Five Minutes
They changed the damn bus schedule on me.
Not the printed schedule, at least not that I know of and I hardly ever look at that damn thing anyway. No, I’m talking about the real schedule, the times when the bus that I need actually shows up at my corner.
For weeks I was on a roll in the morning. If I left the house when the cable TV box clock read between 7:13 and 7:16 in the morning I would be at the bus stop between 7:15 and 7:18 am and would seldom have to wait more then two or three minutes for my bus. On particularly good mornings I would hit the corner just as the light turned so I could cross and my bus would just miss the light so it would be halted just short of the stop giving me time to cross in front of it right before it rolled into the stop. Heady times indeed. Some mornings I would just make the light and it would turn green the other way just as I reached the far curb so I would amble right onto the bus without even breaking stride.
Alas, as it always happens, those days have ended for now. They changed the damn de facto schedule. They haven’t issued a new print schedule. Oh no, that hasn’t changed. What has changed is the drivers’ interpretation of said schedule.For the last 3 or 4 workdays in a row leaving at the 7:13-7:16am window has resulted in my being trapped on the near side of the road as I watch my bus roll by on the other side resulting in a 7-10 minute wait for the next one, resulting in my being 15-20 minutes later to my desk in the morning (in the heart of NYC rush hour, say 7-9:30am, the delay of departure time always results in at least double the overall travel delay due to traffic build up) which screws up my entire day. What’s that “for want of a nail…” bit again?
This morning I had to leave at 7:10 to get back on schedule, five minutes earlier more or less. It worked out, but I’m not happy. Five minutes is no big deal you say? Well take five minutes across five work days and you’ve got 25 minutes. 25 minutes more commuting and less living is a sizable chunk. That’s a decent amount of reading or music listening or hell, 3 minutes more than the actual program content of a half hour of television, PBS included (don’t give me that non-commercial crap, five minutes of “thanking underwriters” at the top and bottom of a show is commercial content). So now 25 minutes a week has been vacuumed out of my life thanks to the whims of bus drivers. Imagine that.
You know what I could do in 25 minutes? I could make bread dough. Actually, I could do that in less than 25 minutes thanks to Coach Ray’s Genuine Wild Caught New Jersey Starter. Yes sir, lately I’ve been taking three cups of that starter, 400 grams of bread flour, and a tablespoon of kosher salt (more or less) and around half a cup of warm water and combining it on Sunday mornings. Then I take five minutes, the same length of time that has been stolen out of my mornings by the invisible hand of transit and knead. Those are five of the best minutes of my life, working the dough on a flour-coated bit of counter near my open kitchen window hearing the birds or the rain or the stray cat or the squirrels in my yard or just hearing nothing, a perfect Sunday morning stillness while my hands make something useful and even a little tasty that I can share with people I love. I fold and press and fold and press and flour and fold and press and the dough becomes stiffer until it’s ready to proof and the moment is gone, five more minutes of peace gone by. The bread isn’t perfected, the recipe will continue to evolve (I tried to make a small loaf with parmesan cheese included this weekend, wasn’t half bad but needs work) but what makes me happiest is I have broken free of the bounds of recipes on this one. I looked at a bunch of different bread methods, took what made sense to me and ignored the rest (there was one that suggested, for example making the air in the oven damper by putting a cast iron skillet in, heating it and dumping water into the screaming hot skillet which sounds dangerous, stupid, and needless) and have been flying by the seat of my pants with decent results. The way I see it is humans have been making bread since we lived in tents and cooked it over open fires so precision is a bit overrated here. I love the fact that I have to use my sight and touch and hearing and smell as a guide. Cooking using only a little bit of technical knowledge and all your senses is an incredibly engaging and enjoyable thing to do. For instance, I really enjoy the fact that I can now hear something start to burn before I smell it, enabling me to rescue the food before it’s too late.
How do you “hear” something burning? When you put something in a pan to sauté it or put it on a grill to sear it whatever you’ve put on there sizzles. Or it should sizzle if you preheated your pan or grill properly. That sizzling has a certain pitch. If the pitch starts to get higher, whatever you’re cooking is starting to burn. I’m not a food scientist by any means (I prefer to think of cooking as a creative craft instead of a lab experiment), but I think the reason for that as the moisture evaporates from the surface of something the sound of that evaporation rises in pitch. Maybe it has something to do with the size of the bubbles that are breaking as the liquid evaporates. Who knows? All I know is that it works for me.
One thing that doesn’t usually work for me is cooking times. I get asked, pretty frequently in fact, “How long does it take to cook (x)”? Inevitably my response is “Until it’s done” which makes everyone think I’m a smart ass. I’m not trying to be a smart ass, I just don’t know how accurate your oven really is or how hot your pots or pans get on your burners or what you think “medium-high” is vs. what I think. It’s not that I don’t use a timer; I often do. But I know how long things take with the equipment that I have and I also rely on a thermometer along with my senses. I try to tell people to use instant-read or probe thermometers and I’m typically greeted with blank stares and “So 20 minutes a pound, right?” Then I change the subject. Or try to.
Why is it that everyone wants to be so precise and consistent about time? Ah, that’s a bad broad generalization. Not everyone is so consistent. Bus drivers, for example. They all run according to their own internal clock. I wish my morning bus driver would tell me when his damn internal clock changes. I would get close to a half an hour back in my life.
