12-Week Writing Practice Group Begins on Monday January 5, 2026

January 2, 2026 //
2

Happy New Year everyone.

I love to teach Natalie Goldberg’s writing practice. I hate to market my classes.

Here’s the deal. I am a dharma heir of Natalie’s and studied with her for more than twenty years, mostly in person. I started a writing practice group in response to requests from students in Natalie’s online classes at Shambhala/Prajna.

That group, the Monday AM Practice Group, is still going. We meet once a week at 9 AM Monday morning in the Pacific time zone of the United States on Zoom. Class lasts an hour and a half. We begin with ten minutes of silent, zen-style meditation. Then we practice writing, reading aloud to each other and listening. We often read a work of fiction or a memoir mid-quarter and draw writing topics from it.

I open the group to new students once each quarter. Students must commit to being present for all twelve sessions, barring personal emergencies: this is a community of writers, not a drop-in group. Winter Quarter starts January 5th, this coming Monday. Tuition is $300.00 for a 12-week quarter, payable in three installments of $100.00 USD, or as a lump sum of $300 USD.

If you are ready to jump in and join us, or have questions, please use the comment field or contact me via email at sharyndimmick@att.net. Thank you.

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Categories writing practice

Christmas Cookies Redux, Part Five

December 30, 2025 //
1

Today, on December 30, 2025, I frosted my last batch of pfefferneusse for the year. I baked them yesterday right before a guest arrived for tea and cookies (I served her previously baked and frosted cookies). Today’s cookies are sitting in a heated kitchen and I am hoping that the icing will set because I will be mailing out cookies tomorrow morning on the last day of the year. Perhaps some of them will arrive by “old Christmas” on January 6th.

Before I got to the pfefferneusse, I spent yesterday morning rolling and cutting ginger cookies with the usual kinds of trouble, including dough that stuck to my marble slab and cut cookies that wrinkled when I tried to pick them up with a spatula. I was working in an utterly cold kitchen — about 40 F — to minimize difficulties from warming dough.

As I began rolling out the last fresh batch of the last dough, a miracle happened: the dough did not stick to the slab, I could roll it paper-thin and, for the first time in eight days, the cookie cutters lifted the dough rather than leaving it cut in place. Hallelujah. The perfect amount of flour, the perfect room temperature, the drier weather — whatever it was — allowed me to cut out three trays of fresh cookies and do the re-rolling to finish the ginger dough. Whew.

I enjoyed cutting those last batches of cookies. I was on a roll, using up open bowls of lime green and red sugars, ferrying trays to the oven.

I was working on parchment paper and, when I attempted to remove the last baking sheet one-handed, the sheet of parchment slid off the baking sheet. The cookies fell to the oven floor and began turning to charcoal and the edge of the parchment paper burst into flame. I picked it up, dropped it in the sink and splashed dishwater on the burning paper.

My house had smelled lovely, scented with freshly-baked ginger cookies and sugar. Now it smelled like burnt offerings.

I discovered that I cannot reach the lock on the window over the sink — I should add a one-step step-stool to my kitchen equipment, so I pivoted and opened another window. My smoke alarm, which goes off when I fry bacon, remained silent through the entire episode.

With half an hour to go before company, I reduced the oven temperature to 300 F, rolled the pfefferneusse dough into balls and baked them, after scraping black carbon off the oven floor. I began the kitchen clean-up, thinking I was done, when I spotted a small tray of ginger-re-rolls.

Drat. When the pfefferneusse came out in twenty minutes, I cranked the oven back up to 375 F and baked the last ginger cookies of 2025.

This morning I located enough boxes to mail cookies in, found a few boxes and tins that would fit inside them and decided to sacrifice a few tins from my permanent collection to send to some friends. I will get them packed today or tonight and be ready to walk them to the post office tomorrow when it opens.

Next year: start earlier. Maybe collect some new small Christmas tins this week if I can find any.

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Categories baking, Christmas baking, cookies, Uncategorized

Christmas Cookies Redux, Part Four

December 25, 2025 //
0

Today, Christmas Day, I took the day off from baking and cooking. I had planned to cook a roast lamb feast, but had no takers, and I had a last-minute invitation to a turkey and trimmings Christmas dinner, so all I made today was a kale salad for the feast and a bowl of oatmeal with sour cherries and walnuts, which I ate at noon.

Yesterday, however, I combined searching for a red tablecloth, testing tree lights, moving boxes around and making French onion soup and kale salad with baking a few dozen ginger cookies and pfefferneusse, and frosting said pfefferneusse.

