YOU KNOW YOU’RE a sister when your friendship can survive one of you writing, publicly, about the other. Or can it? It all started innocently enough. I sat down for a coffee with the editor of a regional magazine based here in the hinterlands, talking about what I might write for him, what I was writing for other folks, and inevitably, the conversation turned to The Sister Project, and our amazing oldest sister, lovely Margaret. I should have known what was coming. The editor, like everyone else I meet, wanted to know all about her, her garden, her projects. Now there was a subject! Could I finagle a profile of my friend (and regional celebrity) Margaret? Yikes.

Margaret, for someone who lives a pretty open online life, is also a private person. More important, she’s my friend. I tried to explain. “I work with her, you know.” “Are you her employee?” he probed. “Well, no…”

“Then I don’t see any conflict. See if she’ll do it. We will run it this summer–perfect for a garden story.”

I called when I got home.

“Err…How would you feel about being profiled?”

“Mmmm…#$%@%. Can’t get this post to upload properly…” Margaret was distracted. “Sure, sure, whatever you want. Tell me what I need to do.”

And so it began. I interviewed Margaret, and was thrilled when she gave me some tidbits about her rural odyssey I hadn’t read anywhere else. Maybe, just maybe, this would all be ok. I interviewed four other sources, friends and plantsmen all, who were transparent in their love for Margaret, their amusement at her quirks, their deep admiration for her knowledge and creativity in the garden and beyond. They confirmed her stories, adding color and detail; one of them gave me a slightly snarky but funny and accurate quote that I thought twice about using before deciding that my article had to be written by a writer first, a friend second. In truth, everything was going so, so well.

And then. Photography. Margaret had images of the garden she’d shot herself that could be used by the magazine, saving them money and allowing them to show off the garden in its best light, through all seasons. It would be a lot of work for her to select and format them, but she was willing. Great! But there remained one sticky issue.

Here’s something you may not know about Margaret, though if you were a close reader of Martha Stewart Living when she was editing there, you might have suspected it. She really, really doesn’t like to be photographed. Not in the way I don’t like to be photographed, where I’m all, “Oh, crap, I’m so fat, let me contort my body to try to find some angle where I don’t look like the Michelin man, and meanwhile I’ll hope the light is catching my cheekbones nicely so everyone will look at them instead of my saggy everything else.” Nope. Imagine how the last Dodo bird might have reacted if confronted by James Audubon: running like hell, convinced that to surrender to the portraitist may well mean the end of the entire freaking species.

My editor, a nice enough guy, wanted his photographer to shoot Margaret. None of the portraits she already had (taken, beautifully, by her friend, Erica Berger, who knows exactly how to manage Margaret in a photo shoot, and no, there are no pharmaceuticals involved, although, note to self, maybe not a bad idea for next time) would suffice. He wanted his own. Oh, [expletive deleted].

I tried gently to suggest that he try, hard, not to set himself and Margaret up for the pain of a shoot. Not only was there the issue of Margaret’s aversion to the lens, she was also, rightly, concerned that a portrait shot in the garden in (very) early spring might look out of place in a story running in July. And, there was her schedule to contend with. Always busy, she was now immersed not only in her two websites, but also in writing the first draft of her book. She really didn’t have a lot of time to give away. As the tug-of-war over images continued, I grew more and more worried.

Selfishly, I had thought this profile would be good for my portfolio, good for developing a relationship with a new (to me) magazine and editor, good press for Margaret and the websites. More, as I finished the piece, I liked what I’d written and thought it presented an accurate and compelling picture of my friend.

But as the tension mounted, I put the article out as a sacrificial lamb to Margaret. If the photo shoot was going to be too much trouble, she could walk. I would understand. The editor might never forgive me, but I was crystal clear on this point: My relationship with Margaret, the one I feared I’d jeopardized by trying to write honestly and with some humor about her, quirks and all, was not available for the chopping block.

