A Place in My Oven

Home smells like banana bread

I made a banana bread today.

This was the first thing I baked in my new apartment. It felt like a christening of sorts; as if injecting clouds of banana smells into my living space was my way of declaring the new territory as my own, of making a tiny college apartment into a home.

It would be spurious for me to say I haven’t had my waves of obsession when it comes to baking. I simply love the act of putting ingredients together to create sweet food that is equally as nourishing as it is delicious. Of course, most baked goods are not particularly of the nourishing kind, and as such my baking always falls into some synthesis of the subcultures of vegan, gluten free, refined sugar free, grain free, oil free, and paleo variety. I am also very sparse on utensils, tools, and counter space in my tiny Boston apartment, so my baking likewise needs to fall into the category of being made in just 1 bowl, under 30 minutes, and with ingredients that won’t break the bank.

How can I be infatuated with baking with the limitations described above, you ask? Well… there is actually a wealth of knowledge on the internet about all of the wonderful recipes that do fit all of this criteria. It’s become so second nature for me, in fact, that when I see my fruit going bad I instantly can allocate time in the afternoon to make a crumble, or on finding some fresh dates at the market can recollect how much of the other ingredients I have on hand to make a basic granola bar recipe. Baking is automatic for me and very satisfying. I also eat everything I bake and never let any of it go to waste. This actually saves me from creating excess trash (every snack/meal not eaten out is plastic, cardboard, and more saved) and there is often no waste at all when it comes to baking since most basic ingredients either use their skin as their wrapper (like fruit) or last long enough to make a good use of the plastic containers they come in.

Baking also is a practice of control: each ingredient’s displacement from the prescribed amount will alter the outcome, ever so slightly. To be a great baker is to know your limits, and it adjust the product midway if something doesn’t seem right and trust your intuition on making minute changes. 

I really first found baking when I decided that part of my identity would be being a very healthy eater. This of course meant that many of the things I used to love to eat would be cut out of my diet. To replace them, I started seeking out recipes that were vegan — and was surprised to find many that were vegan, healthy, and actually tasted delicious. Making these first recipes was my eureka moment. I became hooked, and baking became a core part of how I ran my everyday life, how I rejuvenated on the weekends, how I became in tune with a version of myself that I liked the most.

Life did throw me curve balls, though, this time in the form of a coming-of-age urge to adopt new identities, from which travel, experience, and chaos ensued. I cast baking, along with other things, aside to make room for the new person I was becoming. This was good sport, at first. Though it was in deviating from the things I loved so much — and the eventual return them, as of just this month — that I realized how powerful it is to find something that you love, that fills you with joy and purpose, and how on finding things like this in life it is so so so important to never let them go. It’s easy for young people to dismiss good things and take them for granted, for the world is so big and vast and as an emerging recent graduate I had only uncovered a tiny morsel of it. How could I trust anything I knew, when the gargantuan world surely held truer truths than all I had come to know?

But just because you know nothing doesn’t mean that you don’t know yourself. Practicing baking, something that brought me such joy, was how I retuned myself, how I realized just how far I had gone and that it was time for me to rekindle my flame. That is what hobbies and passions do for us: they help us rekindle our flame by lighting sparks of happiness in our lives every time we do them. What I once denounced as a basic, dare I say it girly hobby, I now view as one of my greatest strengths, and not just because I make one of the best vegan gluten-free refined-sugar-free banana breads on the planet, but because I have something which I know will be a rock in my life despite where I am, how old I am, who my friends are, and what my future aspirations unfold into.

My wish for you, dear reader, is to consider that in your life which speaks to you. That you view as a mentor, a teacher, a guidance, even though that thing might be an action or a practice that you yourself are doing, and be so grateful you have found it. If you don’t have something of this sort yet, that is okay. But I urge you to not stop trying new things until you find it. We live in a world of prescriptions; of people we are supposed to be, jobs we are supposed to work, social pressures we will never escape like ever before. Having that which brings grounding and simplicity to our lives is a gift and a blessing.

So, to my banana breads, cookies, scones, biscuits, and granola, this is my love letter to you. I am forever grateful to the way you transform a house into a home. I am grateful for that which you’ve showed me about how healthy food really can taste just as wonderful as the alternative, and I’m grateful to you for inspiring me to become a lifelong learner in the art and creation of baked goods. It’s to you I owe a part of my identity, and to you I look to when life grows tumultuous. Thank you for having a place in my oven.