A Recipe For Disaster
I am the proud owner of my dead Nona’s apron. It’s red, with white stripes, and three deep pockets. It’s stained with extracts, batters, and icing, all that lept haphazardly from my too-shallow mixing bowl. Almost as if to say, “Me–me! Choose me, for your Chai-Orange Sugar Cookies! Pour me out, and use me up for your mixing magic!”
My mixing bowl is stolen from my mother, it’s the size of a cauldron and has dents from the many times I’ve stirred too aggressively. I’m saving up for a KitchenAid, a tool my Nona would call cheating. If it’s not whisked by hand, it’s not homemade. Well, she’s dead so who can accuse me of cheating now, Nona!
Sorry, I didn’t mean that. You see, I commune with her spirit while baking. The vanilla extract extracts her spirit from the metaphysical world and into my kitchen.
She’s unimpressed with my Ikea cabinets, and linoleum floors. I assure her, one day I will have a sunlit kitchen, with wooden floors and sage green cabinetry and a back garden for basil, and tomatoes, and a dog that I have to keep from PISSING ON THE BASIL AND TOMATOES–BARRY THE BERNESE, GET OUT OF THERE!
I can feel my Nona’s hand slap mine as I steal another bite of raw dough, or lick my fingers.
(To those who eat my treats often, don’t fret–I wash my hands so frequently while baking I wind up with lavender-scented callouses.) But I do consume about half the batter before it makes it to the oven.
She hovers over my shoulder as I follow her directions precisely. Her recipe book like a sacred text. A text that must be very carefully read but loosely interpreted.
“It says 4 cups of flour–” Nona offers, panicked. Wringing her pale, delicate hands.
“No WAY!” I exclaim, the dough still sticky and wet after proofing. I add ½ cup after ½ cup of flour until we’ve reached 9 cups, and finally, the dough is light and moldable.
“9–” Nona sighs, “9 cups of flour. That’s my mother for you.” My ghost Nona is now perched on a stool in the corner. Her wrists draped over each other delicately.
My great-grandmother had horrid handwriting, her “9” looked like a “4.” Once the doughy, but delectable atrocities are in the oven, I collapse into tears on my kitchen floor.
“Cinnamon Rolls aren’t worth crying over,” I sigh, wiping away tablespoon-sized teardrops.
“Yes, well–” Nona waves her hands in the air, non-verbally referring to the much muchness of too much. It’s all been too much. 9 cups of flour is arguably, too much.
As I cry, and cry the salt from my tears casts her out–she believed in unsalted butter, and an extra pinch of sugar–she’s expelled from my home. Returning to whatever awaits us when the kitchen timer’s up.
Timer’s up. Cinnamon rolls out of the oven.
I’ve baked since I was a little girl. The women in my life instilled in me the healing power of baking. A musical soundtrack on the SONY CD player, the bottom of my feet scarred with the marks of the step stool I used to be at hip height with the counter, my Mom urging me to be VERY CAREFUL if I ever put eggshells down the garbage disposal.
In our house, we made green-dyed pancakes for St.Patty’s, and Heaven Muffins to send my brothers while they were away at camp, and once the leaves started falling, Pumpkin Bars for church brunches.
I could often be found in the kitchen, staring out the large sink window, that faced my best friend's house. On sunny Saturdays, I’d wonder if she was around while taking rotten bananas out of the freezer for banana bread. I’d be met with a dial tone, as I balanced our landline in the crook of my shoulder while mixing cinnamon and sugar in my hands for snickerdoodles.
Please leave your message after the beep!
“Hey! Hey–it’s me, I–uh, I’m making cookies, and I was wondering if you wanted to come over and we can have some lemonade. Or! I could come over with them, and then we can go for a swim in your pool. Ok–bye!”
I was a lonely kid, hoping to coax friendship out of those with a sweet tooth. But I acted out Wicked while waiting for the bread to rise, and I talked my Mom’s ear off as I melted butter in 10-second increments in the microwave.
