Category: Baking

Rolling Out the Dough

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Back in the early 1960s, Mom plucked two mounds of dough out of our Philco refrigerator.

She plopped them on the kitchen counter to let them soften and warm to room temperature, then pulled her rolling pin out of the cupboard.

Diane and I took our places on either side of her, holding our primitive cookie cutters. Grey. Flimsy. Metal.

One was a simple star. The second, a classic Christmas tree. The third, a basic bell. The fourth, a reindeer in flight. The last one, a profile of Santa Claus carrying a pack of toys.

Further down the counter, two slightly bent cookie sheets waited, along with green and red sugar sprinkles we would soon shake above our freshly formed Christmas cookies.

But, in this gauzy 60s slice of life featuring baking, rolling out the dough had to come first.

Mom reached into her container of flour and tossed a handful on the counter. Then, dusted the wooden roller with the remains.

She leaned in with the rolling pin and pressed the dough. Back and forth with equal measures of love. The surface expanded with our hearts and imagination.

We took turns dipping the cutters into the flour, creating our shapes in the dough.

Then, we lifted them carefully with a spatula onto the cookie sheets, added the sprinkles, and slid them into the oven for eight to ten minutes.

While the first batch of cookies baked, Mom gathered the bits of dough that remained. She created a smaller ball and flattened it out with the roller. Together, we repeated the process.

It was 1961. I was four years old. Diane was seven. We felt loved, safe in the presence of our mother.

***

Earlier this week, I found one green Christmas cookie cutter in our kitchen drawer here in Arizona. It was a gift from our friend Jillian a few years ago, but I hadn’t made sugar cookies from scratch since those early days in suburban St. Louis with my long-gone mother.

Tom and I bought a wooden rolling pin, and I found an easy sugar cookie recipe online. I assembled the ingredients to make the dough: butter, sugar, flour, one egg, a teaspoon of vanilla extract, and a dash of salt.

I mixed it all together and let the dough settle in two large discs in the fridge overnight.

On Monday, I rolled out the dough, cut the cookies, and topped my Christmas trees with green and rainbow-colored sprinkles. Then, I slid several trays of cookies into the oven to bake.

Why this year? I don’t really know, except to say it’s been an awful period in our country even though I’m a survivor and somehow have reached new creative heights in my personal life in 2025: several memoir-writing workshops, two joyful holiday concerts, and another book.

And, of course, I still miss my mother. She’s been gone since January 2013, but the grief reappears with the holidays. I suppose I needed to feel her presence again.

I needed to rescue my past Christmas-cookie-cutting memory with Mom. To keep that sweet, simple goodness alive in the stillness of my kitchen. To shepherd it into my present Arizona life with Tom and breathe new life into that tradition.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

Seven Slices

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The quietest slices keep us whole and hopeful. If we let the snippets slip past without noticing, we are missing the moments, the essence, the connecting tissue, the story of life itself.

If you enjoy my poetry and photography, purchase a copy of A Path I Might Have Missed on Amazon.

Egg Custard Pie: A Holiday Favorite

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If you follow my blog, you know that–in addition to being a writer–I am the baker in our family. One of my favorite desserts for the holidays is egg custard pie.

If you’re looking for a simple-to-bake-and-creamy pie recipe, this one is a keeper. It definitely qualifies as comfort food at a time in the world when we could all use a heaping helping of that.

This recipe was passed to me via the southern branch of my family tree … from my mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother, Martha Jane Matilda Simpson Miller. She lived in rural Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, in the early 1900s.

* * *

Ingredients: 3/4 cup sugar, 1/2 stick butter, 4 large eggs, 3 tablespoons flour, 1 2/3 cups milk, 1 teaspoon vanilla.

Directions: Cream sugar and butter until light. Beat eggs and add to sugar/butter mixture. Add flour and beat until smooth. Add vanilla to milk. Mix milk into other ingredients gradually until smooth. Pour into an unbaked pie crust (deep dish) and bake at 350 degrees for 50 minutes or until custard is set and crust is brown. (The original recipe didn’t call for cinnamon, but I like it. If you do too, sprinkle the pie liberally before you place it in the oven.)

***

Incidentally, this egg custard pie recipe also appears in From Fertile Ground, my first book. which I wrote and published in 2016. It’s not a cookbook, but a memoir about love, loss, and grief … and the healing power of the written word across three generations of my family. If you haven’t read it, I hope you’ll check it out.

Most important, as 2021 comes to a close, I wish you good health. As we continue to endure this global health crisis, I encourage you to find comfort in your creative passions in 2022.

Pie and Pottery

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My husband is an excellent cook. In a given two-week period, he gladly prepares chicken, tilapia, salmon, cod, turkey meatloaf (along with potatoes, Brussels sprouts, green beans) and pasta of every kind. I am thankful for him and all the things he does for us.

What is my contribution? I am the baker in our family. I concoct corn bread, blueberry muffins, chocolate chip cookies and the like. Oh, and on special occasions, I prepare and bake pies.

Our two deep dish favorites are egg custard (a silky treat handed down from my southern/maternal family) and Dutch apple (a recipe I found online several years ago). The latter has become our go-to dessert for Thanksgiving.

More than cake or cookies, I think the smell of pie baking in the oven will always cue my emotions and provide deep dish comfort. That first and last forkful of crumbly goodness with a cup of coffee won’t hurt either.

Anyway, this morning I stood over the kitchen sink and sliced eight Granny Smith apples for this year’s pie filling. Over the years, I’ve discovered the tartness of Granny Smiths make them ideal for baking.

That piece of wisdom came from my mother. So, naturally, I thought of her as I prepared a pie for Tom and me. It doesn’t matter that my mother has been gone for nearly nine years. Her influence in my life endures.

During the last four years of Helen Johnson’s life, she lived at Brighton Gardens, an assisted living facility in Wheaton, Illinois. My mother loved to bake and glaze ceramic pottery in a class there.

For her last Thanksgiving–2012–our family gathered a few weeks early in a community room at Brighton Gardens to celebrate the holiday together. Mom was in hospice at that point and declining rapidly, so that seemed like the safe thing to do at the time.

Meanwhile, back down the hall in her empty apartment, I can still imagine the shelves and tables of her room lined with family photos and a dozen or more of her prized pieces of homemade pottery.

Remarkably, my mother lived two more months. After she passed, my sister Diane and I held a memorial in early February for her. We brought many of the pieces of pottery with us to the funeral home and placed them on tables around the room.

When family and close friends departed after the service that night, we asked that they choose a piece of her art and take it with them.

Today, I still have at least a half dozen of Mom’s fired-and-glazed pottery from her Brighton Gardens days in our two-bedroom home in Scottsdale, Arizona.

At Thanksgiving every year, I bring out this ceramic turkey-shaped napkin holder she made. It is inscribed with her name “Helen J.” brushed on the bottom.

It’s stationed on our Thanksgiving table … next to my delectable, deep dish Dutch apple pie … ready to create a new batch of memories for Tom and me on Thanksgiving Day 2021 in our Arizona home.