bearing blog

Back just after Epiphany, I received this great email from a reader named Jenny:

I just wanted to let you know that I tried your faux cinnamon roll recipe… but not for cinnamon rolls. 

Down here in New Orleans, Epiphany heralds not so much the end of the Christmas season as the beginning of the Mardi Gras season. The famous parades don't really happen until a couple of weeks before Mardi Gras itself–but the balls and banquets begin on "Twelfth Night". An important (hee) part of this whole Mardi-Gras-season is, of course, King Cake. Every local bakery makes them–you can get them at coffee shops, grocery stores–just about anywhere, in this town, at this time of year.

King Cakes are usually a brioche made into a circle and decorated with icing and purple, green, and gold sugars (the "official" colors of Mardi Gras). I tried my hand at making one a few years ago, but I find brioche difficult to work with. And then I started having babies. And I stopped trying to get a handle on homemade brioche and started using a bread machine. 

But your bread-machine cinnamon roll recipe has saved me! It makes a delicious King Cake bread!

 I used your recipe…

[added by bearing:  here's what you put in the bread machine, taken from the link above]:

•    2 and 1/4 cups whole wheat flour
•    1 and 1/2 tsp bread machine yeast
•    1/2 tsp salt
•    1/2 tsp cinnamon (cardamon is also nice, as is chai spice)
•    3/4 cup plus 2 Tbsp milk (or you can use apple juice; omit the sugar)
•   3 Tbsp sugar
•   1 Tbsp coconut oil (or butter)
•   1/2 cup raisins or currants

 

….but when I took the dough out of the machine, I sort of stretched it into a long snake–which I then flattened out and dotted with small pats of butter and an additional sprinkling of cinnamon and white sugar down the center. I folded up each side to enclose the cinnamon/sugar/butter and then laid the whole thing in a ring on a baking sheet. I baked it at your recommended time/temperature.

[After the second rise of about 30 minutes, bake it at 350 degrees for 30-35 minutes — edited by bearing].

When it came out and had cooled a bit, I did a simple powdered sugar/milk/vanilla glaze and then added the colored sugars.

Everyone loved it. My husband, an actual New Orleans native, proclaimed it "the best King Cake he'd ever had", even after I'd accused him of just trying to get in good with the chef (ha).

Anyway, thanks for the recipe! The good/bad news is that now we've decided that since it is, in fact, better than store-bought King Cake, I am now assuming the role of Official King Cake Baker from now until Mardi Gras… 

I've attached some photos of the cake, in case you're interested.

Am I? Am I?

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I almost feel bad about this because… this is a reasonably healthy recipe!  That's why I use it for an everyday, if fun-to-eat, breakfast bun.  It's made from 100% whole wheat flour, a little bit of coconut oil, milk (or apple juice if you want), and not even very much sugar.  No eggs even.  Heck, you can make this recipe vegan if you want!  Not exactly in the spirit of Mardi Gras!

It is possible to make non-faux cinnamon rolls in the bread machine, with a brioche-style dough, if you want a richer version (e.g. with eggs and milk and butter and not so much whole wheat flour).  But Jenny is right that brioche dough is harder to work with, so this may be a lower-stress version as well as a lower-sugar-buzz version.

Traditionally you're supposed to hide a trinket inside the cake, and the person who gets the trinket has some kind of obligation or wins a prize or is lucky or something like that.  Be careful not to choke on it!  

I’ve been out of town with the family for a week, hence the lack of posts. I should be back up to my normal level, or at least what it has been lately, within a couple of days.

We drove to Montana, a place I had never been before, to go skiing. It is a gorgeous drive. You know, people joke about North Dakota being flat and boring, at least till you get out West and hit the Badlands, but I thought it was pretty. When the land is flat, the sky is big, and on a clear blue day the sky coming down all around you is a sight worth driving to see, I think. Maybe that gets old if you have to drive the same road over and over again. I certainly don’t get excited anymore about the path through Illinois and Indiana that we travel a few times a year going back and forth from Minnesota to our extended families in southern Ohio. But North Dakota was pretty: snowless this year, golden-brown and grassy.

