Project herbal

Amidst all the work over the past few months of packing, sorting, and organizing, I indulged a few times in thoughts of what I would do when those tasks were behind me. I challenged myself to come up with a positive and proactive plan for something I could do once we moved: something beyond the necessary corollaries of unpacking, sorting and reorganizing.

I came up with the idea of growing herbs. This house has a deck right off the kitchen. I’ll put some small flowerpots of herbs on the deck and see if anything comes of it, I told myself. I know I don’t have the attention or ambition for vegetable gardening right now, but I imagined that I could nurture a small pot of some savory growing thing that didn’t require protection from pests or need special kinds of fertilizer.

My sister Lauren, an expert gardener, wrote to me with some advice on growing herbs when I asked her about it. Her long explanation reassured me that some of it would be just as straightforward as I’d hoped, even if a few parts might be a little more demanding than I’d pictured. Lauren encouraged me to think in terms of seedlings and not seeds, and I liked that idea. I didn’t feel ready to test my green thumb by actually having to wait to see something come out of the ground; using plants that were already sprouted and growing, and restricting my role to trying to make them grow some more, sounded like a task that was about my speed.

I imagined that I’d visit some high-end nursery to get the best-quality herbs I could find along with lots of garden-center advice to increase my odds of success, but as it happened, over the weekend I visited my friend Jane. We went for a walk and then ended up at her house; I was already in the car backing out of her driveway to head home when she remembered that she had planned to offer me some herbs to take home.

“Could I possibly take some that I could try replanting?” I asked. She conceded that I probably could. She fetched a trowel and some plastic bags from her garage and showed me what she was growing. We agreed that I would take a cutting of garlic chives and a cutting of mint from her.

As soon as I arrived home, I went out to plant them. Our yard already has a fenced-in area where the previous residents gardened in the past. I couldn’t find a trowel, but I found a large rake and a small one that they had abandoned in the garden, and those two implements seemed sufficient to till the soil enough that I could put my garlic chives and mint into the ground, at opposite ends since I didn’t know how much they’d spread.

I watered them, tamped down the dirt around them, and mentally encouraged them to take root. I sprinkled some water over them from the watering can, also left in the garden by the previous residents. Overnight I heard a light rain falling and hoped that it boded well for my herbs.

The next day I was shopping at Whole Foods and in the produce section discovered some herbs still in their soil, growing in small pots. Buying seedlings at the supermarket didn’t quite fit in with my vision of a visit to a high-end nursery, but then again, neither did taking them from Jane’s yard, and both opportunities had presented themselves over the weekend. I bought a cilantro plant and found a place for it within the garden when I arrived home.

In the day and a half since I planted the third of my three herbs, we’ve had a few light rainfalls and not much sun. I’m not sure how my plants are doing. The garlic chives from Jane’s yard look fairly firmly rooted, and I’ve heard no one can mess up with mint. The cilantro, on the other hand, is looking a little peaked and ragged, more like a pile of produce you might see on the floor at Whole Foods than a thriving crop. But it’s still in the ground, and I’m hopeful it will perk up in the next day or two.

Growing my own herbs would bring me great pleasure. It’s a new endeavor and one I’m not yet sure I have the skill to manage. But somehow it seems like the pieces all fell into place: the encouragement from Lauren, the visit to Jane’s yard, even the fact that Holly, who normally doesn’t like food with strong flavors, ate several stalks of garlic chive right out of the garden yesterday afternoon (and reeked of garlic and onions for the next several hours). Just as I’d hoped when I came up with the idea over the winter, though, it’s something positive, something far more appealing than more unpacking and reorganizing. It’s an attempt to do something new and proactive, and for all of those reasons I’m hoping that it turns out to be something I do well.

I need a recipe...

My sister was laughing as I answered the phone. “You’re not going to believe why I’m calling.”

I knew immediately. “You need my recipe for mud pie cake.”

It’s an ongoing joke with us. For the past thirty years, every place she has ever lived, she’s called me for the mud pie cake recipe. It’s an inexplicable coincidence that this is the one recipe she never remembers to hold on to, though perhaps Freud would point out here that there are no accidents. She and I both love to cook; there are literally hundreds if not thousands or recipes she could be calling me for. But it’s always the mud pie cake recipe, which has been in our family for decades, a moist chocolate cake with a name that amuses kids.

The first time was when she was a teenager doing a summer homestay in Switzerland. There was a birthday in her host family, and she wanted to impress them with our trusty family recipe for this most all-American of treats: basic chocolate cake.

She called for the same recipe from Ohio when she was a freshman in college. Then there was the call from Austria while she was an exchange student. The mud pie cake recipe followed her around the globe – through Europe and then back to subsequent residencies in Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, where she and her husband and children have more or less permanently settled. Since they’ve lived there for so long, I assumed the recipe was safely stashed at last and I wouldn’t be getting any more calls. But no, they still travel, and wherever they go, she gets the urge to use the kitchen, and for some reason remembers to bring along every recipe she wants except for this one. So in the past five years, I’ve gotten the SOS call from locales including southern France, Colorado, and Indiana. Now they’re spending a sabbatical year in Germany, and sure enough, she wants to bake a cake.

Yesterday she claimed that as I read her the recipe, she was transcribing it into an electronic file on her laptop and would therefore never need to ask me again. I’m skeptical. If it was that easy, why wouldn’t she have done this years ago? No, there has to be something more nuanced about it. It’s not like we ordinarily have a hard time talking. We discuss our kids, books we’ve read, our parents and their idiosyncrasies (by the hour, believe me), gifts to jointly give our other sister, exercise programs, the weather. We talk about all kinds of things. And yet it’s the cake that keeps her calling.

This cake recipe has been in our family for a very long time. Unlike many cake recipes, it’s absolutely foolproof; there’s nothing delicate about it. I remember making it in playgroup under my mother’s guidance when I was three years old, and I used to make it for bake sales in junior high. I don’t know much about the cake’s history, but because the recipe includes no milk or butter – no dairy products at all – as well as no chocolate in solid form and no eggs, I suspect it was a Depression-era recipe that bakers invented in order to make a cake out of inexpensive, readily available ingredients. Yet you wouldn’t know it from the taste: it’s moist and delicious, as well as really fun to make, especially for kids. “Water the garden!” my mom used to say back in playgroup days as each child had a turn to add one of the liquid ingredients and then stir. Now I make it with my kids, and both my sisters make it with theirs.

If it guarantees regular phone calls from my sister, no matter where in the world she happens to be, then I actually hope she never does remember to bring the recipe with her – or, worse, memorize it. I like these regular phone calls from across the globe. Mud pie cake batter: the ultimate sororal glue. In our family, anyway.

For those who are curious about this baking tradition, here’s the recipe:

Mud Pie Cake

1 ½ cups flour
3 tablespoons cocoa
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 cup sugar
½ teaspoon salt
5 tablespoons vegetable oil
1 tablespoon cider vinegar
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 cup cold water

Preheat oven to 350. Combine dry ingredients well in a large mixing bowl. Then stir in remaining ingredients one at a time, mixing well after each addition. (You can do this with an electric mixer or by hand.) Pour batter into a greased 8-inch or 9-inch cake pan or brownie pan. Bake for about 30 minutes.