It took me three weeks to write my first entry. I just became too wordy and I kept thinking I was over-sharing, which is typical of me. Sometimes, as a teacher, I just need to shut up! You’d think after years of teaching I would figure that out! I think things changed during the Pandemic. Everyone seemed to have an inner voice that was screaming to get out!!!
I said before that I wanted to write about possibly retiring at some point and moving to Italy. I always wonder what it takes to have courage — not just the courage for normal things, but the courage to make a life change. I’ve experienced a few life changes: having a baby, returning to college after a 10-year break, graduating with my undergrad at 47; with my first Master’s degree at 49; with my second Master’s at 53; work at a young women’s correctional facility as a teacher; etc. I didn’t view any of those things as “life changes” requiring a great amount of courage. They were necessary for me. I needed each of those things to move on with my life. There were no expectations of failure, or expectations period. I kept moving forward.
My first days as a real teacher (not a substitute) were scary. I kept thinking I was pretending. I was nervous and had blood-pressure issues. I would drive home with a raging headache nearly everyday. Finally a nurse told me to “get it together” and “this isn’t going to go away without an intervention.” What she meant was that I needed to get my health under control or I would have a stroke. I listened. And I changed jobs a few months later.
Teaching is hard and a blessing at the same time. There are days when I get home and crash. I’m so tired, my eyes hurt. Other days I come home and I think about how I had a great day. I love teaching Hamilton, the Musical. It is so fun and even people who don’t think they’d like it end up singing the songs and they don’t want it to end. In 2022, we got to see it in Portland. I was on a Hamilton high for days. My mom was staying with us since she was getting cancer treatments. The night I came home after seeing it with 35 or so kids, I was bouncing off the walls! The kids just loved it — some were so surprised it wasn’t just a screening on a big movie screen. There were real live people singing and dancing through all the songs they knew by heart!
I teach at a Native American Residential High School in Salem. In 2020, right before the Pandemic started, I was teaching Culinary Skills. We had just gotten to the point where we would start cooking things and then… We were sent home. The next fall, when we began the school year, we planned to teach online indefinitely. I had a dream one night about making cooking videos to use for online teaching. I’d often fancied myself as a Food Network Star. When we came to work (we were working in our classrooms with all the appropriate protocols with no students – just a camera and screen). I asked if I could make cooking videos to teach and the next thing I knew, my husband and I were creating videos in our kitchen.
During the previous school year, I’d asked students to tell me what they wanted to make. I would start easy, but some of my students were interested in everything from lasagna to ratatouille. During the summer I tried a couple new things: chicken pot pie and ratatouille, as well as raspberry white chocolate scones. Then there were the things I knew how to make: cinnamon rolls and hamburger buns. For the most part, my neighbors were lucky recipients of some of our goodies.
I tried to keep things simple for the kids. Our first video was buttermilk biscuits with a hack for making buttermilk out of milk and lemon juice. We ended up filming it six times before we finally had enough film! Then, a fellow teacher edited our video and we had a usable teaching tool. We showed the video to the one of the classes and one of my students decided he would make biscuits at home while class was in session — we had sent out basic ingredients and he was confident he could pull it off. He did not have buttermilk however. Or lemons. He did have limes, so he used them instead. He took a bite of his biscuit at the end of class and said they turned out pretty good, except right before he swallowed, he got the very distinct taste of lime and it was a bit off-putting!
Some weeks later, I made cinnamon rolls. The frosting I make for my cinnamon rolls is a buttercream with a slight orange flavor. One of my students had everything for the cinnamon rolls, but nothing for the orange buttercream. She settled on making a frosting out of sweetened condensed milk. She had siblings and nieces and nephews at her house and they loved it. She said it was a little too sweet. I thought it was very imaginative. I always encouraged students to use ingredients they had on hand. I didn’t expect them to have all the things in their kitchen that I had in mine.
Not all of my students gave me happy endings. I planned what we would make and we sent out boxes of ingredients. Toward the end of the school year, I had a couple seniors that had done very little in the way of cooking. I finally said, “What I want you to do is to look at what we sent and figure out something you can make with those ingredients.” One senior responded, “You mean we are supposed to cook with that stuff?” I think I hit the mute button before I thoughtfully responded, “Yes. That was why we sent you items you could use for cooking.” He then sent me a Google Image of a loaf of bread that he supposedly baked. It was a little too perfect. If you’re reading this, I hope you know you didn’t fool me!
Mike and I learned a lot about making cooking videos. We tried to have fun. One time, after several “takes,” I started giggling and it took several minutes for me to get it together enough to make the video. Another time, Mike was busy with his job, so I decided I could do it myself. I don’t remember what I made, but I set up a camera and filmed it all myself. It was terrible. I don’t think any amount of editing could fix it. We also developed tricks for filming as we pulled casseroles out of the oven and tasting food. One time I burned my mouth with a hot bite of soup. Another time, my editor sped up my 10 minutes of kneading bread dough until it was a comedy! When we made spaghetti and meatballs, he used an Italian Restaurant sounding music for the intro. We all started talking about my Food Network break and agents. Honestly, cooking videos from home and all that went with it turned out to be less stressful than cooking in the classroom. I taught Culinary Skills last year in the classroom and it was very exhausting!
For a while I had a Youtube account, but I don’t know what happened to all those videos. I probably have them somewhere on a thumb drive!
Also, I inserted a picture above of the braided challah I’d made and mentioned in my last post.
Here is the recipe:
That’s all for now. Until next time…
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