I remember the heavy air and the smell of gin
The kitchen on Queen Street was out of proportion, with a large linoleumed space that could hold a table for six but contained only an old refrigerator and a telephone jack. The stove, sink, cabinets and counter space were jammed into an adjacent galley. Everything we owned -- pots, pans, dishes, and silverware -- was a parental hand-me-down. In the mornings we would linger over percolated coffee diluted to a muddy brown with half and half, the perfect solution to a mild hangover. Some days I would come home for lunch to make BLTs on poppy seed buns, the bacon still hot from the pan, tomato juice and mayonnaise dripping down my fingers.
This was the place where we learned to cook, tried recipes from Gourmet Magazine and the Silver Palate Good Times Cookbook. In our year there, we made pizzas from scratch, cleaned and fried squid, and grilled chicken marinated with olive oil, lemon juice, and rosemary. Peter showed us how to make pesto and a cook at the Ironstone brought us a bushel of crawfish that we steamed in a cauldron of boiling water.
I have a file of recipes from that period, most of them copied by hand from D's mother's cookbooks, some of which I still make, like Lebanese Cucumber Soup, and Rice with Garlic and Walnuts. I even have the pizza recipes from Gourmet, which seemed so exotic at the time (Sun-Dried Tomato Pizza with Peppers, Onion, and Garlic Confit, Broccoli and Ricotta Pizza). Going through them reminds me that I never clip recipes anymore, just search around on the internet or Epicurious to see what looks good. Recipes on paper are another thing I miss from the pre-internet days, another reason to toss our modem out the window. I want a paper trail blotched with oil and tomato sauce. I want tangible memories. I want to have my mind and time returned to me (brief interruption while I look at Facebook: see what I mean?).
Still, the memories remain. When my family returned from vacation last Friday, there was a half batch of gazpacho, vinegary and bright, waiting for us, courtesy of our housesitter. Gazpacho was one of D’s favorite foods and I thought of that long-ago summer, which was also the first time M and I made the soup. The recipe called for peeled, deseeded tomatoes and we were mystified. How did one peel tomatoes? Like, with a vegetable peeler? Or by hand somehow? And, umm, the seeds? What was the problem with seeds? Finally, M called her mother. She gave us instructions: put a big pot of water on to boil, remove the tomato stems and cut Xs in the blossom ends before immersing them in the boiling water for under a minute. Then remove the tomatoes with a strainer and plunge them into an ice bath.The peels would slip off in our hands.
Gazpacho recipe, copied in the summer of
1988.
It worked. M and I pureed
the still-seedy tomatoes with bread crumbs,
garlic, vinegar, olive oil and tomato juice,
adding onion and cucumber at the end. The
soup chilled while we chopped the garnishes.
It was late July on the Eastern Shore. The
air was resistant, fluid, like water. Heat
flattened the landscape, made the houses
across the shimmering street one-dimensional.
While I poured the soup, M filled two cups
with ice and gin and topped them with tonic
and thin wedges of lime. We sat in the living
room with our drinks, the bowls of gazpacho
balanced on our laps. The soup was bracing,
the acidity of the tomato and vinegar
complemented by the bite of onion and
coolness of cucumber.
Sometimes all that remains
is sense memory -- the taste, the scent, the
aching loss, the joy of conquest -- or a
suspicion that something
else must have happened. So
maybe M and I went our for a walk that night
after the sun went down, barefoot on
sidewalks that radiated a memory of sun. Or
maybe we refilled our cups again and again
and cried about our crazy mothers, our absent
fathers. Or we danced to Prince or sung along
to Paradise
by the Dashboard
Light. D may have spent the
night, the two of us still and quiet on
checkerboard sheets, feeling the pull of
the window fan in my attic bedroom, while
downstairs M let the smoke from her
cigarette drift out of an open window.
That night is lost. But I remember the heavy
air and the smell of gin, our kitchen counter
splattered with tomato juice, the closeness
of friendship at a time when the world was
new.
Images:
Top: Me, a blurry goofball in the yard on
Queen Street.
Middle: The original gazpacho recipe.
Bottom: The checkerboard sheets, the
I
Love You This Much
statue, the orange crate. The
artfully-placed bottle of Corona.
Cinnamon savior
Pour sugar into a small bowl. Add cinnamon until you are satisfied with the mix. Will the sugar be light, café au lait? Or will you keep pouring in the cinnamon until the sugar seems like a sweet afterthought? Toast bread (Sprouted California Style), spread with butter. Sprinkle generously with cinnamon sugar. Cut each piece into diagonal quarters. Present to the boy.
