Flour on the Floor: Corn Muffins & Summer's End

Holiday weekends always sounds good in theory—three whole days to spend as a family! But most of the time I find myself thanking the creator of our modern-day calendar for making most weekends only 48 hours. This weekend we eschew our usual game of offspring hot potato—you take them to the park, then I’ll feed them lunch—for a visit to our friends’ lake house.

We have been going to this Michigan home for years now and there are some things I can count on: I will gain three pounds in two days and I will start wanting a lake house. Fat and nagging—there’s really no upside for my husband. The thing I love most about these trips is how they remind me of my own childhood summers. We didn’t travel during the hottest months of the year and certainly didn’t have a second home, but the days were chock full of free-form fun. Where we live now, summer days are packed with camp activities organized by others.

My Florida summers consisted of tribes of bare-footed children roaming the neighborhood, stopping at the 7-11 for Slurpies, picking up golf balls at the perimeter of the course or overshot tennis balls at the courts.  We’d swim in the club pool if we knew even a single member.  We’d have sandwiches and chips at each other’s houses, sometimes two or three lunches in a day.  We’d sell lemonade, our own drawings, cookies our mothers made—anything we could make a few quarters on from other parents and passers-by.  Each day would unfurl with cool, damp grass and quickly build to a sweltering, yard-yellowing heat.  It would end with pink skin and black feet and Happy Days and Laverne and Shirley.  It was heaven.

I look to the rural locale of the lake house to offer our children some freedom in their final summer days. Pre-trip, I always run around like crazy, cooking and baking as if we are about to lose power for a week. The idea is that, once I’m there, I can just relax and enjoy the sounds of the boats and the squeals of the kids being dragged behind them on tubes and skis.

I’m making Corn Muffins to serve alongside corn-on-the-cob with lime-chive butter and bbq pork ribs—a perfect end-of-summer meal. I over-pack and over-cook. I am in a frenzy to make the last days perfect before school, car pools, sports practice, and ballet start constricting our schedule.

I’ve already made and corn muffins seem like retread but it has its own recipe in Baking Illustrated. The editors also include a helpful photo illustration of the things that can go wrong when making these muffins. It reads like a list of my ex-boyfriends: squat and corny; dense and doughy. Corn muffins aren’t made with fresh corn and there’s nothing about them that say “warm weather;” in fact the ingredients consist of corn that’s been ground down to sand and cream that’s been soured. Yet the muffins seem right for the season.    

As my daughter and I start gathering ingredients, we discover that we only have about half of the needed sour cream. We make a quick store trip for that one item and spend $63. Aproned and ready to go, we measure the sour cream and my daughter asks to try it. If I gave her sour cream on top of a potato or on a taco, she’d refuse to eat. But here, as we measure for a recipe, she can’t get enough. The presence of measuring cups transforms the sour cream from food into an ingredient. And ingredients are good.

My husband is home during daylight hours on this last day of his work’s summer schedule and, as our daughter eats sour cream by the finger-full, he starts making the ribs. I’ve cleaned the kitchen since I’ll be taking photos of our progress for this blog. Now there is a pot so big I could hide a few cats in it on the stove, and there are sharp knives, and three racks of raw meat on the counter. We are measuring white ingredients—flour, milk, sour cream, sugar—and there are now pools of watery red on the countertop. There are too many people and projects in our small galley kitchen.

As we put the muffins into the oven, my daughter announces, “I don’t like corn muffins.” I remind her that she’s never had them. It strikes me that I won’t be in a position much longer to differentiate between the foods she has and hasn’t tried—she’ll be out in the world more and more, trying and doing all sorts of new things without me. She takes me at my word and says, “Oh, that’s right, I never know what I might like until I try it.” I’m happy that she’s learned this bit, but am thinking it’s a lesson I might want to revoke when she heads off to college.

Our kitchen counters have taken on the look of a Southern diner right before the lunch rush. There’s tomato salad, boiled corn, ribs, chicken wings, corn muffins and a dessert I affectionately call butter bars owing to the two full sticks of butter in them. Summer is no time for diets. We pack it all up for our three-hour car ride.

Many individuals can recount childhood cross-country road trips filled with delightful side stops and good ol’ family fun. This was when seatbelts were mere suggestions and us kids free-floated from back to front in the car, lying down to nap or read books. Now car trips are buckled in and battery-fueled; there are DVD players, DS and leapfrog game systems, ipods, ipads and other things that start with a lower-case “i.”

I remember riding along singing Motown songs with my mom and creating my own handle on the CB—cooler than a cell phone any day. If pressed, I can also remember my dad’s mounting frustration at our off-key singing and his insistence that I get off the CB already. Still, it seems like some rite of passage to stuff everyone into a car and start driving. It’s tinged with excitement of the unknown even though we know the GPS will keep our way. We start the drive by playing “name that tune” followed by scrambled word and spelling games, 20 questions and finally, iSpy. Sixteen minutes later, we turn on Scooby Doo.

When we arrive at the lake, we release the children into the wild. There are no phones and no internet—we are delightfully cut off. We swim; we fish; we cocktail. I take my daughter on her first Jet Ski ride and mistake her loud cries for laughter as I go faster and faster. The kids have wrestling matches in the lake on an overturned tube they dub “the ring of death” which should actually be called “the ring of keeping-Band-Aid-in-business.”

My favorite part of our yearly lake house trip is a visit to the abandoned church camp across the lake. Our friend has made up a story that he tells around the campfire at night to the white-knuckled reaction of the kids. He has concocted a creep he calls “The Rambler” who roams the empty buildings. I feel like a kid myself when we ride the dune buggy around the lake at dusk, flashlight in hand, on a Rambler hunt.  My son, wide-eyed, says, “Um, Mom, maybe we should go now,” as we sneak through the abandoned rooms. I linger as if staying there can prolong summer.

At dinner we convene outside with plates of ribs, corn and muffins. The corn muffins are sweet and grainy and demand butter—and are even better with the cayenne and chive laced butter I’ve prepared for the corn. The kids eat standing at the edge of the table, antsy to finish their ribs and run off dirty-handed and barefoot and in all states of undress. Only two more days and they will have to go to bed at a decent hour and brush their hair and don backpacks. I tangle with them in the hammock and organize a water balloon toss which ends with most of the balloons being tossed at me, instead of to me. Removed from the day-to-day, I’m reminded how fun our kids actually are.

We parents eat slowly and acknowledge that another frog-catching, ice-cream eating, sand-filled summer is winding down. Two days from now we will bring up the campfire chairs, pull in the tube, and cover the boat. Yet another season of our lives will end. We toast under the warm looming darkness.