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A Few Simple Ingredients
KATIE BLACKBURN
The first time I try the salad is at one of our yearly college reunion get-togethers at the river. Every summer since graduation, we fill a big house with anywhere from ten to twenty-five friends, and all our kids get sunburned out on the boat. We eat a huge dinner and stay up way too late telling stories around the fire, reliving the memories we’ve all retold a dozen times because they still make us laugh until we cry twenty years later.
As the kitchen fills up that special evening, with hands ready to help and small bellies demanding to be fed, I see Emily pull out the biggest bowl she can find in the kitchen and dump a Costco-sized carton of arugula in it. Then she swirls good olive oil all over the greens and squeezes lemon juice, turns the salt and pepper shakers more than one might think is sufficient, dumps a few generous fistfuls of Parmesan on top, and sticks two salad tongs in the mix. In three minutes, a beautiful bowl of salad is on the counter and being heaped onto paper plates next to salmon and hamburgers and corn on the cob.
“Emilyyyyy!” I say through a mouthful of peppery and tangy bliss. “This is to die for!”
“Isn’t it so good?” She smiles back. “It’s my favorite salad in the world. And it is the easiest thing you’ll ever make, Katie. You cannot mess it up; it’s always just right.”
I go back a few minutes later for a second helping, but the entire Costco-sized package of arugula Emily made into a salad is gone, leaving only a dusting of Parmesan and olive oil at the bottom of the bowl. Perhaps we are an exceptionally hungry group of friends, but really, I think Emily’s salad is just that good.
Thankfully, Emily brings her arugula salad to every dinner we share together for the next three years.
I met Emily when we were freshmen in college, at a campus ministry for student athletes. She was a superstar basketball player who looked like a real-life version of Disney’s Princess Jasmine: tall and athletic and strikingly beautiful, with a laugh and personality that warmed the temperature of the room from the moment she walked in. I was the opposite in almost every way: short and average, shy and unremarkable. But as soon as I met Emily, I felt drawn to her like a magnet. I wanted the warmth, the encouragement, the magic her personality brought wherever she went.
It started simple, as most friendships do: We met for lunch at Dilly’s Deli on Arizona State’s campus. I was recovering from knee surgery and getting around on crutches, so Emily carried my turkey sandwich from the counter to the table for me; then she cleared all the leftovers when we’d finished. I’ve never forgotten what it felt like to have someone I was just getting to know carry everything I couldn’t— and do it with joy. But Emily has always seemed to know how to carry things for people.
We grew as friends, catching up in the computer lab during our required study hall time, meeting up for frozen yogurt, and attending each other’s
games when our schedules allowed (basketball for her, soccer for me). We talked about being followers of Jesus on a secular college campus, and we shared the physical and mental load of being student athletes and carrying the pressure of performance in all areas of our lives. We also loved working together with our campus ministry and formed the group of friends that would gather at the river twenty years later.
Emily and I lay by the pool for hours in the Arizona sun and ate our way around Tempe’s best cheap college spots. Emily and her fiancé once set me up on a truly hilarious and terrible double date, one that involved sushi and bowling and perhaps too much to drink (the date, not me). I have never let them forget that night and the comical catastrophe it was.
We built memories like little bricks in the home of our friendship, one at a time. Those four years of our lives— so fun, so full, so remarkable at forcing us to learn what we were capable of—were a season we often long for, wishing we had another chance to savor it.
~My ex-husband’s struggle with addiction came to a breaking point a few months after our tenth wedding anniversary. For me, discovering his addiction was not only shocking, but the shock amplified the pain. The same day the secrets came to light, he went to an inpatient recovery program for the first time, a Monday in December. The hurt, the wild incongruity of life from one day to the next— it felt impossible to make it through the day.
Emily came over to my house the afternoon I found out, with chicken pot pie for me and pizza for the kids, and, of course, the ingredients for her arugula salad. And four days later, on a Friday afternoon, she texted me: I’m coming over for a sleepover. You can’t say no. I have brownies and popcorn.
