Home is Where the Chocolate Is

There are less than forty-eight hours left before the kids float in from college for the Thanksgiving weekend, and a few more hours after that before fifteen people sit down in the kitchen to devour a turkey and a half. On one of those intervening days between I'll be at work fifty miles away. On the other, I'll be a guest speaker at a law school class. I'm cutting it closer than usual to the margins when it comes to getting ready for company.

The house is still a disaster from (a) living with a puppy and (b) relying on a "piling system" for all the detritus from family medical disasters, funerals and estate management that have wound up on my doorstep for the past three years, and (c) having housework take a backseat to all the unforeseen things that required making hay while the sun was shining this past summer and fall. Painting the storm windows, for example. Painting the garage doors. Cutting overhanging branches with a saw on the walking path. Laying the brick patio. (That was a real doozy of an project.) Redoing part of the patio project two months later. Reorganizing the garage. Right now there are furballs galore to be vacuumed, and dishes to be washed, and a kitchen to be cleared to make elbow room for passing the dinner rolls.

And what did I do with this evening? I got home from work, took Lucky for a walk, and then, with my last shreds of concentration waning, shoved a chocolate cake in the oven. Not just any chocolate cake, but my famous sour cream chocolate cake, whose seductive aroma is still wafting through the house like the welcoming arms of Venus.

This is the cake whose first four ingredients--soft butter creamed with white granulated sugar, then beaten with vanilla and two eggs added separately, then whipped to an impossibly light mousse with the addition of three and a half melted squares of unsweetened chocolate--make the epitome of "finger food." I confess to overindulging at this stage to just one more taste...and then just one more...ad infinitum until the only way to counteract the amount disappearing from the bowl is to wing it with decreasing the proportions of the remaining ingredients and hope that, as Julia Child used to put it, "you're alone it the kitchen." So far nobody who ever digs into the cake, smothered with buttercream frosting, has complained about quality control.

The day before, the kitchen floor got washed, and some beds got made. But the piece de resistance was a nine by thirteen plan full of "mint squares," a desert that comes in three layers and incorporates a can of Hershey syrup, a package of chocolate chips, and nearly three sticks of butter. There are priorities in my family caretaking, and dessert ranks high.

In the grand scheme of things, my children know that while they may not always be able to count on clean laundry or a carpet free of pet hair or a piano bench not covered in books and magazines, there will be desserts if they stick around long enough. I am a mediocre cook if I stray from my few standards--pork normandy, homemade potato salad, turkey tetrazzini, chili made straight from the recipe on the back of the seasoning packet.

But oh, desserts are a different story entirely. Chocolate chip cheesecake. Chocolate amaretto cheesecake. Crustless fudge pie. Homemade frozen custard (okay, we haven't done that in a while but it's still part of the record!). Apple pies and apple crisp and banana muffins with streusel topping and cinnamon rolls with cream cheese icing. Chocolate chip cookies made with brown sugar and real butter. Blonde brownies studded with chocolate chips. My love of transforming various proportions of sugar and butter and eggs into delectable sweets takes me back to baking cakes with my aunt when I was a little girl and life was far simpler.

At Christmas we have traditionally gone overboard on the sugar express, although the last few years have seen the baking get scaled down to accommodate more pressing family matters. The kids took over the baking of the rolled out cookies a couple of Christmases ago. The holiday still stands alone in distinction for being the introduction of the "bloody axe" cookies.

Memories of earlier Christmases inundated by dozens of cookies in several varieties linger. Gingerbread, butterballs, tri-color bars, pressed butter cookies, homemade fudge. I still remember one year when I started my baking early. I made my first batch of toffee bars just after Thanksgiving, and dutifully put them in a storage container in the freezer. They were out of sight but not out of mind, unfortunately, and I developed the habit of sneaking two or three frozen bars out of the freezer as soon as the kids left for school, thawing them in the microwave, and enjoying them with a cup of tea. I ate the whole batch that way, then baked another when the school bus left me with an empty kitchen. However, just as I was pulling the replacement bars out of the oven, I got a call from school. My youngest son--only in kindergarten--was not feeling well. Could I please come to school and bring him home? I did, of course, thanking my lucky stars that he was not quite tall enough to see over the top of the stove to the evidence cooling on the back burner. I tucked him into bed, carved the toffee bars into squares, and put them all back in the freezer. It was a close call, and taught me to never think I was capable of ignoring chocolate in my freezer for that long again.

