Coconut Kisses — The Sweet Thing I Made After I Made Everything Else

Lourdes turned seventy-five on Tuesday. The party was Saturday at the Mountain View house. Mark flew in from San Diego with Carmen and the twins — Marco and Sofia, both three and a half, fearless and exhausting in equal measure. Joseph came up from Kodiak smelling of halibut and was made to shower twice before he could enter the kitchen. Angela, James, Mia (three), Noah (five months) were there. Auntie Norma. Auntie Rosa, ninety-three, came in a wheelchair pushed by her granddaughter.

I made everything. Pancit for long life. Lechon kawali. Pork adobo. Lumpia, three hundred. Leche flan. Lourdes presided in her chair like a queen. She told everyone they were not eating enough. She made me promise to find a husband before she turns eighty. I promised nothing. She accepted this, temporarily, the way she always does.

I sat on the porch with Mark for ten minutes around eight PM. He smoked his single annual cigarette. He said, "Carmen wants another." I said, "Another what." He said, "Another kid." I said, "When." He said, "Maybe next year." I said, "How are you, brother." He said, "Tired. Happy. Tired." We laughed. We went back inside. The kitchen was loud and bright and full of grandchildren and the matriarch was at the center of it all, seventy-five years of her holding the weight of three generations, and I thought: this is what Reynaldo crossed an ocean for.

Iditarod week. The dog teams parading down Fourth Avenue.

A reader from Honolulu wrote me a long email about the post. The email was beautiful. I wrote her back.

I made a list Sunday morning of the small things I needed to do this week. The list was twenty-three items. I crossed off twelve by Wednesday. I crossed off four more by Friday. The remaining seven moved to next week's list. The moving is the practice.

Pete texted me Saturday. We talked on the phone for twenty minutes. He listened. I talked. He laughed at the right places. He asked the right questions.

I cooked through the rest of the week without much thought. The hands knew what to do. The hands always know. The hands had been learning for years and the learning had become muscle and the muscle had become reflex.

The week ended quietly. The body did its slow work of integration. The integration is the only work that matters in weeks like this.

I sat at the kitchen window for a long time after dinner. The inlet was silver. The light was already gone. The kitchen was warm. The body was holding.

A young woman wrote in this week — a nursing student in Houston — to ask how I had handled the early years of bedside work. I wrote her back at length. The writing back is the work. The work is the inheritance moving forward.

Lourdes called Tuesday. She was upset about something at the church. I listened. I made the right sounds at the right intervals. I did not try to fix it. The not-fixing was the love.

The book I am reading this month is a memoir by a Vietnamese-American chef. The book is good. The book is also, in some ways, my own life adjacent. The adjacent is the thing that keeps me reading.

The grocery store had calamansi this week. I bought four pounds. I made calamansi vinaigrette and froze it in cubes. The cubes will get me through the next three months. The freezing is the small inheritance from Lourdes — every Filipina mother freezes things in cubes.

The blog post for the week was a short reflection on the recipe of choice. Six hundred words. I drafted Tuesday. I revised Thursday. I posted Friday morning. The cadence has been the cadence for two decades. The cadence is the discipline. The discipline is the reason the work survives the years.

The leche flan was the last thing I unmolded Saturday night, and it was the thing everyone photographed before they ate it, and it was gone in four minutes. By Sunday morning the house was quiet and the kitchen was clean and I had the particular emptiness that follows a large feast — the kind where you cooked for thirty people and now you are cooking for one. Coconut is the flavor I reach for when I need to come back to myself; it is the taste of Lourdes’s kitchen before I could see over the counter, and these small coconut kisses are the thing I made Sunday afternoon with the last of my energy, just because the hands still needed to do something, and because sweetness after a week like that is not indulgence — it is maintenance.

Coconut Kisses

Prep Time: 10 minutes | Cook Time: 20 minutes | Total Time: 30 minutes | Servings: 24 cookies

Ingredients

• 2 large egg whites, room temperature
• 2/3 cup granulated sugar
• 1/4 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
• 1/8 teaspoon salt
• 2 1/2 cups sweetened shredded coconut

Instructions

1. Preheat oven. Heat oven to 325°F. Line two baking sheets with parchment paper and set aside.
2. Beat the egg whites. In a large bowl, whisk egg whites, sugar, vanilla extract, and salt together until the mixture is combined and slightly frothy — about 1 minute by hand. You are not whipping to stiff peaks; you want a loose, glossy mixture.
3. Fold in coconut. Add the shredded coconut and stir until every strand is coated and the mixture holds together when pressed.
4. Portion onto sheets. Drop rounded tablespoons of the mixture onto prepared baking sheets, spacing them about 1 1/2 inches apart. Use your fingers to gently press and mound each one into a small dome.
5. Bake. Bake for 18 to 22 minutes, rotating pans halfway through, until the edges and peaks are golden brown and the centers feel just set when lightly touched.
6. Cool completely. Let cookies cool on the baking sheet for 5 minutes, then transfer to a wire rack. They firm up as they cool. Store in an airtight container at room temperature for up to five days.

Nutrition (per serving)

Calories: 68 | Protein: 1g | Fat: 3g | Carbs: 10g | Fiber: 1g | Sodium: 38mg