You don’t forget to eat, do you?

By nature, at least by circulation, I have cold hands. Sometime in October the tips of my fingers begin to lose their heat, then my knuckles and the second joints and my palms down to the wrist, and they all stay cold until the middle of May. Not that they are ever hot in summer, so much as less cold than they are in winter. On a really frigid day it is not uncommon, if I am riding in a friend’s car, to find that the windows on his side are fogged over with condensation but the windows on my side remain perfectly clear. Apparently I don’t give off much heat. 

I am used to the cold. It is comforting even, but occasionally my hands wander somewhere unexpected and cause a shock. At least two persons I have dated – each with no direct knowledge of the other I am pretty sure – have called me cold like an icicle. I don’t think either meant the phrase as a compliment, and the charge used to sting. But not long ago, as I was cradling my flush cheeks in my cool palms, reviewing my dating history, the old adage about good bakers and cold hands came to mind. I remembered an oncologist I met a few years ago, a specialist in pancreatic cancer, a mild-mannered man with a pleasing face and voice that were especially suited to delivering bad news. How I made some pecan brioche rolls for him to take on a plane trip after only knowing him three days. How pleasing his voice sounded on the phone a couple of weeks later when he called to say he wasn’t going to see me again. 


I don’t know why I’d never thought of it before. Why I’d never wondered that butter pinched into flour between my fingers doesn’t feel more greasy. That milk chocolate doesn’t take my fingerprints. That puff pastry at least seems always so glad at my touch. That I am still mourning the loss of winter a bit. 

The middle of May is now gone and my hands are reaching their peak temperature, and to make matters worse earlier this week summer arrived full force. The humidity over twenty-four hours became so intense that everything paper in my apartment began to soften and expand at the same time. Not an attractive conjunction. The once stiff pages of the book in my hand I found bloated and melting stuck to each other.  


Restless I sought refuge in my kitchen. Standing in front of my open freezer, looking to catch a breeze, I recognized a Ziploc bag full of lemon turnovers. They were calling out to me, teasing me, daring me to fire up the oven. Torture! A long weekend and too hot and humid to bake. 


Yesterday the temperature dropped and the humidity passed, and sitting on my hands on the bus in the afternoon I knew what I had to do. As soon as I got home I brushed the turnovers with some half and half, sprinkled them with sugar, and into the oven they went. They’d been asleep in my freezer for seven or eight months at least, but thirty minutes at 375 degrees Fahrenheit and they tasted as sprightly awake as when I first made them.  


The magic of the puff pastry I find is in the creaminess of the layers. The outer few layers are flaky, but the pastry below the surface is surprisingly custardy. The sensation in the mouth is a bit like an éclair. Really I should make puff pastry more often, especially considering how much it loves my freezer, almost as much I think as I do.  


The lemon curd tends to bubble out during baking, so I just spoon it back into place.  

I am experimenting a bit with backdrops in the light box. Orange is my favorite color, so I gave it the first try. It isn’t as flattering of the lemon turnovers as I hoped, but not unpleasing either I think. Also I’ve been trying to figure out what season is Gabriel Porras, and so far have only ruled out fall, though I bet he could pull off an orange sweater if he wanted, and I would gladly help him.