The twins had a friend over and it was an overcast Saturday. Perfect for warming the house with brownies. They asked where the mix was and I said I usually make them from scratch. I was in the sewing room wrestling with a queen size quilt when Hope came in.
"Want to help us make them?" she asked
sweetly.
I had assumed they wanted girl time without me, but did not refuse the invitation.
Sitting in the corner, so as not to hamper the preteen chatter, I listened as they read the recipe, which they pulled off the internet. Wistfully I glanced at the cookbooks that guided me through the first years of marriage, some with splattered pages, and notes in the margins. Moosewood Cookbook ushered me from eating in a college dining hall to being
queen of my own stove. Laurel's Kitchen taught me about bread, before gluten became the enemy, and The Joy of Cooking helped me learn the basics I didn't pick up from my own mother. Food crafting was not her forte, her specialty being tuna fish casserole which had three ingredients.... a box of elbows, a can of Campbell's Cream of Mushroom Soup and a tin of Chicken of the Sea. I guess the days of cookbooks are
waning. Most of the things I make I know by heart now, banana bread with rice flour, waffles, apple crisp.
Aurelle read off the directions.
"Half a cup of flour, half a cup of brown sugar, half a cup of salt."
"Whoa, check again," I suggested.
"Half a TEASPOON of salt. It seemed like a lot of salt but what do I know."
I was relieved to have diverted a spoiled batch, and tried to remember the last time I had baked with them. Being the eighth and ninth kids, they missed my more
industrious years of matching aprons and hot mitts. There was a year when we were homeschooling Lukas and Chara that we studied a different country each week and made an ethnic dish.
Cooking is a good skill to learn in person. It is hard to master the art of dividing egg whites from a sentence in a book. And the smell of a cake when it is brown around the edges can't be captured in
ink.
Mentoring is a stab at sharing good practices in person. One time we were with a couple where she dominates the conversation in real time, and we shepherded them through check ins and appreciations with good boundaries. Another couple told us that if we were not present they would be off in different rooms doing their own things. We modeled sitting side by side, which admittedly is as
easy as separating an egg yolk.
We have even been known to stop a deluge of salty comments before they ruined a pleasant evening.
