Sonya Cheney

Writer. Witch. Creatrix.

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before it was cool.

April 25, 2020 by Sonya Cheney Leave a Comment

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In November, I started watching Jenna Fischer’s bread baking videos on Instagram, which lead me to ordering Bonnie Ohara’s Bread Baking for Beginners—previously mentioned in my eight-hour no-knead bread post—and diving headfirst into the world of bread baking.

I’d been making bread for a while before then: a bulgur wheat recipe that I got in college and still love; the occasional homemade pizza; one cinnamon-raisin loaf so successful that our dog ate all but one slice in a single go. I love bread (who doesn’t?), and in my years-long effort to become a self-reliant homesteader, bread became one of the skills being added to my repertoire. It wasn’t until November, though, when that perfect book came into my life that my love of the loaf really started to blossom.

Then the pandemic hit, and now everyone and their brother seems to be making bread on Instagram, and I’m not going to lie—I feel a little less cool now.

I can’t begrudge anyone making the best of a bad situation and learning to fend for themselves even in this small way. Making bread is a cool skill and, like I said, who doesn’t love bread? Any time someone mentions to me, even in passing, that they want to learn to bake bread, it’s all I can do to stop myself from shoving a copy of Bread Baking for Beginners into their hands. I would gladly buy a copy for every person I know if I could afford it. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t that small part of me, some holdover from being a teenager no doubt, that gets a little disgruntled by the nineteenth photo of bread I scroll past on Instagram in one sitting. (Granted, one sitting could be quite a long time.)

It’s always been a part of my personality, this wanting to be seen as unique in some way or another, but the reality is that it’s near impossible to truly be unique. I might be the only Me in the world, but I’m not the only person who loves to bake, who loves to knit, who loves cats, has a son, is a witch, wears size six and a half shoes, or some combination of any of those traits. And the funny thing is that there are plenty of people who were, say, baking bread before I was and who I thought were cool for doing so—who’s to say I wasn’t that same person to someone else? Who’s to say I’m not still?

Being inside your own head and forgetting to explore other people’s perspectives can be detrimental in so many ways, big and small. We know that seeing the world at large from another person’s point of view can be helpful; that’s something we’re taught in elementary school. But we don’t always remember to think about how our own world, on a personal level, looks to someone else, unless it’s in a self-conscious way.

What if they don’t like what I’m doing?
What do they think of my outfit?
What if I’m too much or not enough?

I think it could be important to start thinking about the positive ways people can see us, the positive effects we can have on others even if we don’t know it’s happening.

Maybe someone will make their own version of this.
I wonder if anyone will have questions.
I’ll add some recommendations in case anyone wants to learn more about this.

The people I admire the most—specifically on Instagram, since that’s where I spend most of my time—are ones I consider cool because I learn from them. They inspire me to try new skills and hobbies, and they inspire me to get better, to do better, to stop worrying so much. If I was baking bread “before it was cool,” then maybe someone saw it, and it inspired them to bake their own. Or maybe it didn’t. But it shouldn’t be a competition either way. Too many things are competitive when they don’t need to be, and I shouldn’t turn bread into another one of those things for no reason other than my own ego. Like the people that I, even in the last year of my twenties, look up to, I need to just do my thing and fuck everything else.

I need to just let them bake bread.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: baking, bread, personal

comfort in creation.

March 28, 2020 by Sonya Cheney Leave a Comment

If I’m being honest, my daily life hasn’t changed as much as so many others in the wake of the pandemic. I’ve never had much tendency to leave the house in the first place; even when I would be exceptionally bored and think, “Maybe I’ll just go to Barnes & Noble and browse for a little while,” I would inevitably find myself still at home and before I knew it the day would be over. The biggest changes have come in the form of Dan working from home for the foreseeable future and the constant unknown of what he’ll actually manage to come back with from the grocery store, not matter what I put on the list.

I’ve always been a homebody, and I’m okay with that. I’m one of the people all of the introvert/pandemic memes are referencing on Instagram. But even though I was made for a life at home all day, every day, I’ve still been on a roller coaster of discomfort and anxiety over the past couple of weeks. Some days I feel hopeful and confident; other days, I check the news. Sometimes, it just doesn’t feel worth it to stay informed.

