My family is not a Martha Stewart family. I do not understand the purpose of doilies and I cannot fathom why anyone would spend hours making cookie dough when Nestle already cooked up a batch.
My family is a Betty Crocker quick mix family. For Christmas dinner, we order Chinese take out. I love it. Kyle shovels out the sticky white rice. Melissa makes a “salad” out of crunched up fortune cookies and squiggly lo mein noodles. Sheila stabs her fork into the carton with meat. I savor the sweet and sour chicken.
Christmas dinner with our Chinese take out is blissfully perfect.
But then, we tie on our apron strings, sneeze out flour, and for Christmas, we become Martha Stewarts as we make homemade doughnuts.
It is the one time of year our culinary ambitions come to life in the form of rising warm bread and spitting hot oil.
The Family Doughnut rules:
· You are only allowed to make homemade doughnuts on Christmas Eve.
· You must stuff your face with the doughnuts until you put Santa’s own appetite to shame.
· If Dear Jolly Old Saint Nick takes more than his allotted two doughnuts we leave on a plate for him, he is on our own kind of list.
We spend Christmas Eve rolling out the dough until the warm, yeasty smell fills the kitchen. The kitchen smells like a hearth with dry cracking oats and sweet syrup. We savor our doughnuts because this is the only time of the year, with no exception, that we make our homemade dougnuts.
Today, I may have broken this rule.
I did not want to go out into the Old City. I spent the morning helping paint a mural at a special needs school My feelings about that are simply too long to put into this blog post, so that will be for another day. But simply: I loved the morning. I loved being at that school. It was where I needed to be. But I needed to study. I still need to study. Desperately. So after lunch, Kaylie promised: we would just go out for doughnuts at the shuk (aka the open market) and then go home to study. So I agreed.
Off we went.
I wrapped myself up in all my sweaters, because I just can’t stand the cold wind on my chicken skin. Kaylie, Suzy, and I brought our pink and green baggie lunches out to the terrace and ate out on the lawn. We finished our pitas and sandwiches then munched on the chocolate muffins (aka cupcakes) we smuggled from the cafeteria this morning, and the sun came out.
By the time we walked the hill to the Old City, the curls on my head were starting to stick to my forehead.
So I started to take off my big hoodie sweater in the middle of a crowd.
Bad idea.
A boy behind me called out, “Ahhhh!” and other boys started yelling.
I quickly shoved my sweater back down past my belly.
Lesson learned: Do not partially undress in the middle of the street in Israel.
We dawdled along the streets of West Jerusalem. Suzy saw a ruby red pea coat, with pomegranate red buttons, and a licorice red belt hanging in a store window. Of course, we stopped. And, of course, we each tried on the bright red pea coat. We admired and cooed at our fashionable reflections in the mirror, but the price tag was just too much. The woman at the store chased us down the street, jabbing a finger in our direction and ordered us into a dark alley to re-negotiate the price…so we had to run.
We dawdled some more down the street. I found another hat. But this one is like a gypsy hat with bits of fabric trailing behind the tag. Of course, I bought it.
Finally, with my gypsy hat tucking my hair all around ears and shoulders, we made it to the open market for our doughnuts.
It smelled like warm, rising yeast. And sugar crumbs. And soft, doughy moist bread.
We had a large order: 17 doughnuts. No, no we already get these doughnuts for ourselves every day so these 17 weren’t all for us. I needed to get some for the girls I visit and teach. Suzy did too. And Kaylie needed to get enough for her entire family home evening group. And other people who heard we were going asked us to pick some up for them (we are all obsessed with the shuk’s doughnuts).
When the shop owner heard our order, he just grinned, and invited us into the place. He tossed a few more grapefruit sized balls of dough into a vat of oil and then invited us to help. I took over the job of flipping the balls of dough in the oil. The liquid hissed and sizzled as I tried to maneuver the wooden spoon under the fleshy dough balls. Kaylie and Suzy busily pumped a few of the cooked doughnuts full of sticky strawberry jelly. The shop owner dusted our order with a snowfall of powder sugar.
He seemed to take a sense of pride in his little shop. I kept trying to flip over a glob of dough in the oil and it wouldn’t budge. He stepped over as I tried to maneuver the wooden spoon.
“Faster, faster,” he said, “bloop, bloop.”
I kept trying to “bloop” the dough balls and eventually I turned over the white blobs to their dark moon sides.
Next time, maybe I will just powder the doughnuts.
The shopkeepers helped us take all of our pictures. I think they were having just as fun as we were.
We walked away from the store with a box full of seventeen doughnuts. Then, with the doughnuts in our arms, we continued our search for ruby red pea coats. I still felt like a gypsy, wandering the streets of Israel, licking the sugar and strawberry goo off my fingers.
Today was the kind of day I treasure.
I want to wrap up today.
I want to bake today inside of a jelly-filled doughnut.
Then, on days, which are not so jelly-filled, I will unwrap my doughnut, take a bite, and remember a jelly-filled day.
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