I am busy baking London Fog cookies made with Earl Grey tea and just enough lavender. As I work with the butter, flour, sugar and eggs, I find myself thinking about a five-day Pastry Boot Camp I attended more than ten years ago at the Culinary Institute of America.
I was a widow then. I had always loved baking with my mother and my sisters, and the workshop was an opportunity to immerse myself in something I had always enjoyed and wanted to understand better. Did you know that pastries are built around the same basic ingredients: butter, flour, sugar and eggs? What changes is the proportion. A little more of this, a little less of that, and you have something entirely different.
It struck me today that life may work much the same way. The ingredients I have carried with me have been curiosity, determination, patience and, yes, a certain amount of luck. The proportions have changed over the years. Curiosity has probably been the most consistent ingredient of all. There were times when determination had to do most of the work, and times when patience was called for in much larger quantities than I would have preferred. And luck? I have learned never to discount it.
More than ten years later, here I am in my own kitchen, baking a cookie made with Earl Grey tea and lavender and those days at the Culinary Institute came right back to me. When I took that Pastry Boot Camp, I had no idea I would someday be growing lavender on a farm in the Capay Valley. I certainly didn’t know that the lessons from that pastry kitchen would find their way into a life I could never have imagined then.
Butter, flour, sugar and eggs. Curiosity, determination, patience and luck. Sometimes the ingredients stay with us. We just keep learning how much of each one the next recipe requires.