Although I’m doing pretty much all of my usual stuff each day, the small, normal things have taken on even more meaning for me. Being able to bake my own bread (something an astounding number of people have started doing), knitting, even starting my small herb garden have all helped me get through each day and feel like I have some semblance of control and…not significance, exactly, but something like it.

In all my love for oddities and the macabre, I of course find myself going down conspiracy theory rabbit holes every once in a while, though I would far from consider myself a conspiracy theorist. I’m more like a casual observer, and I scoff at most conspiracy theories after researching them. I’ve come up with my own surrounding the pandemic, but they come entirely from my own imagination so they’re more personal entertainment than anything; however, this entire situation has cemented my homesteading dreams. For years I’ve wanted to make my way into a slower, more self-sufficient lifestyle. We had our own little brood of chickens a few years ago, and I still love the experience of collecting the eggs and just hanging out with the chickens. (Sometimes they were friendly enough that they would even jump into my lap, which, as an animal lover, I had such a blast discovering!) There is nothing quite like eggs so fresh the yolk is blinding.

Of course, there’s also nothing like picking up a little box of technology, taptaptapping a screen, and connecting with an endless number of people. I have no intention of disconnecting. I may be an introvert, but I’m not a hermit.

In this scary and uncertain period that we’re all going through, I’ve found so much comfort in not only being able to maintain my usual habits, but also in using my skills to help keep my family going. I can cook for us. I can keep us warm. I can take care of the baby. I have a role to play and a way to keep busy, and my skills and hobbies aren’t useless, even if it has felt like they were for so long. As someone whose work is often creative and abstract with no immediate monetary payoff, if any, it’s hard to justify how I spend my days in a capitalist society. In this time of crisis—whether you believe it’s big or small or you’re not even sure anymore—it’s reassuring to know that the things I do that don’t make money are still worthwhile.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: baking, bread, homesteading, knitting

bread baking | eight-hour no-knead bread

February 1, 2020 by Sonya Cheney Leave a Comment

Months ago, I started following Jenna Fischer on Instagram only to discover that she is obsessed with baking bread. I’m not sure how I didn’t know that beforehand, but whatever. My status of being behind the times is not the point of this post. The point is to share the fact that Jenna’s obsession quickly turned into my obsession, and maybe a week or two after following and binge watching all of her bread-related Instagram highlights, I ordered a few supplies for myself and got to baking.

Sort of.

I ordered Bonnie Ohara’s Bread Baking for Beginners in late November, and since then I’ve made exactly three (3) loaves of bread–and two of them were the same recipe. Yes, having a small child in the house who often demands my undivided attention is a pretty good excuse, but still–I want to bake all the bread, dammit! Even if he can’t quite eat it yet, Dan and I sure as hell can, and when I do get around to baking a loaf, boy do we. One of our favorite dinners lately has been a good loaf of bread, fig jam, and goat cheese. That’s it, unless we decide to go really wild and add some olives and salami. But just those three keep me perfectly content.

Anyway, I recently finally had the chance to try my second recipe in the book, the eight-hour fermentation no-knead bread. What I love about the book is not only how much I learn, but how much it focuses on precision to get your loaf just right. I’ve made a pretty good amount of bread over the years, but I’ve only recently really committed to not only weighing my ingredients but also checking the temperature of them. Doing this in the winter in a somewhat drafty house can make it a little challenging at times, but it’s still amazing the difference it makes and the results that I’ve gotten so far.

Dan suggested after the first loaf that I should make a scrapbook for the breads I bake throughout the book–especially since I’m just baking my way through in a linear fashion, building foundation skills to add to as I go–and I definitely think I’ll be doing just that. I’ve become so enamored of travelers notebooks lately, and along with that, one of my goals this year is to get back to using my dSLR camera again, so I think it’s a great way to combine all of these loves.

I’ve got this funny little dream of a very rustic life, being a writer with a farmhouse and a good-sized garden to feed us. Baking bread is a big part of that dream; it’s simple, but it’s wholesome. It is, in fact, very hygge. Basically, I just want to be a hobbit.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: baking, bread, slow living

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