The essay explores the connection between a family's history and a traditional holiday recipe. Kieflies, or kifli, are Hungarian walnut crescents baked by the author's family at Christmas. The tradition of baking kiflis, like the family itself, has no clear, authentic origin myth; rather, the passage of the ritual from one generation to the next is marked by distortion and reinvention: the mystery of the family's Hungarian Jewish origins; the development of a non-consanguineous lineage, from Irish daughters-in-law to Korean adoptees; and the strategies of evasion, survival, storytelling, adaption, and imagination that both obscure and enrich the ritual. The author has assumed the role of kieflie -baker to her adoptive family, applying her own innovations and interpretations to the tradition, as her mother, aunt, grandmother, and great-aunts did before her.

Wheat is a crop that has been put into its place. That place is the Wheat Belt, the center of the country. It can grow where most crops don't do well and where there is no economic incentive to grow anything else. At one time, wheat was grown as part of a diverse cropping system in virtually every region of the country. Today, wheat is returning to places such as the hills of North Carolina, Vermont, Maine, Northern California, southwestern Oregon, the Skagit Valley, and San Juan Islands of Washington. These areas are “out of place,” and there is value to wheat grown out of place. That value can be indirect—for example, when used as a rotational crop that reduces diseases and other pests. Its value can also come more directly in unexpected forms, such as flavor and unique functional properties. The new focus on wheat production is helping farmers produce value where before they were bit players in a brutal commodity market geared only toward larger producers.