Instead of turkey, mashed potatoes, etc., stuffed grape leaves (along with shish-kabob and pilaf) is the traditional centerpiece of our Christmas dinner.
Disclaimer: Every script I’ve ever written is overly descriptive and too long, so no doubt this recipe will be, too. Apologies in advance.
About a month ago, I shared a recipe for buttery shortbread. In a cooking class I taught recently at my local natural foods co-op, we made the same shortbread, only rather than using 1/2 cup cake flour as my original recipe instructed, we used brown rice flour. It gave the shortbread a much creamier, more tender consistency. It was delicious. I thought it couldn't get any better.
Until today. I crushed some dried lavender buds, minced up some crystallized ginger and worked them into the rich dough. A sprinkling of Mrs. Kelly's Lavender Rose Sugar was the icing on the cake, or the cookie, I guess.
I first discovered dried lavender buds when a friend of mine from Pennsylvania, who also teaches cooking classes, shared a recipe for an appetizer of lavender infused honey over goat cheese.
For the past few birthdays, Christmases, and really any occasion requiring a gift, my Mother has been wrapping up her own belongings and passing them off on her children. It began the year that she divided old photos from her father’s side of the family among my brother, sister and me: huge stacks of ancient, scalloped-edged, sepia prints. For Christmas my boyfriend got an indoor grill from his mother; I got a box of anonymous, sour-looking Germans from mine.
Gift giving has never been particularly ceremonious in the French family household. My father routinely forbids us to buy him anything, ever, preferring to get something for himself. (Last Christmas my sister wrapped his present for him, attaching a card that read “To Dad: Only you know what you really want. Love, Dad.”) And yet this new trend of giving away my parents’ belongings is beyond eccentric; it’s morbid, even by my mother’s standards. The portrait of James Joyce and the highball glasses now residing in my kitchen aren’t examples of re-gifting. “I’m getting rid of my stuff,” my mother explains, pronouncing “stuff” as if collectible paintings and vintage crystal was a dubious-smelling carton of milk, “before I die.”
Around our house in those days, if you didn’t clean up your room you went to bed without dessert. Not just a mess in your own room, either. If you left a mess anywhere and refused to be responsible for it—reasons ranging from recalcitrance to outright sloth—no matter! There was NO EXCUSE FOR IT! You hit the sack with a hole in your belly. Tough patooties. That was the law of the land.
In the great Southeast, no meal was complete without something sweet to finish it off. Round it out, take the edge off. Such punishment then was tantamount to twenty lashes. While you might be able to stand fast, stay whatever course had to be stayed concerning your Mess and its necessity, it was you, the Messer, who teetered bedward in sugar shock, the withdrawal kind, not the law upholders of the land.
It was 1960, when our mother’s chums entered her in the Mrs. Nashville contest as a practical joke. Not because she wasn’t up to muster in all things home ec, it just wasn’t something anybody from our side of town had ever “done.” Nonetheless, she went right on ahead with it, jumped through the field trials, and sashayed home with the banner. Mrs. Nashville, 1960. Nice picture in the paper, everybody got a big kick out of it.
The press representative agreed to let me into the Courbet retrospective a day before the preview. My mother and I were in New York for a couple of days before heading up to Westport, Connecticut to attend a memorial service for her sister, my aunt Judy. Our visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art would be our own private memorial.
Judy used to drive into the city whenever I came out from Los Angeles and she relished taking me to lunch at the Trustees dining room. She had three sons and none of them were interested in art so she considered me her daughter once removed, the only member of the family, other than herself, who thought time in a museum was well spent. This time, I took mother.