I made the onion soup base first, caramelizing sliced onions in butter and olive oil, adding thyme and white pepper, de-glazing the pan with chicken stock. Then I de-stemmed kale for salad. Then I decided to tackle ginger cookies.

Ginger cookies, when you want them wafer-thin and crisp, are difficult — there is no way around it. Lessons learned or remembered this year. 1) Chilling the dough for several days is not enough 2) Kick the silicone mat to the curb — it does not help. 3) Turn off the heat in the kitchen: this dough must be seriously cold to manage (It’s the molasses). 4) When the cut cookies wrinkle when you try to pick them up, give it up, scrape the dough off the marble slab and put the dough in the freezer for a few minutes. 5) While, you are at it, refrigerate the marble slab.

Yesterday I left the marble slab in the refrigerator with rolled out dough on it. I’ll see what happens tomorrow.

After I gave up on ginger cookies, I turned to pfefferneusse, easy to roll into balls and pop onto a sheet of parchment paper when you have used up your supply of butter wrappers. They bake in a nice slow 300-degree oven for twenty minutes. Nothing ever goes wrong with them except the royal icing.

I can’t tell you how many times I have made royal icing that doesn’t want to set. I don’t want it tooth-achingly sweet, so I might use less powdered sugar than some people do. I don’t measure it. I just dump powdered sugar into egg whites and whisk until I like the consistency. I add a generous amount of anise extract — you need to taste it in the frosting.

I hand-dip each cookie in the icing and set it on the cut-open paper bag that I have been using for all of the cookies. The bag catches stray colored sugar and absorbs excess fat from the cooling cookies. Doing pfefferneusse last adds frosting drips to the brown paper.

After I finished with ginger dough for the day, I turned the heat back on in the kitchen. It turns out that a heated kitchen helps icing dry. Who knew? In our Kensington kitchen the only possible heat sources were the ovens, the stove, or the dryer. Here in Washington, my kitchen has a heating vent and thermostat. What luxury.

So, by the end of the day I had some of each of the classic four Dimmick cookies made: cocoa shortbread, maple butter cookies, ginger cookies and pfefferneusse with candied ginger and orange peel.

In times past there were more cookies. Mom would make Russian tea cakes, dream bars, even coconut macaroons. I make Russian tea cakes if I have time and I have experimented with apricot bars but have never found one I like with a serious amount of dried apricots and nuts — I want it to be mostly apricots and nuts on a not-too-sweet base. In times long past there were homemade divinity and caramels, homemade eggnog marinated in whiskey. I can make all of those things, but find it difficult to find the time. There was fruitcake and mince pie, neither of which I miss. Mom made walnut fudge and Grandma made rocky road fudge and sometimes double fudge as well as plain sugar cookies like hockey pucks: dead-white with flour, thick and hard. We liked them when we were kids, but every year Grandma used more flour and less shortening until they resembled sweetened hardtack: you could eat them if you dipped them in tea, coffee, cocoa or milk, but why bother.

Before my neighbor Eileen arrived for Christmas Eve dinner I made lemon-tahini salad dressing with garlic, added artichoke hearts and sliced green olives with pimentos for a festive touch. While she plugged in an extension cord she had brought and strung the lights on the tree, I made Gruyere croutons for the soup.

Eileen opened a bottle of Tempranillo. I routed out some punch cups from a large box of fragile glassware packed by professional movers (I have nowhere to display or store goblets, tea cups and punch cups so they are still in their box). She poured an inch of wine and we drank a Christmas toast.

We ate soup and salad, followed by cookies. We put ornaments on the tree. Eileen dried dishes, stowed leftovers and packed cookies to take home.

My current plan is to finish baking ginger cookies and pfefferneusse on Boxing Day and to box up cookie assortments to send to far-flung friends. If I run low, I will make more of anything except ginger cookies. Enough is enough. I also hope to roast the lamb, fix mashed potatoes, lemon pie, radicchio salad and cinnamon rolls. We’ll see how far I get…

Tell me about the holiday cookies you love. And let me know if you have a wonderful apricot-nut bar.

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Categories baking, Christmas baking, cookies, home cooking, seasonal recipes

Christmas Cookies Redux, Part Three

December 23, 2025 //
0

When I walked in the door this evening my house smelled like maple. I spent all day rolling, cutting, decorating and baking batches of Smitten Kitchen’s Nutmeg Maple Butter Cookies. I have to say that this cookie is my favorite variation on a classic Christmas sugar cookie. The dough handles perfectly (Is it the egg yolk that keeps it from drying out or getting too stiff?). And they taste fabulous. Deb makes hers austere, but when I make them I tart them up with colored sugar because, you know, when I make them they are Christmas cookies.