She walked in the house the same way I remember her walking into the room the night I met her in college—joyful, energetic, full of life— and the temperature changed. She helped me put my six kids to bed, and then we sat on the couch with our warm brownies. And because I was empty and spent and out of words, we let our silence and tears fill the space. She slept on my daughter’s bed so I wouldn’t be alone in my house that night. And she knew me well enough to tell me I couldn’t say no to her presence or her snacks. It was as if Emily knew intrinsically, as author Ann Hood once wrote, “That even in grief, we must take tentative steps back into the world. That even in grief, we must eat.”1
Here’s the thing about my friendship with Emily: It’s sturdy and solid, with all those bricks of laughs and disagreements and apologies and Can you believe that happened? memories in the foundation, but it’s never been perfect. We’ve been insensitive and had arguments and have misunderstood each other more than once. But the difficult moments make a friendship just as strong as the good ones. And when you’re standing on something you trust is built well, it tends to need less maintenance in the long run.
The difficult moments make a friendship just as strong as the good ones.
That’s why when Emily moved across the country, from Spokane to Atlanta, I wasn’t worried about us. Over two decades of friendship in our busy lives, we had become experts at making five-minute phone calls, leaving quick voice memos after school drop- off, sending slightly inappropriate and always hilarious GIFs, and not worrying about the stretches of silence
in between— because, bless it, sometimes Emily takes a week to respond to a text. One time she apologized for not responding for a few days, and I told her, “It’s okay, Em, I know you are giving your whole self to whatever is right in front of you.”
And she is. She’s done it for me a thousand times.
Some friendships in my life need more than five minutes here and there; with other people I think I need more than that, perhaps because we share less history, fewer memories to rely on, a shorter catalog of hurting one another’s feelings and needing to ask for forgiveness without knowing how that rocky patch will end. People don’t often tell you that a good friendship needs a record of wrongs made right to be strong, but it does. And I don’t think those conflicts are always bad, because when two people want to restore something, it is usually stronger than before.
Friendships built during different seasons will have different foundations, and the foundation determines everything. But just like Emily’s arugula salad, our friendship has a few simple ingredients: memories, loyalty, understanding, and trust. It’s quick, easy, and reliable.
And after all these years, it’s really hard to mess it up.
My husband spent four months in a recovery program, and for the next two years, I thought we were both working as hard as we could to restore what had been fractured. But nothing about addiction is simple or predictable. My marriage ended for good on a Wednesday. And Emily wasn’t just a few miles away anymore. She couldn’t come over with dinner and salad and dessert and her determination to make things better. And of course, processing the fresh grief of such a huge loss in my life needed more than our five-minute phone calls in those first few days; one morning, we talked while I cried in the Target parking lot for thirty minutes .
But as the weeks went on, as my appetite came back and I found my footing, I started making Emily’s salad for lunch a few days a week. It was like I was taking tentative steps back into the world. A few handfuls of arugula, a splash of olive oil and lemon juice, some salt and pepper, everything topped with Parmesan. After a quick toss, I’d sit on the couch with my feet curled under my body and eat. The routine was a comfort and a good choice for my healing body. Mostly, in this season of loss, it was an embodied reminder that something in my life remained constant.
On a particularly quiet afternoon at my house, with five kids in school and one taking his nap, I texted Emily as I sat down to eat her salad. It always makes me think of her and reminds me of the strong, solid bricks of love and care I have around me. She responded to my text in her quintessential Emily way, with a deep question that gets to the heart of how I’m really doing: Tell me something you’re proud of yourself for, Katie. I wrote back lightheartedly: Eating this salad instead of a milkshake right now!
A few more silly exchanges, and then we were back to our lives, to the dishes and the children and, for me, the healing.
But in those few moments, my friend carried me, helping me with the heaviness of a season that hurt, just as she’s been doing since the first time we had lunch together. And I couldn’t help but feel the weight come off me just a bit. I smiled and thought about what a grace it is to have long friendships, quick phone calls, trust in the distance, and arugula salad.
Emily’s Arugula Salad
I already know what some of you are going to say: “I don’t like arugula.” Fair enough. I’m glad you know yourself. And I wish I could tell you that a spring mix or a bowl of spinach or kale would produce the same result with this salad, but alas, I cannot. The peppery bite of arugula is the magic to the simplicity here. You’re welcome to try another green, but please, don’t say I didn’t warn you.
