It's enough to lead anyone to stress eating, but I have a better solution for what ails us: stress baking, followed by the gifting of the results to anyone who wants some. This is not goal-oriented baking, not meant to celebrate a birthday, graduation, wedding, or promotion. It's a meditation with shared dessert at the end.
My home south of the Palisades survived the fires, but at one point my neighbors and I decided to make decisions by committee. We packed go-bags when the evacuation zone leapt toward us. We agreed not to leave when the new zone border stayed put for hours. We became a care team -- and in the days that followed, I felt the need to do something for them beyond comparing notes about air purifiers.
So I baked a cornmeal and sour-cherry cake and told them to come by with plates. I love to bake; put a homemade dessert in front of someone and watch their cares melt away, if only for a moment. But this was different. This was cake that somehow promised life on the other side of fear, however long it takes to get there.
For Inauguration Day, I chose an Italian rice-and-citrus cake from a recipe that belonged to the mother of a chef I know. An impractical choice, because it's a very big cake, but when my neighbors weren't around I reached out to other friends nearby and drove a curbside delivery route.
It fixed nothing, except that it did what dessert always does. It made people feel special because they had a treat -- it revived them at a moment when the gap between daily life and joy was stretched almost to breaking.
This makes no sense if you're a catastrophist who scoffs at the small gesture, whose reaction to the decent act is a world-weary "Oh, please." You can stop here.
But there's good news for those of you with the best of intentions and no idea what to do with a whisk: Baking is hardly the only thing that helps when we feel overwhelmed. I was dismayed, at first, to see that my cellphone use doubled in the days after I first noticed billowing gray smoke in my rearview mirror -- until I realized that much of my time was spent responding to email and text inquiries. Concerned messages rippled out in concentric circles, from extended family to current and former work colleagues, former students, and a guy I got in trouble with at our eighth-grade dance.
Strangers struck up conversations just to have someone to chat with, which required no ingredients at all, and better still, no cleanup.
I hope that soon we'll feel less frightened of the very air we breathe here in Los Angeles and will return to restaurants, which are struggling even as they step up to provide thousands of meals to first responders and evacuees. But there will always be stress cake at my house, or a lattice-top pie, or those bar cookies that truly take 10 minutes to make, because there is always the need for human outreach, whether it's a cake or a text or a dinner reservation for four. I showed another masked woman watching the sunset how to install the Watch Duty app on her phone, to monitor the fires, and felt better all the way home.
Baking won't clear toxic waste or protect people who are "scared," to use the word chosen by Washington, D.C., Episcopal Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde in her inaugural prayer service comments. In a very big and uncertain context, it's a very small thing. In aggregate, though, very small things will help to get us through. I'm not one of those people who looks for the silver lining in moments as desperate as these, but food is about comfort as well as nutrition; and something homemade is kindness on a plate; why not feed people to help them get through the day?