Buttermilk Honey Scones with Rose-Strawberry Jam

I’m finding more beauty in the crumbs, the coffee stains that ring a mug. I found an old textbook about gender and saw the pages, dog-eared and speckled in burns and blood, from a paper cut and ashes dusted aimlessly from my cigarette.

I used to read under grapevines and now I sleep twelve hours some days.

I used to speak Spanish in a timid accent and now I don’t speak it at all.

I used to bite my nails, but I stopped that a long time ago.

I read about 6 sisters who changed the world and I used to think I could, too. I told my mother I was never going to speak to her again, and now I watch the news with her, nursing coffees that grow cold and conversations that became keep memories of her mother alive and warm. She opened a box in a room she turned into a cat infirmary yesterday morning. Inside were thirty-seven napkins, hand-stitched and embroidered in yarn, lace, and scraps of satin.  How delicate they were; carefully folded and not very well made. They did the job and we moved on to other topics, like how my mother isn’t very good at tennis and I’m not very good at forgiving. If my brother was having a boy or a girl. How my mother loves the smell of rosewater and hates how many ants she found in the windowsill in the kitchen.

How many years its been since I last celebrated my birthday with her.

I live for those moments, those mornings. The innocence and the redemption. The fog hands dully until about nine in the morning. It burns off, I go to work. She sits with her cats, with Milo and her Labrador retriever. She watches crime documentaries and lights candles in the heat. She went shopping the other morning and brought home some roses. Strawberries were on sale and she had never seen honeycomb before. So I made her these scones as a thank you for taking me back in. So close to home, so different than who I was. I used to read under grapevines and they’re still there. Giving second chances and strangling the chicken wire fence that surrounds the house.

Buttermilk Honey Scones with Rose-Strawberry Jam

Ingredients for the Scones

• 2/3 cup buttermilk
• 1 egg
• 1 TB vanilla extract
• ¼ cup honey
• 3 cup flour
• ½ sugar
• 1 TB baking powder
• ½ TB cornstarch
• ½ ts salt
• 8 TB butter, cubed and cold
• 3 TB honeycomb, cut into cubes for topping

Directions for Scones

1. Preheat oven to 450*F and line a baking sheet with parchment paper
2. Whisk together buttermilk, egg, vanilla, and honey, set aside
3. Sift together all dry ingredients into a mixing bowl and transfer mixture into your food processor
4. Add butter, pulse to combine until fat is the size of peas
5. With motor running, add liquid through feeding tube
6. Turn dough onto a floured work surface and pat into a round
7. Cut into 8 triangles, and pat edges to be clean
8. Place on baking sheet and bake for 13-18 minutes or until puffed and golden brown
9. Top with honeycom

Ingredients for Rose-Strawberry Jam

• ½ pint of strawberries, hulled and halved
• 1 cup sugar
• Juice of 2 lemons
• 2 TB fruit pectin
• 2 TB rose water
• Zest of one lemo

Directions for Rose-Strawberry Jam

1. In a medium-sized saucepan, combine strawberries, sugar, and juice. Heat on medium.
2. Stir occasionally (I like to use a wooden spoon) so that the mixture does not burn, but you want enough heat that the juices bleed from the berries and the sugar and lemon juice condense slightly
3. Allow to boil for a good 2 or 3 minutes
4. Add your fruit pectin and stir vigorously for a few seconds to combine
5. Resume your boil for another minute
6. Take off heat, stir in zest and rose water
7. Jam will continue to thicken as it cools, when slightly warm to the touch, you can put in your jar. This recipe makes one pint of jam and is not a proper canning technique, but a quick jam recipe
8. Store in fridge, use often and plentifully

Acoustics.

