My Enemy Is Not My Enemy: Perfection Is My Enemy

Shhhh. Everyone is sleeping at my house. My messy house. My house that is part house, part pet rescue (and I have just risen and lit a candle, burning my finger in the process, because of what someone… who shall remain nameless (Finney) has just done to the litterbox), part office, part school, part dorm room (once your kid tops 15 your house becomes more of a dorm than a home), part respite center (for my relative who stays here during treatments), and 100% rented, in fact the rent was just raised this month.

I want to say this to my fellows: my ADHD buddies who recently figured out that’s what’s been going on all these years, or who knew it all along, my fellows coping with parental estrangement, my fellows blooming late, or trying for a second or third bloom, my fellows who sometimes push things to the side so they can sit at the table and eat (move the computer, bottles of vitamins, child’s homework, couple of bills, stray fruit from the bowl, to the right and sit down and enjoy the meal, dammit!), my fellows heating up their coffee for the… fourth? time, my possibly low-grade lonely or depressed fellows, my fellows with stick-up straight bed hair, or the rotten haircut, or the inevitable hair loss, my fellows of the wide waist, or short stature, or clumsy feet, or poor eyesight, my fellows of the resilient smiles, I want to say this: what you did was good, and you should appreciate it.

For example, I give you my peach somethings, pictured above. I got the idea that my daughter and I might try to take her amazing pot pie on the road by making it hand-held. My daughter loves pie crust, and I thought she might like puff pastry. It’s been years since I worked with puff pastry. Of course, being just a dormer here, when I thought we might make the chicken handy sandwiches, she got invited to join the gang from 9th grade at the movies, Minecraft, at also the movie is at the mall, and we have a good mall, so to hell with hand pies. And I 100% agree. But I also have my visiting relative, and this morning, as usual, I am up hours before the rest and a couple before the sun, and I got out a bag of frozen peaches, and one of the puff pastry sheets and thought, “Let’s do this thing. Nice with coffee.” And it’s been a minute since I used puff pastry. I had thawed it in the fridge, as recommended, and when I unrolled my roll the whole things fell to bits like I was trying to make bandages from my petticoat in the civil war. The hell? And, frankly, I wasn’t sure if you, if I, could roll-out puff pastry without it losing its puff, because it’s been a minute. I should have gone Googling, but instead I just plowed ahead with my usual devil-may-care (and, considering my personality, I wonder if mine expression should be angel-may-care?), and rolled the pastry, on parchment paper, with flour, a little. Enough to give me some pieces big enough to use as a base. And then I cut the others into quick strips with the pizza cutter, which I am a little squeamish to use, having just finished watching the (mostly) excellent Killing Eve) and glued the thing together with macerated peaches, corn starch, dollops of cold butter (one square for the peach thing, one square for me, because :butter), and egg wash, placed the upon fresh parchment, and threw them in a 400 degree oven and looked at them after 9 minutes, and then again when I remembered and smelt them (about three minutes more). 

The puffiness of the puff pastry is not quite there, not quite the delicate peeling flower I had hoped for. “There are layers there,” Paul Hollywood might say to me someday.

Imperfect, but still some flake

It is crisp, and there is burnt peach goo around them on the paper, which is like the red glass on a candied apple in the way it hits my molars, and I like the taste. And then, of course, I made whipped cream, which, if you have a food processor, is as easy to make as falling off a log. The peaches in the pastry are just a bit tart, which is perfect because my whipped cream is always a tad too sweet, probably because I was raised on Cool Whip. Listen, those containers made good Tupperware, and no one in the 70s who wasn’t Julia Child made real whipped cream. The thought was scandalous. Cool Whip, and it’s disgusting and shelf stable cousin Reddi Whip exist because moms were expected to make dessert often, if not for every meal, and real cream cost money, and who had expensive food processors or stand mixers? And, probably, with the incredible destabilization of the United States Trump has forced on us, cream will be pricey again, and RFKJr. will try to sell us on preservatives, as soon as The White House communicates to him that everything real has gotten too expensive, and also they have stock in Conagra. Yep, did you not know it? Raging liberal here. In any case, for a warm morning treat directly from the oven, with real whipped cream, and strong coffee to drink is A-ok, and better than a lot of people are having this morning, which is not to snub those people, but to say to those of you also offering imperfect baked goods to your loved ones: they’re gonna love them, and they’re (hopefully) gonna appreciate that not everyone has them, and you have made them lucky by your (imperfect) efforts and your perfect love.

So, dammit, write the damn book. If you need help getting to the finish line you can ask me. I’ll help you. And when your book is finished, and published, and out in the world, a few people are going to read it, and some of them will love it, and some of them will like it, and so on. It will be, no matter who you work with and no matter how many times you polish it, imperfect, and meaningful, and enjoyed. So learn to embrace the messy with the neat, the sweet with the too sweet, or too sour, the perfect lamination and flaky layers with the slightly squished layers covered by whipped cream. What you can do, and the way you do it, no one else can do, and it’s time here is fleeting. Make the most of your time to share yourself, and leave a bit of you for those who come behind.

Love ya’~