How Baking For Others Led Me Back To My Values

MY MOM'S WILDLY INAUTHENTIC KHARCHO RECIPE

In today’s personal essay, I want to share my story of how baking for other people helped me find what my true values are at a time in my life when I was completely lost.

At the end of the newsletter this week, you can find a recipe for mom’s wildly inauthentic Kharcho—a category of traditional Georgian dishes. Generally, Kharcho refers to soups or stews made most commonly with beef, a khmeli-suneli seasoned broth, and a spicy kick. Kharcho is considered a type of Georgian spicy beef stew. I’m including a how-to video at the bottom! Enjoy!

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I STARTED BAKING for others back in 2017. Looking back it was probably one of the best decisions of my life. It was a little over 6 months into my first 9 to 5 job as an Academic Advisor at the University of Texas at Austin.

I officially left my PhD program at the end of spring 2016 semester. I came across a position for an academic advisor in the College of Liberal Arts. I decided to apply and after a couple rounds of interviews, I got the job. My transition into a “real people job” was not easy. To be honest, I am still transitioning. At that time, I was still grieving the loss of my identity as a scholar as well as processing the complete disillusionment I experienced of the academic world. I struggled, as do many other humanities PhD students, adjusting my life and lifestyle from a “free” spirited ideas driven researcher to a 9 to 5 office lifestyle of ROIs, KPI, etc. I’m one of those people who loves but also dreads structure. Having a set schedule for longer than a semester did help me worry less. There was more certainty in my life compared to my graduate school days where your fate was completely unknown at the end of each semester. But after a year and half, the repetitiveness of a set job schedule started to weigh heavy on me. The process of waking up at 7 a.m., biking to work, working 4 hours, eating lunch, working another 4 hours, and biking back home, was not making me happy. It is just all too normal.

The real reason I was struggling was because leaving my PhD program meant I had to construct a new professional identity for myself. The thing about academia though is that it has a tendency to bleed into your personal identity and self-worth. If I wasn’t a PhD student, who was I? If I wasn’t going to pursue a career in academia, what career was I going to pursue? If I wasn’t going to write academic books for a living, how could I continue writing? In other words, I was trying to figure out WHO I WAS. I was trying to figure out what mattered to me, what my values were, and what motivated me and my work.

As I was grappling with these questions, I was baking more and more with each week. There was something about baking that felt natural or straightforward. You follow the recipe. You watch technique videos. You buy the ingredients. Best of all, you get to eat the end product! As I baked more and more, there seemed to always be extra sourdough loaves in the house, the freezer was full! One day, I can’t recall what gave me the idea, I decided to bring the extra loaves of bread to the office with me. I usually ate my lunch in the English faculty lounge since it has a bunch of counter space, microwaves, coaches to nap on, and most important of all it, a coffee machine! As soon as I got to the office, I took off my helmet, ran up the stairs to the lounge, cut up the bread, laid it out on one of the tables, and sprinted back to my office.

My heart was beating so fast, I thought it was going to burst through my shirt. I even forgot to write a note, letting people know that the bread is up for grabs, but I was too nervous to go back up in case someone would see me in the lounge. As the morning went on I forgot all about the sourdough until Tom popped into my office reminding me that it’s lunch time. It was time to face my fears and go into the lounge to heat up our lentil curry. As we unlocked the door to the faculty lounge a couple of faculty members were there discussing the mysterious bread that was in the lounge. By that point all of the slices were gone. I was in shock. Still feeling quite anxious, I didn’t reveal to the faculty that I was the secret bread baker.

At that point in my baking journey nobody besides my partner Tom and my sister Sveta had tried my breads. Towards the end of lunch hour, a couple more folks came in and commented on the delicious surprise they found in the morning. I finally got the courage to confess and take ownership of the mystery sourdough. Faculty who have spoken less than two words to me, were struggling to contain their excitement about how much they enjoyed the bread. I honestly couldn’t believe it at first. They liked my bread? They loved something I made? To be honest, I haven’t felt that feeling of fulfillment in a very long time. I have written plenty of academic papers by that point but I have never seen a faculty member this excited about anything I have written. I didn’t realize at the time that faculty weren’t allowed to display excitement (emotion) when it relates to academic work, that would not be very scholarly of them now would it. My sourdough on the other hand was making people smile. Something I made was making people experience feelings of happiness and joy.

After that first sourdough bread sharing experience, I got the courage to bring more and more of my baked goods into the office. Eventually, my name became synonymous with sourdough. My partner was working at the Harry Ransom Center, our buildings were literally next door to one another, at the time and he started to bring some of our excess goodies and leave them in his lounge for the HRC folks to enjoy. Little by little people started to ask Tom if they could buy the bread from me. I gladly said yes. So I started to sell sourdough bread to my and Tom’s colleagues. One loaf led to another and soon I was baking every weekend. Tom and I would bring some of the loaves to work with us as deliveries to people in our departments. The word started to spread and people from other parts of campus started to ask for loaves.

