saturday, baking

You can't really call it a pantry. It's more like a niche, a stunted corridor, a two-and-a-half foot space between the kitchen and dining room. It's where the house's previous owner put four wooden shelves, a wooden countertop and, underneath, a wooden cabinet with two doors. The shelves house mixing bowls, mismatched wineglasses, and a set of tumblers from Target. The bottom cabinet is for baking supplies -- white sugar, brown sugar, flour, baking chocolate, chocolate chips, cookie cutters, and sugar sprinkles in every color imaginable.

I was supposed to be tidying my closet and had even taken most of the clothes off the hangers and thrown them on the bedroom floor. But, instead, I sat in front of the two-doored pantry cabinet and rearranged and restacked all the plastic containers of flour and sugar and threw away the baking powder that expired in November 2006 and the cornmeal that the flour moths had gotten into. Then, although it'll probably turn out to be the hottest day of the year, I went online, looked up a recipe and made three loaves of squash bread* -- one to eat now, one to eat later, and one to freeze.


*The recipe for which turns out to be remarkably like the one for the zucchini bread that I made last summer.