I was born into that fray and thought it all perfectly normal until I was in kindergarten. I learned that most dads left the house each day and came home for dinner. I could go over to other houses to play after school, but because of the whisper clause, no one ever came over to my house. Only if the weather was fitting for outside play in the backyard would I be able to host friends. Most of my friends thought I lived in the yard because they never got to see my room, or even believed I had a room inside. That was cemented by the fact that Mom brought us meals outside, too. All that was missing was a tent and a sleeping bag.

As an adult I realized how my mom came to be such a fabulous baker. She lived in the kitchen. She couldn’t be in the living room near the Ad Man’s office because the swish of the turning pages of her book would bother him. She read books in her bedroom on the other side of the tiny house, where I found her each day after coming home from school. She spent the day baking and relaxing before dinner with a book. Later, I learned that the relaxing had more to do with resting her damaged heart than just chilling.

Mom baked tons of goodies, but none more frequently than her brownies. She was the entire welcome wagon for the growing neighborhood back in the mid-1940s and would bring a plate of brownies to every new family. She baked them when requested and they became popular beyond reason. We loved when she made brownies because the crisp edges had to be carved off before being given away. The four of us fought over each edge though the pan was square. As the youngest, I got first dibs most of the time. I loved teasing my brothers and taking the imaginary largest size edge from the square.

Thankfully, the recipe made its way into print in the 1964 Syracuse Hadassah Cookbook. Otherwise, none of us would have ever known how she made them. Most of her recipes were hand-me-downs and no one ever bothered to write them out. I still wonder how she got her strudel dough so thin and delicate. And while I watched her make rugelach often when I was a tiny kid, I do not know the ingredients list.

Undoubtedly these were oversights on her part, thinking she had lots of time to share them with us. She did not. Mom died from heart failure when I was 10. It is now fast approaching the bend in the road where she will have been gone almost as long as she was alive.

Fortunately, the brownies live on. I followed in her footsteps and made them as welcoming gifts for new neighbors when we lived in places that had neighbors. I make them as gifts. I’ve updated the recipe to reflect changing chocolate sources, but essentially I leave it alone. Some things deserve to be historic mom-uments, including recipes that have a heritage and taste really good.

Ada’s Brownies? That would be the Ad Man’s witty headline. When the recipe was to be immortalized in the cookbook, it needed a catchy title. A riff on Ate a Brownie became Ada’s Brownies. You cannot imagine how many people ask me about Ada and was that my mother’s real name? Um, no. Just the Ad Man’s moment of Zen. Which is why he never was a Mad Man.

Happy 49.5 Million Minute birthday, Mom. Your brownies live on, and now they will travel that magic highway, the giant World Wide Web, where they will live on for virtual eternity. Bon appetit.

Ada’s Brownies by Anne Stander

1/4 pound of butter
2 squares baking chocolate
1 cup sugar
2 eggs
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup flour
1 teaspoon vanilla
1/2 cup chopped nuts

Melt butter and chocolate and set aside to cool. Cream sugar and eggs. Add vanilla, then flour, salt and nuts. Add butter and chocolate mixture. Bake in greased, floured 9-by-9-inch pan. 350 degrees for 10 minutes, then 300 degrees for about 25 minutes.

My Notes

This is the original recipe written as was. Translated: 1/4 pound butter is one stick of unsalted butter. Two squares baking chocolate is 4 ounces of unsweetened chocolate — use the best you can find. Cut back on the (white) sugar slightly. Nuts are optional.

For gluten free: Use Bette’s Featherlight gf flour blend from Authentic Foods and add 1/4 teaspoon xanthan gum. Under-measure the gf flour just slightly.

Mix everything as little as possible. Brownies don’t benefit from overmixing. Less fussing makes them dense and chewy.

There is something about 6th graders and dirt that just makes sense. They can’t resist it; can’t wait to move it and pile it and throw it in each other’s faces. But when you’re a 6th grader in the desert, “outside” is a different kind of beast. As I watched my students in rural Arizona pull cactus needles out of their rear ends and kick up dust, I thought about the uses of this barren land we call home — and we don’t use much.

Moving from a big Michigan city to this tiny Arizona town called Camp Verde, I found that the word “barren” could be used to describe almost everything — the landscape, the bookshelves that lined my English classroom, the extreme apathy for education and the rare semblances of togetherness between the Hispanic, Native, white and black students. At school board meetings, all I heard was “We need to form a sense of community,” and “Our community needs a stronger identity.” Camp Verde is a dot on a map — but what is it?

I tried to figure this question out with my 6th graders. We made lists of things our community is and isn’t, what it needs and doesn’t. The one thing that reappeared, over and over, was food. From the tamales that Hispanic students share with each other to the local fry bread stand a Native American family runs, the unique things we eat were the dominant traits that defined us. We talked about how important, culturally and practically, food is to family and we talked about how being poor means having few resources for fresh produce. So, with community and food swirling in my head, my students and I planted a garden.

We dug up the weeds, trekked manure from neighbors’ farms, and $40 later, planted a plethora of local plants outside of our three-school, K-12 complex. As we measured distances and plopped seeds into the prepared earth, the squeals of excitement at the sight of a slug or the misfire of the garden hose triggered a smile on my face that had not been so fierce in some time. We researched the plants, planned for their use in the cafeteria, created a classroom-composting bin, and most important, talked about the compelling diversity of the place we lived.

The day we planted, I saw something I had not seen in Camp Verde, ever: Parents, who rarely seemed invested in their childrens’ education, showed up with rakes and trowels. A college professor called and asked if he could help. A woman who ran a greenhouse donated bags of compost on the spot. The community began flocking to the garden site. I asked one student what she was learning and she replied, “Nature is more than what God created. It is a part of life.” I was stunned. The Native American parents that showed up began impromptu lessons about the history of the agave plants, and another 6th grade teacher taught a lesson about water conservation in the desert. Inside the garden, inside the decrepit fence, racial tensions eroded and the true meaning of community blossomed.

It was likewise inside the classroom. When one student, Sharli, talked about the chilies her family grows on their farm, a Hispanic student look stunned and said, “Really? You eat chilies?” The connections and compassion came from all over, reappearing daily. At the end of the unit, students brought in dishes from their cultures and we learned about every family and what is “normal” for them to eat for dinner. Students found similarities and loved the differences. When I admitted that I had never been introduced to tamales before, students loved sharing them with me. It was a binding experience that paved the way for new friendships and discussions.

We sat in our garden, weeks later, and all wrote about the growth we could taste and touch with our fingertips. Students talked about how they wanted to keep this going forever. With impending budget cuts, teachers working with half the lights on, and another year of ancient textbooks, the funding to put in a functional (and environmentally friendly) watering system was just not plausible.

But we keep plugging. We keep toiling in our small piece of desert land where things still grow. My dream as an educator is to give our community what we deserve — the right of healthy, local, community-driven food. While we’ve created something that students will hopefully remember and cherish, we still have much more work to do. We have funds to raise. We have people to convince. But, when the school board asks me, “What can we do to create community?” I’ll tell them the answer: food.

Alissa J. Novoselick