Here’s a secret to Dimmick rolled cookies (You may never look at cookies quite the same way again). My mother taught me to use a sequence of cutters: when the dough is untouched, when it has been chilling in the refrigerator and you pull your first quarter or eighth of dough out to roll, you select the cutters you are going to use. I like to start with six-pointed stars and Christmas trees. Then you use only those cutters every time you select a fresh round of dough. When you roll up the scraps and roll them out, you choose entirely different cutters: I chose a flower that I think of as a poinsettia, but could be a Christmas rose. All second-generation dough (aka re-rolls) is cut with this cutter. And if, God forbid, you have a third generation of dough made from twice re-rolled scraps, you choose yet another cutter.

Why do we do this? The first time you roll out dough it has minimal added flour on your work surface. The cookies that you get from a first dough are more tender and flavorful. By the time you are re-rolling dough, you have incorporated the flour that is on your work surface and you usually have to add a bit more flour when you roll it out so that it does not stick, so second and third-generation cookies have more flour in them and the dough gets worked more: both of those things toughen the cookies slightly. The compensation is that the re-rolled dough is usually a bit easier to work with due to the added flour and sometimes you can get the stiffer cookies quite thin. The second generation cookies may look better than the first generation ones, but the first ones taste better. Switching cutters functions as a code. You can say to those in the know, “The poinsettias are re-rolls,” while you make them attractive for others to grab.

My mother favored delicate, thin cookies and I share that preference. I tend to use small, angular cutters with unfussy shapes. My favorite cutters are just an outline of the shape, as opposed to the kind that have a flat top and a sharp cutting edge — cookies tend to get stuck in overly fancy cutters. I don’t make gingerbread men, although I have the cutters to make them.

As I was throwing red sugar onto the maple poinsettias, I realized that I would run out of red sugar before I had baked all of the ginger cookies (which I haven’t started yet). I also saw that I did not have enough powdered sugar to make royal icing for the pfefferneusse — that recipe makes a lot.

When you make cookies hour after hour by yourself, you get into a rhythm. Take a butter wrapper and use it to grease a baking sheet. Set that on the counter. Add flour to your work surface: I use a silicone mat over a marble slab. Pat the dough into a round as you would for pie crust. Flour your rolling pin. Roll out the dough as thinly as possible. I usually end up with one thick end on the top and am running out of room to roll, so I will break the thick part off and set it aside — it is just like new dough because I haven’t finished rolling it.

Choose your cutters and flour them. Place the cutter as close to the edge of the dough as you can. Then place the next cutter as close to the last place you cut as you can. After awhile, you start to see “If I turn the tree cutter right side up here and upside down there” I can cut very close together.” I imagine someone laying out paper patterns on fabric. I don’t think of myself as having strong spacial abilities, but I am good at placing cookie cutters, probably because I’ve done it a lot.

Pop the filled cookie sheet in the refrigerator to chill while you fill the next one. Transfer the chilled sheet to your work table for decorating. When all your trays are full of cut cookies, preheat the oven. Decorate the cookies while it preheats.

As I cut cookies, I move the scraps off to the side of the marble slab — I will gather them up to re-roll later. Mom sometimes made “scrap cookies” of the odd bits of dough between cookies. I prefer to re-roll the scraps and make cookies with recognizable shapes.

Suddenly I remember the family lexicon: members of my immediate family talked about “crap cookies,” not because there was anything wrong with the Christmas cookies we looked forward to all year but because my younger brother couldn’t say esses when he was little. “Scrap cookies” became “crap cookies.”

Before I decorated the last round of poinsettias, my phone rang. My former next door neighbor from Oberlin Avenue who is one hundred years old now was calling to wish me a merry Christmas. I was touched. I asked her if she would be going out to visit her daughter for Christmas. She was, but she wanted to see if I was home first. I told her I was baking cookies, that that had been one of Madge’s specialties and that I still baked them. She said she’d check up on me from time to time and I told her I had never forgotten how she sent us food when my mother was so ill.

While cookies bake, I mix up new batches of colored sugar. I’ve made light green, turquoise, denim blue, orange and an accidental brown — no matter what the package says you cannot make purple sugar with cheap liquid food coloring.

I do not set a timer. When the cookies are ready I will catch their scent wafting through the air. When cookies smell like cookies they are done.

I baked the last tray of cookies, washed my silicone mat and forced myself out of the house for a Safeway run. Safeway was out of red sugar, but I got powdered sugar and a few treats (coffee yogurt and tapioca pudding) and the thyme leaves I have been eying, outrageously priced at nine dollars, but 33% off this week. The walk stretched out my back a little, compressed from all the standing and sitting.