And so, as she does in most things, Margaret prevailed. I still don’t know (and don’t want to) what magic she worked on my editor to get him to use an existing portrait;  until the magazine arrived in my mailbox yesterday, I had no idea (I’d been afraid to ask) how this issue had played itself out. Apparently I, too, have something in common with a giant flightless bird, because I’d stuck my head into the sand, not even discussing the article with Margaret again until just the other day. After reading the online version, I sent off a tentative email. I needed to know she didn’t hate it, or me.

“I hope you’re ok with it. I know it wasn’t the highlight of your year,” I stumbled.

She came through, like a sister. In part, her response read, “I love you and love your writing.” Right back at you, sissie. Now, when can I take your picture for my photo album?

From 'The Betty Betz Teenage Cookbook', 1953

WE HAD OUR first picnic of the summer last weekend, my family and I, thanks to an impromptu visit from a dear sister-friend. Given plenty of advance notice, I had choices to make, cookbooks to consult, menus to plan. My sister-friend Chris (she of the long-distance cooking) would be on the east coast with her family for one day, and so we planned to drive down to New York City to meet up. My mother, when she learned of our picnic plan, had said “Oh, how fun! You should make a real picnic lunch, with chicken and salad.” My response was less than enthusiastic. “I could. Or I could pack some sandwiches and chips and be done with it.”

We scowled at each other, as only a grown mother and daughter can do. I could have made fried chicken, true, but as you may know about me, I have fear of frying, and besides, we were going to be leaving early in the morning. I wasn’t going to fry chicken, dress children and muck stalls all before 9 a.m. No way, no how.

Instead,  I bought a baguette and some smoked turkey, and made some sandwiches (delicious with good mustard, olive oil, and thin slices of tomato and avocado). I did want something homemade, though. But what?

Had I consulted my sisterhood of ladies’ auxiliary cookbooks, I might have found all manner of suggestions, both practical and practically off-putting. How about some ham slaw? Or peanut butter and bacon sandwiches? (Ok, that actually does sound good, in a disgusting kind of way.) Maybe an egg salad pie?

Maybe not.But to be fair to my precious stash of sisterly recipe books, there are treasures in there, too, like Mattie G.’s handwritten recipe for “coca nut” (sic) pie tucked into Sister’s Kitchen Secrets (compiled by the Sandersville, Georgia ‘Sister’s Home Demonstration Club’, circa 1960) or from my adored Betty Betz Teenage Cookbook, a perfectly delicious-sounding picnic chocolate cake.

But I wanted to strike out on my own. I opted for my favorite chocolate cookies, adapted from someone I wish was my sister, my personal queen of chocolat-ology, chocolatier and cookbook author Alice Medrich. With a light texture and rich flavor reminiscent of a great brownie, these are not too sweet, and have just enough flakey sea salt to make them really addictive. They are also easy and fast to make. If you don’t eat gluten, substitute your favorite gluten-free baking mix for the flour. (I use Pamela’s with great results.)

Bittersweet Decadence Cookies (adapted from Alice Medrich’s Bittersweet, Artisan, 2003)

5-1/2 oz 72% bittersweet chocolate, chopped into chunks (I use the “Pound Plus” Belgian chocolate bars from Trader Joe’s)
3 tablespoons unsalted butter
3/4 cup sugar
1/4 cup all purpose flour
1/4 teaspoon Maldon sea salt
1/4 teaspoon baking powder
2 large eggs
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
2 cups walnuts, chopped coarsely
6 ounces bittersweet or semisweet chocolate, chopped into small chunks (or store-bought chocolate chips)

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees, and line two cookie sheets with parchment paper.

Stir together the flour, salt and baking powder and set aside.

