Spring is here. Liz Billings of East Hawley enjoys watching her five-year-old daughter, Rachel, play outdoors. A little mud (and sometimes at this time of year it can be a lot of mud!) is easily taken care of in the bathtub. After play, Rachel often helps her mother cook.
Rachel’s favorite thing to make (and clearly one of Liz’s favorites as well) is cookies. Liz notes, however, that Rachel isn’t fussy.
“It doesn’t really matter what we’re making. She just likes to help. Even dinner,” Liz told me recently. She explained that Rachel recently composed a song with the title (and the sole lyrics) “We’re Cooking Bacon.”
Liz has a varied life. She was educated as a graphic designer, and she is currently working on a consulting gig in that field. Most of the time, however, she is busy with other projects.
She and her husband Shawn run a small farm, Billings Brook Farm. They sell eggs from their hens to stores and to individuals. In season, they sell blueberries as well. They also have two alpacas. Liz can spin, weave, and knit; she boasts that she knows “how to go from animal to garment.”
Liz is in the process of getting her kitchen certified so she can sell her own lines of jams and cookies. She has always baked, she told me. “With my mom is how it started. She lives in Orange.”
In addition, Liz works as a substitute teacher at Hawlemont School in Charlemont. She is Hawley’s town clerk. And she is a devoted mother to Rachel.
This past fall she also took on the task of teaching baking to 10 of Hawlemont’s 4-H members. Her group consists of boys and girls in Grades 3-6. Rachel sits in and helps with the fun.
The class is limited in time; it takes place twice a month in the afternoon from 3:15 to 5. Liz tries to vary the techniques involved, although she doesn’t have time to do lengthy recipes. The group has baked a lot of cookies, which is just fine with young Rachel and indeed, Liz reports, with the whole group.
For the moment, the class hasn’t tried to bake bread, which usually takes more than the time available. Nevertheless, Liz is game to try if the demand arises.
Recently, Liz taught her students to make shortbread.
“I have always loved shortbread,” she told me. “It’s one of the things my mom used to make with me. You can also do fun things with it. My mom has a chocolate shortbread recipe. Or you can dip it in chocolate. It is so full of buttery fat!”
She finds teaching the youngsters infinitely rewarding. “I’m absolutely happy I decided to do it,” she enthused. ”It’s so much fun to see them figure things out. Something clicks in their brain. Baking is very much a science as well as an art. There’s math involved. It uses so much of their brain that it’s fun to watch.”
Although she tries not to make the baking difficult, she recalled that when the group was learning to separate eggs there were … incidents. “We lost a couple of eggs,” she laughed. Still, she noted, “They did really well for their first try. It was fun.”
Liz’s students are allowed to go outside and play while their creations are baking, although she is strict about ensuring that they return the kitchen to immaculate order before they leave. “If you make the mess, you have to clean it up,” she explained.
She hopes to continue teaching the class next year. This year has been sheer joy, she told me.
One of its highlights was having the youngsters assemble gingerbread houses for the holidays. The candy for decorating the houses exceeded the modest budget 4-H provides. Luckily, private donors and Mo’s Fudge Factor stepped in and supplied what was needed.
Liz Billings endorses Hawlemont both as a place to teach and a place to educate her daughter. “I just love the community there at the school,” she said. She also loves living on 27 acres in Hawley, watching her child play and mature, and tending to the resident animals.
“I’m pretty happy at this point,” she smiled.
Liz’s Scottish Shortbread
Ingredients:
1 cup (2 sticks) butter at room temperature
2 cups sifted flour
1/2 cup sifted confectioner’s sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
Instructions:
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Cream the butter. Sift together the flour, the sugar, and the salt. Blend the dry ingredients into the butter.
Pat the stiff dough into an ungreased 9-by-9-inch pan. Press the edges down. Pierce with a fork through the dough every 1/2 inch.
Bake for 25 to 30 minutes. Cut the large square into 20 smaller squares while it is still warm. Makes 20 buttery cookies.
Tinky Weisblat is the award-winning author of “The Pudding Hollow Cookbook,” “Pulling Taffy,” and “Love, Laughter, and Rhubarb.” Visit her website, TinkyCooks.com.