Chocolate Sandwiches

We are too far from the unsalted waters of Lake Michigan to hear the waves, but not too far to drive to enjoy them amongst the tourists that flock to the quaint town in Michigan’s lower peninsula that we call home. We live far outside any city limits but with Grandma’s house just through the woods, sometimes it feels like we have our own tiny village.

A short dirt path twists through the little woods between ours and Grandma’s house; it begins in our yard, near the side of our big white house, and twists through the woods until it reaches Grandma’s side yard, ending about 100 feet before her brown-orange cedar sided home. In the spring and summer, birds chirp in the many tree branches that surround the skinny footpath, and chipmunks dodge in and out of fallen logs. Sometimes we bump down the connecting mile long gravel driveway on our 1971 gasoline powered golf cart, and arrive at Grandma’s smelling of exhaust, but most of the time we enjoy the three-minute walk through the path as we make our way next door to Grandma’s for dinner.

We eat 95% of dinners at Grandma’s. This works out well because Grandma enjoys cooking, and Mom has a disdain like no other for preparing a meal (or at least like no other person I am aware of). Mom cooks if she has to, but never because she wants to, unless it involves chocolate. Whenever she does start to cook her mind is preoccupied with anything and everything else; she zips here and there doing random tasks like folding the towels fresh from the dryer- it seems as though she thinks the towels will turn to dust if they are not folded right that minute. Regardless of which task aids her avoidance of the kitchen, she inevitably returns to make a pot of tea. She rests her hands on the butcher block countertops as she waits for the water to stop drizzling out of the faucet after she turns the knob carefully off. Once she places the tea kettle on the stove, she always seems to remember that she is hungry. Sometimes in the afternoons, after the tea water gets hot, she forgets she’s hungry and we race back out to put up a temporary pasture in what used to be a hay field for our three horses to graze on fresh grass, and sometimes she gets situated on the riding lawn mower and bounces along for hours at a time.

Today isn’t a lawn mowing or pasture making day, today the farrier is coming, and it is also my real birthday. We plan to celebrate it over the weekend with a small party, so it isn’t a big deal that the afternoon is booked with the farrier coming to trim the horses’ hooves. Mom turns off the tea kettle, even though the water is hot, and we head back out to the barn. I knew he wasn’t here yet because there wasn’t any dust billowing down the driveway, but she was in a rush just the same. The farrier comes to trim the horses’ feet every few months and he’s never really on time, because some horses aren’t so keen on having their hooves filled, trimmed, shoed, or picked up even... Sometimes it is a smooth process in our barn, but often Gigi (one of our horses) has other ideas…

“Alright, you’re going to your room,” Mom says.

“Are you putting her in time out…?” I ask, as I try not to laugh.

“Yes. Walk her to her stall.”

Gigi had been misbehaving. The farrier was simply trying to trim her feet- something she grew up with and should be used to by now- but she was smarting off. When the farrier lifted one of her feet, Gigi would pick up another foot, in addition to the one he held up, just far enough to take her weight off it. Slowly she would start to lean on the farrier. He tried to maintain his stance, holding her foot between his knees, trimming and filing away with his gigantic nail file (really it is called a rasp), but eventually he gave in and had to drop her foot because he is a person, and she is a horse. When he was finally almost halfway done, he picked up one of her back feet and she swatted him in the face with her thick black tail. That did it. Mom was ticked and Gigi knew it.

Mom often describes horses like big dogs, and in a lot of ways, she is right. While Gigi spends some time in her stall “thinking about what she’s done” as Mom puts it, I hold my horse, Blaze, to have her feet trimmed. Blaze is “barely a horse” at 14.3 hands high (apparently someone decided long ago horses had to be nearly 15 hands high to be considered a “horse” and not a “pony”). Blaze is usually well-mannered and today is no exception, which makes Gigi’s behavior seem even worse.

Finally, Gigi is the only one left, because Georgia, Mom’s horse, had her feet done first. I hook up the blue lead rope to Gigi’s halter as I open the stall door. The farrier watches as I walk her back to the center of the aisle in the barn. The look of dread tries to break through his expression, but he attempts to maintain his composure. I can’t say as I blame him- I have been hit in the face with a horse’s tale- it burns. 

“You hold her. Don’t let her lean on him!” Mom walks to Gigi’s hips. She holds her black tail firmly in her hand. The farrier glances up and smiles. I hold the lead rope in my hand and wait for her to try to sit on him again.

I wander into Grandma’s kitchen at dinner time that evening, but she kicks me out. She tells me to go sit at the table and wait. I listen and sit patiently at the big oval dining table. My chair faces the living room, so the kitchen is behind me. Grandma sets down a steamy big metal bowl she’s lined with a kitchen towel. I know instantly what is inside- baked potatoes! I can smell them. My mouth starts to water. Mom places a cookie sheet full of tater tots on the trivet in the center of the table. My smile grows bigger. Mom never buys pre-packaged potatoes- but Grandma knows I love them. I expect a plate of chicken or some type of protein to be placed on the table next, but instead, Grandma sets down a big pot full of mashed potatoes, a ceramic bowl of steamed red skin potatoes, and broccoli.