I fed the cat, had dinner myself (bagel, peanut butter, yogurt, raw carrots) and realized I wasn’t up for a second shift. The ginger dough is the hardest one to handle. Stay tuned.

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Categories Christmas baking, cookies, home cooking

Christmas Cookies Redux, Part Two

December 18, 2025 //
7

I thought about the kitchen. I wrote about the kitchen. I tried to avoid thinking about the kitchen. And then I went down to the kitchen.

Onyx followed me down, hoping that I would open a can of cat food at 4:20 PM. Not happening. I tell her it isn’t time. I tell her she has to wait. I don’t know how much of this she understands, but after watching me for a few minutes she disappears up the stairs. I turn on the oven for a commercial frozen turkey pot pie for dinner: when I am doing production baking I don’t cook meals — it will be muffins for breakfast, quesadillas or roasted yams or a bagel with peanut butter for lunch and whatever I can find for dinner for the next few days.

I put the glass bowl of molasses, butter and sugar back into the microwave. I just set it in there to get it out of the way while I sift flour. Three and a half cups into a metal bowl that held flour earlier in the day. When I bake more than one thing in a day I reuse cups and bowls without washing them whenever I can: a cup that only contained flour can be used for flour again; a teaspoon that has only measured dry ingredients can be used for more of them, sometimes with a quick wipe with a towel to remove dark-colored coffee or cocoa powder or cloves. I see that I will have to get flour soon, but I have enough to finish this recipe. The half and half I prefer in coffee has gone blinky, but I do not want to go to the health food store tonight — I want to finish this dough. I’ll open a can of evaporated milk tomorrow morning because I will have coffee long before the store is open.

I measure the flour, rescuing spilled flour from the counter and cutting board when I can to make up the last half cup. I have left measuring spoons out, so I measure a teaspoon of soda and eyeball the salt. Then I turn to spices: cinnamon, ginger. The nutmeg is on the counter where I have left it. Hmm. Pie spice. What’s in it? A quick read of the label reveals cinnamon, vanilla sugar, ginger, nutmeg, mace, cloves and fennel? None of those things will hurt the spicy molasses dough. Neither will the white pepper I just bought for pfefferneusse. I measure a scant teaspoon of cinnamon, a generous teaspoon of ginger and a level teaspoon of pie spice and whisk them into the flour mixture. I tap the last flour out of the measuring cups. Then I pour the molasses mixture into the flour and start stirring and folding with a rubber scraper. I scrape the dregs of molasses from a measuring cup and from the Pyrex bowl into the forming dough.

The dough turns a lovely mahogany color and smells spicy. Yum. It is very soft, but it will firm up some from chilling. This is the hardest dough I work with at Christmas (Molasses is like that, especially if you want thin, crisp cookies without excess flour). I will make use of both a chilled marble slab and a silicone mat and will probably do some unChristian swearing the day I roll out the ginger cookies. Into a bag goes the dough, still warm, but destined for the refrigerator.

I am done with doughs for the day. Getting three done is pretty good. I might have done the fourth except for the flour shortage. One result of having a smaller kitchen than my mother had is that I can’t stockpile ten or fifteen pounds of flour and fifteen pounds of sugar — there is nowhere to store them — so I have to shop more frequently. I will get more flour and a carton of eggs tomorrow. I have enough molasses to make another half batch of ginger dough, plenty of brown sugar and a big bottle of vanilla, at least three forms of ginger, pounds of butter in the freezer. I have the ingredients for another batch of cocoa shortbread and for more maple butter cookies.

Since I scraped all of the flour I could into the half cup measuring cup for the ginger dough I am able to run a damp dish cloth over the cutting board and counter to clear the rest. I wipe the flour container and close the sifter into its box. I gather the glass bowl and the metal bowl and the glass measuring cup and put them in my dishpan with detergent and hot water. I wash the pasta bowl to get it out of the way, put a cookbook away. I won’t clean the floor until I am through messing with flour several days hence.

I am thorough about getting all of the ingredients out of mixing bowls and measuring cups, off whisks and scrapers. This is respectful of the ingredients and it also makes the bowls, cups and utensils easier to clean: they are not swimming in molasses and butter or crusted with sugar. When I can no longer get more out of a bowl with an implement I use my index finger and get a lovely taste of a finished dough. Part of me wants to eat spoonfuls of it, but these stolen tastes are enough to assure me that I have made good stuff. I wash my hands thoroughly and frequently and dry them between uses so I can’t really explain the floury fingerprints on the microwave. I wipe them off.

