Chapter 2: The Long Way Home

Date Skillet Cookies

These are the cookies my kids want me to make every year at Christmas, and they’re the same cookies I wanted my mom to make every year. There are some things you can’t help but love because, despite everything, they’re home. 

You’ll need:
1 cup pitted dates, chopped. Though it’s tempting, do not buy pre-chopped dates, the finely ground oat coating on the outside of store-bought chopped dates keeps them from melting easily into the butter.
1 cup sugar
2 eggs, please buy eggs that are kind to chickens, okay?
2 Tablespoons butter. Get a good brand, we’ve got zero time in life for just-okay butter. 
Truth, the kind that sinks in slowly, a little at a time
1 teaspoon vanilla, my favorite is the very fancy Cook’s Vanilla Bean Paste, which I get from Anchor Pantry
1 cup pecans, chopped 
3 cups Rice Krispies 
Powdered sugar, for rolling the cookies into logs
Parchment paper
A large cast iron skillet or, as my mom always used, an electric skillet set to 350°F
One good playlist, must include: “Cowboy Take Me Away,” by The Chicks and “Long Way Home,” by Norah Jones

Begin by chopping your dates. If you think this part is an unnecessary pain in the ass, I will say that sometimes, the best things in life feel like taking the long way home. Yep, those dates are sticky and it’ll take you a little bit of time. It’ll be worth it. 

In a medium bowl, whisk together your sugar and eggs and set them aside. 

~

There’s a great photo that was taken of me when I was about ten. I was on my grandparent’s ranch in Lake City, CA. I’m wearing an oversized tee-shirt, a high ponytail with a big old scrunchie, and my best summer freckles. I’m holding a chicken, and I look equal parts very proud to be holding a chicken and totally terrified to be holding a chicken.

My grandma thought it was so cute that I loved the chickens. I thought it was so cute that she canned and pickled everything they grew on the ranch and kept rows and rows of beautiful jars in their cold room to keep my grandpa and her in tomatoes, and strawberries, and cucumbers through the winter.

She’s the reason I’ve kept chickens throughout my adult life. We had twenty-three hens when I lived in Chico, and because I ran a catering company at the time, the chickens were very much a part of my business. They ate leftovers from our events, which dramatically reduced our food waste, and I used their eggs in the gluten-free bakery arm of my business.

When I moved to the Bay Area, I felt disconnected from my small town roots, and disconnected from the kitchen. In an effort to make my new commuting-mom-working-in-sales life feel more like home, I kept four little hens in the backyard of my suburban house in Martinez, CA even though it wasn’t technically legal and my neighbors probably hated it. 

~

Gently melt your butter, being careful not to let it brown.

Accept the invitation to slow down; dial back the heat. Notice the way time also melts away, like butter, and appreciate that when heat is evenly applied, the inevitability of change can be gentle, intentional, part of the joy of making something delicious. At least, that’s what we all hope for.

Add your dates to the melted butter, and cook over medium-low heat for about 15 minutes, until they begin to soften and dissolve into the butter. Sway your hips to the song on your playlist and sing along. Dates and butter and country songs are a sexy sort of prayer, just like curvy hips and cowboys. 

Stirring quickly and continuously, add your sugar and egg mixture to the dates. It's very important to keep the mixture moving at this stage so the eggs incorporate without scrambling. Nobody wants scrambled egg cookies.

This step can be a little tricky, we're trying to bring a lot of different kinds of things together, but I know it's possible because I've done it.

~

I don’t know exactly how I knew I wasn’t like other girls, but I felt it very young. I wanted to do everything boys could do, and because I grew up in the country, I learned to fish, and shoot, and pick up crawdads just behind their front arms so they couldn’t pinch me as I pulled them out of the creek and tossed them in a bucket. 

My grandpa thought it was cool that I wanted to ride my aunt’s old dirt bike around the ranch, following the trail from the driveway, through the alfalfa field, across the creek bed and back again. 

I thought it was so cool that he was, with his own hands, renovating the ranch house that had been moved into place over a hundred years ago, pulled by men on horses. 