MAKES ABOUT 2 ENTRÉE SERVINGS OR 4 SIDE SERVINGS
1 (5-ounce) package fresh arugula
Extra- virgin olive oil to coat the greens
Juice of 1/2 to 1 lemon
Salt and black pepper to taste 1/4 to 1/2 cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese
Toasted slivered almonds, optional (if you’re feeling fancy and craving a crunch)
1. In a large bowl, add arugula.
2. Drizzle the greens with olive oil, just enough to coat them. Squeeze in fresh lemon juice.
3. Add salt and black pepper to the mixture.
4. Sprinkle Parmesan over the greens, then toss the salad together. Taste the greens, adjusting the olive oil, lemon juice, Parmesan, and seasonings to your liking.
5. Sprinkle with toasted almonds, if using.
6. Enjoy during naptime when the house is quiet, if possible. While you eat, text a friend and ask her to name something she is proud of herself for doing.
How Can I Get Them to Stay?
MOLLY FLINKMAN
When my eleven-year-old daughter, Lily, asks if she can make sugar cookies on a Saturday afternoon, the answer is an easy yes. I grab our stepladder and pull my well-worn handwritten recipe card out of a high cabinet. We preheat the oven together, and then I take a seat on a stool at the counter, content to watch her complete all the steps herself.
She unwraps the margarine, and I remind her that this specific kind of margarine is one of the reasons why these cookies are so good.
“Why does it matter?” she asks.
“Actually, I’m not sure,” I say.
I came about this cookie recipe the first year my husband, Jake, and I were married. One of my childhood friends had tucked the recipe card in a wedding gift bag alongside all the required nonperishable ingredients. I mostly followed the recipe the first time I made the cookies, except I used margarine instead of butter, and I skipped the step instructing me to chill the dough for two hours. I didn’t want to wait that long, so I rolled the warm dough into small balls and figured I’d see what would happen. The cookies were so soft and delicious—made even better with a thin layer of vanilla icing—that I never got around to following the recipe as it was originally intended.
Since that day, I have made countless batches of sugar cookies for people in my life. I’ve brought them to professional development meetings, church potlucks, and baby showers. I’ve sent them to work with Jake and made them for parties—whether or not we were hosting. They’re a bit of my legacy is what I am trying to say. When people see them plated on a counter, they know who made them. They almost always eat more than one.
But today, while I’m watching Lily cream the sugar and margarine with our hand mixer, I find myself thinking about the future teenagers I will make these cookies for someday— the future friends who will be looking for a place to hang out together on the weekends. Someday after a basketball game or before a school dance, they’ll need a place to go, and I want them here. What’s more, I want them to want to be here.
I’ll bribe them with these cookies, I think. This is how I’ll get them here.
But then I consider what I have to offer them besides warm baked goods. I start with our couch, because what teenage hang is good without a couch? Ours was given to us almost a decade ago, though it certainly wasn’t new then. Brown and threadbare, it sits in the center of our family room, which suddenly seems small and unexciting when I imagine it full of lanky kids. Here on my stool in the kitchen, I think about all the things our home doesn’t have to offer: There’s no backyard pool here. We don’t have a fancy movie room. We don’t have a finished basement. In fact, our 1939 farmhouse basement doesn’t even have the potential to be fully finished. When I take it all in, our home tends to feel crowded and a bit bedraggled.
But some things are new here. Jake recently replaced most of the flooring on our first floor, and I have been slowly chipping away at updating the light fixtures. These are nice touches, but when it comes to our house, my eye always seems to be drawn to the shabby and unfinished— the three colors of trim in most rooms, the holes in the wall by the back door, the piles of papers I can’t seem to figure out how to stay on top of.
Our menagerie of old and worn things doesn’t feel like much to offer our kids’ friends someday. I worry they’ll want flashy technology and nicer spots to gather. I want them in our home, but what do we really have to give them? I can bake them these delicious cookies, sure, but is that really enough to make them stay?
