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.