In this time of seemingly endless, unmarked days where a calendar is a relic of a pre-pandemic life, few things mark my days like baking. I know it’s a Thursday when I take my sourdough starter out of the fridge to feed it for a couple of days, strengthening it enough so I can make my dough by Saturday and bake bread on Sunday. It’s given my week a grounding intentionality when so much of the world feels tenuous.

I’m not alone in using baking as therapy, evidenced by the scarcity of flour and yeast at area grocery stores. On the third week of the lockdown, when I couldn’t find yeast in stores, I did some research and made my own starter. (A starter, for the uninitiated, is fermented dough filled with natural, wild yeast and a bacteria called lactobacilli. It’s a leavener and can be used for making just about anything calling for yeast.)

My starter took about 10 days to mature. I watched over it as carefully as I did my own baby, feeding it every 12 hours with exact measurements of flour and water. It was a marvel to watch it harness the wild yeast that’s all around us.

Over the past three months, my kitchen has become a timekeeper of sorts: From that one starter I’ve marked the weeks with sourdough loaves, cinnamon rolls, bagels, sliced bread and pancakes. It’s been a lifeline to the outside world, too. I’ve given jars of starter to friends, doing the hand-off at my front door, or mailing dehydrated flakes to friends across the country.

Local food writer Marisa Finetti also began her baking journey during a time of great significance—when she was about to give birth to her first child 18 years ago. “I remember this pretty well, because it was the first real cake that I made from scratch. … I started making it as soon as my labor pain started. I made a triple-layer chocolate cake from scratch with a buttercream frosting. And I brought it to the hospital on the day of the delivery and gave it to the nursing staff.”

These past few weeks, Finetti has been focused on perfecting a lemon cake recipe, tweaking an ingredient here and there, baking it over and over until it’s just right. “It’s not unusual for me to bake a cake and then taste it and immediately know what I have to do the next time around,” she says. “I’m very obsessive; I want it to be just right.”

Baking requires a kind of attention and patience that was hard to find in an overstuffed life pre-pandemic. Now, with nowhere to be, I can spend entire days in complete vigilance of mydough, witnessing a kind of alchemical sorcery taking place before me. Who knows what our new normal will look like once we emerge from our shelters? For me, I know what I’m doing on Thursday.

Recipe: Chocolate Chip Cookies

New to baking? It doesn’t get any easier than the classic Nestle Toll House chocolate chip cookie, a crowd-pleasing recipe that whips up fast and is practically foolproof. Make a double batch, and freeze uncooked dough shaped like a log in the freezer. Next time the craving strikes, simply slice and bake.

Ingredients:

• 2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour

• 1 teaspoon baking soda

• 1 teaspoon salt

• 1 cup (2 sticks) butter, softened

• 3/4 cup granulated sugar

• 3/4 cup packed brown sugar

• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract

• 2 large eggs

• 2 cups (12-ounce package) Nestlé Toll House Semi-Sweet Chocolate Morsels

• 1 cup chopped nuts (optional)

Directions: Preheat oven to 375˚. Combine flour, baking soda and salt in small bowl. Beat butter, granulated sugar, brown sugar and vanilla extract in large mixer bowl until creamy. Add eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition. Gradually beat in flour mixture. Stir in morsels and nuts. Drop by rounded tablespoon onto ungreased baking sheets. Bake for 9-11 minutes or until golden brown. Cool on baking sheets for 2 minutes.