Seventy-Six Degrees
On Creative Constraints
My husband curses from our crawlspace, loud enough for me to hear him in the kitchen. Rain lashes at the cheap siding on our house while flooding the crawlspace.
Our cheese is warm, the cat food fermenting, and the fridge sits at a cool 76 degrees. After hours spent of bargaining, attacking the freezer with a blow dryer and a screwdriver, followed by several panic attacks, I finally give up.
“We’re ordering from Costco.”
After purchasing our second fridge in three months, I sob. For the food that went bad, the energy burden, the financial stress. For my inner child, who thought owning a home brought security - finally, a tether in this world. Like I could say: see, I belong! Instead, homeownership is one emergency after the next: flooding and sagging floor joists, snowstorms followed by ice dams, barely evaded electrical fires and moldy food.
While G slips in the mud, cursing and pumping, I stare down a pile of baking ingredients with little hope.
How many times have I made eggless muffins for my niece? How often have I said fuck it, substituting plain sugar?
A lack of whole wheat flour is not a lack of all flour.
Changing half the ingredients doesn’t guarantee poor results. They might end up in trash with everything else from the fridge.
Isn’t baking an art? Aren’t I allowed to create bad art?
I turn the oven on, rolling my sleeves up past my elbows. Using a half cup of applesauce instead of eggs, I create muffins from a modified banana bread recipe. I use the 33-cent bananas, glad to be saving something, somewhere.
When there isn’t a wrong way, just diverging routes, the pressure dissipates - and I bake the best muffins of my life. Crispy, the banana making the crust taste like pure melted butter - one of the very things we lack.
As an ingredient family, not having access to eggs, butter, chopped garlic, or sauce was initially scary, but it forced innovation. Creativity reclaimed a space that had become rote.
Maybe constraint isn’t the enemy; it is an invitation.
When Prudence Brooks asked me to co-lead a workshop in May, it felt like proof. There is creative energy swirling all around me, pressing close in the kitchen. We just need to be brave enough to reach out and grab, allow our grubby fingers to leave greasy stains on everything.
Life is an unending eggless baking session. Panic inducing, but the options are limitless once you start.
But you have to try, you must.
Rain still comes down sideways, into our crawl space. But the hot water heater is safe, and the oven’s heat warms the entire kitchen.
Muffins cool on the counter; I sit down to plan for the first time in months.