Chinese Almond Cookies

The week after the diagnosis. I have read everything about Parkinson's that the internet contains, which is both too much and not enough. I know the stages. I know the medications. I know the statistics. I know that the progression is different for everyone and that knowing the statistics is both useful and meaningless when the person is your mother. I have organized my research into a folder on my laptop called "Karen — Medical" and I hate that the folder exists and I am grateful that it exists and this is the territory I live in now: gratitude and grief, side by side, the way they have always been in my life, except now they are about a different kind of loss.

James has been extraordinary. He cooked dinner every night this week. He did not ask me to talk about it. He did not push. He was just there — in the kitchen, at the table, on the couch, steady and warm and present. On Wednesday he made his mother's Taiwanese chicken soup — ginger, rice wine, sesame oil, slow-simmered — and brought me a bowl while I was at my laptop reading about dopamine agonists. He set the bowl down. He kissed the top of my head. He said, "Eat." I ate. The soup was perfect. The soup is always perfect when James makes it because he learned it from his mother's hands and he makes it with a care that is indistinguishable from love.

Karen started her medication this week — levodopa, the standard first-line treatment. She takes it three times a day. She reported to me, with clinical precision, that the tremors improved by about 30% and she felt nauseated for the first two days and then the nausea resolved. She is approaching this with the same methodical determination she brought to raising two adopted children in a white suburb in the 1990s: imperfect but relentless. I respect it. I also wish she would cry. I wish she would let me see her be afraid. But Karen has never been afraid where her children could see it, and she is not starting now at seventy.

David is the one I worry about. He is seventy-seven and he has never been alone — he went from his parents' house to the Navy to Boeing to Karen, and the idea of Karen not being Karen is something I can see him trying not to think about. He is busying himself. He has organized the garage. He has cleaned the gutters. He has cooked three meals this week, which is three more than his lifetime average before retirement. He is coping by doing. I inherited this from him. Or maybe I learned it. Either way, we are both the kind of people who, when the ground shifts, start building something on the new ground immediately.

Jisoo wrote on Thursday. I had told her about Karen on Monday — a careful, measured email, because I did not want Jisoo to feel the full weight of it through a screen. Jisoo wrote back: "Dahee. I am praying for Karen. She is your mother. She raised you. I am grateful to her for every day of your life that I missed. I will pray for her hands." I printed the email. I put it in the archive. Two mothers. One praying for the other. The geometry of my life is impossible and it is the only life I have.

Banchan Labs: the waitlist is at 6,200. I am going to expand Box Three to 1,200 boxes, as planned. James approved the spreadsheet. Grace came in three mornings this week and was, as always, the calm center of the operation. She brought me homemade songpyeon on Wednesday and said, "You look tired." I said, "I am tired." She said, "Eat the songpyeon. Rest will come." She is sixty-eight and she speaks to me the way I imagine Jisoo would speak to me if Jisoo lived in Seattle and spoke perfect English. I did not tell Grace this. She would be embarrassed. But I am thinking it.

The recipe this week is James's Taiwanese chicken soup — the one he made me Wednesday. It is simple and healing and exactly the kind of thing a person needs when the world has shifted beneath them. Bone-in chicken thighs, 4 pieces, blanched. Fresh ginger, sliced thick. Rice wine, generous. Sesame oil, a drizzle to finish. Simmer the chicken with ginger and water for 45 minutes. Add rice wine in the last 5 minutes. Ladle into bowls. Drizzle with sesame oil. Scatter with sliced scallion. Eat slowly. Be held by someone who does not need to fix anything. Be held.

James’s soup carried me through the hardest part of this week — the kind of food that holds you the way words can’t. What I keep returning to is how food made from someone else’s family tradition becomes its own act of love, and Chinese Almond Cookies carry that same quiet inheritance: a recipe with deep roots, passed between hands, asked for in hard moments. I’m sharing them here because Grace brought songpyeon and James brought soup and somewhere in all of that, I understood again that the people who feed you are telling you something. These cookies are for the week when you need to make something small and real and good.

Prep Time: 15 minutes | Cook Time: 18 minutes | Total Time: 33 minutes | Servings: 24 cookies

Ingredients

1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 cup almond flour
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup unsalted butter, softened (or lard, for a more traditional result)
3/4 cup granulated sugar
1 large egg, divided (yolk for dough, white for egg wash)
1 teaspoon pure almond extract
24 whole blanched almonds, for topping

Instructions

Preheat oven. Heat oven to 325°F (163°C). Line two baking sheets with parchment paper and set aside.
Whisk dry ingredients. In a medium bowl, whisk together the all-purpose flour, almond flour, baking soda, and salt until evenly combined.
Cream butter and sugar. In a large bowl, beat the softened butter and granulated sugar together with a hand mixer or stand mixer on medium speed for 2–3 minutes, until light and fluffy.
Add egg yolk and almond extract. Beat in the egg yolk and almond extract until fully incorporated, scraping down the sides of the bowl as needed.
Combine wet and dry. Add the flour mixture to the butter mixture and stir with a spatula or wooden spoon until a soft, cohesive dough forms. Do not overmix.
Shape the cookies. Roll the dough into 24 equal balls (about 1 tablespoon each) and place them 2 inches apart on the prepared baking sheets. Flatten each ball gently with the palm of your hand to about 1/2-inch thickness.
Apply egg wash and top with almonds. Lightly beat the reserved egg white with 1 teaspoon of water. Brush the top of each cookie with the egg wash, then press one whole blanched almond into the center of each.
Bake. Bake for 16–18 minutes, rotating the pan once halfway through, until the cookies are lightly golden at the edges and set in the center. They will firm up as they cool.
Cool completely. Transfer cookies to a wire rack and allow to cool for at least 10 minutes before eating. Store in an airtight container at room temperature for up to one week.

Nutrition (per serving)

Chinese Almond Cookies — The Taste of Someone Else’s Hands