Bread and Wine: Mom's Blueberry Crisp

You can learn a lot about yourself by trying a new recipe.

When I originally planned on cooking and blogging through Shauna Niequist's lovely book Bread and Wine, admittedly I had rather nice ideas of how it would go. Yes, yes a la Julie and Julia. No Art of French Cooking here, but I figured I could tackle a few recipes and give my rusty writing skills a workout in the meantime. Easy-peasy.

Let's just say it hasn't gone that way. Or maybe I should say I have not gone that way.

Let me explain.

When I came to the recipe in the first chapter of Bread and Wine, "Mom's Blueberry Crisp," I thought, Oh! How delightfully simple. 

Simple.

The chapter is really the essence of the book-- celebrating the memories and connections that come out of recipes. Niequist talks about her mother, an early healthnut before healthnut-ness was cool, and all of the times this beautiful little recipe of fruit, nuts, and oats-- your basic tasty berry crisp-- has been served in her family.  

Sweet.

The recipe is a mere seven ingredients, healthful, tasty, a crowd-pleaser. Originally I had planned to make it one morning before the kids woke, and because it was simple, I planned to make several other things around the same time that morning.

Oops.

The night of the first day I tried to write this blog, the "crisp" was still sitting in my refrigerator, frozen blueberries still in their frigid state in my freezer. The only pictures I was able to take all day displayed a forlorn pan of crumbled oats surrounded by a ghastly jumble of spoons, smeared pots, and dirty cutlery from everything else I had tried to accomplish at the same time-- a pot of chicken noodle soup, a pan of brownies, and all of my son's baby food for the day.

How could something so simple not get done?

I began to think that maybe my attempt at this blog was all wrong. I didn't have the time. I am too messy. I don't have the right filters on my camera or something.

Then  it occurred to me that I actually had not followed the recipe at all. 

I mean I really hadn't made Niequist's  recipe. I'd followed some monstrous path of my own making that involved too many things that weren't really necessary to my goal. I'd cluttered my counters and my vision with too many to-dos. The result wasn't just messy--because really, all good things are messy to some degree-- it was actually convoluted.

Interesting how we make simple things so complicated, isn't it? A recipe, a blog, a job, a relationship. Too many times I know I miss out on simple because I think I want the big and grandiose. But sometimes when I clutter my heart and my mind with the big and the grandiose, I miss on what I really wanted all along-- simple.

So I tried again, with the perfect opportunity of a visit from a high school friend. I cleared my counters and my clutter. I cleared my mind and followed the recipe: Simple, just like that. The result was sweet, a little savory, a little crunchy and a lot creamy, bubbly blueberries, and we ate it served over Breyers vanilla bean ice cream, just like Niequist says.

And it was simply perfect.