Grandma smiles as big as me when she sees how surprised and excited I am. I thought this was it, but she comes back with another one of my favorites, scalloped potatoes, the ones you buy in a box and make from thick dried potato chips. The roasted redskins with rosemary Mom sets down next to the tater tots makes a total of six kinds of potatoes. The smell of potatoes, salt, butter, and rosemary fill the air as we began to eat. I ask why there is broccoli. I cannot imagine who would want to eat broccoli when there are so many yummy types of potatoes.

“I thought we should have some sort of vegetable,” Grandma says, “and besides, your dad will eat it.”

The next day as we plod out across the yard towards the barn, I carry the potato peels from my special dinner in a metal bowl. The manure pile, outside of what we call the “cow end” of the barn, towers high above the metal T-Posts that make up the fence line. Mom likes to compost leftover food scraps because combined with the horse and cow poop, it makes a lovely fuel to grow vegetables in. I’ve never really cared about it, but every day I bury the food scraps into the pile of straw, pine shavings, and poo. Abe, our humongous steer, is sometimes friendly because my sister, before she went off and got married, trained him to be an Ox. If Mom wasn’t such a softie, he’d have been traded for hay and wound up as someone’s hamburger long ago. I’ve grown fond of Abe over the years but today, I forget his strength.

Per usual, I climb to the top of the manure pile and dig a hole. I dump the potato peels and a few other scraps and begin to cover them over. I glance up to see Abe trudging up the pile. Sometimes he likes to eat the scraps, but we usually get them covered before he can. I push the peels away from him as he noses around the scraps. He does not appreciate that. He gently sticks his monstrous hollow head between my legs and launches me off the pile of manure with his nose. In the blink of an eye, I am airborne. I am petrified I am going to be skewered on one of those metal T-posts. I scream furiously at Abe as I fly through the air. Somehow, I land running backwards, tears streaming down my face. I am still screaming at the massive cow as my feet hit the ground. Abe happily flings the potatoes peels about, ignoring me completely now. I spot Mom in the barn doorway.

“Why are you laughing?!” I ask. My heart feels like it is going to pound out of my chest.

“You were running in the air. It looked funny,” she says.

“I could have landed on a T-post!”

“Oh, yeah. But you didn’t. What were you doing up there with him?” Mom asks.

“I didn’t want him to eat the potato peels because they were green…I didn’t want him to get a stomachache.”

After our outlandish and scary morning, we go inside the house for a water break. The heat rises to the tall 22-foot cathedral ceiling, keeping the lower portion of the house cool and breezy with the windows and doors open on warm days like these. In the winter, the high ceilings are a bit of an issue, as temperatures reach the negatives and the heat rises into the empty loft, but in the summer, it is lovely.

“I’m hungry,” I say, as a single drip of water runs down my chin and lands on my grubby oversized t-shirt. I was guzzling the cool well water too quickly, and my mouth couldn’t hold it all.

“I could go for something sweet, but I don’t think we have any chocolate chips…” Mom says.

The semi-sweet chocolate chips we buy, to make cookies, often get gobbled up as snacks before they make it into cookie dough. Mom rummages through the pantry.

“We have Hershey’s bars!” she says.

I walk towards the pantry; the small wooden door creaks as I pull it open to peer in at her. That old door is sacred to Mom because it came out of her great grandparents’ house. The bottom and top edges of the thin boards, and a few other spots, are painted what I think is a light green, although Mom insists it’s grey. It seems as if each board would tell me it’s story if it were able, and if I would stand there long enough to listen. I bump the closure mechanism, a simple metal sliding lock, as I lean on the pantry doorway. The echo it makes sounds as if I’ve dropped a dish.

“Oops- that was loud!” I look at Mom. “We could use those instead of chocolate chips to make cookies…”

“Or we could just eat them.” Mom looks up at me. The edges of her thin lips curl into a smile. For some reason, she is still half-squatting near our secret chocolate stash.

“But I’m actually hungry and there’s not much in the house to snack on,” I moan.

Mom grabs the Hershey’s bars and takes them into the kitchen. I follow her like a puppy follows its owner when they’re holding a Milk Bone.

            It’s interesting to contemplate how food works to fill voids, the way it can ease tension, and how certain foods fit certain situations and people. There are dishes I will only make for my loved ones, and others are just for me (although usually those are foods my family doesn’t typically like). It’s interesting to contemplate how much food can evoke a sense of calm, and how our alimentary memories stick with us from childhood into adulthood. Food is inherently a collaborative social activity, so it makes sense to create scrumptious food we can all enjoy together, whether someone was flipped off of a manure pile by a massive steer, or just had a rough day at school, food is how we soothe ourselves and each other. Food is one way I now show my own children how much I love them, and it seems it is also how my mom was expressing her love for me that day.