I watch Lily measure and mix, measure and mix— adding the wet ingredients and then the dry— and I think about when I was a teenager, back in the early aughts. My friends and I traveled in a large coed group in those days. We hung out together most weekends, and we’d decide whose house to go to through a combination of landlines and early Nokia cell phones.
My friends’ basements and family rooms varied in size and style, but many of them were dark and arguably too small for a crowd our size, which could sometimes reach a dozen. A few of our chosen spots had room for only a loveseat and a corner recliner. We were often splayed across the floor and got pretty good at squeezing together on sectionals. But never once did we care about amenities. We were not concerned about the size of the television or the make and model of the refrigerator. All we cared about was being together.
Usually, before we would pile into someone’s basement, we would hang out in the kitchen first, where moms and dads would feed us and pepper us with questions. Our school was small, so our parents had all become friends, too. While we were on courts and fields, they were on bleachers and sidelines, rooting us on together. I couldn’t tell you the color of the walls in those homes or whether any of the carpet had recently been replaced, but I do know that our collective group of parents loved us. We crammed around their tables and filled their driveways, and every set of those parents was completely delighted to host and serve us. We were everybody’s kids, and we knew it.
I have long since wanted to re- create this for my own kids— this sort
of pack mentality and communal friendship experience— but now the state of our home gives me pause. I wish I had more to offer these hypothetical future teenagers.
Once Lily is finished mixing, she rolls the dough into balls just like I’ve shown her time and again. I help her slide the cookie sheet into the oven, and then she sets the timer and escapes into the other room while I start to clean up.
I wonder when I started to care about all the tiny imperfections of our home so much—when I started to wish for more and new and bigger and better.
I wasn’t always this way. When Jake and I were first married, I loved our apartment décor, a hodgepodge of hand-me- down items from our childhood homes and college dorm rooms. There were a few new pieces sprinkled in from our wedding registry, but those things didn’t reflect a cohesive sense of style. Nothing really matched. One of our couches was made of a faded blue-and-gray plaid fabric, and the other was deep pink with a kick pleat skirt around the base. The couches sat in front of our television stand, which was actually a desk Jake had sawed in half and turned backward in the corner. And yet none of it fazed me. None of it bothered me the way it all seems to bother me now.
I grab a dishrag and start to clean the counters.
I think it all shifted when I started to notice how other people in my life have homes that could be magazine features. These homes have well- designed entryways; they have places to file the mail and the one million papers the kids bring home from school. There are no handprints all over the walls. There aren’t random single socks scattered around the rooms. The trim is painted the same color. There is a cohesion in these homes that has slowly made me feel self- conscious about the seeming mismatch of mine.
The timer goes off, and Lily bounds back into the kitchen. I watch
her carefully move each cookie to the piece of parchment paper I’ve set out on the clean counter. We mix the frosting while the cookies cool and then dip each one into the shiny glaze.
I hope they’ll keep coming back because they know how much we love them.
And it’s this small moment that resets something for me. This simple act of togetherness— of connection between the two of us— reminds me that I’m paying attention to the wrong things. Maybe some kids care about fancy things, but I think most just want to feel known and cared for. At least, that was true of my pack of friends. It’s true of Lily right now. I like to believe it will be true of the future teenagers who will walk through our door someday. And when I think about it that way— about how I can best love our kids’ friends when they’re here with us— the state of our couch suddenly feels less important. I’ll never have a keen eye for design, but I do know a thing or two about how to make people feel welcome.
That’s enough, I tell myself. It’s a simple shift in focus, but it makes all the difference. It re- centers me on what actually matters.
“I’ll make these cookies for you and your friends someday,” I tell Lily while we stand there in our imperfect kitchen— holes and handprints and all.
I’ll make this recipe for our kids’ friends any time they want, and maybe they’ll come for the cookies. Maybe this is how I’ll get them here, but I hope they’ll keep coming back because they know how much we love them.
Lily and I each take a cookie. They’re slightly underbaked to perfection.
“It’s just right,” I tell her, and it is.