And of course there is a moment when you are driving along, minding your own business and gazing at the grasslands, when you go around a turn and the wide, particolored Painted Canyon opens up before you, carved down below the grasses, the weird alien landscape of the Badlands. Welcome to the West, it seems to say. “Wow!” said all the kids. We took a little detour there into Theodore Roosevelt National Park, stopped at the visitors center (which has a tiny little T.R. museum, plus a petrified tree stump you can touch and examine, and a short historical movie about Roosevelt and the Badlands). Then we decided that we had a little extra time, not long enough to drive the whole scenic loop in the park, but long enough to drive in a little wa us and then turn around and drive out. So we paid our National Parks vehicle fee and went in, where we saw bison and prairie dogs up close. It was a very worthwhile half hour.

We skied at Moonlight Basin, a resort in western Montana about an hour and a half outside Bozeman. Moonlight Basin is adjacent to the ENORMOUS ski area of Big Sky, and in fact one can ski from one to the the other; there are two lifts that you can access with lift tickets from either side, and it is possible to buy a shared lift ticket that allows you access to all the lifts on both resorts, which is apparently the lift pass that gets you the most acreage of any lift ticket in the U.S., though not as much as Whistler in Canada, according to my husband, who memorizes ski area statistics as if he were training to appear on All-Skiing Jeopardy.

The five- eight-, and eleven-year-old all took at least some lessons, and I took a half-day lesson too, at the start of the week, to get back into the feel of the skis. My five-year-old daughter was the star this week: she went from barely being able to form a wedge to skiing black-diamond tree runs. It was so exciting to accompany her for a couple of hours on her all-day lesson (day 3) and watch her following her instructor, a cheerful young woman from North Dakota who spent most of her time skiing backwards so she could watch my daughter from below, around the little moguls that were starting to form in a clearing of the tree glade. “Hockey stop against the bump!” the instructor would call out, and my little girl in her pink helmet and pink coat and pink mittens would *swoosh* around one mogul and stop, her skis throwing a little spray of sparkly snow into the air. “Do it again! Hockey stop against the bump!” and she would turn the other direction and swoosh to another stop. And I, who had last entered a mogul field several years previously when skiing with Mark and he accidentally sent me into one (I had to climb out of it), listened and watched and then figured that if my five-year-old could do it, I could too.

The big boys are better than I am by now, but they want to ski with me at least a little bit anyway. (“Why, when I am so slow?” I asked the 11-year-old on the lift. “I have my reasons,” he replied mysteriously.) I spent some time with Mark and each of the others, and then he and the big boys went off together. One of the days they bought the all-mountain pass and skied over at Big Sky. Even though the eight-year-old crashes a lot and the eleven-year-old is naturally cautious, they both have a way of carrying themselves on their skis — natural and easy, at home. I enjoy skiing, but I only feel the way they look once in a while, when I happen to carve a few turns in a row just right, usually when I am trying to ski down to the base in a hurry to pick up a child from a lesson in two minutes, and so I am not thinking about how I am doing but only trying to go fast. The boys look like skiers. They are following their dad and loving every minute.

Meanwhile, the two-year-old spent a few hours in the slopeside child care center, three of the four days. Skiing trips with the family are a good object lesson in how one must balance the needs of everyone in the family, and how the balancing techniques evolve as families grow, and how each sibling has a different set of experiences by necessity. I never — never! — put my firstborn in hourly childcare settings with unfamiliar staff at that age, and he would not have gone happily into them. But when there is an eleven-year-old boy around who really want to ski with Mom and Dad, well — you know, I just don’t want to keep saying no to that until there are no more little babies around. Babies don’t keep, I always say, and — this is important — neither do eleven-year-old boys who want to ski with both their parents.

