Photo Week #20 and Photo Week #21

What a long two weeks it's been. I had all intentions of posting this last week, after my first two days back at work, with some tired but optimistic post, but then I got more and more tired, and started questioning everything, and then even more people died because of gun-related violence, and all things considered I didn't feel like writing anymore.

A couple of things I have been worried about: Junie's safety. Junie's sleep. Junie's eating. Jeremiah's covid. Sleep training. Going back to work. Colleague drama. The possibility of going back to work in person. Postpartum hair loss. Pumping and my supply dropping. Wanting to work out but instead eating ice cream and boba....

I don't know why I worry so much. I mean, yes, these are all valid things to worry about - but it sucks when I have to worry about all of them at the same time. Sometimes I feel like I veer the other way and compartmentalize way too much, but then the compartment sizes are also not proportional to the worry. Maybe I need to konmari some worry out of my life. Not maybe, I definitely need to konmari some worry out of my life.

I will end on a funny, fail baking story - I attempted to make black sesame kouign amanns this weekend, which, let me tell you, is quite difficult to manage when you have a lot of time on your hands, much less when you're trying to do work at the same time and potentially have to feed a baby in the middle of the night so you want to maximize sleep as much as possible. The dough rose beautifully, even though I was scared my yeast wasn't foaming (I feel like my yeast never foams... I've read different things about using warm water, sugar, et cetera to make sure your yeast is alive, but most of the time I just blindly believe that my yeast will be alive and my dough will rise and that seems to work). My butter block was an actual block! I made the first dough and butter combo, stuck it in the refrigerator... and five hours later, I took it out and it was not firm. But this was already like, 10pm so I decided to just attempt rolling it out for round two and.. that was a failure. The butter gushed out underneath my rolling pin and made a huge slimy mess, but since it was already so late I decided to just go with it and spent another couple hours waiting for it to (not) firm up again, and stuck it into the muffin cups to firm up for the next 12 hours. When it came time to bake the kouign amanns, I made the rookie mistake of not putting a pan underneath the muffin pan, so the butter leaked out of the pastries, fell onto the oven floor, and caught on fire. So that was fun! Thank you to Sam, David, Jeremiah, Jamie, and Rachel (who helped to evacuate Junie during this time!!) who all stayed relatively calm and opened all the doors and windows to wave out the smoke. We did not set off the smoke alarm, which makes me question whether or not our smoke alarm works... but oh well. We still ended up baking these in our air fryer convection oven, and while they are definitely not kouign amanns, they tasted like some sort of buttery baked good, so at least it wasn't a total waste.

So here's your PSA to check your smoke alarms and make sure your dough is super, super firm when making laminated pastries!

Also to clean your oven.