I have a cold and so tonight I made apple sauce (from a few different apples and a pear).  I discovered Aurora's mother's copy of the The Tassajara Bread Book, relevant to all cooking and baking endeavors, in it there is a poem that begins like this:

A COMPOSITE OF KITCHEN NECESSITIES

Bring food alive with your

loving presence.

To have compassion, to have respect

for fresh foods, for broken bowls,

for dirty napkins, and little bugs.

To take care of leftovers,

not saying, oh that's all right, we have plenty

we can throw that away.

Because everything is saying love me, 

have compassion, hold me gently.

Please hug me now and then

(we're really one, not two),

but don't get attached

(we're really two, not one).

The bowls and knives, the table, the teapot,

the leftovers, the molding vegetables,

the juicy fruit,

everything is asking this of you:

make full use,

take loving care

of me.

The cups, the glasses, the sponges,

the sticky honey jar,

all asking to fulfill.

Just to make deepest love all the time,

concentrating not on the food, but on yourself:

making your best effort to allow things

to fulfill their functions.  In this way

everything is deliciously full

of warmth and kindness.

I've been on the road for two weeks...

My first night in Seattle, I was going to make cookies but a friend of the friend I was staying with is allergic to gluten (flour, oats), dairy (semisweet chips), soy (Earth Balance), peanuts, corn, practically everything.  After consulting with Aurora, I made her mother's chocolate cake:

3 eggs

1 cup coconut milk (instead of buttermilk)

long squirt of honey

1-3/4 cup (gluten-free) flour

1-1/2 cup brown sugar

3/4 cup cocoa

2 tsp baking soda

dash of salt

The recipe calls for a cup of coffee, which provides most of the cake's flavor, but I didn't have time for it, and the end result was bland but happily devoured with a Dagoba Lavender bar. Despite my precautions, the allergic friend had migraines for the rest of my stay in Seattle and is maybe still having them.

My only other (not quite) cookie experience before leaving the rainy city was a delicious cone of bourgeois cookies and cream ice cream from Molly Moon's -- peppermint ice cream with Girl Scout thin mint cookies -- mmm!

 

Then I headed south to San Francisco, where I set up a mobile cookie unit, carrying all the ingredients for the Chocolate Salty Oat knock-offs around with me in my backpack (except the eggs and butter which I left in the knowing hands of Providence to make available to me).  I made them three times, first for friends at UCSF, then for a dinner party in Berkeley and last for my family in Sonoma on the night before Thanksgiving, when we celebrate Hanukkah (we also got a mint chocolate chip and oreo cookie ice cream cake from Baskin Robbins decorated with a menorah).  The only change worth noting was in the batch for my family, I used a Trader Joe's Pound Plus dark chocolate bar chopped into chunks instead of chips.  The next day, my cousins chatted me up about the idea to start a cookie business, maybe out of a truck in New York -- I tried to explain to them that the secret ingredient to any successful cookie venture is Stewart's charm and good looks.

I brought the mobile cookie unit with me on the plane to Arizona, smuggling the 4 oz. bottle of vanilla in my back pocket through the security check.  They searched my backpack, feeling my flour for anything I might have hidden in there but without opening my Quaker Oats tube, where I hid my chips and baking powder.  I was nervous and talked a mile a minute about how a friend and I are looking for a space to open a bakery in New York.  Nothing was confiscated.

My family had many opinions on how to improve the recipe, some methodological, others about ingredients and proportions.  On Sunday in Flagstaff, where I am now, I made the recipe again with an extra 1/4 cup of butter.  They came out better but still too crumbly.  Next, I'm going to try replacing coconut flakes with coconut milk and/or try using melted chocolate instead of cocoa powder.

