Chronicles of Whistling Duck Cottage
Week Six — A Missing Box and A Broken Piece of My Heart
Week Thirty-One of 52-Week Writing Challenge
Once a year, my grandchildren’s school has a fundraiser fair they call “Pot O’Gold”. Each class has a booth with some sort of game to play with prizes to win. There are bouncy-houses, a very popular dunk-the-principal game, and various other entertainment for the kids. Local stores and businesses donate baskets full of goodies on which attendees can bid. In October 2015, I bid on a basket of baking paraphernalia (see photo) because the children wanted to learn how to bake.
In my “previous life”, I cooked and baked often. However, the current man in my life is the main chef in our household, so I gladly relinquished cooking duties to him. But, sadly, he is not a baker. Enjoying a rest from 20+ years of kitchen duties, I learned to live with store-bought baked goods. The children wanted to change that and put me back in the kitchen — with their help!
Unfortunately, my mixer, baking pans, and all the other baker tools were long gone until . . . we won the baker’s basket at the fair! Lugging the heavy, cellophane-covered basket to my car in the 90-degree heat of a Florida fall, we chattered about all the delicious confections that we would create.
Through the remainder of October and November and into the Christmas season, we baked nearly every weekend — pies, cakes, cheesecakes, muffins, biscuits, and Christmas cookies. When my workload tripled in January, as it always does, the baking was set aside. In the spring and summer, it was resurrected, but with a less consistent schedule due to summer activities and my work, only to be halted again when the new school year became too demanding.
One of my goals when I moved to my new home was to reawaken our baking lessons, and we are accomplishing that. Unfortunately, I couldn’t locate most of my baking gear after our move. Box after box was unpacked but the majority of the contents from that Pot O’Gold basket were not unearthed — fortunately, the cookbook, oven mitts, and rolling pin were packed separately.
Several boxes still sat untouched in the second bedroom but none were marked “kitchen”. Positive that one of those boxes was mislabeled, I opened each one two weeks ago. Lots of papers, tax returns, and office supplies but nothing for baking was discovered. Perplexed, I went through each box a second time and scoured our closets and cabinets with no success.
The only possible explanation was that the box containing cake pans, pie plates, cookie sheets, our hand mixer, spatulas, measuring cups and spoons, cooling racks, mixing bowls, and hand-written recipes was accidentally put in the “to donate” stack of boxes (we moved boxes ourselves so I can’t blame the moving company.)
Fortunately, my cookbooks were boxed up with all my other books, and are safely on a shelf in my kitchen. Unfortunately, the most treasured recipes (many told to me by my husband’s mother in Spanish and translated by him) hand-written on various pieces of notebook paper and index cards are gone. Everything else in the missing box can be replaced, and we have been doing that over the last two weeks, but those heirloom recipes are irreplaceable. A tiny piece of my heart is broken.
Setting aside my distress over what cannot be replaced, the children and I visited several stores, including TJ Maxx and JC Penney’s, to gather new tools for our baking hobby. Over a couple of weeks, we came home with round and square cake pans, a tart pan (didn’t have one of those before), a springform pan (also a new addition), measuring devises of all sorts, handled mixing bowls, spatulas in a rainbow of colors, a Bundt cake pan, cookie sheets, and two hand mixers (one ten-speed hand mixer was returned because all ten speeds were the same speed — throw-everything-out-of-the-bowl speed.)
After another shopping trip yesterday, we returned home to wash our purchases and bake a fresh peach cake. I purchased way-too-many-to-eat peaches from a local farmer. His summer crops are about done and the fall ones are not ready, so he travels to Georgia to purchase peaches and peanuts to sell here. Everyone in our family, other than my husband, has peanut sensitives so I passed them by but bought a very large basket of peaches. The best way to use that many peaches was to make peach pound cake.
The recipe we used is this one from AllRecipes:
The only recipe adjustment we made is to add a tablespoon of cinnamon because my family believes that cinnamon is a necessity in nearly every baked good.
First, my grandchildren tackled peeling and chopping the peaches:
My grandson complained of a sleepless night — probably due to first-day-of-school worries (they go back on Tuesday) — so after helping with the peaches, he retired to the living room to watch soccer with my husband. My granddaughter and I labored on:
While our cake was baking and after the soccer game, my husband made ribs for himself and our grandson (my granddaughter and I are vegetarians), mashed potatoes and corn-on-the-cob. I baked pre-packaged biscuits — not homemade but good enough — and sliced fresh tomatoes.
We ate well and had this for dessert:
To mend the broken piece of my heart, my husband is going to contact some of his family members to see if anyone has his mother’s recipes that we no longer have. We are not very hopeful. His mother’s generation appears to have been the last to bake from scratch. Considering she passed at 95, there are no others of her generation to ask. But, perhaps luck will be on our side and someone in my husband’s generation will have the recipes recorded or can recall the ingredients. If not, I will be busy Googling Argentinian recipes hoping to find ones exactly like hers.
