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Cooking Helps

April 2nd, 2006 Caroline

A tragedy struck our community this week, and while we absorb the news I find myself doing a lot of baking. It’s good to have something very concrete to focus on (trying to write would give me far too much room for reflection), and when I’m done there’s a ton of food, so we invite friends over to share a meal, making everyone just a little less sad.

The first day, with Ben and some of his friends out of school, we made granola and bread. Granola is really just a lot of measuring, and the kids are good at that. Bread is both measuring and playing with dough — cooking and an art project all in one! I had a cookbook open to a particular recipe, but since I was the only one reading it, and with the kids starting to argue about whose turn it was to measure, things got a little casual. Still, it turned out fine. Bread, in my experience, pretty much always does.

That evening, with the kids sleeping and the rain pouring down again (we set a record, did you hear?) Tony and I found ourselves in the kitchen, quietly doing some more cooking. He made his stuffed peppers, I wound up making two lasagnes and a pie.

We had enough food, ultimately, to gather friends for dinner two nights in a row.

Tonight I started making food for tomorrow’s vigil and potluck. This weather, and my mood, makes me long for strong flavors so I dug out the recipe for Martha Stewart’s chocolate ginger cookies. They’re kind of a pain to make (dissolving the baking soda in boiling water, please…), which is why I don’t make them more often, but they are truly great cookies. If you’re going to go to the trouble, double the recipe.

Then, not feeling like cookies were quite enough, I turned to Feast, my go-to cookbook these days. Besides, I think Nigella, more than any other living food writer (MFK Fisher is her predecessor in this), really understands the intricate connections between food, celebration, and mourning. In the introduction to the final chapter, in fact, she quotes Fisher, who describes “the mysterious appetite that often surges in us when our hearts seem about to break and our lives seem too bleakly empty.” The rosemary remembrance cake looked just right.

(Links to more recipes coming as time permits… )

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