Warm olive oil in a large pan over medium heat. Sauté onions, garlic, ginger and a seeded hot pepper (chopped, minced, whatever fits your mood) until the vegetables give in. Add cinnamon (use a light touch), ground coriander, maybe cumin. Toss in a small can of tomatoes with juice or, if the season is right, a couple of cups of peeled and seeded fresh tomatoes. Cook, crushing the tomatoes with the back of a wooden spoon until all that remains is their saucy memory. Add a cup and a half or so of cooked chickpeas to the sauce to warm. Sprinkle with chopped cilantro, an enthusiastic squeeze of lime juice. Serve with brown rice and cooling raita.
Think about cinnamon and its antiseptic properties. Use it during times of illness – the stomach bug, the flu that lingers in the lungs. Return to the day after your mother's surgery. You walked to her house to make cinnamon toast. She didn't own a toaster, so you used the oven rack, burned your fingers pulling the bread from the heat. Her days of fertility were over, so you soothed her with cinnamon. Remember the heavy feeling of your own body, the baby growing, hidden, suppressed.
Remind yourself that food is comfort, is nourishment. If you cook the right dish at the right moment, you could still save her. You could save yourself.
Back to the Round Robin prompts. Today's prompt was "Cinnamon."
Image from Chai Pilgrimage.
The bitter scent of coming winter
I remember preparing a meal for him in the decay of autumn, after the leaves had dropped from the trees and lay rotting in the gutter and the breeze was turning cold and harsh. I was just 21 years old and could focus on the kitchen, had the time to think about cooking, and it was all still new, too, love and cookery. There was a recipe in Gourmet for roasted fall vegetables. I skinned and hacked a heavy butternut squash, added knobby shallots, garlic, and chunks of red potato, then tossed the vegetables with olive oil and roasted them in the oven. Near the end of cooking, I added slivered sage leaves, the bitter scent of coming winter.
Sage takes well to butter and olive oil, get
crisp and intense, medicinal over gnocchi,
tucked among thick slices of potato. My
husband and I grow sage in our front yard.
The plant sits between the flat-leafed
parsley and the lemon verbena, its silver
green leaves upright, purple flowers still
drawing honeybees. I’ll have to trim it soon,
deadhead the flowers and clean off the spider
webs in preparation for the feasts and
sadness of fall.
Here is the original recipe, from
Epicurious. Add 2 tablespoons
slivered sage in the last ten minutes of
cooking to recreate my more winter-scented
dish.
Roasted
Autumn Vegetables
1 1/2 pounds small red potatoes
1 pound shallots (about 24), peeled and
trimmed
5 tablespoons olive oil
1 bay leaf
1/4 teaspoon dried thyme, crumbled
4 garlic cloves, crushed
2 pounds butternut squash, peeled and cut
into 3/4-inch pieces (about 4 cups)
fresh thyme sprigs for garnish, if desired
In a bowl, toss together the potatoes,
quartered, the shallots, 4 tablespoons of
the oil, the bay leaf, the
dried thyme, the garlic, and salt and pepper
to taste. Spread the vegetables in an oiled
large roasting pan and roast them in the
middle of a preheated 375°F. oven, shaking
the pan every 5 to 10 minutes, for 25
minutes. In a bowl toss the squash with the
remaining 1 tablespoon oil and salt and
pepper to taste and add it to the pan. Roast
the vegetables, shaking the pan occasionally,
for 10 to 20 minutes more, or until they are
tender. Discard the bay leaf and garnish the
vegetables with the thyme sprigs.
Gourmet
October 1990
Image: Attractive sage
bush, much nicer than ours, from
eHow.
The intersection of food, love, and memory
If it wasn't frozen,
processed, or heavily laced with sugar, my
grandmother didn't cook it. I have her old
recipe box, which includes many selections
from the "Kitchen of Duncan Hines," as well
as things like Pow-Wow Sandwiches, English
Liver Bake, and salad molds, recipes that are
products of the sixties and seventies. My
grandfather made the box, designed it to hang
between the refrigerator and the stove in the
kitchen at Hollywood Beach. We use it to hold
keys now. One of the first things I do when I
move to a new place is to hang it by the
front door, a reminder of a past so long gone
that it feels like fiction. I may look
through the recipes, but I never feel an urge
to actually make any of them.
