Thankful for Food, Friends, and Cinnamon Rolls
I’m presently writing this over a bowl of oatmeal, which I’ve lately been decorating with tahini, apple butter, raisins, pumpkin seeds, flax meal, and cinnamon. Sometimes I add sweet potato into the mix as well. These days, oatmeal is about as far as my culinary pursuits go. My new job is, apparently, slightly too fantastic, as the kitchen produces so many delicious plant-based leftovers that I no longer need to cook. That being said, after two weeks of eating phenomenal food that I haven’t had a creative role in, I find I’m craving the process of cooking and baking more than the delicious outcomes.
Yesterday in my pottery class, I noticed that my fellow peer Patty brought pumpkin muffins. And the week before, she brought in tote lemon poppy seed muffins. I asked her if she liked to bake, to which she enthusiastically responded yes. She told us that she began to bake once a week when the pandemic first ensued, and it’s a habit she kept up since. She states it’s too much for just her and her husband, so she loves to share with her neighbors, and our pottery class as well.
How I Fell in Love with Food
Patty’s love for baking has inspired me to reflect upon my love for being in the kitchen. I began to intentionally cook about four years, as a freshman in college. My roommate Katrina was vegetarian, and I had met a girl named Leanah in my humanities class who was vegetarian and a baker/chef extraordinaire. I heard rumors that Leanah wanted to start a cooking club, and since I wanted an excuse to hang out with both of them, Leanah, Katrina, and I joined forces weekly in our grungy community dorm kitchen. I knew so little about cooking, so I gleaned what I could from two of my favorite food creators. Beyond the grungy kitchen and throughout our four years in college, our kitchen pursuits and potluck dinners fostered my appreciation for culinary ingenuity and taking the time to nourish body and soul with delicious food and the best company.
Beyond the kitchen, I volunteered with City Farms Grower Coalition and the Chattanooga Food Center. With City Farms, I learned about sustainable food production and its far-reaching implications. Food production is an incubator for intimate relationality, where through the seasons we can witness change, growth, and decay among a community of others cultivating this intention. In discovering this intimacy, I realized the lack of it among those who have neglected reciprocal living and those who have been disenfranchised from fulfilling reciprocal living. To eat with an ethic of relationality has since emerged as a critical up-taking. Further, with the Chattanooga Food Center, I learned about how an intention for ethical food sourcing can evoke a gracious community. Therefore, it is this ethic of gratitude for food and friends which pervades the past four years.
While I am living alone, I don’t know many people (yet), and I’ve moved here just in time for the antithesis of the growing season, my outlook is surprisingly not too grim. Rather, I have some ambitions up my sleeve, like seeing if this Patty lady will be in a baking club with me one day or volunteering at a local organic farm once the growing season begins again. In the meantime, like Patty, I think I may bake once a week to keep myself creative, grounded, and sane.
Apple Pie Cinnamon Rolls
It must’ve been just before the pandemic that I baked my first batch of cinnamon rolls. Discovering a recipe for vegan carrot cake cinnamon rolls, I couldn’t resist. Since then, I’ve made this recipe a handful of times with roommates or for special occasions, and it’s always been well-loved. Following the aforementioned recipe, I used last week’s leftover apple butter as the filling. Alas is the union of apple pie and carrot cake in cinnamon roll form. At this moment, I am joyfully intoxicated by the warm, sweet, apple-y bread smell gracing the kitchen. I feel tempted to give it all up to become a cinnamon roll chef.