I confess to feeling chagrined some years ago when one of the children came home from grade school with the results of a holiday class assignment. What family traditions did we share at Christmas time? Little classmates shared experiences of making presents, crafting handmade ornaments, visiting relatives, singing Christmas carols, setting up a creche together, cutting down a live fir tree in the forest. Our contribution? "We make a LOT of Christmas cookies," my child wrote. I felt like I'd been handed a "participant" ribbon in the race to responsible motherhood. Surely I'd failed SOMEHOW in not inbuing my children with more meaningful, soul-nourishing holiday activities. At the very least, I could have taken my cues from Martha Stewart and come up with something more substantial, or convoluted, than a butterball rolled in powdered sugar.

As the years have rolled by, I've learned to forgive myself more for things that used to bother me a great deal. Some are deeper than others. The timing of a divorce, for one thing, compared to the fact that I may never again fit into my "skinny" jeans that I wore when I was twenty two (and which I still hold on to as a relic of my past).

And one of those censorious thoughts that have softened with age is that feeling of dismay at discovering that an abundance of cookies were the highlight of our family Christmas experience. There is a heck of a lot of bonding that goes on over a plate of cookies, with milk, and cocoa, and coffee on the side. A lot of laughter that ensues when a kitchen full of teenagers turns the sedate routine of rolling out cookies on the kitchen table into a flour fight. A rhythm and joy in sharing the act of pouring sugar and flour into a mixing bowl with a four year old to make something special for a birthday.

So when the tribe arrives for Thanksgiving again this year, they may not come home to the cleanest bathroom in town, or to a living room entirely free of clutter, or to cups that always match the saucers. But they know that when they walk in the front door, more often than not they'll catch the smell of something chocolate baking. And that's how they'll know they've come home.

The CatBird Returns

Meatball moved in a couple of days ago, a temporary gig until the end of the semester. He came with a cat carrier and a bag of “senior” cat food, in the arms of my prodigal college student son who was home for a 24 stretch of TLC and laundry service before returning to campus.
My son’s first official action upon returning home was to stretch out on the sunlit sofa in the living room and crash for three hours.

Meatball’s first official action was to put Lucky, the forty pound puppy, on notice that he’d be missing an ear or an eye if he got too close. Lucky is part Border Collie, so he’s pretty smart for a five month old. Rambunctious, but smart. He took the warning to heart and is keeping a three foot radius from danger most of the time.

We’re all making some adjustments here, but for now I’m still basking in the afterglow of kicking into “mommy gear” for an entire day. I cooked dinner—turkey tetrazzini—one of my son’s favorites. I actually had the oven and three burners going on the stove at the same time.

This was no small feat. I use my stove so rarely these days that after the holidays last winter, a mouse moved in under the left rear burner. I thought that Smokey, the sixteen pound house cat who likes to stage death scenes for my enjoyment, would take care of business, but in the end it came down to me and a “live trap” I picked up at WalMart and a dab of peanut butter. After contemplating the frigid outdoor release options, I finally set the little guy loose in the garage with a handful of bird seed. He repaid me by getting in to my car a few days later and drowning in my half-full bottle of Diet Coke. Yes, I know, one mouse looks much like another. But in my heart, I know that this was the same little guy who had thought outside the box for his kitchen living quarters.

I did laundry—five huge loads of T-shirts and socks and jeans—and folded it too. This, too, was no small feat, and these days is completely out of character for me.

I made pancakes from scratch for breakfast, and served them with “real” hot maple syrup. This too, was a departure. Back when I still had four kids around the breakfast table and everybody wanted waffles or French toast, I bought the kind of breakfast syrup that comes out of a plastic squeeze bottle and costs a fraction of the genuine article.