Best Sugar Cookies Ever
Set aside everything you thought you knew about sugar cookies. This recipe doesn’t require chilled dough or a rolling pin, and it isn’t going to give you flat cookies. Instead, you’re going to bite into a soft ball of sugary goodness and never look back to the old way of things. These cookies pair perfectly with any occasion: parties, potlucks, holidays, and regular weekday afternoons. Just heed my one warning: Do not overbake them.
MAKES ABOUT 24 COOKIES
For the sugar cookies
1 cup vegetable oil spread, softened to room temperature
1 cup granulated sugar
1 egg
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 teaspoons baking powder
3 cups all- purpose flour
For the icing
2 cups powdered sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/4 cup milk
For the sugar cookies
1. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.
2. In a large mixing bowl, cream the vegetable oil spread and granulated sugar with an electric mixer until light and fluffy, about 2 minutes. With the mixer on low, add in the egg and vanilla, and mix until incorporated. Add in the baking powder, and then mix in the flour, 1 cup at a time, until fully combined.
3. Roll the dough into 2-inch balls and place 2 inches apart on an ungreased cookie sheet. Bake for 8 to 10 minutes, then check the bottom of the cookies. If they are golden brown, take them out of the oven. Do not overbake. Transfer the cookies to a wire rack or parchment on a counter, and let them cool completely.
For the icing
1. While the cookies are cooling, in a medium bowl whisk the powdered sugar, vanilla, and milk until thoroughly combined. If you want a thicker icing, add more powdered sugar.
2. Once the cookies have cooled, dip the top of each cookie in the icing so that one entire side is covered. Place each cookie on parchment paper so the icing can set.
Note: In place of vegetable oil spread, you can also use butter or margarine. But for the best flavor, I recommend vegetable oil spread—particularly Imperial Vegetable Oil Spread.
Once Upon a Time
CALLIE FEYEN
Once upon a time, I was in the best book club that ever was. It consisted of three members: my friends Rae and Emily, and me, Callie. When we met once a month, we called our meetings “REC days” because of our initials and also because a lot of times our meetings took all day, like a good recreation day ought to. We began at Colorado Kitchen, a place in Washington, DC, that served the best coffee and donuts the city had to offer. After a hearty book discussion and breakfast, we moved on to whatever adventures we had planned. We rode our bikes along Rock Creek and through the National Zoo. We ate lunch at Politics and Prose. We ran around the terrace of The Kennedy Center. We drank beers on the banks of the Potomac.
We read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and decided we had to stand in a New York City tenement where the protagonist, Francie, grew up. So we did. We drove to New York City and walked up a narrow, creaky, dark wooden stairwell and thought about Johnny, Francie’s father, coming home after a day’s work, singing his favorite song, “Molly Malone.” We stood on old floorboards and looked around at the dark, tiny space and wondered about seeds that are planted in a great big city.
Once, during a trip to the annual Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival in West Friendship, Maryland, the three of us were watching sheep get sheared up to their chinny- chin- chins, and we all decided we needed to learn how to knit. Rae told us about a lady named Helga who, word on the street of the nation’s capital, was the best knitter in all the land.
“I know she’ll teach us,” Rae said as the three of us watched a farmer lead a sheep to be sheared. A bluegrass band played in a barn nearby, a tune about heartache and pain set to banjos and a fiddle. The sheep’s hair fell in puffs to the floor, as if it were a part of the tight-knit harmony.
“Helga’s blunt,” Rae said as we stared at the sheep, now bare. She didn’t say it like she was warning us. Rae spoke like we were getting free French fries with our meal. “She tells the best stories,” Rae said, and the farmer led the sheep away, and the band played on.
Helga agreed to teach us, and Monday evenings became knitting nights. That first night, she led us to a nook built into her yellow kitchen, where three woven baskets holding skeins of yarn were waiting for us on the table. “That’s my yarn, and those are my baskets,” she told us. “And you can keep them.”
We each took a seat at the table, and she showed us how to cast on, making the first loops of yarn on the needle. Rae and Emily got it right away, but all I did was tie knots; my fingers were so tangled in the mass of yarn and needles, it looked like I was giving the finger to knitting.