I pop open the can of food that Onyx craves, mash it up and take it upstairs to her. Then I take my pot pie out of the oven. She will get some of that, too, but not until I am done. Onyx comes back down to get me — she wants company while she eats. I turn off the oven, the heat and the lights downstairs and go upstairs where I eat, serve the cat a torn up cube of turkey, and compose this post while listening to rain fall on the roof.

To be continued.

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Categories Christmas baking, cookies, seasonal recipes

Christmas Cookies Redux, Part One

December 18, 2025 //
0

I am avoiding my kitchen at the moment.

This is my first Christmas in my own house in a December where I have misplaced my house keys, contracted a virus, hired men to bring pallets into my garage and re-stack boxes and furniture to keep them from flood damage from what someone dubbed “the Godzilla of atmospheric rivers,” and then hired them again to bring over sandbags when I noticed puddling on my driveway. I have wondered why the curbs are not higher and why there is no drain in the driveway. Also, my oven seems to be running low after performing well at Thanksgiving, just in time for baking season.

This morning I began mixing up Christmas cookie doughs, softening sticks of unsalted butter in the microwave, measuring granulated sugar and cocoa powder, sifting flour, adding espresso powder and vanilla. The aromas made me happy. I didn’t make Christmas cookies in 2023 when I was taking care of my mother and I didn’t make them in 2024 when I was living in a rental without my kitchen equipment. Now I am back in production.

Cocoa shortbread dough made, I popped it into a Ziploc and into the fridge to chill. I wanted to make pfefferneusse next, but I couldn’t find a paper recipe copy and I didn’t want to stop to go upstairs for my laptop, so I made up maple and nutmeg sugar cookies next. More wonderful smells arose: maple syrup and freshly grated nutmeg, butter. The maple dough went into another bag (I used to chill doughs in metal bowls, but I bought a small refrigerator to fit my kitchen and I don’t have shelf space for four or five metal bowls if I want to keep eating regular meals before Christmas; plus, I don’t buy plastic wrap anymore).

I turned to ginger cookie dough. The first step is to heat butter, shortening, molasses and brown sugar together. Microwaves and Pyrex bowls are handy for this. I was nuking and stirring, nuking and stirring by turns to melt the butter when my neighbor texted me that it was a good time to bring her some muffins I had promised her.

My late mother taught me to clean as I go in the kitchen. It is unlike me to leave a baking project half-finished, but if I stayed long enough to finish the ginger dough Eileen and Harry would not get their muffins. I hastily screwed the top onto the flour jar, but left everything else as it was.

When I got home, I had minutes to assemble a lunch of leftovers and to practice a guitar part I wanted to play at a musical Zoom — no time to finish the dough or clean the kitchen. I saw swirls of congealed shortening on top of the dark brown mass. Fragrant with molasses and brown sugar, but unattractive at this stage.

My genuine happiness at working again with sugar and butter as primary ingredients collides with a shudder as I picture the flour-strewn counter, the glass bowl of glop, not to mention the floor. And so, for now, I delay by writing about the clean-up I am avoiding.

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Categories Christmas baking, cookies, seasonal recipes

A Quince Experiment: Quince and Apple Pie

December 8, 2025 //
0

A few weeks ago, one of the vendors at the farmers market had quinces for sale. I have heard of quinces but have never tasted one, so I bought one. I discussed with the vendor adding it to an apple pie or apple crisp. She recommended cooking it separately before adding it to a pie. She said the fragrance was wonderful.

The quince sat in the fruit bowl for a few weeks, next to a single orange and a few local apples while I looked at quince recipes on the internet. The most intriguing one involved cutting the quince in half like a squash, scooping the guts out, and baking it with spices and honey in the cavity. The day before Thanksgiving I bought a bag of Granny Smith apples at Grocery Outlet — not my favorites, but serviceable when I need cooking apples and local apples will soon be gone.

Yesterday it was time to use up two homemade pie crusts left from the holiday. I still had three local apples in the fruit bowl, plus the Granny Smiths. I pulled out my trusty 1956 Betty Crocker Picture Cookbook, my mother’s and my go-to cookbook for basic cooking, and flipped to the index for Q.

No entries for quince.

Okay. I went for my Deborah Madison cookbook collection. Madison makes tea from quince pips and candied quinces and uses quinces in filling for mince pies.

