Oops!

I like the skins on sweet potatoes. I enjoy their texture and I like knowing that there are nutrients in them. I also don’t particularly like peeling them. It adds an extra step that is not necessary, which makes a difference in the limited time I have to cook us a meal. But she doesn’t like them. If I leave the skins on anything — sweet potatoes, carrots, grapes, even chickpeas — she sticks out her tongue and spits until the offending characters out of her mouth. Perhaps the texture is too much for her smooth baby tongue. Or maybe she doesn’t have the right technique to adequately grind the skins down with these new teeth of hers. My job is to smooth the rough road ahead of her, so I peel the sweet potatoes before I put them in the food we will share.

I lived on Kauai for the past two years. During that time I never seemed to see the news. No one I knew had televisions and I almost never saw a paper. But as we are transitioning our life to Mexico, I have been stationed at my in-laws’ house in a suburban purgatory for a month. This is my vacation to the rest of the world. Here, the news is a part of life.

It’s not that I value being uninformed. Quite the contrary. It is that I value learning what I need to learn without taking a healthy dose of fear alongside it. It is possible to do this, though it does take a bit of work because everyone has a slant, including me.

When I was in my early twenties, I woke very, very early and hauled myself into a kitchen of a cafe in Boulder, Colorado. I flipped on the lights at 5:00 a.m., turned on the ovens, and spent my morning hefting gigantic trays of steaming muffins, pies, and cookies from back of house to front.

Baking has been in my DNA since I was born, and it was delicious fun to live out my childhood fantasies as a professional baker. But as much as I loved spreading the perfect cream cheese frosting on a carrot cake, this new direction kept appearing for me. At the same time I was learning to perfect my cheesecake recipe, I was learning about the effects of refined sugar on my body. I was whipping up layer cakes while doing candida cleanses, and suddenly it just fell apart. I left my job as a sugarplum drug dealer and sadly tucked my apron deep into the back of my pantry.