Category: creative reinvention

Fellow reinventors, a long while back I wrote about baking as a form of spontaneous creativity.

Well, sweet Georgia Brown if I didn’t find more justification for the art of mixing flour, sugar, eggs, [yeast, if you’re leaning toward bread], and heat.

The Rise of Anxiety Baking

Thank you, The Atlantic and writer Amanda Mull.

A few favorite quotes:

• “It’s nice to be able to bake and know that I’m creating something that has a beginning and an end and people can enjoy it,” she [Folu Akinkuotu] says. “A lot of people have jobs that traffic in ideas or theoretical things, so it’s nice to make physical things.”
• “…baking does indeed force you to put down your phone, get your hands dirty, and pay close attention to what you’re doing.”
• “Most baked goods still taste good even if they’re not perfectly executed…”

Need a little nudge into the kitchen and engage in a little culinary reinvention?

Easy cookie recipes from Bon Appetit

MarthaStewart.com’s Easiest Cookie Recipes

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Here is the repeat of my post entitled, Celebrate spontaneous creativity.

Those can be magical moments.

For me, it happens most often in the kitchen.

Why? Consider all the available tools and ingredients.

And then there’s the love of food.

And spontaneity can also be fed by the time of day or the day of the week.

Sunday afternoons are a time for baking. Sure it’s fun to thumb through a cookbook or launch a Google search for quick and easy coffee cake [a more-than-occasional venture at our house], but it’s just as fun to use the recipe as a foundation for experimentation.

Case in point: Last Saturday morning.

I was all set for our traditional jaunt to the local farmer’s market. But I didn’t feel like waiting for breakfast.

Someone once proposed that hunger was the mother of invention. I think it was me.

The next thing I knew, amidst a cloud of two kinds of flour, a little corn meal mush, separated eggs, and the other expected ingredients, I had set up a waffle station. Soon after came the colby cheese for one batch, the almonds and dried cranberries for another. [The true miracle, however, was forgetting to add chocolate chips for ‘she who must have chocolate’.]

Soapbox time: We retirees should revel in times like this. Remember…’try new’.

I looked up ‘spontaneous creativity’ and there is a book with that title, but I was drawn instead to this 2013 post from Scott Myers:

That is where relying on our creativity is most important. This implies a kind of trust in our creative instincts and that implies having worked with our creativity enough to learn to trust it.

But in truth if we trust in our creativity, we can surprise ourselves with moments of deep insight to help us perform to our best ability.

Okay, waffles aren’t exactly a deep insight, nor was my dinner tonight, which was supposed to be bangers and mash, but ended up as mustard greens/caramelized onion/sausage/sun dried tomatoes swimming in a chicken broth base, topped with a splash of balsamic vinegar, served over a bed of cavatelli.

But while not profound or life-changing, the spontaneous creativity can’t be denied.