I peeled the quince, and then cut into it, which was difficult: I had to sharpen my knife three times while removing the core and seeds and cutting the fruit into pieces. Are they always like this? The fragrance was underwhelming, faintly citrus-y. Was it even ripe? (The skin was bright yellow).

In the end, I threw it in a saucepan with a third of a cup of sugar and some water and let it cook while I rolled out the bottom pie crust and stuck the crust back in the fridge to chill.

Then I received a phone call that there was a ticket available for the last matinee of The Nutcracker. I turned off the stove, kissed the cat goodbye and hurried to town.

I watched half of the performance. I was shocked to learn that there was no live orchestra (I don’t go to The Nutcracker for the dancing, but for the music). The artistic director had set the piece as a local story in a barn, the Olympic Mountains and lavender fields. It still had the Rat King and the Nutcracker and plenty of corps de ballet.

I would have stayed for the second half, but I was meeting my friend Eileen to drive out for the annual lighting of Lake Crescent Lodge, a beautiful art deco building. There was a fire blazing in the fieldstone fireplace, a decorated tree, a Santa hat on one of the resident deer heads, carols by the Sequim chapter of the Sweet Adelines, costumed elves passing trays of cookies, and Santa himself, posing for photos with infants, children, teens, and bold old folks.

We drove home in the dark. I fed the cat and ate salad, vegetables and the last of the Thanksgiving stuffing for dinner.

Time to finish the pie. I put the oven on to preheat to 400 F, retrieved the pie shell from the refrigerator, scooped out the poached quince chunks with a slotted spoon, peeled and sliced the three local apples and one gargantuan Granny Smith, added half a cup of sugar mixed with nutmeg and cinnamon, piled the fruit and sugar into the crust, dotted the filling with butter. I rolled out the top crust and crimped it in place, popped the pie in the oven and started doing dishes.

I had my first slice of pie after lunch today. The quince’s flavor still reminded me of roasted sweet potato — not unpleasant, but not special in my opinion. Sometimes there was a faint rose-like odor. I’d just as soon eat plain apple pie.

Did any of you grow up eating quinces? What do you like to do with them? They are gone for this year, but next year I can do another experiment.

P.S. This morning, a week after I made the apple and quince pie, I used the leftover quince poaching syrup as part of the liquid in a three-day batch of oatmeal — one cup poaching liquid, two cups whole milk. I added dried apricots, dried sour cherries, almonds and grated fresh ginger, thinking those flavors would go with the residual quince flavor. I was right. I made a triple batch because the poaching liquid was quite sweet and I wanted to dilute the sweetness.

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Categories Uncategorized

Dear Madge (a Letter to My Deceased Mother)

November 30, 2025 //
4

Dear Madge,

My Thanksgiving dinner was two days late this year. I got a virus a week before Thanksgiving and was not well enough to shop and do food prep. My neighbor Eileen, who lives just around the corner, suggested that she could take me to Grocery Outlet on Wednesday morning and we could have dinner on Saturday, so that’s what we did.

Prices have gone up. The “free” turkey that you get with purchases required $125.00 of spending at Grocery Outlet and $150.00 at Safeway. And some things on my list were not on the shelves at all — maple syrup, for instance.

Friday morning I was standing in the kitchen, noticing how well the fast burner on my stove browned onions. I knew you would be pleased. I actually had to turn off the heat for awhile while I chopped celery and grated carrots.

I learned a new trick for roasting chestnuts: after you cut the cross in the shell, you soak them in water for an hour before roasting them. Oh. You and I didn’t know that. It worked like a charm.

What I really miss, Mom, is your kitchen: the zinc-lined bread drawer, the bread boards, the double ovens, the cooler, all of those big low cabinets and drawers. You and Stan the carpenter did a great job of designing a practical working space.

It’s all gone now. The people Bryan sold the house to took out many desirable things, converted closets to bathrooms, ruined the bay window in the breakfast room to make a deck (handy for the chilly Kensington summers). We were fortunate to live in that well-designed house for so long.

I was tired on Saturday morning because your cat Onyx jumped over my head at 2:45 AM. She came here to live with me this month. Surprisingly, at fifteen and a half she still goes up and down the stairs — I feed her in my bedroom, but she likes to supervise the opening of the can, which happens in the kitchen. When she woke me, I realized that I was hot and that the hallway outside my door was hot.

I had tried out the heat in the kitchen and adjoining dining room for the first time on Friday, anticipating dinner guests who would expect me to heat my house. I knew I had turned the heat off, but it was clear that it had been blasting away. Basically, the control knob malfunctioned: it turned, but it didn’t make contact with the mechanism that controls the temperature. I wrenched it off again, hoping that I had been successful (The vent was so hot that I couldn’t tell if it was still on).