But by now, because of that different balancing, the two-year-old has had plenty of experience in hourly childcare settings and with new babysitters and the like, mostly with one or more of his siblings around, and occasionally by himself, and he didn’t seem to mind it at all (dropping him off is always touch and go, but Mark is good at waiting till he is enjoying a toy or a story and then sneaking away). So he had fun too, finger painting and eating applesauce and getting taken out in the snow with other children to watch the skiers, and the women on the staff told me that he didn’t fuss or worry, and he told me the names of the other children who were there each day (only two or three — busy season for Moonlight Basin hadn’t started yet).

On the last day we picked up the five-year-old from her morning lesson and had lunch together except for Mark — he slipped away so he could do one good solo run on the steeps up top, from the lift you have to hike to. Then all five of the skiers went for a few runs together. My daughter amazed her big brothers, who could not believe how well she could ski after three and a half days of lessons. She linked her turns smoothly across the slopes, and one time skied right down to my eight-year-old and made him flinch when she executed a perfect hockey stop, on a dime, inches before colliding with him. On these runs, we sent her down first, followed closely by Mark who was keeping an eye on her, then the two boys, and then I would come behind last, a sort of insurance against leaving any children behind. There was one moment, as we came down the shallower runout of a wide groomed intermediate-level slope, when I saw before me three of my children and my husband, crisscrossing each other back and forth across the hill, in their yellow and green and orange and pink coats, and the littlest pink one going just as fast and as smoothly as everyone else, and I wished I had a helmet cam or some other way to keep it going forever. We made this happen, he and I, and it is very good.

The five-year-old and I were going to stop early and go get the toddler, so the younger children wouldn’t be overtaxed and the bigger ones could get in a few last black-diamond runs with their dad. As we came down from our last run through the terrain park, my oldest shouted the toddler’s name. We turned and there he was in his pudgy little snow suit and hat, toddling toward us as fast as he could in his boots, calling out his brother’s name, the child-care teacher following with another little one by the hand. The little ones had been taken out to watch skiers and go for rides on the “magic carpet” (a conveyor belt that takes little beginners a few yards up the bunny hill, with or without skis). He was grinning from ear to ear and jumping with excitement to see his family on skis all around him, and his big brothers and sister gathered around him and cooed and picked him up and cheered.

That was obviously the end of my last run, so the five-year-old and I followed him back to the child-care center, and we took off our skis and gathered him up and went back to the rental condo for bathtime and hot chocolate and animal crackers while we waited for the daredevils to return.

Every family is different. I think, though, that it is good for all families to have some *thing* (many things, really) that helps define an identity as a family. We are a family who skis, among other things. The kids know it and say so, though I occasionally have to suppress the expression of it (“Our family doesn’t *like* snowboarders,” I overheard the five-year-old loudly announcing to her instructor near the start of a lesson). It doesn’t have to be skiing, it could be many other things. And you would think that it was kind of unimportant, just one sport that we all like together, compared to more important values that we want to pass on to our children. But you know, I think it gives us practice — practice passing on those values. We can see how it works with skiing, how the kids want to do it because we want to do it, how they want to do it well because they want to please us and also because it feels good to do it well for its own sake. We can see how if we are confident (as Mark is), we can teach them easily, and how if we are not so confident (as I am not), teaching them presents more of a challenge; and we can see what kinds of other teachers can help us along the way. We can see how these brothers and sisters encourage and challenge and goad each other, too — sometimes not so helpfully, but other times cheering each other on with genuine enthusiasm and admiration. As it goes with leaping little jumps and moving on to bigger ones, maybe it will go with the other skills and knowledge and values that we want to share.

And if not, at least when they are young adults, if we want them to visit us we can bribe them with lift tickets.

Here's the official statement from the USCCB: (as of late evening, February 10)

The Catholic bishops have long supported access to life-affirming healthcare for all, and the conscience rights of everyone involved in the complex process of providing that healthcare. That is why we raised two serious objections to the "preventive services" regulation issued by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in August 2011.

