Time Is Fake, and So Is Chronology

At this point in the pandemic, there’s one thing we can all agree on. No, confoundingly, it isn’t that vaccines are the clearest way out of this fiasco, or that horse medicine is for horses — it’s that time isn’t real.

Is it a Saturday when I’m writing this? Is it “fall”? Who’s to say? At this point, I couldn’t tell you if our neverending lockdown began a year and a half ago, several decades back, or last week. I can only very rarely tell you what time or day it is, a challenge exacerbated by the fact that I spend all of my work hours at home on a shift schedule best described as “uh, lunchtime til bedtime a few random days a week, I guess?”

Time is made up — and so, accordingly, is chronological order. I’ve been baking through 100 Cookies in the order it was printed so far, but, when I visited my mother for her birthday last month, I decided to throw that out the window. I handed her the book and told her I’d bake whatever in it sounded good. So here we are, following up Recipe 28 with Recipe 53: Citrus Pie Bars.

Ultra-rare merger of my two genres of photography: food pics and flower pics

In general, I’m not the biggest fan of citrus. If I’m having dessert, I want it to be chocolatey, and if I’m having fruit, I want it fruity — flavorful and snack-worthy like a strawberry, not like the gustatory punishment you get when trying to pucker your way through a grapefruit. Lemon bars, though, have grown on me over time, so I was relieved when my mom chose lemon from the citrus options recommended for this recipe.

I started in on the bars while my parents were at work, insisting that they shouldn’t bring out their stand mixer for me, given my avowed vendetta against the things. I made it through the crust and the lemon-filling layer before they came home for lunch, leaving only the whipped-cream topping still to make. Susan, not understanding the concept of “relaxing” or “being the guest of honor,” informed me that it simply made no sense not to use her Kitchen-Aid for homemade whipped cream, and she dragged the thing out of storage, declaring that she’d even clean it herself when I finished so I had no excuse not to try it out.

This, friends, was an offer I couldn’t refuse. So I tried out the Kitchen-Aid, and you know what? I WAS RIGHT. Yes, the whipped cream turned out fine, and yes, I suppose it became so marginally faster than when I’ve made it before by hand. But I could’ve managed sans mixer — meaning, you know, congrats to me and my iron anti-mixer will.

All of this, however, is a sidebar to the two key questions for any of these recipe trials: How were they, and how were they to make?

On both counts, my answer would be “pretty good.” Even to a citrus skeptic like me, they tasted great, and despite their three separate layers, I found them fairly easy to pull together (as long as you have a full day to leisurely make them in). They were tart and tangy thanks to the citrus and the addition of cream cheese to the whipped topping, and they held up well too, thanks mostly to the very long time they spent in the fridge before serving. The birthday girl liked them, as did the grandparents I delivered leftovers to, so in all, I’d call this bake a win.

Time still may not be real, but I’ll confess that, after this diversion, I did go back to the brownie chapter to pick up where I left off. Stay tuned for a return to chronology in my next post, but be alert: You never know when I may make another time’s-not-real diversion again.