I went back to bed after 3:00 AM, but could not get back to sleep. I forced myself down to the kitchen at 8:15 AM where it was still warm enough to go barefoot. Usually it is about 45 degrees in there this time of year, good for rolling out pastry.

Then I just worked: I stuffed the turkey and put it in the oven, pulled the neck out and started a stock pot with vegetable scraps. I made Grandma’s roll dough and your pie crust, pumpkin pie filling, cranberries. I trimmed and poked yams. I trimmed Brussels sprouts and cut crosses in the bottom.

My neighbor Eileen arrived when I had reached the point of utter exhaustion and was functioning on determination and willpower. She had a workman in tow (Her husband begged off because he is currently subject to coughing fits). Dave the workman brought the glass top from the old breakfast room table up from the garage, unwrapped it, cleaned it up, and set it on its pedestal. I had dragged up the pedestal and chairs on Thursday.

I don’t love it in my dining room — it’s too big for the space, especially the chairs — but I had to have a table in place for holiday entertaining so it will stay there at least until January 6th. Kelly, my friend and former landlady, is coming for pie and coffee in the next few days and she will appreciate having a chair at a table. I eat in my bedroom and on the front porch a lot.

Anyway, the food was delicious — all the things we usually made, except salad: working alone I can’t make a salad on Thanksgiving Day. I had thought to make a kale salad with lemon-tahini dressing because it improves as it sits, but I didn’t have the energy to make it on Friday, or the time to make it on Saturday. I asked Eileen to carve the turkey and to mash and season the potatoes because I was decanting dressing, making gravy, shaping rolls. I had her make after dinner coffee, too, while I whipped the cream.

Thank you for teaching me to cook this good, basic Midwestern food. I still enjoy cooking it and eating it and sharing it with others. Eileen pitched in to do a lot of the clean-up — she’s much more careful about wrapping food than I am. I sent her home with food for her husband, packed into my cake pans and then I had a hot soaking bath.

Onyx is enjoying a small dish of turkey scraps every day. She would like a bigger dish of them, or perhaps for me to serve them more frequently, but i don’t want her to develop digestive problems. She is much more vocal than she used to be: she runs through her repertory of yowls and howls and complaints every morning when she wants to be served breakfast earlier than I wish to get up, but she’s basically a good kitty and has largely adapted to life in this house. She hides in the bedroom closet if she hears a stranger on the stairs. She still roly-polys occasionally and I sing her little Onyx songs (“If i Were an Onyx,” “Rock-a-bye, Onyx,” and “Roly Poly, Onyx little cat girl”). She is definitely a survivor cat.

I don’t know what else to say. I just wanted you to know I was thinking of you and all of those holiday dinners we made together and thinking of your mother’s eagle eye when I was peeling and de-eying potatoes. Today I enjoyed a breakfast of pie, coffee and rolls and started listening to Christmas music. My house has wide window sills so I will scavenge greenery and put up birds and ornaments.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Love,

Sharyn

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Categories grocery shopping, home cooking, seasonal recipes

“What’s in the cupboard” baked oatmeal

November 7, 2025 //
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I like to make baked oatmeal. I make stove-top oatmeal too, but I like having breakfast made ahead for those mornings when I don’t want to fuss with anything beyond feeding the cat and making coffee.

The last time I made baked oatmeal I looked up a basic recipe that used four eggs because I only had four eggs left in the house. I flavored it like a carrot cake, adding to the oats, milk, eggs, soda, salt and baking powder, maple syrup, grated carrots, coconut, cinnamon, cardamom, nutmeg and walnuts. It was delicious.

I was going to make it again, but as I was gathering ingredients my eye fell on a jar of apple butter (I have two from a baking box I used to subscribe to, alas put out of business by tariff shenanigans). It sounded like a good thing to add to baked oatmeal and already contained cinnamon and cloves.

When I opened the jar, I found the darkest apple butter I had ever seen, the color of a cup of strong coffee. I mixed it in with 2 and 1/2 cups of milk, four eggs, half a cup of maple syrup. I added freshly ground cardamom, ground ginger — forgot I had fresh ginger in the freezer — a teaspoon of soda, a teaspoon of baking powder, a scant teaspoon of salt. I added all this to four cups of rolled oats in a big bowl and then added a cup of raisins, a cup of chopped walnuts and three finely grated carrots — I like sneaking vegetables into breakfast.