First, we objected to the rule forcing private health plans — nationwide, by the stroke of a bureaucrat's pen—to cover sterilization and contraception, including drugs that may cause abortion. All the other mandated "preventive services" prevent disease, andpregnancy is not a disease. Moreover, forcing plans to cover abortifacients violates existing federal conscience laws. Therefore, we called for the rescission of the mandate altogether.

Second, we explained that the mandate would impose a burden of unprecedented reach and severity on the consciences of those who consider such "services" immoral:insurers forced to write policies including this coverage; employers and schools forced to sponsor and subsidize the coverage; and individual employees and students forced to pay premiums for the coverage. We therefore urged HHS, if it insisted on keeping the mandate, to provide a conscience exemption for all of these stakeholders—not just the extremely small subset of "religious employers" that HHS proposed to exempt initially.

Today, the President has done two things.

First, he has decided to retain HHS's nationwide mandate of insurance coverage of sterilization and contraception, including some abortifacients. This is both unsupported in the law and remains a grave moral concern. We cannot fail to reiterate this, even as so many would focus exclusively on the question of religious liberty.

Second, the President has announced some changes in how that mandate will be administered, which is still unclear in its details. As far as we can tell at this point, the change appears to have the following basic contours:

·It would still mandate that all insurers must include coverage for the objectionable services in all the policies they would write. At this point, it would appear that self-insuring religious employers, and religious insurance companies, are not exempt from this mandate.

·It would allow non-profit, religious employers to declare that they do not offer such coverage. But the employee and insurer may separately agree to add that coverage. The employee would not have to pay any additional amount to obtain this coverage, and the coverage would be provided as a part of the employer's policy, not as a separate rider.

·Finally, we are told that the one-year extension on the effective date (from August 1, 2012 to August 1, 2013) is available to any non-profit religious employer who desires it, without any government application or approval process.

These changes require careful moral analysis, and moreover, appear subject to some measure of change. But we note at the outset that the lack of clear protectionfor key stakeholders—for self-insured religious employers; for religious and secular for-profit employers; for secular non-profit employers; for religious insurers; and for individuals—is unacceptable and must be corrected. And in the case where the employee and insurer agree to add the objectionable coverage, that coverage is still provided as a part of the objecting employer's plan, financed in the same way as the rest of the coverage offered by the objecting employer. This, too, raises serious moral concerns.

We just received information about this proposal for the first time this morning; we were not consulted in advance. Some information we have is in writing and some is oral. We will, of course, continue to press for the greatest conscience protection we can secure from the Executive Branch. But stepping away from the particulars, we note that today's proposal continues to involve needless government intrusion in the internal governance of religious institutions, and to threaten government coercion of religious people and groups to violate their most deeply held convictions. In a nation dedicated to religious liberty as its first and founding principle, we should not be limited to negotiating within these parameters. The only complete solution to this religious liberty problem is for HHS to rescind the mandate of these objectionable services.

We will therefore continue—with no less vigor, no less sense of urgency—our efforts to correct this problem through the other two branches of government. For example, we renew our call on Congress to pass, and the Administration to sign, the Respect for Rights of Conscience Act. And we renew our call to the Catholic faithful, and to all our fellow Americans, to join together in this effort to protect religious liberty and freedom of conscience for all.

I am not able to post much over the next two days.  Comments are open for discussion.  Consider these questions:  

(1) Is there a substantive difference between an employer being forced to buy coverage for a drug/procedure, and all insurers being forced to provide them at no cost to all people covered by their plans?

(2) Set aside the question of whether or not the rule is, as a policy matter, a good idea or a bad idea.  It was pretty obvious before that the rule was one that called for civil disobedience:  a Catholic hospital (for example) could not follow both the rule and its conscience except by shutting its doors.  Is that still the case?  Has this change created any plausible argument that Catholic institutions do not have the moral duty to disobey the law or shut down?  