“I’m left-handed,” I muttered, looking at the floor.
Helga shook her head. “Nuh-uh, honey. Left-handed ain’t got nothin’ to do with it.” She slapped a hand on my shoulder and leaned in. “You got to bloom where you’re planted.” She looked at my fingers, the tips turning purple from the yarn that was wrapped around them. “Honey, I think this is the wrong soil.”
She started to laugh. I looked at Rae, who was struggling to keep a straight face.
Emily looked at me with her lips set and her eyes slightly sympathetic but more matter of fact, as if to say, “Helga’s right.”
I laughed so hard that I was afraid I would have an accident if I didn’t get my hands untangled and get myself to Helga’s bathroom.
I think Helga questioned my intelligence because I kept coming back for knitting nights. I brought my basket and my knotted-up yarn and I pretended to try while I listened to Helga tell her stories. She had a story and a comeback for everything. She could talk about politics, faith, marriage— nothing was off-limits, including the story she told us about the time she knitted a bikini. Whatever happened in that bikini was scandalous and precisely what Helga had intended to have happen, but Rae, Emily, and I were laughing so hard at the concept of a knitted bikini that I barely remember the rest of the story.
What I loved about Helga’s stories— about Helga— is that she wasn’t there to teach us a lesson or impart wisdom about what it means to be a wife, a woman, a good Christian girl. Her stories were gifts, pink packages with silk bows she handed to us. We were all too eager to pop off the top, look inside, and ask, “What will we do with this?”
“Whatever the heck you want,” Helga would say.
The last time I saw Helga was the spring of 2008, when I went to her house for a bridal shower for Rae. I was about six weeks pregnant, but I was bleeding, and it wasn’t stopping. My ob-gyn knew what was going on and told me to come in that Monday “to make sure.” She didn’t say anything else, and I didn’t need her to. I knew what would happen next.
Somewhere women are always telling stories to each other. The stories are often told in the dark—maybe in a cave or, more likely, while waiting for the Metro. The darkness and the waiting, they’re important. Because
usually that’s where the stories come from. “This reminds me of . . .” one of the women might say. Or, “Here’s how it happened . . .” It’s in the darkness that “once upon a time” is born, a rope that tethers women together if we are brave enough to hold on. Somewhere, right now, women are telling stories— on the soccer field sidelines, in coffee shops, in the carpool line, around a firepit or an old dining table draped with a wine-stained linen cloth hiding marks of life imprinted on the wood: pencil indentations from homework, rings from hot tea mugs, scratches from plates heavy with something homemade, something shared.
That spring day, when buds from the cherry blossoms were just beginning to burst, I went to where the stories were. Not because I wanted to forget my own, but because I needed help carrying it.
I put on a black dress with silver skulls for buttons and a high slit. I had bought the dress in New York City with Rae and Emily. I’d bought it because it was edgy and nothing I’d ever pick out to wear, but I loved the way I looked in it, and I loved the way I felt— strong and confident. I slid on black heels. The dress had a belt, and I tied it around my waist loosely because I wanted to be gentle with whatever small seed might be trying to grow in the dark.
At Helga’s, I sat around the table with Rae and Emily and a slew of other women and listened to stories, mostly told by Helga. She told us about growing up in Germany, living through World War II, and marrying an African American soldier, then moving to the United States during a time when interracial marriage was banned. That spring day, when buds from the cherry blossoms were just beginning to burst, I went to where the stories were.
She used to sell Avon, and most everyone thought it was a little side job— something to do in between chores and childcare. Helga’s husband got sick, and among the sadnesses they were dealing with, they could no longer go to the beach and swim as they used to every year. “We should build a pool in our backyard,” Helga told him. He said they had no money for a pool. “Maybe you don’t, but I do,” Helga said. Over the years, she’d squirreled away a dollar here and there and had saved over ten thousand dollars— enough to build a pool in the backyard.
“First thing I’m gonna do when I get to heaven is find that man,” she began. “Second thing I’m gonna do is smoke a cigarette.”
“Anything else?” Emily asked.
“I’m gonna find God. I have some questions.”