And for the crowning piece of nostalgic motherhood, I produced two new “Looney Tunes” collections of cartoon DVDs to watch as we chowed down on breakfast. You just can’t beat the classics. I’ve always had a bit of the “kill the fatted calf” thing going on when one of the kids has come home from college.

It felt great. It felt deeply satisfying. It felt like being a retired firehorse and suddenly getting back into harness.

And through it all, Meatball kept chirping away like a canary. Yes, “meow” has generally been the expected cat commentary throughout recorded human history. Meatball just comes with a more interesting vocal range. I don’t know how else to describe it, but if you were listening from another room, you’d think I had a pet bird in a cage in there. And his raspy purr is faintly, strangely, evocative of Peter Lorre in "Casablanca."

This wasn’t Meatball’s first trip home. He was the definition of Christmas for me just a couple of years ago.

Back then I was behind on everything because of simultaneous family disasters a hundred miles away that had started in early November with my mother's broken leg and gone downhill from there. I wrote no newsletters. I baked exactly two small batches of Christmas cookies before the kids came home, hung no garland, left the creche in the storage bin, looked for but never found the mistletoe ball. When the kids came home for a few days over the holidays, they were the ones who hauled out the ornament boxes on Christmas Eve and made sure that something was hanging on the tree. They made merry as they rolled out and decorated the traditional butter cookies in truly demented ways while I sat, exhausted on the living room sofa.

But Christmas day itself came and went with me driving solo on the Illinois Tollway to Chicago and back, making a round of two hospitals and a nursing home to keep an eye on things on the only day without snow in the whole week. I was not a happy camper.

I was feeling very "Grinchy" that morning as I pulled out of the driveway at eight in the morning. But then as I drove, the sunlight and the season and the fact that I've got kids that I adore got to me, and I felt a spasm of generosity twitch in my heart that up until then still felt two sizes too small. A half hour into my drive, I called my older son, who at the age of twenty-one was most definitely deep in slumber, and left him a voice mail. Hey it's Christmas, honey, yes, you can bring the cat home.

Simple words, but they masked a world of complexity.

Mike had adopted Meatball from an animal shelter and brought him home to his student apartment about eight months earlier, where the eight-year-old cat promptly became known for leaving his odorous "mark" on his master's clothing. The problem seemed to be resolved by Christmas, but I was still wary. There was a very large cat who already owned my house, and so I drew a line in the sand at the plaintive requests to bring Meatball home for the holidays. I was thrilled to death that Mike had a cat, since I always think that life is far better with pets. But two adult male cats who were strangers sharing space in the same house? I could foresee only disaster.

So Meatball stayed home alone at the apartment with a big bowl of cat food and a big bowl of water while the rest of the family gathered and visited. And on Christmas Day, I wasn't the only one on the road—my son would be driving eighty miles back to his apartment that day to check on his pet.

And so during my own Christmas drive, thinking of my baby spending half his day traveling back and forth just to make sure Meatball was okay, I took a leap of faith and relented. And felt better for the rest of the day. Three days of feline togetherness passed with no accidents and no bloodshed and a new era dawning in terms of pet visitation. Meatball proved to be no-fuss houseguest with the mind of a simpleton and the peskiness of a two year old.

Things are a little more complicated now. You could tell that Meatball knew something important was in the works as my son was leaving when his master carried out baskets of laundry … but not the cat carrier. He stood on the staircase, chirping, as I got my last, heartfelt good-bye hugs. Then there was a final pat from my son, and the household was suddenly minus one young man.

And so we are all adjusting. Meatball has taken to dogging my footsteps like a puppy, driving the real puppy in the house—restricted to the kitchen most of the time—absolutely bonkers with jealousy. Smokey the cat, sensing that this new arrangement may last a while, has taken to dourly stalking around in an existential funk and curling his vast, furry bulk into an empty laundry basket as though it was his Fortress of Solitude. I can’t bear to tell him that it doesn’t make him invisible. Lucky the puppy is putting up with the topsy-turvy reality of seeing the new cat sampling his dog food. It’s got to be a dominance thing on Meatball’s part.

And if you close your eyes and imagine, once in a while you just might think there’s a canary chirping in the other room.