Mom gets out the griddle and carefully sets it on the counter next to the left side of the stove, being careful not to damage the butcher block.

“What are you doing? Are we making pancakes?” I ask.

As she carefully closes the cherry cabinet with her left hand, the twisty burner starts to wobble in her right. After removing the regular circular burners, she plugs the griddle burner in and sets the heavy cast iron griddle atop it.

“Get the bread, eggs, and milk,” Mom says, “we’re going to make chocolate sandwiches!”

I have no idea what she is talking about but I’m hungry and share her love of chocolate, so I don’t question her. I grab the heavy gallon from the fridge and slide the milk onto the countertop. Next, I reach for the egg carton. “How many eggs do we need?” I ask, unsure of what we are actually doing.

“Oh, I don’t know, one or two maybe…” Mom twists the black stove knobs until the orange dots indicating “high” or “low” point to the warmest setting.

“What are we making?” I ask. She seems so sure of what we are doing, but I have never heard of a chocolate sandwich – at least not outside the form of a store-bought cookie. I watch as Mom combines two eggs and some milk in a low ceramic Pyrex dish.

“Are you making French toast?” It looks like the start of French toast to me…

“No, we’re making chocolate sandwiches…” Mom says, distracted by the blob of egg white struggling to drip off the white bread that is slowly becoming limp and giving in to the snotty looking blob; it reminds me of the little goobery green guy in Ghostbusters, only clear. Finally, the snot blob tumbles back into the light-yellow milky mixture. Mom lays the limp bread on the hot griddle and my ears delight in hearing the familiar sizzle. It sounds, and smells, like French toast cooking on a Saturday morning.

“See, I only dipped one side of the bread, so we can put the chocolate in the middle. Then we’ll put another piece of bread with one side coated in the egg and milk mixture on top of that and flip it,” Mom says, as she begins assembling two sandwiches. The delicious scent of French toast fills the air as light whiffs of smoke roll gently off the searing hot griddle. Mom takes the ancient metal spatula, the one that looks like it should have come from my great grandparents’ house but didn’t, and flips each sandwich, revealing a buttery gold crispy piece of bread. My nose starts to tingle as it fills with hints of scorching chocolate; the chocolate is melted now and seeping out of the edges onto the cast iron where it instantly burns. Mom grabs the spatula and plops each one onto a plate. The center of each sandwich is weighed down with liquid sweetness.

“Oh- we need powdered sugar to put on top!” Mom says, looking at me. I dart out of the kitchen, down the short, angled hallway and back through the historic pantry door to retrieve the requested ingredient. I arrive back in the kitchen just in time to see Mom cut the sandwiches in half. Melty chocolate oozes out of the freshly cut center seams.

“I think you’re supposed to dust it on…” Mom contemplates for a fleeting moment, “hand me the sifter.” As Mom pours the powdered sugar into the sifter, it gracefully snows down atop our sandwiches, covering them in extra sweetness. It smells more like a candy shop than Saturday morning French toast now, but I don’t dislike it; I think it smells good!

“Should we eat on the swing?” Mom asks, as she hands me a fork.

“That sounds good to me!” I grab a plate and head past the dining room. I turn into the foyer as I make my way to the long front porch. We quietly sit on the big wooden swing, gently swinging back and forth, as birds sing in the background. I cut into the center of my sandwich and take a bite as I watch the melted chocolate slowly oozing out onto the plate; it’s a gloppy crisp hot mess of goodness.

“These are good, Mom. Where did you get the recipe for chocolate sandwiches?”

“You know, I’m not sure. Maybe it was in a magazine- oh wait, maybe I saw it on Martha Stewart…”

Chocolate sandwiches always stayed in my own little private pantry for many years- decades even- I knew they were there to make but I hesitated to make them, because they evoke memories of quieter times, stressful times when we pulled joy from seemingly mundane things, we found joy within different, often scary situations, through food.I could hear Mom’s smile through the phone when I told her I was writing about our chocolate sandwiches, but somber reflection quickly followed. When I was 19, Grandma was diagnosed with lung cancer and our world was turned upside down. I grew up a lot over the course of the next year or two, as I did my best to show her the same sort of love and compassion she’d always shown me. Even though Grandma’s kitchen now stands empty, void of the smell of potatoes and rosemary, it will always remind me that food is more than nourishment, it is love. Chocolate sandwiches remind me of a simpler time. One where Mom and I could come inside from the warm summer days, from crazy horse mishaps and cow excursions, guzzle ice cold well water, and indulge in chocolate. They remind me of when I was on the cusp of adulthood and trying to hang on, just a little bit, to the innocence of my youth.

Side note: You can find the recipe for chocolate sandwiches here. Thank you, Alecia, for sharing this family recipe with us!