A Time for Peace (22 page)

A simple fruit dessert for any season

Homemade bread or sweet Hawaiian rolls from the grocery

store

Fresh fruit in season

Heavy cream or ice cream

For each serving, tear up bread—homemade bread or Hawaiian sweet rolls—and place in a soup bowl. A slice or slice and a half of the bread or two or three rolls should be right for an individual serving. Top with your favorite summer fruit. Ripe peaches, plums, strawberries, or any kind of mixed berries will do nicely. Thawed frozen fruit will also work— even canned pie filling. However, fresh fruit in season is best.Top with heavy cream or ice cream. This dessert is a busy Amish
fraa's
favorite.

For the cookies:

1 cup shortening

2 cups sugar

1 cup hot water with 2 teaspoons baking soda

4 ½ cups flour

¾ cup cocoa

Dash of salt

3 eggs

1 cup milk (buttermilk is best)

2 teaspoons vanilla

Filling:

4 tablespoons flour

1 cup milk

1 cup sugar

1 cup shortening

1 teaspoon vanilla

(OR, you can use that marshmallow fluff in glass jars found in the grocery store in the baking section)

Preheat oven to 375 degrees.

For cookies: Mix the dry, then the wet ingredients. Drop mixture by the teaspoonful onto a greased baking sheet, taking care to space far enough apart so cookies don't blend together.Bake for 8-10 minutes, cool.

For filling:

Mix flour and milk and cook in a saucepan, beating until smooth. Add sugar, shortening, and vanilla. Cool. Spread onto one cookie and top with another.

Then stand back and watch out for the hordes of children and men who will descend and devour these!

 

 

 

A
year ago, Mary Katherine wouldn't have imagined she'd be here. Back then, she'd been helping her parents on the family farm and hating every minute of it.

Now, she stood at the front window of Stitches in Time, her grandmother's shop, watching the
Englischers
moving about on the sidewalks outside the shop in Paradise. Even on vacation, they rushed about with purpose. She imagined them checking off the places they'd visited: Drive by an Amish farmhouse.Check. Buy a quilt and maybe some knitting supplies to try making a sweater when I get back home. Check.

She liked the last item. The shop had been busy all morning, but now, as people started getting hungry, they were patronizing the restaurants that advertised authentic Amish food and ticking off another item on their vacation checklist.Shoofly pie. Amish pretzels. Chow chow. Check.

"Don't you worry, they'll be back," Leah, her grandmother, called out.

Smiling, Mary Katherine turned. "I know."

She wandered back to the center of the shop, set up like the comfortable parlor of an Amish farmhouse. Chairs were arranged in a circle around a quilting frame. Bolts of fabric of every color and print imaginable were stacked on shelves on several walls, spools of matching threads on another.

And yarn. There were skeins and skeins of the stuff: Mary Katherine loved running her hands over the fluffy fibers, feeling the textures of cotton and wool and silk—even some of the new yarns made of things like soybean and corn that didn't feel the same when you knitted them or wove them into patterns but some people made such a fuss over it because it was using something natural.

Mary Katherine thought it was a little strange to be using vegetables you ate to make clothes but once she got her hands on the yarns, she was impressed. Tourists were, too. They used terms like "green" and "ecological" and didn't mind spending a lot of money to buy them. And was it so much different to use vegetables when people had been taking oily, smelly wool from a not very attractive sheep and turning it into a garment for people, silk from silkworms, that sort of thing?

"You have that look on your face again," her grandmother said.

Mary Katherine smiled. "What look?"

"That serious, thoughtful look of yours. Tell me what you're thinking of."

"Working on my loom this afternoon."

"I figured you had itchy fingers." Her grandmother smiled.

She sighed. "I'm so glad you rescued me from working at the farm. And
Dat
not understanding about my weaving."

Grossmudder
nodded and sighed. "Some people need time to adjust."

Taking one of the chairs that was arranged in a circle around the quilt her grandmother and Naomi worked on, she propped her chin in her hand, her elbow on the arm of the chair. "It'd be a lot easier if I knitted or quilted."

Leah looked at her, obviously suppressing a smile. "You have never liked 'easy,' Mary Katherine."

Laughing, she nodded. "You're right."

Looking at Naomi and Anna, her cousins aged twenty and twenty-three, was like looking into a mirror, thought Mary Katherine. The three of them could have been sisters, not cousins. They had a similar appearance—oval faces, their hair center-parted and tucked back under snowy white
kapps,
and slim figures. Naomi and Anna had even chosen dresses of a similar color, one that reminded Mary Katherine of morning glories. In her rush out the door, Mary Katherine had grabbed the first available dress and now felt drab and dowdy in the brown
frack
she'd chosen.

Yes, they looked much alike, the three of them.

Until Mary Katherine stood. She'd continued growing after it seemed like everyone else stopped. Now, at 5'8", she felt like a skinny beanpole next to her cousins. She felt awkward next to the young men she'd gone to school with. Although she knew it was wrong, there had been times when she'd secretly wished that God had made her petite and pretty like her cousins.And why had he chosen to give her red hair and freckles? Didn't she have enough she didn't like about her looks without that?

And Naomi and Anna always looked calm and serene, as they did now. Mary Katherine had always had a problem with that—oh, not with Naomi and Anna. Who could have a problem with them?

No, Mary Katherine had always almost bubbled with energy and lately it seemed her moods were going up and down like the road on a rolling hill.

"Feeling restless?" Naomi asked, looking at her with concern.Nimbly, she made a knot, snipped the thread with a scissors, then slid her needle in a pincushion.