In a double boiler, melt the 72% chocolate and the butter together. Stir until just blended and remove from the heat. Leave the heat on under the boiling water. In a large, heatproof bowl, whisk together the eggs, sugar and vanilla. Set the bowl over the boiling water in the double boiler and continue whisking until the mixture is warm but not hot to the touch. Stir the eggs into the warm (not hot) chocolate mixture, and then stir in the flour mixture. Finally, fold in the nuts and the chocolate chunks.

Drop by generous tablespoon-fulls onto the cookie sheets, about 2-3 inches apart in every direction. Bake until the tops of the cookies are dry, cracked and shiny, but the insides are still tender and gooey–about 14 minutes. Let the cookies cool slightly on the sheets before removing to a rack to cool completely. It helps to twist the cookies slightly as you pull them off the paper, so they don’t leave their soft bottoms stuck behind. This recipe makes 18-24 cookies depending upon size (I make mine pretty big–about 3-4 inches in diameter) and doubles well.

What will you be bringing on your summer picnics? Do you have recipes handed down from sisters in previous generations? Or, like me, are you hoping to start your own traditions? And the biggest question of all: do you, or do you not, fry?

The Sister Project is starting to write down its rules for sisterhood. Mine follow; Marion and Anastasia have some, too. We hope you’ll add to the list.

LET’S FACE IT–cooking is more fun when it’s done with a partner. I don’t mean a husband or a boyfriend, I mean a sister, one who likes the same flavors you do, is happy to skate back and forth between top chef and sous chef, one who will chop onions for you or remember to take out the roast while you run off for a bath or a quick battle with a family member.

These days, I don’t get to cook in tandem like this very often. When I first moved to Los Angeles, my then-roommates and I cooked together–a lot. Driven by grad-student poverty and a shared love of entertaining, with different specialties and wildly different heritages represented, we were able to feed everything from vegetarian chili to sweet potato pie to Japanese curry to crowds of friends.

After our happy household broke up, my cooking life dwindled, and certainly my ability to cook alongside a sister-friend disappeared, at least for a time. Then, without really thinking about it, my friend Chris and I began to cook together. I’m not even sure how our culinary partnership started (though I suspect it began in earnest when she moved into The New House With the Beautiful, Big Kitchen.) This was after marriage, and at the beginning of motherhood, and cooking together brought yet another dimension to an already-deep friendship.

Chris is the one who taught me about brisket, who endured my experiments in Passover baking, who would always tell me the truth about flavorless stock or gummy risotto. But mostly, we kept ourselves comforted and sane while we nursed babies, weathered professional tsunamis, rolled our eyes at spousal insensitivity and, whenever we could, laughed at everything, funny, or not.

And so, for Chris’s birthday, I decided a few years ago to put together a cooking class with a few of her dearest nearly-sisters. Four of us gathered at the home of adorable wunder-chef Tim, and under his tutelage we made divine cocktail-party food and drank champagne. One of the guests, Stacey, had been fighting breast cancer for almost six years. She wasn’t feeling great, but she managed to rally for her sister-friend, and she chortled and bitched and reveled with the rest of us.

As it turned out, that night was one of the last times Chris and Stacey really went out, one of the last times she was feeling well enough to just enjoy herself, before enduring months of a bitter, painful end. Chris was with her every single step of the way through her disease, and I like to think that the memory of that evening, spent stuffing endive leaves and drinking champagne, laughing together, stirring and sautéing in a sweet stranger’s apartment kitchen in L.A., is one of the good ones from that dark time.

For me, the memory of that evening, and all the other uncountable evenings Chris and I spent in her kitchen or mine, make clear the first rule of the Cooking Sisterhood: Laughter is not optional when cooking with your sister. You can cry while you’re laughing-that’s OK–but when you’re chopping, peeling, or beating, nothing is so sacred that it cannot be mined for humor, no matter how perverse, bleak or even tearful the laughs might be.

What are your rules for cooking with your sisters? Must there be wine, but no whine? Does anyone get to lick the bowl? Are there any recipe secrets between sisters? Chime in.