i'd rather be baking

Summer! It’s almost over. How did that happen? I’m still kind of confused because this is the first summer of my life that I haven’t been sweating it out in 100° temps every other day. And let me tell you, I am so into it. I can handle this kind of summer. Please don’t hate me! Anyway, here’s what I’ve been into.

Pancakes! I’m so into pancakes right now. Fancy ones, with fruit. Like these.

Local berry anything. We ate this marionberry shortcake at the Bite of Oregon and I almost died. Amazing.

These shirts. I’m obsessed and wear them constantly. They are beyond comfortable and super flattering. I can’t get enough.

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Here’s the thing: I love making my own breads, but I mostly love it when it’s easy. I’ve been wanting to make homemade pretzels for awhile now, but just haven’t really had the inclination to spend that much time shaping dough. And today I wanted to make some sort of rolls to serve as buns for the veggie burgers I was planning to make for dinner, but I needed something easy. It’s a busy week. So I thought…pretzel rolls! Perfect.

These guys did take a few steps, but honestly they were dead easy and really kind of impressed me. I made these in between writing, doing laundry, loading the dishwasher, and continually adding things to my massive list of things to do before going out of town this weekend. My brain was only about 20% in the kitchen. The moral of the story is that these guys are winners!

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I’ve realized that my recent blog entries (except for this lovely pie) have centered around fruit or something reasonably healthy. Honestly, it’s just where my head is most of the time! I know that healthier baking isn’t for everyone, but most of the time it’s definitely for me. If I can indulge my baking habit with foods that nourish my body well, that makes it all the more enjoyable for me!

These zucchini muffins fall perfectly within those parameters. Zucchini bread is a classic summer treat, whether your zucchini is the result of a homegrown bumper crop or simply the rock-bottom prices on squash this time of year. It’s something I dearly love to eat, and healthy-ing it up a bit means I get to eat it more often. I win!

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Every weekday morning I stumble straight from bed to the kitchen for breakfast. I do not pass go and I do not collect $200. This is serious business. This is also why I eat cereal, yogurt, and fruit for breakfast 99% of the time — it’s super fast! This is also why although this oatmeal has been on my to-do list for quite awhile, it certainly did not happen until this past weekend. After I ate some cereal, of course.

To be fair, I really don’t like oatmeal. I’m not a fan of the mushiness. But Ryan loves it and I figured this recipe had enough fruit and walnuts and cinnamon involved to be palatable for myself, the oatmeal snob. I still hedged my bets and made a half-batch.

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I’ve been behind this week. Behind on work, on working out, on baking, on blogging, on household chores. Sometimes you just get behind, right? And it’s easy to focus on the tasks mounting on your to-do list, the overflowing inbox, the dirty dishes in the sink. We’re all guilty of this; it’s human nature, pure and simple.

These things grew dim for me this week, as I suspect they did for many others. This week I, along with hundreds of others in the food blog community, was captivated by the death of fellow blogger Jennifer Perillo’s husband, Mikey. Mikey died of a sudden heart attack, leaving behind Jennifer and their two small girls. I don’t know Jennifer, and honestly had never read her blog before this week, but my heart has broken for her all week. And last night, I learned that a dear childhood friend of mine just lost a cousin to a suicide bomber in Afghanistan. Life is so utterly fragile and short.

Jennifer wrote a beautiful, heartbreaking post asking that those who wished to help her in some way do so by making peanut butter pie (Mikey’s favorite) today, and sharing it with their own loved ones. I thought this was a wonderful idea — realistically there’s nothing most of us can physically do for her, and nothing we can offer will diminish her pain. But we can make pie, and we can show love to those close to us. I don’t know of anything more important than that.

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