I’m padding around my kitchen barefoot, late at night, on a rescue mission – making homemade ricotta from the milk that’s set to expire and cooking a batch of broccoli cheddar soup before the broccoli expires too. I love this quiet solo time in the kitchen. Pots on the stove. Fragrant aromas wafting through the house. Soft lighting. A shaft of moonlight falling across the dining room table. It’s a gorgeous August night. There’s a cool breeze, a waxing gibbous moon, and Neil Diamond singing “Stones” from the Hot August Night album on the radio. I’m on a massive trip down memory lane, remembering my beautiful best friend from high school, who succumbed to cancer way too early. We knew every single word to this entire album.

I keep stirring the milk for the ricotta, pausing to check the temperature using my mother’s old candy making thermometer. I’m remembering my mother making jam and coconut ice, and old-fashioned boiled fudge with this thermometer. I can see her perched over the pan, oven mitts on, peering at the thermostat complaining that the numbers were just too damned small. I hung around when she was cooking, just as I’d hung around my grandfather in his kitchen years before.

I grew up loving the kitchen, loving what happened in there. The magical, chemical transformations. The productivity. The smells and tastes. The tangible results.  The memories. To this day, even when I’m alone in my kitchen, I’m never actually alone. I’m remembering the people I’ve loved, the people I love. The long thread of ancestors before me. There are lifetimes of memories in every dish I cook.

The milk is boiling and I double-check the temperature even though I don’t really need to. I pour in the vinegar and a bit of salt and watch as the mixture starts to curdle. Kitchen alchemy. I pour the mixture through a coffee filter in a sieve and let the curds separate from the whey. And there it is: homemade cheese. Such a simple, beautiful thing.