for our rapadura whole cane sugar that I replaced the brown sugar with. But now he had gone a step further and later in a new mix it was organic pepitas, soaked chia seeds (so you can digest them better) and if it were legal in Australia like it is in the US and EU, there would be added a little hemp seeds, rich in EFAs (essential fatty acids), crushed with a stone mortar.
Mixing the ingredients, I suddenly felt, poignantly, how rich these ingredients were; how nice it was to be able to sift them with my hands… Spirals forming, fire flickering as I stir the molasses into the butter and watch the intensity crescendo as the baking soda is added… It truly was a moment of immersing myself in the eddies of the universe; feeling so stirred in that miniature cauldron on coals; feeling a deep connection to my ancestral lineage of women who cooked with that flickering light… It may be worth considering the proposition shared by MD Carole Hungerford that the flickering of fire induces relaxation in the conscious state, which may explain the painfully raw and unsatisfied hunger that lies beneath the gaze of those addicted to watching the flickering of their late-night televisions…
I am suddenly touched by a tinge of sadness: was it just a touch of bitterness in the blackstrap molasses? Or was it sadness that so many of us never bake our own cookies and eat an inferior processed product that often ‘costs’ less to make them; or so they make us believe. Without a doubt, it is worthy of contemplation to consider what we are actually eating and receiving in each case. If you haven’t seen the movies Chocolat or Babette’s Feast, they are moving and powerful illustrations of what food can be found in the conscious kitchen and perhaps a great testament to why the monastery cook was required to be a highly evolved being…
Leave a Reply