Slice of Life: Making Roll in Tennessee!

Today I join my fellow bloggers in "serving up a slice" 

to the Tuesday Slice of Life (SOL) community.
Thanks to Stacey, Tara, Betsy, Dana, Beth, Anna, Kathleen, and Deb

                    for hosting this meeting place each Tuesday and nurturing our writing lives.

Sometime around dusk, I hear the coyotes howling.  Sometime in the night, I hear the lonesome wail of a train.  And sometime around daybreak, I awake to a lone rooster greeting the day.  Time to rise and shine!  

Sarah, my great niece, pops in the door with the first egg of the day.  She's fairly dancing with excitement for our morning project.  But first we gather around her grandmother Nancy's table for a country breakfast - two farm fresh eggs served with homemade wheat bread toast and crabapple jelly.  

And then it's time to rock and roll because today is "roll-making" time.  Sarah is learning how to make chocolate roll, a pastry that family lore traces to my great-grandmother, Elizabeth Caroline Duff, Sarah's great-great-great grandmother.  My nephew, Shaun, has requested that I share the recipe and a hands-on lesson with Sarah while I'm visiting Tennessee.  

The biggest decision of the morning is whether to bake a cinnamon or chocolate roll.  No problem there, we'll just make both.  Each of us stirs up a batch of pie dough.  I model the process with the chocolate roll, and Sarah makes the cinnamon roll.  As she expertly rolls out the rectangular base for the pastry, I verify that she has the baking gene!  

As Sarah pulls her finished cinnamon roll out of the oven, I think of the angel cooks hovering in the kitchen, (Elizabeth Caroline, Ella, and Lillian),  giving their nods of approval.   I can almost hear the flutter of wings as they exit the room, knowing that another family branch will continue to sit down together to savor chocolate and cinnamon roll.