Bad Hair Days



On my many work video calls, everyone has a different hair story. Some are lost behind hair. Others are unrecognizable in choppy haircuts which the rest of us politely ignore. There are no happy exclamations of "Oh! You cut your hair!". We silently commiserate with each other as we each deal with a never ending sequence of bad hair days. 

On family WhatsApp calls, aunts and uncles whose hair was resolutely black pre-pandemic, have aged in an instant, their hair stripped of color, as though coronavirus has washed out the dye.  

But I don't want to be the pot calling the kettle black (err..grey). My hair is, by no means, my crowning glory. I've never had very much of it. These dark times, and age don't help matters. I have stopped counting my grays. It is too depressing. In the early days of social distancing, I decided not to make matters worse by attempting a haircut. 

Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them. I was not born with barbery skills, and I never achieved them, but I certainly had barbery thrust upon me. My husband, who has a head full of hair, struggled with a problem very different from mine. His hair was threatening to take over his face. With social distancing keeping everyone else away, naturally, the task of cutting his luscious locks fell to me.

I held a section of hair between my fingers, as I have seen hairdressers do, and went snip, snip, snip. Something felt off, but I kept going. Half a haircut is worse than a bad haircut, I reasoned. The thing with cutting hair is that every action is irreversible, and the results are instant. As I kept going, I could see things getting worse and worse. I realized too late that hair is not to be cut in horizontal rows. When I was done, my husband ended up with steps of hair, sort of like this.


We quickly ordered a hair trimmer on Amazon, and used it as soon as it arrived. As I ran it over his head, hair fell in heavy clumps. There was no art involved. It was like shearing sheep. Like lawn-mowing. But the trimmer served the purpose, delivering a buzz cut that wiped out all traces of a homemade haircut gone wrong. 

The next day, at his weekly staff meeting, his colleagues (not being as polite as mine) said, "Oh! You cut your hair". 

He ran his fingers through his non-existent hair sheepishly. "Oh, my wife cut my hair", he said. 

He has always been good about giving credit where it is due. 

****

My latest hit recipe is one for plum torte. The recipe calls for plums, but really, any sort of stone fruit will work. I used peaches once, and plums on another occasion. The fruit is the best part of the cake, so I recommend you use it lavishly. The best way to layer the fruit slices is to have each slice overlap the next one slightly, so you can cram in the most fruit possible. I used part all purpose flour, and part almond flour once, and that turned out better than using all purpose flour alone. The recipe calls for baking time of approx. 1 hour, but my cake was ready in 45 minutes or so. The recipe doesn't call for vanilla extract, but I added it on one of my tries. Almond extract is also a nice touch. This is a very forgiving recipe that is also easy to execute. A winning combination. 



Here is the recipe, as written in The New York Times.

PLUM TORTE

INGREDIENTS

¾ to 1 cup sugar

½ cup unsalted butter, softened

1 cup unbleached flour, sifted

1 teaspoon baking powder

 Pinch of salt (optional)

2 eggs

24 halves pitted purple plums

Sugar, lemon juice and cinnamon, for topping

PREPARATION

Heat oven to 350 degrees.

Cream the sugar and butter in a bowl. Add the flour, baking powder, salt and eggs and beat well.

Spoon the batter into a springform pan of 8, 9 or 10 inches. Place the plum halves skin side up on top of the batter. Sprinkle lightly with sugar and lemon juice, depending on the sweetness of the fruit. Sprinkle with about 1 teaspoon of cinnamon, depending on how much you like cinnamon.

Bake 1 hour, approximately. Remove and cool; refrigerate or freeze if desired. Or cool to lukewarm and serve plain or with whipped cream. (To serve a torte that was frozen, defrost and reheat it briefly at 300 degrees.)


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