Baking in Nazareth (or the story of how Google is wonderful)

            I really, really, really like to bake, much to the benefit of those who lived in dorms with me, and much to the annoyance of my mother, who says that it’s bad for her diet.  So of course, after I’d been in Nazareth for a couple of weeks, I wanted to bake something.  At first I thought that baking from scratch would be too much of a hassle, due to the whole I-can’t-read-anything part of life in Nazareth (there’s a blog post about illiteracy under this one).  Trying to figure out which box contained baking soda versus baking powder seemed like a stretch when I was lucky to get the right kind of juice.  I thought that a good solution would be to buy one of the box mixes, where you add eggs and oil and water, mix it up, stick it in the oven, and eat it.  They aren’t the same as homemade, but they’re pretty good.  You can buy the same Pillsbury mixes here in the grocery store, except that all of the instructions are in Hebrew.  They don’t even have pictures like most of the mixes at home do.  So… I’ll be good at baking from scratch by the time I get home, even if I do learn to read Hebrew eventually.

The lady in the hospital kitchen gave me flour and sugar and apples, and the nice man at the store at the bottom of the hill helped me find baking soda.  I found a recipe that used ingredients that I had (thanks Google), and I baked a lovely apple cake.  Except that it wasn’t really so lovely after all.  I’m going to the blame the oven and not the chef.

         

This is our oven.  Instead of things on the dial that make sense like ‘bake’, ‘broil’, and whatever else your oven might say, there are a lot of pictures, with boxes and circles and squiggles.  These mean absolutely nothing to me.  So I just picked one that made the oven hot, converted Fahrenheit into Celsius, and went for it. It didn’t work so well.  The cake got burnt on the top, and wasn’t cooked in the middle.  We ate it anyways (it tasted okay if you put it in the microwave), but I didn’t want to waste my time trying to bake things that wouldn’t cook.  Yes, the emergency room is only a skip and a hop away, but I’d rather not get food poisoning. 

            Again, Google to the rescue.  The brand name of our oven is in English, so I was able to find an instruction manual online.  I don’t think it was for this model, but it showed pictures of the boxes and circles and squiggles and explained what each was for.  Hence the sticky notes adorning the back of our oven in the picture.  I don’t want the next person who lives here to have to eat a simultaneously burnt and raw cake.

       

            Once we had the oven more or less under control, I tried to bake chocolate chip cookies with two of the other volunteers.  And they came out really well!  We used a different recipe than the one I use at home because we didn’t have brown sugar or the molasses to make a substitution (thanks Google, for helping find the recipe).  We also didn’t have a proper cookie sheet, so we put the balls of dough in a brownie pan instead. I checked with Google, to see if anything terrible would happen.  Just so you know, it works fine.  And if you’re ever desperate to bake cookies and don’t have a cookie sheet or anything else that’s designed to go into the oven, you can apparently wrap the oven rack in tin foil.  It’s not recommended.  I don’t quite know what to make of that information, but that’s what you get with Google.

            So baking has been an adventure, but we haven’t set the house on fire or set off the smoke alarm (mostly because we don’t have one).  We do flip the breaker for the kitchen, and sometimes our entire apartment, and I’m still not quite sure why.  But I know how to fix it, so perhaps I’ll figure out how to not flip the breaker in the first place.

             

Lessons from Baking

-  You should know where your breaker switches are.

-   People will usually help you find strange ingredients at the grocery store.

-  Recipes are often more guidelines than actual rules.  You can use baking soda instead of baking powder, and it’ll probably work.  Same for using 500 grams of butter instead of ½ cup.

-  Google can convert units so that you don’t have to.

-   Google can also help you learn from other people’s mistakes.

-  There’s nothing like eating chocolate chip cookies and watching a movie.

Since then I’ve baked brownies and a fully cooked apple cake, which I may have finished for breakfast this morning.  And now there’s butter thawing on the counter to bake another batch of cookies.