Overcooked sabbatical

David was a pleasant lad in his mid-20s. Despite his cheerful exterior, deep down he was basically melancholic possibly due to his unique experience as a mixed race individual with Anglo-Saxon father and Vietnamese mother in regional Australia. People did not know quite how to place him, as neither Aussie nor Asian, but something else entirely. So there were elements missing from in his connection with fellow townsmen which made him sad on the inside. You wouldn’t know it though, because he was lively and usually active in some project or other. He’d usually occupy himself in his free time with starting things.

His mother was proud of him, but he had a girlfriend who recently gently chastised him, ‘You’re a dilettante, you’re a tinkerer. You work in a pastry factory, but you can’t make your own croissants. You examine things but you can’t actually get anything done.’

David lived in Parkes a town about four hours’ drive from Sydney, Australia’s largest city at the time. Parkes was growing rapidly with a new transport hub being built, so there was no shortage of work, and was considered by some as the future Chicago of Australia. Parkes also was world-famous for its annual Elvis festival, and so sometimes was known as the Memphis of the south. David loved the enthusiasm and future-focus of the place.

Today was David’s day off as the leadership at his company were having an offsite planning day, and the rest of the staff were given the day off as a ‘sabbatical’. David had decided weeks prior to use the day off to make croissant dough, inspired by a photo he saw on the internet of croissants on a plate in the famous cultural district Montmartre in Paris France. The night time of sabbatical day would be used for the baking part. The sabbatical day came sooner than David had expected and so David was caught short of the preparation that he had wanted to do.

Fortunately, as the sabbatical day was not a public holiday the supermarket was open. So David went to the supermarket by bus to purchase his ingredients. These included flour, brown sugar, yeast, and lots of butter, amongst other items. David got home and excitedly unpacked his groceries. Opening the flour he was dismayed to find ants crawling through the packet. One or two ants would have been fine – David could have just picked them out and continued as if they had not been there. But somehow it was as if the flour package was an ant’s nest complete with catacombs and queen ant. David found it disgusting and could not rescue the packet, so he threw it out but felt too time-constrained to go back to the supermarket for a refund. After all he only the single day off. He certainly also was too annoyed to buy another packet from another store. Why should he spend again? He remembered, though, that the next door neighbours on the right-hand side were often baking cakes with pleasant smells wafting across the footpath in the morning, so they must have flour.

He went next door to ask to borrow some. However, it seemed there was no-one home which was not surprising since this was a normal workday and school day for the children. David walked around to the backdoor to confirm. He banged on the back screen door but no answer. The screen-door was locked, and it was the secure kind that he remembered from advertisements on television, so felt there was no point trying to get through that. The kitchen window above the sink was wide open leaving only a flyscreen between David and the pantry. David managed to jiggle the flyscreen loose and push it in. He climbed in hands first into the sink, and then landed on his feet on the kitchen floor. David found the pantry at the other end of the kitchen, and went in and identified three 1kg packets of plain flour and two 1kg packets of wholemeal flour. He took 1kg of plain flour. Briefly remembering that convicts had been shipped to Australia 250 years prior for crimes such as this, he considered it a loan and decided that the neighbour would willingly have parted with it if only they had been there to be asked. To return the window to its correct state, David placed the flyscreen in the sink to plan the flyscreen re-fitting process, and then re-attached it.

To exit David unlocked the inner backdoor and the screen door. He then re-locked the back door and closed it, and it remained locked on closing. However, the screen door when locked would not close, so David had to leave the screen door unlocked. Perhaps the neighbours would assume that they had forgotten to lock it.

David got back to his own kitchen now equipped with the flour. He was relieved to open the packet and find it was usable and not colonised by ants. Opening the recipe on his screen, David scanned the first steps of the recipe instructions. Clicking through the ads, David read each step.

The main task was to make the dough. Normally croissant dough doesn’t need a rolling pin but David didn’t feel complete making dough without a rolling pin. So he fished the rolling pin from his bottom drawer and pressed down to roll, but the two ends slid right down to the benchtop. The metal axle had rusted through to nothing. So David had to content himself with doing it properly, and he kneaded by hand for two minutes, gradually adding a bit more flour as he went, and made a soft dough which was slightly sticky.

Okay dough was done. Next thing was the folds. The instructions said to fold then chill far an hour in four repeat cycles. David finished the alternate folding then chilling at 2pm. David set the finally folded dough for the long chill, which was to be between 8 hours and 18 hours. David went off to read a book.

* * *

After finishing George Orwell’s Burmese Days at 11pm, David returned to his kitchen.

Feeling nervous, David took his folded dough out of the refrigerator and set it on a kitchen table.

But David couldn’t get the stove to start. The clicker would not spark, and the matches were still wet from the last flood. The town was not prone to flooding but it did happen from time-to-time. Moreover, there was no hissing sound of gas through the pipe. It seemed David needed a repairperson and at this time of the night! Tomorrow morning was not an option as he had to be at work after the sabbatical. Management would be keen to share their new plans with the team.

