Finding home and self

Wow!  Has it really been two years since my last post?  I guess the speed of time really surprises me, especially while trying to figure out where my life is going.

I am living back in Los Angeles now, having traveled by boat and then train to return home, giving me new eyes with which to see my home country.  It's bigger, more beautiful, more wild and friendlier than I remembered!  How wonderful!

After our return, we married in August under redwoods, surrounded by loving family and friends and celebrated late into the morning with Mexican food, pies, champagne and dancing.  It was a magical experience, one that left us both very high.

A year later now we are still finding our feet, our independence, and negotiating our sense of self--no longer expats in a foreign country but natives rediscovering what home is.  Also throw in the mix transitioning from my world-traveling-twenties to thirty.  Am I suppose to have my life figured out now that I'm 30? I haven't.

As always, food and cooking is my therapy and becomes a medium for me to explore and sort out the bigger ideas and questions of self.  So of late I have returned to the basics, the fundamentals of baking: bread.  Last Christmas my uncle gifted me a jar of my grandmother's starter that he has been keeping alive since she passed twenty years ago.  I had no idea that her starter still existed and that he had this!  I was excited beyond belief.  After combing the LA public library system of every book on sourdough, I have been experimenting with sourdough pancakes, waffles, biscuits, cinnamon rolls, and of course bread: wheat, rye, molded, freeform, hand-shaped, on a stone.  I am still forging a personal relationship with my starter and learning something new with each batch of bread I make.  It can be a big time commitment but I love the slow, multi-day process of making bread with a starter.  It slows me down.  It also keeps me on my toes.  It is seemingly simple and basic yet I feel I the outcome is always a surprise; each loaf is unique and individual.   It is humbling, frustrating and exceptionally rewarding.

I am figuring out the basics and I couldn't be happier: living in a warm, beautiful place, enriched and fortified by the fundamentals of life, just like bread!  Except my flour, yeast and water are my family, friends and an incredible partner.