I buttered a thirteen by nine oblong pan and poured the oatmeal mix into it. I had the oven on to 375 F because I was baking a salmon fillet on a bed of roast vegetables. I took my dinner out of the oven and reduced the heat to 350 F, letting the oatmeal sit on the counter to absorb liquids while I ate. After I wrapped my leftover salmon in foil and refrigerated it, I popped the oats into the oven and started doing dishes.

About thirty-five minutes later, I opened the oven. The baked oatmeal was very dark brown, raisins visible on the top. I took a table knife and scooped out a bit from one corner. The result was nice and moist from the apple butter and the taste reminded me of gingerbread, although there was no molasses or brown sugar in the mix. It must have been the long-caramelized apples.

Throwing preserves or other spreads into baked oatmeal is a good way to use them up should you find yourself with a lingering jar or a flavor that you don’t usually buy. Ditto for syrups, or even the liquid from canned fruit. To make a 13 x 9 pan of baked oatmeal, I use 2 and 1/2 cups of whole milk and 1/2 cup of maple syrup or honey for a total of three cups liquid, but you can use any kind of “milk” you like, or substitute fruit juices or syrups. Part of the fun is figuring out what flavors complement each other.

I cut a square of baked oatmeal every morning. It doesn’t need anything — you can pick it up in your hand and nibble on it — but I like to nuke it in a bowl with a fresh splash of milk for a warming breakfast on a cold morning.

Do you make baked oatmeal? What is your favorite flavor?

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Categories breakfast food, frugal eating, home cooking

On grass roots

October 15, 2025 //
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Dear Readers,

I have not written in a long time. I bought a house in June (for the first time) and it is taking much longer than I thought to get settled and to get things done.

I have been in Washington state for just over a year and I am learning a lot about the differences between Washington and my native California. One of the things I am learning about is the nature of grass roots.

Like many of you, I have heard the expression “grassroots,” as in “grassroots organizing” or “grassroots movement” to indicate organizations built slowly by engaging and connecting individual persons for a purpose.

Now, however, I am beginning to have a visceral understanding of grass roots as I work in my weedy, neglected yards.

There are different kinds of grass, of course, and different kinds of grassy weeds as well. I have not had much experience working with grass because my mother did not want grass in her yard: she filled the front yard with lava rock and the backyard remained soft dirt until she put in one flagstone area, a dwarf apple tree and a few iris beds. When I did not live at my mother’s house, I lived in rentals, some without yards. In my last California rental, I struck a deal with the landlord: he would maintain the lawn in the front yard while I concentrated on growing organic fruit and vegetables in the back.

I have many types of grass. One sends forth thin, wiry blades. Another puts up lush green blades that we think of as grass, but it tends to grow in clumps. To break apart the clumps, I tease the blades apart to see which way they are growing and pull in that direction.

Some of the green blades pull out that way, as do some of the dead or yellowed pieces. But we are not done: close to the surface, or right under the surface, are mats of thick roots in short pieces. Some of them have a hard bit like a knot on the upper end. Sometimes I can pull these out with a lot of effort, but sometimes I cannot get purchase on them (I do this with my bare fingers, which help tease out the direction each strand grows in).

I work away at the most stubborn clumps, prising one piece after another out of the ground. Then I notice that some of these hardy clumps are bound with two other kinds of roots: one is thready and fine, light in color and the others look like classic drawings of roots in soil, indistinguishable in color from the surrounding soil, branching, no thicker than a human hair. Sometimes I can reach beneath a stubborn piece of grass and feel a u-shaped band of roots below the surface. When I yank that loose, sometimes the stubborn bit will come free at last.

And sometimes not.

I pull at the light-colored thready roots one by one, hoping to loosen them. Sometimes I am rewarded when a long root rips out of the ground, traveling several inches from where I have been working and loosening the edge of another clump.

There are also mats of the finest “classic roots,” which look delicate, but are nearly impenetrable and strongly bound together. And that is not all: should I dig a hole, as I do when I am going after a dandelion tap root, I will find the light colored grass roots threading themselves through the soil in all directions, moving laterally, penetrating deeply. If I am to ever be rid of weedy grasses I must get them all out.

So, grass roots: stubborn, persistent, interlocked, strong, hard to break apart without the utmost care and patience. And, did I mention, if you leave even a bit of one of these roots in the soil, the grass will regrow.

Take courage, my friends and countrymen. The No Kings rallies take place this Saturday in the United States, in Canada, and in other sympathetic nations. Those of us who support democracy, due process, the rule of law and the U.S. Constitution are legion. We are strong, powerful, tenacious, especially when we spread by word of mouth and weave ourselves together like grass roots.

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Categories gardening, Philosophy, Uncategorized
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