Not the printed schedule, at least not that I know of and I hardly ever look at that damn thing anyway. No, I’m talking about the real schedule, the times when the bus that I need actually shows up at my corner.
For weeks I was on a roll in the morning. If I left the house when the cable TV box clock read between 7:13 and 7:16 in the morning I would be at the bus stop between 7:15 and 7:18 am and would seldom have to wait more then two or three minutes for my bus. On particularly good mornings I would hit the corner just as the light turned so I could cross and my bus would just miss the light so it would be halted just short of the stop giving me time to cross in front of it right before it rolled into the stop. Heady times indeed. Some mornings I would just make the light and it would turn green the other way just as I reached the far curb so I would amble right onto the bus without even breaking stride.
Alas, as it always happens, those days have ended for now. They changed the damn de facto schedule. They haven’t issued a new print schedule. Oh no, that hasn’t changed. What has changed is the drivers’ interpretation of said schedule.For the last 3 or 4 workdays in a row leaving at the 7:13-7:16am window has resulted in my being trapped on the near side of the road as I watch my bus roll by on the other side resulting in a 7-10 minute wait for the next one, resulting in my being 15-20 minutes later to my desk in the morning (in the heart of NYC rush hour, say 7-9:30am, the delay of departure time always results in at least double the overall travel delay due to traffic build up) which screws up my entire day. What’s that “for want of a nail…” bit again?
This morning I had to leave at 7:10 to get back on schedule, five minutes earlier more or less. It worked out, but I’m not happy. Five minutes is no big deal you say? Well take five minutes across five work days and you’ve got 25 minutes. 25 minutes more commuting and less living is a sizable chunk. That’s a decent amount of reading or music listening or hell, 3 minutes more than the actual program content of a half hour of television, PBS included (don’t give me that non-commercial crap, five minutes of “thanking underwriters” at the top and bottom of a show is commercial content). So now 25 minutes a week has been vacuumed out of my life thanks to the whims of bus drivers. Imagine that.
You know what I could do in 25 minutes? I could make bread dough. Actually, I could do that in less than 25 minutes thanks to Coach Ray’s Genuine Wild Caught New Jersey Starter. Yes sir, lately I’ve been taking three cups of that starter, 400 grams of bread flour, and a tablespoon of kosher salt (more or less) and around half a cup of warm water and combining it on Sunday mornings. Then I take five minutes, the same length of time that has been stolen out of my mornings by the invisible hand of transit and knead. Those are five of the best minutes of my life, working the dough on a flour-coated bit of counter near my open kitchen window hearing the birds or the rain or the stray cat or the squirrels in my yard or just hearing nothing, a perfect Sunday morning stillness while my hands make something useful and even a little tasty that I can share with people I love. I fold and press and fold and press and flour and fold and press and the dough becomes stiffer until it’s ready to proof and the moment is gone, five more minutes of peace gone by. The bread isn’t perfected, the recipe will continue to evolve (I tried to make a small loaf with parmesan cheese included this weekend, wasn’t half bad but needs work) but what makes me happiest is I have broken free of the bounds of recipes on this one. I looked at a bunch of different bread methods, took what made sense to me and ignored the rest (there was one that suggested, for example making the air in the oven damper by putting a cast iron skillet in, heating it and dumping water into the screaming hot skillet which sounds dangerous, stupid, and needless) and have been flying by the seat of my pants with decent results. The way I see it is humans have been making bread since we lived in tents and cooked it over open fires so precision is a bit overrated here. I love the fact that I have to use my sight and touch and hearing and smell as a guide. Cooking using only a little bit of technical knowledge and all your senses is an incredibly engaging and enjoyable thing to do. For instance, I really enjoy the fact that I can now hear something start to burn before I smell it, enabling me to rescue the food before it’s too late.
How do you “hear” something burning? When you put something in a pan to sauté it or put it on a grill to sear it whatever you’ve put on there sizzles. Or it should sizzle if you preheated your pan or grill properly. That sizzling has a certain pitch. If the pitch starts to get higher, whatever you’re cooking is starting to burn. I’m not a food scientist by any means (I prefer to think of cooking as a creative craft instead of a lab experiment), but I think the reason for that as the moisture evaporates from the surface of something the sound of that evaporation rises in pitch. Maybe it has something to do with the size of the bubbles that are breaking as the liquid evaporates. Who knows? All I know is that it works for me.
One thing that doesn’t usually work for me is cooking times. I get asked, pretty frequently in fact, “How long does it take to cook (x)”? Inevitably my response is “Until it’s done” which makes everyone think I’m a smart ass. I’m not trying to be a smart ass, I just don’t know how accurate your oven really is or how hot your pots or pans get on your burners or what you think “medium-high” is vs. what I think. It’s not that I don’t use a timer; I often do. But I know how long things take with the equipment that I have and I also rely on a thermometer along with my senses. I try to tell people to use instant-read or probe thermometers and I’m typically greeted with blank stares and “So 20 minutes a pound, right?” Then I change the subject. Or try to.
Why is it that everyone wants to be so precise and consistent about time? Ah, that’s a bad broad generalization. Not everyone is so consistent. Bus drivers, for example. They all run according to their own internal clock. I wish my morning bus driver would tell me when his damn internal clock changes. I would get close to a half an hour back in my life.
Comments
WV: ferysed, as in the ferysed "you're gonna miss me if you don't get to the bus stop earlier."