Well-Duh Mind

          Full circle, I was back again in Chicago. I remembered walking those streets in saddle shoes and the all-girls Trinity High School pleated skirt and blazer with cream-colored Wigwam crew socks. My saddle shoes were never quite perfectly cool: too sturdy to get slouchy without falling apart in the short two years I wore them.

            The best saddle shoes—as defined by the coolest chick of all cool chicks, Reggie Belmundo—were so worn that the cracks in the white leather were clearly limned in black and gray, much the way tarnish in the pattern lines adds to the value of antique sterling. And, the leather in truly cool shoes had lost nearly all integrity. Softened by almost four years of five-day-a-week wear, the shoes molded to the uber-cool Trinitarian’s feet like moccasins.

            I had transferred in for junior and senior years, so my shoes were able to acquire only a sophomoric glaze, the bare beginning of the degradation necessary for the wearer to achieve true hipster status.

            Reggie…She had very black, very curly hair, hair that had a life of its own, like a benign aspect of Medusa’s snakes. She sat across from me in the honors English circle, one leg tucked under the other, lifting the perfect oval of her knee so her foot dangled, pointing, flexing, and rotating for fifty minutes’ discussion of Don Quixote.

            Reggie brought on my first experience of well-duh mind. Well-duh mind, like monkey mind, is a state of being. Here is an example of well-duh mind:

            Senior year, the school play was Our Hearts Were Young and Gay. Reggie and I were the final call-backs for the role of the feisty, mischievous sister. It was perfectly clear to me that any sane person given a choice between me and Reggie Belmundo would choose Reggie. When the cast list was posted and I was the Paris hotel maid and Reggie was the lively Galbraith sister, Reggie accepted her leading role with the equanimity of a queen stepping into her court. Friends commiserated, and I experienced my first manifestation of well-duh mind. I mean, really…Reggie Belmundo in all her Italian hummingbird glory and me: cute, dimpled and sweet, true…but, really.

            Well, duh, what director would choose me over Reggie?

            After several decades I returned to Chicago, and as my marriage ended I once again faced the reality that I was not the chosen one. And then I had the ultimate well-duh experience. I learned Reggie’s secret.

            No one should choose or reject any of us. We choose ourselves. We are our own coolest chicks.

            Well, duh.

Puff Pastry Life

Puff pastry.

            Even the words are effervescent in a Dom Perignon, I-taste-stars kind of way. If Katherine Hepburn were the product of an oven, she’d be puff pastry: at once aristocratic and sensuous, golden exterior simultaneously crusty and delicate, shattering into glorious shards of deliciousness to reveal a superlatively soft interior. Puff pastry. Cue violin crescendo.

            Buying the frozen product is, while not unpleasant, not glamorous either. Dedicating a whole day to the production of puff pastry is the ultimate in self-indulgence. Landscape-sized quantities of butter are frozen, powdered with the softest flour and pummeled into submission, a process that more closely resembles a really bad love affair than baking.

            When making puff pastry, make a double batch and use a fabulous recipe (I use Julia Childs’).  It really is a lot of effort and besides, while for some folks cheesy macaroni or fabulous chicken soup is the ultimate in comfort food, the knowledge that homemade puff pastry is held in frosty stasis in the freezer will be a glowing ember in your mind.

            Freeze the completed dough in creamy individual portions; you can always move more than one from the freezer to the fridge to thaw, and the ability to move just one bestows the freedom to use one for any reason or no reason but pure pleasure.

            Pop a glorious top on creamed chicken and vegetables for the chicken pot pie of the gods; surround a square of chocolate; marry it to a sliver of silken brie and some tangy fruit; or, simply bake as a croissant.

                        When making puff pastry, the key to perfection is to start with frozen butter and to never, ever let it be less than cold until the actual baking.

            (Some people insist on cold flour and cold bowl. I myself find that a little twee.)

            The idea is to infuse the flour with tiny bits of frozen butter. When the pastry is baked, the butter melts into the flour, leaving tiny caverns of delight that surround fragrant air. The air inflates in the heat, and the pastry bakes around it, leaving myriad bubbles of buttery magic.

            The scent of baked puff pastry lingers long after the process is complete. Here resides, it proclaims, a baker.

            Puff pastry (even the Pepperidge Farm kind) is, I think, an invention of the gods. Enjoy!