Fall has come in so acoustically, and it is all around me now.  I can see it most in the morning, when the rest of the world is asleep.  The dogs stretch their long limbs, widen their jaws into yawns.  They don't want to walk on the dew.  They want to sleep on the hand-stitched Navajo blanket in the morning.  The coffee comes in bursts of steam.  I wipe my glasses off with my sleeve.  I stand in my underwear at the new kitchen sink, head dipped over the last of the summer's peach. I tear it with my hands.  I feel most strong when it's quiet.  When the shower is scalding hot.  When the window is down but the heat is on.  When I can wear jeans around the house.  When our two bodies interlace at night, when I see the tan-lines faded.  When the birthmarks start to show.  When my palms and cheeks are red.  When it's late and you can only hear the occasional siren in the deep, deep distance of our new hometown.  And soon a quick inhale and his long, familiar snore drowns everything else out. I let the change happen, because it's been good to me.  I did not trust it at first, the change of adulthood.  I looked back on how many lives I have lived, and how many more I have ahead and realized that, for each, the impetus was a desire for difference.  I am lucky to feel the autumnal metamorphosis this year, because it is usually so stagnant in California.  I am lucky to live in this two-bedroom house. I am lucky to discover all the new things I'm learning to love these last few years.  I am lucky, I am lucky, I am very, very lucky.

This is not what I thought three weeks ago, buried in the bed.  Covered up, hidden from my own insecurities.  Afraid of my failures, not able to see my triumphs.  My father called me and I hung up mid-sentence.  Nolan kissed my hand and asked if I wanted to get ice cream.  I cried until I shuddered.  I was tired of owing any small amount of success to someone else, attributing each failure to my own misunderstanding of life and how it worked.   I did not feel powerful.  I did not wake up early and take a minute, recollect my thoughts, drink black coffee that fogged my lenses.

I locked the door and didn't let anyone in.  I incubated myself for three days.  I reminded myself to be happy, because sometimes you have to, because no one else will.

I turned 23 the next week.

I moved into a new house four days later.

And at each moment I discovered something new.  When the bruises began to turn purple, when I was most tender.  When I limped away, licked my wounds.  I found myself glad for the change.  Glad to be alive, to have my head above the water when it came to my debts.  Glad I recognized what I owed Nolan, happy to let myself be vulnerable so I could tell myself how stupid I was.  Happy to wake up before the sun, because the sun sleeps in late these days, to brew coffee and write a note to Nolan. "There's coffee waiting for you.  Have a good day."  I write it on paper I got in Belgium, a souvenir of who I was, written over as someone new.  I changed, I evolved.

I remind myself that my clothes aren't in trash bags anymore.  I remind myself that I never loved that drug dealer.  I remind myself that my father was right, that I was young and stupid and didn't appreciate a goddamn thing when I was 17.  All of those things are different now. I remind myself that I have lifetimes ahead of me, and that this one is just passing.  I remind myself that when I'm arthritic and can't hold anyone's hand, to be comforted in knowing that I let myself be vulnerable or a day or two.  I remind myself all of these things, because fall isn't a time for dying, it's a time for remembering.  That peacefulness of daybreak is all we have right now, and I couldn't lay in bed once I realized what a mistake I'd made.

I made this fudge to have in the moments when I felt strong, when the ripped up stone fruit couldn't satiate me.  I made it to feel comforted by the pecans, to savor the tang of the buttermilk.  It didn't feel like home, but it felt like nostalgia.

Pecan Buttermilk Fudge 

from Bon Appétit

Ingredients

• 1 cup pecans
• 2 cups sugar
• 1 cup buttermilk
• ½ cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, cut into pieces
• 1 tablespoon honey
• ⅛ teaspoon kosher salt
• Flaky sea salt (such as Maldon)

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350°. Line a 9x5” loaf pan with parchment paper, leaving a generous overhang on long sides; set aside.
2. Toast pecans on a rimmed baking sheet, tossing occasionally, until fragrant and slightly darkened in color, 8–10 minutes. Let cool, then coarsely chop.
3. Heat sugar, buttermilk, butter, honey, and kosher salt in a medium saucepan over medium-high heat, stirring occasionally, until butter and sugar are melted, about 3 minutes.
4. Fit saucepan with thermometer, bring mixture to a simmer and cook, stirring occasionally, until thermometer registers 238° (mixture will be pale golden and smell faintly of toffee), 6–8 minutes.
5. Immediately pour mixture into a medium bowl and, using an electric mixer on medium-high speed, beat until cool and thickened (it will be stiff and matte), 5–8 minutes.
6. Fold in pecans. Scrape fudge into prepared pan; smooth top and sprinkle with sea salt.
7. Let sit at least 1 hour before cutting into pieces.