I also thought it was so cool that he drove a tractor, and taught me how to buck hay. 

Back then, girls like me were called tomboys, and I absolutely loved the title. To me, it meant that I was doing what boys could do. I felt cool and unrestricted by my gender. I guess I was in my pre-feminist era, just a country girl doing country things, playing sports, bucking hay, and loving life. 

Today, my friends, we call people like me nonbinary. 

~

Remove the date mixture from the heat and let your truth sink in slowly as you add your fancy vanilla and stir. 

Carefully fold in the chopped pecans and Rice Krispies into the hot date mixture. Remember all the heated arguments you had with your stepdad about whether marriage should be restricted to hetero couples. 

Flash back to the look on your mom’s face when you, at fourteen, said, “Why shouldn’t a kid have two moms? What difference does it make?”

By the time you turned thirty-three and started dating women, you hoped they’d be less surprised, but small town ideas change slowly, and sometimes they don’t change at all. 

Didn’t they see your wardrobe in high school and think, “Hmmm, it consists mostly of boy’s clothes” or notice how you stopped shaving your legs, for like, a couple years during a time when all the other girls were mostly strictly worried about whether they had the right hair accessories or if boys liked them? 

Set your family and the date mixture aside until they all just cool the fuck down. 

~

I guess it was during an extended cooling period that I sold my house and moved to Texas. I had a lot of reasons for leaving California, most of them having to do with the overwhelming cost of being a single mom of three in the Bay Area.

In retrospect, however, I needed something very specific that only San Antonio could offer, I just couldn’t see exactly what it was at first. 

Living in the Bay Area made me embarrassed of my country roots and my conservative upbringing. And my country roots and conservative upbringing did not love my Bay Area point of view. 

My daily commute to San Francisco made me long for pine-tree-lined country roads. Pine trees made me long for dinner in the city and grabbing an Uber home when dinner turned into drinks. Politically, I have always leaned very much left, but every single time I wrote a song, it was always a country tune.

I felt impossibly caught between worlds, and completely unsure of how to reconcile their differences. In California, the divide is clear. People of taste do not listen to country music, Jen. 

In Texas, however, that’s not true. Lesbians drive trucks and love country music, and cowboys love gay bars.

Of course, this isn’t true everywhere in Texas, and isn’t true of everyone in Texas (as the voting records show), but San Antonio is a majority Latino city that was also settled by Germans where my Mexican-German country-girl heart and my Bay Area perspective could finally peacefully coexist. 

I sang country songs at The Lonesome Rose on Cowboy Karaoke night and sipped champagne with pomme frites at Mon Chou Chou. I dated men, I dated women. The cost of living was easy, and I could finally breathe. I lived in a city of millions that somehow felt like the small town I needed. What they called “traffic” in San Antonio felt so cute when compared with the snarl of my former Bay Area commute. I drove an old 4Runner with fishing poles in the back, and on my days off, I went fishing with my son. 

When I moved back to California, I was no longer ashamed of my country roots, the country songs I loved, and I felt stronger than ever in my political leftness, and my mixed-race, not-exactly-female, pansexual identity. 

Sure, it’s an interesting mixture, but it’s what I’m working with, guys. 

~

Once your mixture is cool enough to handle, lay a 2-foot piece of parchment down on the counter, sprinkle generously with powdered sugar, and place about half the mixture in a thick line, lengthwise, down the center of the parchment.

Dust the top of the date mixture with more powdered sugar (oh, stop it, you overly health conscious Californians, it is Christmas and some annual powdered sugar won’t murder you in your sleep) and, overlapping the sides of your parchment, form the mixture into a tight log, making holiday traditions, just like your mom did before you. 

Twist the ends of the parchment so the date log looks like a giant piece of wrapped Christmas candy and refrigerate it until completely cool. 

Slice the log into cookies and mail some to your family members, both liberal and conservative, and just be happy that you’re here, alive, and comfortable in your own skin.

Sometimes, we all take the long way home.