Procrastination Projects: What do you turn to when you need a win?

In Medius Projectus is all about those projects you start but don't finish. Some of these projects take days, and some take weeks, but the thing they all lack is good old-fashioned instant gratification. Sometimes, when you've been cutting out cardboard slabs for hours and hours, or knitting until your fingers go numb, or polishing your trumpet for over an hour... Well, you just need a win. You need the sense that you are not just a starter-- you're a finisher. When that happens, we turn to our best skills and hope to knock out a project that will give us the strength we need to get those long-haul projects done!

That's what happened to me today. When I need a win, my go-to project is food. It's always food. Yes, I know. This is not a food blog. But when I really need to jack up my mood and get my creative energies in line, I take out all the mixing bowls and pots and pans I've got and do something I call multi-cooking!

Multi-cooking goes like this: You put on your apron. Mine is a black, v-necked food service apron left over from my husband's stint in a nursing home cafeteria. Despite that, it's the closest thing aprons have to sexy. You put on your shoes because that means you're serious, or you leave them off because it's your damn kitchen. And if you're me, you queue up a couple of episodes of the Daily Show to listen to while you're cooking, because being unemployed in an unfamiliar place gets lonely and the company doesn't get much better than Jon Stewart. The idea is that you and the kitchen are going to get comfortable, so you do whatever it takes.

You start with the familiar. For me, that's bread. Bread takes time, but not a whole lot of hands-on time necessarily, so if you are planning on being in the kitchen for a while, it's a good thing to get going. I mix a bowl of the infamous No-Knead Bread dough and let it sit near the stove, soaking up heat and rising. I immediately feel less world-weary. I am playing to my strengths. I mix up a quart jar of powdered milk and start heating it up for yogurt-- another old friend I could make in the dark. These are foods with magic involved-- the dough rises, the milk congeals. You start the process and mysterious little beasties come and finish the job.

While multi-cooking, you will get hungry. Toward lunch time, I hard-boil half a dozen eggs-- one for lunch with the last slice of the day before yesterday's bread, and the rest for quick meals during the rest of the week. Hard boiled eggs are humble food, but they are a spiffy upgrade a lot of those emergency foods you wish you didn't eat but can't help relying on. The next time you find yourself staring down a bowl of ramen, imagine how much better it would be with a hard-boiled egg sliced over the top, and maybe some frozen peas and carrots thrown in. Add the leaf of something green, like curly kale, shredded up in your hands, and that orange packet is almost an actual meal as well as a blood-pressure inflating sodium bomb.

At this point in the multi-cooking process, you start thinking about cooking ahead. There are times you want to cook, there are times you want dinner, and there are times you want to go out. These do not necessarily coincide. With this in mind, I decide to go ahead and pressure-cook some dried white beans. I used to be scared of my pressure cooker until I realized that having the skill to cook with an apparatus that might explode was kind of badass. Now you would have to pry my pressure-cooker out of my cold, dead hands. I almost took it camping once. While I'm at it, I make a bunch so that I can put some away in the freezer (more emergency meal insurance), have some for dinner, and use a couple of cups for an ersatz white-bean hummus (weird, I know, but I'm out of chickpeas).

During the next stage in multi-cooking your inner artist will appear. Maybe you didn't know you had one. Maybe you are an engineer or an English nerd and you thought art was kind of a geek-chic name for hipster children. Which, by the way, it isn't. Trust me, if you cook for long enough, some kind of Martha Stewart demon perches on your shoulder and starts telling you to do appalling things, like make glazes, or make foods that look like other foods, or buy and use saffron. In general I am the most prosaic of cooks. Ninety percent of the dinners I produce can be described as curried slop over rice. But if you stand there long enough, something takes over and you start using words like "tureen" and "garnish" and "plating."

Things really start to get out of hand when I am poking through the fridge and find a couple of lemons left over from the cocktail parties I am always having. Uh, in my imagination. I suddenly realize I want to make a lemon pound cake that I saw in a magazine eight years ago. Outside, it is pouring rain and is supposed to continue all day. I realize that a slice of pound cake and a cup of coffee are the sole forces in the universe able to make this day beautiful and turn a kind of sorry week of job hunting around.

The pound cake takes some time. I put some butter in a bowl to soften it and set it over the hot yogurt milk as it cools. While it softens, I slice a lemon as thin as possible. When the butter is soft, I set the bowl under my ancient stand mixer and toss in some sugar. I slice lemon peel off the other lemon and let the blender do the work of turning it into grated zest (my hand grater is hopelessly dull). I mix the zest with yogurt and vanilla. By this time, the butter and sugar have reached the consistency of expensive shampoo. I add three eggs to it, one at a time. I mix the cake's dry ingredients together in another bowl, then alternately add the flour mixture and the yogurt mixture to the sugar/butter/eggs until it all comes together.

On the computer, Jon Stewart is interviewing Bill Clinton and all he is doing is asking questions about Hillary Clinton. This in it self is a kind of satisfying revenge for me after the indignities of the late 90s. I realize I am whistling when both cats show up, thinking it's time for kibbles.

Pound cake batter is not like other cake batters. It weighs more but looks lighter, like clingy custard. Uncooked, it tastes good enough to risk salmonella. I scrape it into a loaf pan, lick my fingers, and toss it into the oven. It is now time to turn my attention to the glaze, which is easy-- I squeeze the peeled lemon into a hot saucepan, add sugar, then add those papery lemon slices. In five minutes it's done and can sit and wait for the cake. In the meantime, I wrap the yogurt in an old army blanket and stick it into a cooler with a hot water bottle. After that it just sits for eight hours until it curdles. I take the beans off the stove and mix up the hummus-like spread in the blender, then package up the rest for later. The bread dough is just sitting around, rising higher and higher.

I get the idea that I will dry out the remaining fresh lemon zest by putting it on a cookie sheet and sticking it in the cooling oven after the cake is done. Waste not, want not. Steven Colbert is doing his preview at the end of the Daily Show. I have always thought this was a bad idea. Colbert is funnier than Stewart but doesn't have the class, so the exchange always makes both of them come off slightly pathetic.

Finally, my cooking steam runs out. I have been in the kitchen for four hours. I sit down and one of the cats immediately finds a seat in my lap. I munch on celery sticks with hummus. In five minutes, my cake will be done. I will expend my final effort on arranging lemon slices along the top and glaze the crap out of the little SOBs. When this thought hits my brain I know I am done cooking.

I look at the project I've been working on. It is looking decidedly smaller and more subdued. It knows it's next.

There is still dinner to make and bread to finish. There are still papers to file, books to read, applications to follow up on. There is still a cardboard cat scratcher in progress. But for now, I am taking a break, buoyed on a sense of having created and having been satisfied.

What are your go-to projects when your other projects are driving you crazy?