Cooking For Joy
When a Cookie Is More Than a Cookie
Nostalgia baking during quarantine
Shortly before Mother’s Day, after my daughter and I folded my solo-quarantining mother into our #quaranteam, I spent a good bit of time thinking about what to get her, besides the same-old-same-old flowers. I like to gift shared experiences to my parents — a Broadway show, a concert, a trip to an exhibition, a fishing trip, a spa treatment — but given the state of the world, it felt like something homemade would be more appropriate.
As I rummaged through my cabinets to see what random ingredients might spark joyful memories and inspire some cooking, I found my muse in the back of my pantry shelf, past the various types of flour I was hoarding: a bag of shredded coconut. Purchased to make a banana bread recipe for my daughter that went terribly, terribly wrong, the coconut sat. A little more digging unearthed an unopened bottle of coconut extract. I immediately knew what I would be attempting to make my mother for Mother’s Day.
There’s a memory thread here. When I was a kid, every night around 8:30, my sister and I gathered in our kitchen, which was wallpapered in red and white checkers (à la any Italian restaurant of yesteryear) and anchored by a big, dark pine wood table and matching armchairs. Waiting for us on the table…