When the corn
and tomatoes are at their peak, however, and
I steam a dozen ears to eat for dinner
alongside a salad of freshly-picked tomatoes,
I feel a tug on the line that connects me to
those long-ago meals. Corn on the cob with
butter sits at the intersection of food,
love, and memory for me. It has the power to
bring me back to a time before I was born, to
Hollywood Beach in the late fifties and early
sixties when my mother and aunt were still
children, before my grandfather was
injured in
an industrial fire. On late July and early
August evenings when my grandfather was
working late at the plant, Mom-mom could
be persuaded to abandon the freezer and
let the canned food gather dust in the
cupboard. She would prepare farmstand corn
and sliced tomatoes for dinner, maybe add
some sliced bread on the side. Perhaps she
was feeling as lazy as Ludlam's
dog, unwilling to turn on
the oven or chop loads of vegetables,
happy with simplicity.
It's the only meal she made that my mother
and I still talk about. When I was a kid, my
cousin and I were given weekend corn shucking
duty, sent outside with paper bags to do the
messy work of removing the husks and
cornsilk. We would sit on the white-washed
metal lawn chairs out front under a canopy of
maple leaves, kick our heels against the
grass. After passing the naked corn to my
aunt through the side door, we would wait for
the moment at the table when we could smear
the cooked kernels with squeezable Parkay. I
was fascinated by the prongs, shaped like
tiny ears of corn, that Mom-mom stuck into
either end of the cob, and studied them
between bites, felt the neat rows of
miniature kernels like braille against my
fingertips. We ate until we are too full for
anything else but a thin slice of tomato.
You probably have summer food memories of
your own, can bring back an evening lit by
fireflies, your lips stained purple by
blueberry cake. Your parents didn't care how
late you stayed up and you got to light a
sparkler even though the fourth of July had
been over for days. Or maybe you remember
your mother, already unsteady on her feet,
placing a platter of swaying Jello on the
picnic table. You swirled the first bite
against your gums, pushed it between your
teeth before swallowing and then refused to
eat any more. After dinner you and your
brother played tag in the dark while the
grown-ups drank bourbon on ice and talked in
voices too low for you to understand. When
you slipped in a pile of dog shit, they
laughed until you started to cry.
Image: Recipe from my
grandmother's collection.
Diversionary tactics
Don't be disturbed by the
photograph. It is only a diversion. In fact,
I actually posted it a couple of weeks ago
and then removed the post. I had nothing to
say and the photograph wasn't adding to the
conversation. Today it appears as filler, a
little piece of San Francisco scenery. Or
maybe it works as metaphor, too, though as a
metaphor for what you'll have to be the
judge.
Last night I was walking home from my food
writing class, feeling energized and full of
something (beans? ideas? hope for the
future?) when I realized that I have a
commitment problem. I've been circling
working life for almost five years now,
keeping decisions on hold, tossing words into
the air. I fumbled into my first career,
became a librarian almost by default, then
stumbled when making what felt like a
deliberate move into the world of cooking.
And I've been floating with the current ever
since.
I have to commit or I'll keep on writing 450
- 800 word posts here forever and ever. It's
not a bad gig, though the pay is lousy. I
love interacting with my blogging friends.
But I need something more substantial. A
career.
Do you know what I mean?
For your trouble, your time, maybe as a
reward for leaving a comment, here's a
recipe. Consider it another diversionary
tactic or maybe just some picnic food for
your next visit to Fort
Funston, the hang gliding
mecca.
Herbed
feta and tapenade sandwiches
Briny tapenade and thyme-spiked feta punch up
the flavor of this Mediterranean sandwich. A
couple of simple tricks -- adding a
sprinkling of herbs and olive oil to a
supermarket cheese, roughly chopping a
handful of olives with a touch of garlic –
give it an effortless homemade touch. Bring
extra bread along to sop up red pepper juices
and the occasional escapee feta tidbit.
Makes 2 sandwiches
1/2 cup kalamata olives, pitted and roughly
chopped
1 small clove garlic, minced
2 tablespoons mayonnaise
1/2 cup feta cheese, crumbled
1 tablespoon fresh thyme leaves, minced (can
substitute 1 teaspoon dried)
1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil
pinch freshly ground black pepper
4 slices country bread
1 small cucumber, peeled and thickly sliced
1 large red pepper, roasted, seeded, and
quartered
Stir together kalamata olives, garlic, and
mayonnaise in a small bowl. Lightly toss
feta, thyme, olive oil, and black pepper in
another small bowl. Slather each slice of
bread with a generous amount of tapenade and
layer the feta, cucumber, and red pepper on
two of the slices. Top each sandwich with the
remaining bread, slice in half, and serve.
