One year ago, I didn’t know how to bake bread. I just knew how to follow a recipe. If everything went perfectly, I could turn out something plain but palatable. But should anything change—temperature, timing, flour, Mercury being in Scorpio—I’d turn out a partly poofy pancake. I presented my partly poofy pancakes to people, and they were polite, but those platters were not particularly palatable. During a group vacation last year, a friend made fresh sourdough loaves every day, and we devoured it.