STORIES SHARED

A STORY FROM C.W. FRICK

I learned to cook chicken cacciatore in Home Ec. That and making a coffee cake completed

the kitchen part of the course; sewing a plaid jumper that turned out halfway okay earned me a solid B. And though my skills in the domestic end of life were happily and naively deficient, I admit I liked to cook even if my stuff was never anything to write home about.

This past Christmas I put together (with the help of my friends at the local publishing company) a little family recipe booklet, incorporating friends and relatives' recipes and the stories behind them. It was fun to see the spectrum of dishes (including three for banana bread) and rather inspiring, at least for me because I took spatula in hand and began trying new things again.

Today it was tea cakes (and when they say eight minutes, they mean eight, not ten) that smelled super good while baking but turned out more like tea-cake-crunch. Last week it was my apple crumb cake fiasco. When the mixture looked a bit on the dry-side, I cut in more butter than called for, and then for good measure, even more and my final result resembled something I might call apple crumb soup. When my baker husband asked, "What is that?" I pretended not to care.

But I am not discouraged. Not everyone is a whiz in the kitchen. Some of us enjoy the journey no matter how rough the going gets. I'll keep experimenting and in the meantime I'm sure we won't starve over here. There's always Marie Callender.

As I was wrapping up the sampling of my friends' and family's recipes, I had a remembering of a recipe for Scarborough Fair Bread. My dad had just started baking bread from scratch. Yeah. Dad. In the kitchen. A new thing for me, his grown daughter to watch and learn from. I showed him the recipe and his eyebrows raised with intrigue. He trotted off to the store and bought the parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme, along with the flour and whatever other ingredients it called for and it turned out perfectly. The first time. I can still remember my surprise, and the delight it seemed to bring him. And the aroma that filled the house all evening.

After that, there was no stopping him, Dad was off and running with his new-found joy. Too late to write The Joy of Cooking, he penned his own spin on healthy living and eating and recipes and tips from other health nuts. And thoughts from Scripture, and memories of his own mother's cooking morphing into his own dishes as he experimented with soups and salads and sauerkraut cakes. I'm sure he made many a mess in the kitchen which Mom was more than happy (we think) to clean up after—I know he made quite a splash in mine that day. But all these years later it's the smell of bread that comes back to me as Autumn pulls in the summer sky, brings out the blankets and wood smoke and cider and Simon and Garfunkle and somewhere there's the promise of the first flake of snow. . .