(3) If religious institutions ought to have exemptions from insurance requirements, does it necessarily follow that individual employers (say, the owner of a hardware store or a fast-food chain) ought to have right-of-conscience exemptions?  Assume that the beliefs that motivate a request for exemptions are sincerely held.  

(4)  What about self-insured religious institutions?  And are there any health insurers that are religiously affiliated?  (I know we have our life insurance policies through the Knights of Columbus, so there are certainly some kinds of insurers that are religiously affiliated).  Does their conscience matter?

(5) Is this whole debate just a particularly clarifying way of getting to the heart of the question:  What is insurance for, anyway?  

I would have taken pictures, but that would have annoyed the kids more.  They weren't too happy about being left in the lobby of the community center with nothing but a foosball table and a few dollars for the snack machine, even for the twenty minutes it took me to go in and cast a vote in the straw poll and second a nomination for the delegate to the next step.  I offered to bring the kids in with me so they could view democracy at work, but they preferred to argue about the merits of Pop Tarts vs. Famous Amos cookies (which my eleven-year-old, amusingly, pronounced as "famous ammo" cookies).

It was nothing — nothing — like 2008 in there.  In 2008, the caucus was standing-room-only packed, mostly with Ron Paul supporters.  This time, there were about a dozen tables, one for each precinct in the Senate district, and around each table were folding chairs — as few as eight (mine) and as many as 25.  People sat and chatted amiably about candidates and issues.  I saw all ages represented, almost as many women as men, and (while I didn't stop to take a detailed census) it was a fairly racially diverse crowd as well.  Probably not quite as diverse as the neighborhood we all live in, but more than I had expected.  I got the impression that the younger people were skewed more toward Paul and the older people more toward Romney.

My precinct table only had eight people, but three of us were toting toddlers.   I thought that was interesting.

"What do you have to say?" the gray-ponytailed man next to me asked as I took my seat awkwardly, shifting the two-year-old in the sling.  I said I came more to listen than to talk, which was true.  Unfortunately, I had that thing going where I had three kids out in the next room and one kid wriggling on my lap.  I'm sitting here with my fingers on the keyboard trying to record here the comments I heard people articulating, and I just realized I can't reproduce them because, I think, my higher brain functions were all going to keep tabs on the kids.   I did form impressions, though.

Santorum:  respected, intelligent uncompromising, but not judged by my tablemates to be electable because of the perception of being too religious.  

Paul:  similar to Santorum in that he is principled and uncompromising, but judged by my tablemates to be more electable because his principles do not come quite so obviously from a religion.  

Romney:  part of the problem, emblematic of the broken system that is the collusion  of big government and big money; but could probably get the job done.

The fourth candidate might as well have been called "He Who Shall Not Be Named" because nobody even mentioned him.

Not that the table was uniform in its judgments — there was one guy who steadfastly insisted that all the candidates were equally awful, and he wrote in "Arne Carlson" for his straw-poll vote.  

That is about as far as I got before I judged I had made the kids suffer enough (okay, before I heard the five-year-old wailing because she didn't have any bubble gum) and bowed out.  But I'm really glad I showed up.  One of these days I may actually offer to be the delegate — I might have done it this time, but our family's going camping that weekend.

You could have knocked me over with a feather when it turned out that Santorum was such a clear winner in Minnesota.  I mean, I guess it makes some sense now that I think about it — I mean, it's not like the character of the state as a whole is representatively reflected in the sample that is "people who actually show up to a party caucus."  The state as a whole tends to vote Democratic pretty reliably, and I'm in the center of the metro area, so I never expect any segment to lean conservative — I reflexively expect to see moderate-to-left views most of the time, since that is what I am surrounded by.

UPDATE.  Here's a decent and probably-accurate summary of why it isn't that crazy that Santorum swept Minnesota.  I would just like to point out that Romney won the state's caucuses in 2008, though, when there were still more socially conservative candidates in the field, so it's not like they reliably yield the most conservative option.