Cookies

A few months ago my friend Margaret Roach gave away a cookbook on her site A Way to Garden. I read her description of Heidi Swanson’s beautiful recipes, considered the lush photo on the book jacket, and gave in — as I rarely do — to an impulsive on-line purchase. (Apologies to my much-loved and frequented local bookstore!) I wasn’t going to wait an entire week to see if I might win a copy of Super Natural Every Day; I ordered the book that very moment and two days later I had it in my hands. Which is how this spring has come to be, in our house, The Time of Those Amazing Cookies.

There has been so much going on here that I haven’t written about — the school year ending, boys coming home (and leaving again), family dinners, countless meals and loads of laundry and breakfasts that go on for hours, a piano concert by Henry, laughter and tears, good times with good friends, forsythia and lilacs and irises and peonies blooming and passing in their turn, hot days and cold ones, walks in the woods and runs on the bike-path. We’ve put almost a thousand miles on the car, driving to New York City, to the Berkshires to pick Jack up from school, to Maine to deliver Henry to his summer job, to Boston to deliver Jack to his.

It seems that, no matter how early I get up in the morning or how late I stay up at night, I can’t quite manage to place a margin around these days. And I haven’t written a word. (I figure that hasty e-mails and entries in my calendar don’t count as writing.) Every minute, I say to myself, justifying my lack of output, has been spoken for, busy, packed.

I’ve loved this time of family comings and goings, have loved having both boys at home and asleep in their own beds, “each fate,” as Sharon Olds has written, “like a vein of abiding mineral not discovered yet.” I’ve loved being fully engaged right where I am, as wife and mother and aunt and friend and gardener; have loved each and every one of these spectacular, lengthening days of June.

At the same time, I find myself a bit in awe of, even a bit envious of, those who feel as if they aren’t quite living unless they’re writing. I think of these people as the “real” writers, the ones who weave their writing right into the fabric of their days, no matter what’s going on around them. Real writers are those who are fed and sustained by the daily process of turning the raw stuff of life into shapely, meaningful prose. I wish I was one of those writers — faster, more disciplined, more determined, more productive, more — and this is the one that’s really hard to admit — courageous.

For when it comes right down to it, I know I could find or make the time to write more often than I do. It’s not really hours that I lack so much as the confidence to sit down and come face-to-face with myself. To commit my thoughts to an empty page and then to say, “This is ok, this is enough, this does the trick.” Sometimes, I just don’t have what it takes to wrestle with my own swirling mass of emotions, emotions that I can’t ever seem to adequately translate into words, especially words that can be shared.

In these last weeks I’ve sipped tea with a friend who is facing major surgery, prognosis unknown. I’ve watched my older son sit down at a piano in front of a hundred people and play a gorgeous Rachmaninoff prelude from memory. I’ve taken dawn walks with my husband and gathered around a table at my parents’ house with our entire extended family. I’ve listened in while Henry read a book to his four-year-old cousin and while Jack sang to himself in the shower. There have been sights that have left me breathless: a bluebird perched on the edge of the birdbath, a hummingbird trembling at the lip of a petunia, an alabaster peony unfurling its petals in the heat of an afternoon. And there have been moments that have made my heart swell: watching Jack walk through the door of his old high school (the one he left after sophomore year) to take SAT IIs last weekend; sitting down to dinner on the porch and holding hands with my husband and two sons as we recited the grace we’ve said together since kindergarten days; listening to Jack play his guitar; saying good-bye to Henry for the summer.

In the midst of all these comings and goings, all these meals cooked and cleaned up after, all this being and doing and celebrating, a letter arrived on Monday from a reader whose twelve-year-old son died in an accident two weeks ago. She wrote to me to say that at his memorial service last weekend she asked her best friend to read a passage from my book, a paragraph about missing, most of all, the perfectly ordinary days.

All week, her letter has haunted me, this mother’s unfathomable loss running like a quiet undercurrent through my own busyness. “Your words are helping me heal,” she wrote, “and I wanted to thank you. The memories are all I have now and I thank you for showing me how to look at life a little differently.”

Writing, for me anyway, is a slow, scary, private process. Lately, I’ve been unable to summon the part of myself that believes in the worth of what I do. I wish, for my own sake, that I’d tried to capture some of the fleeting, ordinary, yet incredibly precious moments of these last weeks, for I sense the days of togetherness already slipping away as we settle into summer schedules that keep us mostly apart. But then, for the hundredth time, I ask myself if there is anything at all I can say that I haven’t said before, or that someone else hasn’t said already, but better.

The lesson, the great, overarching truth that I keep repeating even as I learn it again and again myself, is that the sacred is in the ordinary. That it is to be found right here, right now, in our own daily lives. In our most inconsequential yet most holy connections with our children, our loved ones, our neighbors, our colleagues, our friends. In the the kitchen, the bedroom, the office, our very own backyards.