Back in Brooklyn, Stewart showed up at our apartment on a comically small bicycle. I brought a bag of Chocolate Salty Oats by Kayak Cookies back from D.C. for him to try and for us to reverse engineer from the ingredients list, our half batch recipe and the recipe for oatmeal raisin cookies on the Quaker Oats package. Here's what we used:

1/2 cup butter
1/2 cup turbinado sugar
1 egg
2 capfuls vanilla
Hershey's Cocoa till it seemed right (not enough)
1-1/2 cups oats
1 cup whole wheat pastry flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
pinch of coconut flakes
3/4 cups semisweet chocolate chips
Baleine course sea salt to taste

They cook differently than flour-based cookies -- longer -- and they need to be shaped more as they do not settle. They were a little sweeter than the originals (Kayak must use darker chocolate, the package only says "my favorite Belgian chocolate") and were better after cooling than when still warm and gooey (we inadvertently let one cool off before eating it). It's heartening to think we got so close on our first try, I want to try imitating other cookies now, especially since the bag of six cost $12.

It's been a month since we finished painting in Maine and parted in Boston. I returned to Brooklyn and Stewart went out to Ohio. This week he returned east, but we just missed each other in New York -- I left for D.C. yesterday and he arrives in N.Y.C. today.

Last night, with my friends in Washington, I made a half batch, with questionable brown sugar (dried out, we added water and distilled some syrup, don't know how much, not a lot) and only a little, maybe a quarter cup, white sugar, a mugful (no measuring cups) of bleached all-purpose flour, Ghiradelli 60% cacao bittersweet chocolate chips and baking soda, no vanilla, no salt, no oats, no nuts. The dough was not very sweet, but I thought tasted good. In the oven, rather than settle, the cookies puffed up and came out cakey -- too much flour to sugar/butter. I like the chips a lot, better than Ghiradelli's semisweet chips, which are among my least favorite. This morning, my friend took two cookies in his lunch to work. All in all: positive results.

Today, I'm going to get the salted chocolate chocolate chip oatmeal cookies I had when I was here last -- expensive and excellent. When Stewart and I next rendezvous, I hope to recreate them.

We're done.

We said goodbye to the island painter on Sunday night, after the unfortunate Red Sox finale. We watched the last three ALCS games with him, bringing a half batch each night; like the players on screen, sports viewers fall easily into superstitious routines. Game 5 was such a fortuitous come-back that our presence and the cookies that came with us were partly credited. We were invited back and for game 6 the cookies worked again. But for game 7 our luck and our white flour had run out (we made them with all whole wheat flour) and the painter's parting words had an edge of resentment -- the beer had run out the night before and I think the cookies less well-suited the sober outcome of the series.

And then yesterday, we put the finishing touches on the deck, the trim, a screen door and the banister we've been painting, with interruptions, since August. We said goodbye to our neighbor, a man in his seventies or eighties who we'd only spoken to a few times briefly but who said he would miss us. I thought the people on the island were secretive, loners who kept to themselves, and in many ways they are, but there grows a certain companionship in proximate isolation. Watching our neighbor walk by, looking for his dog, waving from the top of the ladder, admiring from a distance the stained shingles he hangs to dry on clotheslines on his porch, and his admiring our work, calling out an encouraging word from the road or just stopping to look, we've become friends of a sort. I will miss him too.

We were pretty much out of food but in the hour before the ferry Stewart scrounged together the last of our peanut butter, a half stick of butter and apricot jam for the egg (flour, sugar, baking soda too) to make a small batch of crumbly peanut butter cookies. We ate them off the tray, finished the milk and that was it. I turned off the power to the stove and hot water heater, we shut the lights and locked the doors. It was too dark to admire the paint job as we walked away, dragging our ladders on a cart to the dock. On our way, we stopped at the island handyman's house to tell him we were going and to ask him to turn off the water in our house for the winter.

We return to the island tomorrow afternoon for the final stretch of work, it's taken a lot out of us, I think the stress is making me sick, my stomach has been hurting for the last three weeks. Someone tried to blame all the cookies I've been eating.