This weekend my family and an assorted arrangement of friends gathered to celebrate the fact that my grandparents have been married for sixty years. We came together in the basement of the church that they got married in so many years ago to toast their accomplishment and eat some dinner and some cake.
60 years is quite an accomplishment.
60 years is a lifetime, especially when looking at it from a 27 days married perspective.
Mr and I arrived during a downpour of rain, and we started the family photos while it was still raining. My grandpa laughed because apparently it rained and rained and rained on the day of their wedding too, but rain at a wedding is good luck.
My baba made more of a speech than my grandpa did, which I thought was pretty special because he is generally the speaker, having been in politics as a younger man and being a generally more gregarious character. She did the speech because “after sixty years, he’s done enough talking.” And she told the story about how she met this handsome fellow with lovely wavy hair (which has since departed) and spent her life in love with him.
Four children, eight grandchildren, two great-grandchildren, a farm, a house, a condo, and many many travels later, there we were, gathered around to celebrate them.
Being in love is about you and the person you’re in love with. To me at least, getting married (or not marrying but deciding to be together forever or for the long term) is about community. It’s about family, genetically connected or otherwise, because the networks that interconnect us are altered, strengthened, and additionally branched when people make official that they are a team. None of us are islands.
My good friend Artemis read this at Mister and my wedding, and I think it sums up what I’m trying to say much more eloquently then I’m saying it:
“Lovers must not, like usurers, live for themselves alone. They must finally turn from their gaze at one another back toward the community. If they had only themselves to consider, lovers would not need to marry, but they must think of others and of other things. They say their vows to the community as much as to one another, and the community gathers around them to hear and to wish them well, on their behalf and its own. It gathers around them because it understands how necessary, how joyful, and how fearful this joining is. These lovers, pledging themselves to one another ‘until death,’ are giving themselves away, and they are joined by this as no law or contract could join them. And so here, at the very heart of community life, we find not something to sell as in the public market but this momentous giving. If the community cannot protect this giving, it can protect nothing.” – Wendell Berry
Either way, 1 June 2073, I’m going to be throwing a party. I hope you can come!
Cranberry Chocolate Shortbread Cookies
(Recipe adapted from Robin Hood)
1 Cup butter, room temperature
3/4 Cup icing sugar
2 tsp vanilla
1 3/4 Cups flour
1/2 Cup corn starch
1/2 tsp salt
3/4 Cup dried cranberries
3/4 Cup semisweet chocolate chips
Directions
- Start the oven heating to 300 °F. Line a cookie sheet with parchment paper or a silicone mat so that the sheet cookie will come off of the pan easily.
- In a mixing bowl, beat together the butter, icing sugar and vanilla until smooth and velvety.
- Stir in the flour, corn starch, and salt, mixing until the cookie dough forms.
- Add in the dried cranberries and chocolate chips, stirring to distribute through the cookie dough.
- Pat the cookie down into the prepared pan. This single, giant cookie should be roughly rectangular and around a half inch thick.
These cookies are loaded with lots of good stuff!
- Bake until golden (~40 minutes). Let the cookie sit in the pan for a few minutes before using the parchment or silicone mat to move it to a cutting board.
- Slice the cookies into bars before they cool completely and serve. If you let them cool all the way before slicing, you are more likely to get cookie breakage.
These cookies are a joy to make, as much as I love a cookie cutter, these are the cookies to make when you forgot that you promised to bring something and don’t have time to roll and cut. I’m sure you could use cookie cutters with this recipe, but the chocolate chips and cranberries would make it more difficult to get good clean cuts. If you have your heart set on cutting your cookies out, you could always leave the chocolate and cranberry out until the cookies are cut and then press the add ins onto the surface.
Anyway, enough talk of the joys of cookie cutting, and to the real point: the eating! A shortbread cookie is a lovely thing, and I quite like it in combination with the chocolate chips and cranberries. My mum used to make shortbread cookies with chocolate chips in them (higher ratio of cornstarch to flour than this recipe, so delightfully sandy) and I believe that the dried cranberries are a lovely addition to that pairing. The recipe from Robin Hood calls for white chocolate chips, which I rarely keep in the pantry, if you try them with the white, let me know how they turn out!
I was going to say that these pair up swell with a cup of tea, but you know me, I think everything is better with a cup of tea.
This time last year: Pastelitos
And the year before: Asparagus Wrapped in Prosciutto
And the year before that: Rhubarb Schnapps