The amount of joy I felt baking for other people is hard to articulate into words. When I looked at people’s faces as they were talking about the bread, I could see the joy that eating the bread brought them. I was responsible for bringing an ounce of joy into other people’s lives with my baked goods. Something clicked. I remember that what drove my work as a graduate student/scholar/researcher wasn’t the content itself but the desire to share it with others! The desire to bring knowledge into the hands of others. To ponder, speculate, ask questions, and postulate theories about the ancient world. All of these things only mattered if I could share them. They only mattered if one of my questions or papers could trigger excitement or stimulate other people to grapple with the material.

It wasn’t the baking that mattered, it was how my baking made other people feel.

I had to overcome severe feelings of anxiety when it came to sharing my baked goods, very similar to the anxiety I experience when sharing my writing. And to be completely honest, I still get nervous with each order, but I know and feel confident in the fact that my baked goods can bring joy into people’s lives. My desire to bring happiness to people superseded my anxiety and nervousness. My feelings of inadequacy and powerlessness took the back seat while I was baking and now while I write. I was finally able to realize that my baking impacted other people in positive ways, bring a little joy into a world full of chaos, violence, pain, and genocide.

As I am writing more and more this year, I am starting to feel more confident in my writing and the positive impact it can have on other people. This past week a talented food writer and demo chef

LujanMV

wrote a beautiful essay on her Substack, Comer.Viajar.Hablar, about her mother, her mom’s vocation as a teacher, and cooking. You can read it here:

Lo que se hereda no se roba

LujanMV

shared with me that her idea for the essay came from a note I posted a couple weeks ago, asking if people’s moms actually taught them how to cook? The fact that something I wrote could inspire another author filled me with so much happiness. Sharing knowledge, recipes, and information is an act of caring. I want to connect people to ideas, modes of thinking, questions encouraging self-reflection, encouragement, and much more. I want to help people. I want to help enrich people’s lives and help people become more informed.

That’s all I ever wanted. To have a positive impact on other people’s lives.

Acts of kindness is what binds us as humanity. Without kindness, without paying it forward, without helping one another, the world will continue to fracture. The gap in income and wealth inequality will continue to grow. Let’s bring more kindness into our world. By inspiring, supporting, and sharing with one another the things that bring humanity joy.

RECIPE OF THE WEEK:

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MY MOM’S INAUTHENTIC KHARCHO SOUP

Ingredient List: 

• 2 lbs bone in chicken thighs or drumsticks

• 4 bay leaves

• 4 black peppercorns

• 4 whole allspice berries

• cilantro bouquet

• 8 to 10 cups water (Note*: Enough to submerge the bones)

• 2 tablespoons olive oil

• 1 large diced onion

• 28 ounce can of crushed, diced, or whole tomatoes

• 2 medium diced carrots

• 3 small chopped potatoes

• 1/3 cup medium or long grain rice

• 2 small diced red bell peppers

• 6 to 10 garlic cloves depending on the size

• Cilantro

• Rustic bread

Method: 

1. Place chicken in a 6-quart dutch oven or pot, now add bay leaf, peppercorns, allspice, and cilantro bouquet. Cover with 8 cups of water. (Make sure the chicken is covered with water if not add up to two more cups.) Place the pot on the stove over high heat and bring to a boil, now reduce heat, and simmer for an hour and a half to two hours or until the chicken falls off the bone.

2. In the meantime, heat up olive oil in a 9 to 11 inch pan over medium heat, add onion and cook for 12 to 15 minutes or until onion is soft. Add the whole can of tomatoes with the juices to the onion pan and cook for 20 to 30 minutes or until the sauce has thickened and the majority of the water has evaporated. Set aside.

3. Once the chicken is tender, add the cooked tomato sauce to the broth along with the carrots and potatoes. Cook for 20 to 30 minutes or until the carrots and potatoes are tender.

4. 20 minutes into boiling the potatoes, add rice and bell peppers.

5. Once the rice is done cooking, grate the garlic straight into the soup, cover with a lid, and turn off the heat. Let rest for 20 minutes.

6. Garnish individual bowls with cilantro and serve with a loaf of rustic bread (or any bread you have!)

   1. Don’t forget to remove the bay leaves and cilantro bouquet before serving.

BAKING NEWS:

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Orders are now open through May 31st.

NEW FLAVOR DROP! Peanut Butter! Coming next weekend!