Image: Hang
gliders at Fort Funston, Memorial Day 2009.
Photo by "Mr. Trinkle."
Beware of Estonians bearing basil *recipe not included*
Peter was only after the blender.
I
was working in the college bookstore, propped
up on a stool behind the register, when he
came in to buy something small, a pack of
gum, a used book, a cassette tape, I don’t
remember. As I passed his change over the
counter, brushed my fingertips across this
stranger's calloused palm, Peter said “I know
you from the newspaper. You told it like it
was.”
A month earlier I was one of five or six
people chosen to answer a question for
The
Elm: what did we think about
the proposed student fee increase? Below my
photograph was the statement “I know nothing
about it. I have no opinion.” Ignorance and
flat honesty prevailed. It was my statement,
my stand on nothing in particular that got me
the boy.
Or maybe it really was
the blender.
After asking my name and relationship status,
Peter went straight to appliance ownership:
if I had the blender, he had the basil. He
knew where to score pine nuts and a fine
wedge of pecorino romano. Peter wanted to
come back to my place, make a little pesto.
The blender sat on the
stained linoleum kitchen counter in the small
college apartment I shared with my roommate
Martha, right beside the coffee percolator
that she filled with Folgers each morning.
Martha bought it with plans for soup-making,
warm vichyssoise in winter, refreshing
gazpacho during the humid summer months, but
in reality we used it make frozen drinks.
After the Piña Colada incident the appliance
went fallow, gathered cooking grease and
flour dust.
Peter's basil source was a
garden across the Chester River, a plot of
rich soil courtesy of his employer, Anthony's
Landscaping. We rode there one sticky June
night, pedaled his tandem through a landscape
defined by moonlight and shadow, moved our
legs in time to the percussion of crickets.
The basil had formed a moat around a pair of
tumbledown beefsteak tomatoes. Rabbits and
groundhogs had ravished the rest. As I
smoothed my fingers over the soft leaves,
pale in the semidarkness, the basil sighed,
let out a breath of spice and earth and warm
sun, a promise of pasta sauce and
anise-tinged kisses.
When you are 18, most of
the world is still a mystery, or it should
be. I already had a boyfriend, and Peter knew
it, but something about his earnestness – his
habit of tossing rocks at my window for
midnight bike rides, the fact that he was as
aimless at 24 as I felt at 18 – made him
irresistible. He was an English major whose
literary mind had been muddled by
deconstructionism, an Estonian-American who
later taught me the best places to go in
Washington, DC for Ethiopian food and the
blues. Peter liked to pass things on. It was
insider information: the slightly off-kilter
notes of Thelonius Monk; the tuneless
pounding and punk bands of d.c. space; the
Biograph movie theater; linguini with pesto
sauce.
His pesto obsession was endearing. And
it was
an obsession.
In circa 1988 Chestertown, Maryland, pine
nuts were an exotic foodstuff. Without a car,
Peter had to finagle his way 75 miles and
back to DC to procure one expensive cupful.
He arrived at our place on the appointed
night, clutching two bouquets of basil, a
greasy paper bag half-filled with pine nuts,
and a crumbling hunk of cheese. Martha and I
had already peeled the garlic, purchased a
good-enough olive oil. We had wiped down the
blender. In the kitchen, I started grating
cheese while Martha opened beers. Peter began
tossing pine nuts and knobs of garlic into
the machine.
The blender turned out to be an inferior
pesto-making tool, or perhaps it was all in
the technique. Crammed in the bottom, the
garlic and pine nuts slowly turned to paste,
while the basil calmly refused to be pulled
into the fray. Peter finally grabbed a wooden
spoon. The high-pitched whine of the blender
was interrupted by a thunk as the bottom of
the spoon splintered against metal blades.
Too late to go back now. He picked out the
shards.
Twenty minutes later, Peter
offered a fingerful of the final product.
Eyebrows raised in anticipation, I kept a
cheerful expression, gazed past the green
film coating his glasses to look directly
into his eyes. The pesto tasted of garlic and
more garlic interrupted by a heady nip of
basil and the punch of sharp cheese. Raw pine
nuts, resinous and rich, just barely kept the
other ingredients in tune. As olive oil ran
down my chin, I carefully deflected a
splinter with my tongue, a little kick from
Peter's secret ingredient.