I’m no longer a lonely kid. I’ve been blessed with friends that hold me up, and ask me to get dinner or drinks, (to which I bring treats,) and my Mom still picks up the phone so I can talk her ear off.
Over the past week, my friend María FaceTimed me twice. (We had lots of gossip for each other.) Both times, she caught me as I was wearing my Nona’s apron, measuring out sugar.
The second time, I answered the phone with, “I’m baking again!” She lets out her big, bright laugh.
“I don’t think you need baking, I think you need therapy.”
“I had therapy TODAY, thank you very much!”
But my ever-observant friend, María called to attention something I’ve always known about myself—
In breakups and broken bones, sad summers, and dead quiet winters, I can be found cross-legged on my kitchen floor, waiting for the oven to preheat. When I don’t know which way to turn, I turn to the pantry. Baking is a coming back to myself.
And sometimes, when the sun flits at the right angle through my window, the ghost of my beloved Nona comes back to me too. She sits on my stool, and tells me, with love, that I’m doing it all wrong.
And yet–the cinnamon rolls come out perfect.
In the spirit of my Nona and my Great Grandma Gina, Here are a few recipes, some borrowed, some new, and a couple if you add in food dye, could be blue!
You and I grew up a fan of the sticky-wet rainbow-speckled Cosmic Brownies. But as we’ve aged, I’m sure you’d agree, our pallets have matured. It’s time for a more sophisticated, mature take on the juvenile treat. This is my recipe for Reality Brownies.
Reality Brownies
Ingredients:
½ cup of Cocoa Powder - Unsweetened, Dutch Processed. (What does Dutch processed mean!)
½ cup of Butter
2 eggs
1TSP Vanilla Extract
1 TSP Salt (Unless you opt for Salted Butter)
A Dash of Cynicism
¼ cup Flour
½ cup of Light Brown Sugar
½ cup of Granulated Sugar
I made these brownies last week and discovered that ½ cup of light brown sugar, and granulated sugar, give the brownies a perfect barely-cooked, chewy texture, perfect if you HATE dry brownies. The touch of cynicism makes it all the tastier when you believe you’ve botched the recipe only to have your co-workers rave over them!
Now, I don’t eat chicken, but when I’m sick, I do opt to order chicken soup, pick out the chicken, and then complain to my boyfriend that it’s too chickeny. Sick in the head! Sick in the head, I am. I thought the idea of the “Chicken Soup for the Kia Sol,” was a fun play on words, but couldn’t think of a way to make that funnier. Whatever:
Chicken Soup for the Kia Sol
Ingredients
1 pkg spaghetti noodles! (unless you want to be fancy and do a silly noodle, like fusilli)
5 cups Chicken Stock (Chicken Juice!)
2 chopped Carrots
1 Yellow Onion
Garlic, Parsley, and Ginger to taste
1 whole rotisserie chicken
Maybe you could swap the chicken, for vegetarian Chick’n! Or, for the Kia Sol pun, you could swap it for bits of tire rubber! Just an idea! The kitchen is your lab, cooking your experiment!
The following is an actual recipe from Nona’s cookbook. They were Minnesotans what can I say:
Orange Jello Salad
1 box Orange Jello
3 cups of Water
2 15 oz cans of Mandarin Oranges
1 cup of Cottage Cheese
1 can Maraschino cherries
This is an abomination and I don’t think anyone in my family has made it since possibly since 1962. But I’ll ask around. When I read this recipe aloud to my partner, Lennon, through tears (I was getting sentimental about family legacies blah blah,) he screamed about the addition of Cottage Cheese for a solid ten minutes.
This next recipe when attempted sent me into a spiral that forced me to schedule an extra appointment for therapy that week because I realized I had never fully processed the death of my beloved Nona. Here are:
Gina’s Cinnamon Rolls
Somewhere between 4-9 Cups of Flour
1 Egg
½ cup of Light Brown Sugar
2 packets of Yeast
⅓ cup of Granulated Sugar
1 tsp Salt
1 ½ cups of Water
Cream Cheese Icing
1 cup of Powdered Sugar
2 tsp Vanilla Extract
4 oz Cream Cheese
