Ruminations on a New Year. Also, Bread.

I missed Wednesday and Friday, so let’s do a combined Foodie Friday and Writing Update Wednesday post, shall we? Yes, we shall. It’s my blog, and if you’re still reading it despite my apparent inability to stick to my own posting schedule, that’s on you.

First up, the life updates. It’s the High Holy Days! Shanah Tovah, to all of you reading this who celebrate. I’ve found it generally difficult to reflect back on the last year, mostly because it seems to run into last year too much, and then I feel overwhelmed by the nature of pandemic life and I have to get my brain to change the subject. I doubt that I’m the only one feeling like this. However, I can’t help but compare how I felt last Rosh Hashanah to how I feel this year, and recognize a general sense of hope.

Last year, it was a week into the semester and it still wasn’t clear whether or not my university was going to go back to in-person classes (we didn’t for another five months). I was on the island with my parents, brother, and grandmother. One silver lining for us was, like many families, we were able to spend more time together than we had in years. A drawback, however, was that none of us had spent time with anyone else in months. It wore on me, and badly—which is saying something, because I am at my core an introvert. But I remember feeling horribly isolated, unsure of how I was going to finish my thesis without access to a library, unmoored without a plan. I was hoping for something, anything different with the start of the year, and I struggled to understand how a pathway towards “better” could possibly emerge.

Last year: tashlich took place at the beach, surrounded by birds. At the time, we joked that it felt like an omen of some kind. This year: tashlich on the shore of the James river, lonely but still vibrant and bright.

This year, I am ensconced in a Master’s program at my dream university. I’ve spent the past year with my family and my friends, as we cautiously reintroduced a vaccinated, masked version of “normal” into our lives. I still struggle—the paranoia and the fear are sort of always in the back of my head. But it’s no longer borderline debilitating. I feel closer to good than I have in over a year, which is crazy to say.

Last year, I couldn’t bring myself to write. Fiction felt too escapist. Reality felt too real. I settled for writing serious academic papers on silly subjects—the feminist nature of fanfiction, for example, or the development of Vulcan calligraphy—and I threw myself wholeheartedly into papers about serious subjects that I couldn’t do anything about but at least I could write. But fiction and poetry just wouldn’t emerge, no matter what I did. I started and abandoned ten or fifteen projects over the course of a year. The closest thing to “new” that I managed was a short story that I meant to turn into a novel but didn’t.

This year, I’ve published a novel (All the Way Home! It’s out now, both ebook and paperback!) and I’m working on its sequel. I started writing fanfiction a little more avidly and I’ve found a phenomenal community there. I realized that writing rom-coms was a surprisingly good method of treating the overwhelming anxiety and frustration that draped over 5780 and 81. I’ve been writing poetry on a weekly basis. I still think there’s a long road to “good,” but I’m definitely at the checkpoint of “better.” And I think that’s important to recognize.

So, in the spirit of the holidays, I think I ought to talk about some food.

I always get a little homesick around this time of year, whether I moved a week ago or a month ago. I think there’s something about either going to services at a synagogue that is not my own, or streaming services from home like I’m doing this year, that just makes things feel a little too distant for my immediate comfort. So it made my day when a package of mandelbread (mandelbrot) arrived in the mail, as much of the rest of my family gathered on the island to celebrate. I, celebrating alone in my office in my apartment in Virginia, really needed that sense of connectivity found in food.

That said, I don’t have the recipe for those. So instead I’ll share what I made, in the spirit of the holiday. I love baking bread. I bake a lot of it, which is probably a habit that developed out of my mom baking a loaf of challah every Friday. So, this week, I put a festive twist on my own challah recipe—basically an apples-and-honey take on cinnamon rolls crossed with brioche and then braided into a round challah shape.

Left: the version of this I made for Rosh Hashanah breakfast last year, aka apple-pecan cinnamon rolls. Right: the version I made this year, the apple-cinnamon round challah.

And let me tell you, it was delicious.

I needed a taste of home, and because I had fresh challah on a holiday, I got it.

I needed something apples-and-honey because ‘tis the season, and it had it.

And I needed a reason to properly stress-bake, and there’s something about filling and shaping dough that just really does the job.

I make the dough pretty much to the letter of this Delish recipe, but I tend to change up the filling and shaping quite a bit.

Filling:

2 apples, chopped  

½ cup brown or turbinado sugar

2 tbsp honey

3 tbsp cinnamon

1.5 tbsp melted butter

Mix all of this together, feel free to add some nuts or nutmeg or raisins as you please.Divide dough into 4 portions (this recipe makes a LOT, if you want a smaller challah it’s okay to either divide it in half or just set some of your leftover dough aside).Flatten each piece out into a long rectangle.Place a line of your filling down the center of each rectangle, and wrap the dough around them, sealing the fillings in.Now, do a 4-strand round-challah braid with your rolled-up, filled strands (you could also do a two-strand twist and just coil it up if that’s easier, but it won’t be a true challah).Tuck in all the ends, brush with an egg wash and maybe another teaspoon of sugar, and bake.

And on that note, it’s Shabbat, I’m tired, and I’m back to living a (masked, cautious) proper social life. So… I’m going to leave this here.

Shanah tovah, everyone. May it be a sweeter, smoother year for us all, with plenty of apple-y, carb-y comfort this fall.