God has given me four wonderful grandsons, the children of my daughter Denise and her husband, Kevin. My greatest wish is that I lived near them, but sadly I don’t.
Over the years I’ve found that phone calls and e-mails and holiday visits are good. They just aren’t enough. I miss those boys. It’s a good thing I learned from my own grandmother MéMé a delicious way for us to stay connected no matter the miles between us.
MéMé lived in a small town in the Massachusetts Berkshires, several hours away from where I grew up. I spent many girlhood summer vacations and one winter at her lovely home, mostly in the kitchen. That was MéMé’s domain, and I loved being her helper. All she had to do was turn on the oven, and I would come running. We cooked and baked for the family and for her neighbors. While we waited for the timer to ring on whatever we had made that day, we would talk and laugh and she would tell me stories.
Even now all of these years later, I can close my eyes and picture MéMé in her handmade apron and the lace-up shoes with heels that made her stand ever so slightly taller than her four feet eleven inches, ready to slice a loaf of bread that was still warm from the oven. First, though, she would mark a cross on the bread with her knife and say a blessing in her native French.
The winter I lived with her, MéMé warmed many a cold morning with her stove-top rice pudding. She carefully stirred the creamy mixture with a wooden spoon, filling the kitchen with the sweet scent of vanilla. I knew it was finally ready when she handed me the spoon to lick.
I wished I could spend that kind of time with my own grandchildren, but as Denise explained, “Their lives are so busy.”
So I followed MéMé’s example. Whenever our family got together—whether it was at my house or theirs—I headed straight for the kitchen. The boys each had their special requests. Nick and Kevin’s was pizza, made from scratch. Joe loved my pumpkin chocolate chip cookies. “Your French toast is the best in the whole world!” Frankie, the youngest, told me. They also all loved the creamy stove-top rice pudding I made (using MéMé’s recipe, of course)—especially licking the spoon.
But the older my grandsons got, the harder it was to schedule visits. There were rehearsals for the church choir, for the school musical. Then the three older boys started their own band. Soon they were playing so many concerts, they hardly had any weekends at home.
I feared that I had lost the closeness we’d had, the closeness I remembered so well from MéMé’s kitchen. My grandsons’ lives were so complicated that I could barely keep up. To me, they were Nick, Kevin, Joe and Frankie. To the rest of the world they were the Jonas Brothers and the Bonus Jonas.
It turns out that I had nothing to worry about. When I finally get to see my grandsons, it’s like no time at all has passed. It’s not Christmas without homemade cookies, and last year I baked several batches of family favorites. Joe was my helper, so naturally pumpkin chocolate chip cookies were among them.
I visited Kevin a while back. One day he came into the kitchen and found me ready to bake pizza—apron on, ingredients arranged on the counter, pizza pan ready to go into the oven. I showed him my recipe.
Step by step, together we made the dough, let it set and made my special tomato and Italian seasoning sauce. Later we rolled the dough, covered it with the sauce and cheese and placed it in the oven. “Wow, Mama,” he said, while we waited for it to bake, “that was really fun!”
Just like MéMé showed me in her little kitchen in the Berkshires, when grandmothers and grandkids cook together, the real recipe is love.
Try MéMé’s Stove-Top Rice Pudding.