Day turned to early evening, and wind blew through Helga’s open windows. Her white curtains lifted and rustled, making a few of her porcelain trinkets shake. Helga, who was well into her seventies, made a move to begin clearing the table, but Rae, Emily, and I beat her to it. She followed us into the kitchen, though, and as we rinsed off dishes and loaded them into the dishwasher, we chatted on like four besties.
Helga asked Rae what she would do next, after she got married, and Rae said she would continue to teach, at least for a while.
“Mm-hmm,” Helga said and looked at me knowingly. “You can’t do it all,” she said and winked at me. I’d left teaching two years earlier because I was pregnant with Hadley. Sometimes I wish I had the courage to tell Helga that I wanted to know how to do it all, that I spend most of my days resisting the idea that I must give something up in order to be good enough for something else. When will I learn time management, Helga? When will I learn to say no? What is a healthy boundary?
Rae scooped dish detergent from a green box under the sink into the dishwasher and started the machine. She told Helga about the giant school building the principal was planning on constructing.
“He’s comparing it to the promised land,” Rae said.
“The promised land?” Helga said, squeezing out water from a knitted dishrag. She turned to face us and leaned against the counter.
“So he thinks he’s Moses?” she asked. Emily, Rae, and I laughed.
“I guess,” Rae said.
“Someone ought to tell him Moses never made it to the promised land,” Helga said and slapped the rag on the sink, nice and neat.
Helga might not have been able to teach me how to knit a scarf, but she taught me how to knit a story by following whatever yarn catches my eye, no matter what anyone else might say about its worth. Casting on might’ve proven detrimental to my fingers, but I learned how to fling myself into the world, offering up what I have, like the sheep who stood silently while the bluegrass band played their high lonesome songs and we all clung to what we knew of sorrow and pain and what had fallen, in the hope it could be picked up and something new could be made. Helga showed me how to make something bloom.
And she taught me how to listen for whatever story was on its way next. Two days after I stood in Helga’s kitchen, I walked into the sonogram room, resolved for whatever “once upon a time” was to happen next.
I heard a heartbeat— its pulse so loud it filled the room like the Tenebrae drum on Good Friday, its thump fierce and beautiful and terrifying and making room for a brand-new story.
No- Burden Bread
I have a knack for making everything complicated. No matter what it is, I find a way to sprinkle confusion, extra steps, even mayhem wherever I go. This is probably one of the reasons Helga knew I shouldn’t knit. So when I found a recipe for what I can only call a “sourdough hack,” I assumed it was too good to be true. This bread is so easy to make, I daresay you’ll throw out that Mason jar of sourdough starter that’s been in your fridge since—be honest—the pandemic.
MAKES 1 LOAF
3 cups plus 2 tablespoons allpurpose flour, plus more for dusting
1 3 /4 teaspoons kosher salt
1/2 teaspoon quick- rising yeast
1 1/2 cups water
1. In a large bowl, mix the flour, salt, and yeast.
2. Add the water and, using a dough whisk or a wooden spoon, stir until a shaggy mixture forms and pulls away from the mixing bowl.
3. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and walk away. Seriously! Let this bad boy do its thing on the counter for about 12 hours. I usually make the dough the night before and bake it in the morning.
4. When you’re ready to bake, preheat the oven to 450 degrees. When the oven has reached 450, place a lidded cast- iron skillet (or Dutch oven) in the oven. Heat the cooking vessel for 30 minutes.
5. While the cooking vessel heats up, pour the dough onto a heavily floured surface and shape it into a ball. Cover the ball with plastic wrap and set aside.
6. After heating for 30 minutes, remove the cooking vessel from the oven and drop the dough inside, without the parchment. Place the lid on top, move the cooking vessel back to the oven, and bake for 30 minutes. After 30 minutes, remove the lid and bake an additional 15 minutes, until the bread is golden and baked through. One way to determine it’s fully baked is to flick the loaf to make sure it has a nice hollow thud. Remove the loaf from the oven and place it on a cooling rack. Slice when you’re ready to eat.
Note: This recipe is adapted from the Simply So Good blog by Janet Barton.1
