CREATE and Bake it: Scones

"When life gives you mashed potatoes, make tatty scones. " Potatoes have an emotional connection in Celtic culture. Some say during the famine is when it started. As a Long Islander for my development and launching years, Tatty Scones in stacks were prepared using Long Island potatoes, by my Scottish grandmother, Nellie Beattie who we called Nanny.

Potatoes were a major crop for the Long Island farmers, out near Mattituck. Now it is Long Island Wine Country. 🍷 Farming and raising ducks on the east end on my fish shaped island on the north shore to Orient Point and the South Shore to Montauk, where fishermen woke up oily and stopped to tell tales at the Diners, where Long Island hash browns were served instead of Nanny scones.

Between our family of six the traditional gathering at birthdays was to go to Charlie Pop and Nannie's to share stacks of Tatty Scones. Pop was a superintendent of the apartment building that they lived in, on Caton Avenue in Brooklyn. There was a wee bit of home in the kitchen, where Nannie baked on a gas stove and oven. After Pop died in 1969, Nannie stayed with us, and then got an apartment on Dale Avenue on the east end of Oakdale.

After school, when I was in Junior High, on Friday, I'd take the school bus to Nannie's, where she would cook fish and chips, wrapping the fish in newspaper. The birthday tradition in February, May, July, August, and November, continued on through 1978. And when I came home from Colorado, it was a special treat to learn with Nannie, my siblings and our spouses, the art of making Tatty Scones.

Music, singing and playing guitar, baking and cooking with Nannie, going for walks along the Connetquot River and Great South Bay, and Nannie's way of knitting blankets for all our kids, and just sitting listening, talking, to the smells and tastes of Home are so much a part of who I am.

I know my experiences are unique to me. And if you ask the surviving members of the Beattie's, our children, and grandchildren, they all would have different memories. Yet, in our minds and senses, we all experience the pictures, the sounds, the smells, tastes and textures of our upbringing.

This is the essence of the Folk Process, the creative process and quintessential experience. To bring these experiences and share them, is what I found as an author, a singer-songwriter, an emcee, a photographer, an amateur cook and a teacher or mentor. Most of all it is communications. Join us email richardbeattie809@gmail.com