(First image: Me, Chestertown,
MD, Summer 1988, taken by "Martha." Companion
picture of Martha not included. Second image:
Basil plants, from Vultus Christi.)
Jailbreak
It was the end of an incredible, challenging half-year. I’d spent June through October in New York, studying culinary arts at the Natural Gourmet Institute, living in a studio sublet in Chelsea. By day I’d take notes on “health supportive” food and create vegetarian gourmet fare with my fellow classmates. Evenings were for wandering Manhattan. The Hudson River was a few blocks away from my apartment, and the West Village was an easy, entertaining stroll. Sometimes I’d go the distance to Midtown where the streets were hopping with humanity and the buildings were a mix of architecture spanning three centuries, old brick storefronts intermingling with structures of concrete and glass.
The streets of Manhattan were overwhelming to me: too much stimulation, every block packed with shops and restaurants, with signs and graffiti (“Mama Loves Neckface”?), every address crying out for attention. Night subdued the signs, softened the calls. So I walked and watched, sometimes talked on the phone with my husband, who was back in DC. We’d go over the days humiliations and occasional triumphs. A few late nights in Brooklyn with my friend Jules – drinking, talking, attempting karaoke (never, never again) -- sealed the New York experience.
I went back to DC for six weeks before my internship at Greens Restaurant and spent the time preparing to start a personal chef business. During this break I appeared on a local television news program cooking contest, which led to a later on-air meeting with Anthony Bourdain. My world was opening up into something completely new. It was shiny and scary, anxiety-producing and freeing, a chance to create a business and change my life.
So. November 29, 2004. I was in my favorite city, San Francisco, about to work at Greens, my favorite restaurant. But something was distracting me from restaurant job panic. The day I started my internship, I also had to track down a drugstore. No matter how many tests I tried, the results were always the same. I was pregnant.
One new world slipped away as another one appeared. This was an alien planet created with an equal mix of worry, sacrifice and love. What would it be like to have a little creature totally dependent upon me? Was I up for the task? Was the pain I carried around hereditary, something involuntarily slipped in through the genes, a burden to be shared? I was terrified.
The 80-hour internship went by in a blur. I was a solitary, preoccupied figure, standing in place at the salad and dessert station as other employees, efficient in their clogs and hats, sharpened knives prepared for work, zipped around me. I would look at my slow, inexperienced hands as they grasped the serving spoon and tipped that night’s curry onto a plate. I methodically patted out tart dough as dinners were plated around me, carefully removed the skin and pith from scores of oranges in a haze of prep staff conversation, inexpertly mixed the ingredients for the filo pastry of the day in the cold of the isolated back kitchen.
It wasn’t enough time to even get my feet wet. My inexperience would never get the opportunity to disappear. I was going to be permanently interrupted.
But was I?
Since my son was born, I’ve been living as though all that was ever going to happen to me already had. I’ve let the experience of being a mother stop me from participating in the larger world. The stories I write here are about the past, about the life I had when I had a life outside of my house.
On the other hand, by writing these stories I am reentering the world, slowly emerging from my own head. And I find that my dreams have changed. That shiny new world of four years ago is no longer relevant.
I can’t wait to find out what happens next.
The first time
It's the first time I've been paid to write something that has been published. And it's totally different from what I do here.
Yay!
Don't worry. I'll be back to my regularly scheduled angst soon. Perhaps as early as tomorrow.
Flim flan
This weekend's project: a low-calorie flan. It's the most difficult. I've been playing with different combinations of ingredients, trying to keep things simple and natural. Flan is not normally on my list of desserts. And now I am tired of it.
The good news is that I think I've created a very tasty, relatively good for you flan. The bad news is that I haven't been able to write Part II of "All that jazz."
Until tomorrow ...
Taking what they're giving
'cos I occasionally work for a living (me,
that is, not C, who is pictured above).
My time has been consumed by a small
freelance writing job I picked up last week,
coming up with some popsicle recipes
accompanied by a short article for
Vegetarian
Times. It's been kind of fun
using my brain in a different way, though
it usually prefers a more leaden diet of
hairshirt nostalgia. Healthy orange
creamsicles or triple berry popsicles
lighten the mood a little too much.
But I'll take what I can get and I'm grateful
for the work.