I do know that. I think that nearly everything I write is some variation on this theme. Sometimes, I wonder if I’m the only one who needs to keep hearing it, and whether, in fact, I really have run out of things to say to the rest of the world. This week, a heartbreaking, generous letter from a grieving mother reminded me of this simple, essential fact all over again. It made me think that perhaps the most important lessons do bear repeating after all. And that there are as many ways to be attentive to our lives as there are ways to pray, to grieve, to celebrate.

I am still hoping for courage. I have a new book to write, an essay due next week, guest blogs to post. And instead of getting down to work, I find myself grating chocolate, chopping apricots, baking batch after batch of cookies to share. Baking, feeding the people I love, I grant myself reprieve from the struggle to find words, words that might begin to respond to another family’s unfathomable loss or that could possibly do justice to the preciousness, the pain, the beauty, the fragility, the wonder of things just as they are.

And that brings me back to where I began here. When I’m floundering, when I lose my way on the page, I retreat to the safe haven of my kitchen counter. I am not always brave enough or self-disciplined enough to write. But I can always cook. And once I began making Heidi Swanson’s not-too-sweet but utterly extraordinary ginger cookies a few weeks ago, I couldn’t stop. It feels almost as if these cookies have expressed everything I haven’t managed to write about lately: love, empathy, joy, gratitude, pride, hope. I make batch after batch of the dough, pop it into the refrigerator, and bake more as needed. I brought ginger cookies to a friend facing her first round of radiation for breast cancer, to a special dinner where they complemented the earliest strawberries and rhubarb of the season, to my parents’ house where my little nephew definitively pronounced them “the best.” I served these cookies to my writing students and to friends who dropped by for a spur-of-the-moment supper. I made over two hundred of them for Henry’s concert, and a dozen to console Jack while he watched his favored team, the Mavericks, go down in defeat to the Miami Heat. If you have seen me in the last month, chances are I’ve handed you a warm cookie.

“Let the beauty we love be what we do,” Rumi reminds us. “There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.” Loving this life, cherishing these perfectly ordinary, radiantly beautiful summer days, I do aspire to be attentive, to be thankful for all that is. Sometimes I kneel and kiss the ground by sitting at my desk, fingers hovering over this keyboard. Sometimes, I just bake cookies.

If you were plunked down in my kitchen right now, I’d turn the oven on, start scooping teaspoonsful of fragrant dough onto the pan, and ask you to tell me the news of your day. Instead, I’ll do the next best thing — share Heidi Swanson’s lovely recipe and give you a link to her popular and wonderfully inviting blog. Meanwhile, if you decide to treat yourself to the book — and I encourage you to do so — make sure to try her amazing Baked Oatmeal, the Mostly Not Potato Salad, and the nutty, orange-scented Granola, which is hands-down the best I’ve ever tasted. (Yes, I’ve pretty much been cooking nonstop here.)

Heidi Swanson’s Ginger Cookies

1/2 cup large-grain raw or turbinado sugar
6 ounces bittersweet 70% cacao dark chocolate
2 cups whole wheat pastry flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 1/2 tablespoons ground ginger
1/2 teaspoon fine grain sea salt
1/2 cup unsalted butter cut into small cubes
1/4 cup unsulphured blackstrap molasses
2/3 cup fine grain natural cane sugar
2 tablespoons peeled and grated fresh ginger
1 large egg, well beaten
1 cup plump dried apricots, finely chopped

Preheat the oven to 350, place racks in the top and bottom third of the oven. Line two baking sheets with unbleached parchment paper or a Silpat mat, and place the large-grain sugar in a small bowl. Set aside.
Finely chop the chocolate bar into 1/8-inch pieces, more like shavings really.
In a large bowl whisk together the flour, baking soda, ground ginger, and salt.
Heat the butter in a saucepan until it is just barely melted. Remove from heat and stir in the molasses, sugar, and fresh ginger. The mixture should be warm, but not hot at this point, if it is hot to the touch let it cool a bit. Whisk in the egg. Now pour this over the flour mixture, add apricots, and stir until just combined. Fold in the chocolate. Chill for 30 minutes, long enough for the dough to firm up a bit.
I like these cookies tiny, barely bite-sized, so I scoop out the dough in exact, level tablespoons. I then tear those pieces of dough in two before rolling each 1/2 tablespoon of dough into a ball shape. From there, grab a small handful of the big sugar you set aside earlier and roll each ball between your palms to heavily coat the outside of each dough ball. Place dough a few inches apart on prepared baking sheets. Bake for 7-10 minutes or until cookies puff up, darken a bit, and get quite fragrant. (In my oven, 8 minutes is just perfect.)
Makes roughly 4 dozen.
Prep time: 30 min – Cook time: 10 min