There was a magnet on the fridge of a repair person coincidentally named Dave, whom David phoned. To David’s surprise, Dave answered. But Dave explained that he was not available at this time. However, Dave did know about a 24-hour service, and he gave David the number. David called it, and made a booking for midnight. The repair person arrived at 11.59pm.

Knock knock. David answered the door. A mid-40s bearded repair person was standing on the doorstep wearing a blue cap and holding a blue toolbox. David could see the van on the street under the streetlight.

‘Thanks ….’ David couldn’t hear his own voice as a crack of thunder pealed through the night. But David could hear his own thoughts, which were saying, I’m going to get this done. ‘Thanks for coming so late at night!’ David shouted.

‘It’s a….’ said the repairman’s voice drowned out by another thunder crack demanding their undivided attention.

After the thunder had passed and the two had regained their train of thought, David explained, ‘My oven isn’t working, there seems to be a problem with the gas.’

‘Okay no problems. Where is it?’

Sure enough there was a chink in the pipe that would have prevented any gas from getting through. It was easily corrected. The repairman looked at the starter and fixed that too, so a nice healthy spark was now forthcoming.

‘Well thanks so much!’

‘It’s a pleasure. Clearly you have some urgent cooking to do. Good luck!’

* * *

With the repairman gone, David turned on the gas and clicked the starter. It seemed there was no gas left in the tank. ‘Oh gees!’ David ran outside only to see the repairman’s van driving away down the street.

Why not drive to the petrol station to buy gas for the oven? Ah but he wouldn’t know how to connect it. Well, he had a camping oven somewhere which could be fuelled with car petrol.

‘Where is that camping oven?’ David thought to himself. There were two cupboards full of miscellaneous and rarely used clothes and collectibles, and it had to be in one of them. David found the camping oven in the second cupboard that he checked, on the top shelf, at the back. Then he remembered the safety reasons why he had put in there ahead of a visit by his little cousins about six months ago.

He had his oven, but it also was without fuel. So David went outside got a bucket and hose from the garden, went to his car and syphoned petrol out of his car fuel tank, through the rumbling sounds of thunder. With that, David topped up the fuel in his camping petrol oven, and by 1.15am had affixed his camping stove inside his home oven.

David turned it on. It would need time to raise the temperature inside the oven to the required 475 degrees Fahrenheit (245 degrees Celsius). He put the camp oven to the maximum which was the high mid 500s Fahrenheit (high 200s Celsius) which he doubted would actually be achieved, but by turning up to the maximum it might come close.

David carefully placed his tray of uncooked pastries in the oven. Intending to cook for 1 hour 30 minutes considering that the oven was not yet pre-heated, he wound the timer to the maximum of 1 hour. However, there was no ticking sound, and David realised he had never used the timer before, perhaps it had never worked. He made a mental note to inform the rental agent to inform the landlord.

There was no shortage of options for a timer, and David set his mobile phone alarm to 3am, and did the same on his watch in case he drifted off to a deep sleep. But would the fuel supply last that long? Probably not, so David decided he would need to complete the baking in three tranches of 30 minutes each since, he estimated, that is how long the fuel would last when the camp oven tank was at capacity. So he reset his alarms for 2am.

While syphoning petrol from his car tank, he had noticed a storm was started brewing outside but did not give it much attention. Now the wind was howling outside and the rain was flying nearly horizontal with hailstones pelting the roof and windows.

* * *

Just before completion of the first 30-minute interval, David was woken by hailstones pounding his kitchen window, and one actually smashing through it which got David up off his bed in a panic. There was broken glass in his sink. ‘Karma payback for breaking into the neighbour’s house,’ thought David, surprised at his cross-cultural nearly spiritual thought. Then again, he was making croissants inspired by a photograph from France, so maybe the sabbatical had changed him. No longer as true blue as he thought himself to be.

Fiddling with the fuel to re-fuel the camp oven tank was a fiddly business, and David completed this process twice more before 3am. David barely slept before the croissants were completed at about 3.15am. But there they were, not exactly like in the photo that had inspired David, somewhat flat, but still golden brown and crisp looking. There were eight of them and they were quite small. David slept deeply despite the storm, which abated at about 6am.

He woke at 8am with a spring in his step, and had two of his anaemic croissants for breakfast. David placed the remaining six in a plastic Tupperware lunchbox-like container. After dressing for work, he walked to the more distant bus stop to pass the retirement village on his street. He would have loved to share with his neighbours from whom he taken the flour, but thought it might enhance their suspicion if they noticed anything amiss in their kitchen and pantry. He left two croissants at reception at the retirement village.

At work, David shared the remaining four croissants with colleagues, also team leaders, who found it interesting how seriously David offered them. David thought they might be thinking that David’s interest in pastry-making had some cultural connection with the French colonisation of Vietnam, but he could never be sure if there was a connection nor what any of his colleagues thought. Anyway he did not care, for he had done it. And after all, this was a pastry factory so why couldn’t they all have an obsession with croissants without speculations on connections with ancestry. It was a fun snack as they shared with each other their brief accounts of what each had done on their sabbatical.

The second half of the day was to be spent listening to their leadership explain freshly-hatched plans for the future of the pastry factory where David had been a team leader for the last two years.

End.