Family table
If you want to get decadent, peel four cloves of garlic. Take the bread – Acme sourdough works well, and it doesn’t have to be stale – and slice it thickly into four to six pieces. You can cube it or you can keep the slices. It depends on your willpower, what you are going for. Heat four tablespoons of olive oil in a large sauté pan (low to medium heat), toss in the garlic cloves, and cook, stirring occasionally until they are golden brown on all sides. Remove the golden cloves. Cool them. Eat them. Puree them. Smash them with a knife and breath in the scent of tamed garlic.
Turn up the heat – not too much – and toss the bread cubes/slices into the hot oil. They will sizzle. They will drink in the garlic-scented oil and turn crisp with joy at what they are about to become. Stir them occasionally, until they are mostly brown, and then remove them from the pan.
Try your best to let them cool. Try your best not to eat them all before the family comes into the kitchen and claims theirs. Wait for the salad, for the romaine and the chickpeas and the feta, for the red onion and cherry tomatoes and kalamatas, for the red bell pepper and vinaigrette. Wait! Wait I tell you!
If food was purely love and not also fuel, then this is what I might make every night. Croutons. Real macaroni and cheese, bubbling and unctuous. The things that we used to call things (corn tortillas, faux sausage patties, salsa, green onions, tomatoes, jalapenos, cheddar cheese, avocado and sour cream cooked on a griddle until the tortilla was crisp and the cheese was melty, a combination of spicy, crunchy, and smooth). Pumpkin waffles, despite the dog’s fear of the iron’s dangerous beep.
Every Saturday morning I used to make pancakes, always the same, oatmeal batter with blueberries, and then I just stopped. Maybe this was the end, the line in the sand, the snap of the rope. I took one step back, and then another, watched them as they sat with their cereal, as they got smaller and smaller. I accepted that some children might like prepared rice and beans better than my own. I had ideas about the dinner table and family, ideas from an early life of meals where I was excluded or ridiculed. I swore this would never happen in my own family and so I made it easy, with as little conflict as possible.
If food was purely a combination of love and fuel and not also a tug on the heart, if childhood meals and tables weren't forever linked in my mind with my worth, with myself, the separation would not feel necessary. While they talk, I let my mind wander. I think about the dishes waiting to be cleaned, the lunches I have to make, the next task, because the moment is so hard to be in, with its associations, its sad recipes and I wonder if they notice me as I float above the room.
From the prompt "The wall."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. I tightened this one up a bit. And please remember that these prompts are just little snapshots of writing, that they don't necessarily represent my continual internal state. In other words, it's not always that bad.
Image by kevindooley.
Toasted and burned
I am an outlier.
We had a fire in the downstairs fireplace on Sunday night, a special treat while the husband was out of town, and in preparation I bought some marshmallows and prepared the boy for the process. The firewood we used was old and eager to disintegrate in the heat. I’m nervous around fires with small children. My grandfather was burned in an industrial fire, 80% of his body covered in 3rd degree burns, a foot later amputated, hearing gone. A drooping sleeve can catch flame, a little boy's hands can get too close when putting a stick into the stack of flaming wood. Still, the boy got to contribute, collected sticks and sometimes put them in, rolled up the newspaper fire starter.
I toasted the first marshmallow and passed it to him: instant hatred and tears, at the texture, the goo in his mouth and on his finger. He doesn’t like marshmallows much anyway and a toasted one is marshmallow intensified, the flavor, the mouth feel. I ate that one, and the next and gave up on the project.
We stared at the flames. I added more wood. The room was warm. We let the fire soothe us with its smoky breath of autumn, its winter memories, and I wondered how I had ended up in a place where summer mornings are colder than November nights, where the fog obscures the sun in fits of anguish and shorts in August are ill-advised, a decision to shiver all day, the place where a fire in May makes sense.
But it’s beautiful here, once you get past the long asphalt stretches with their crummy shops and the avenues concreted up against anything green. The hills are lovely, the sky an amazing thing when it’s almost clear and the clouds puff and stretch against the blue. You can visit summer in the summer, go to the heat past the hills, and bask and swim and then, tired of sweat and brightness, return to Berkeley where you sleep under layers of blankets, waiting for the distant fog horn to wake you up. Downstairs the fireplace awaits, the tinder is dry and yields easily to the match. While the boy is content with dry cereal, you can toast marshmallows for your breakfast, let the caramelized skin give way to soft sweetness, close your eyes as the sugar dances through your body.
From the prompt "Pillow talk." Marshmallows are like little pillows, aren't they?
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. I spend about 20 minutes making this one flow better. Seems I'm doing that more lately, but I think my prompts just aren't as clearly written lately. Feeling much better than yesterday, however.
Image: Sunday's fire.
Comfort me
Instead, I live off of chocolate and alcohol, though I prefer my empty calories in liquid form. I don’t want the mind-dulling effects of carbs and butter. I want the emotion-tugging action of booze, the nightly IPA chased with red wine. And it has to be the good stuff. No cheap alcohol for me. I won’t drink it, will miss the sloshing effects, will go to bed clean and sober and bored as shit, that and worried, worried about what is next, worried about where I am, where I am going.
So I stock up. Soon I’ll be visiting different liquor stores on my way home from various appointments, cruising their wine selection, anticipating the velvety texture of red on my tongue. Because something is wrong. Something is dreadfully wrong and I’m not sure what it is and I’m not sure what to do about it.
But, oh, am I thin, thin as a reed quaking in the wind, thin as a sheet of paper being carried away by a wind gust. My problems are written somewhere, on my mind, hidden on my body, locked in the physicality of thin, of table manners, of the constant harangue of my mind, of them, of abandonment. I want to seduce abandonment, want to make him my lover, show him a thing or two before I abandon him myself.
I’ll leave him alone at the bar nursing his drink. There will be no announcement. I’ll excuse myself to go to the ladies’ room and won’t come back and I’ll never call. I will stop chasing beer with the wine. All my drinking will be social. After I abandon abandonment, I will eat the occasional square of chocolate. Otherwise, my diet will be balanced, a mix of green and beige and red and orange, the crispy nestled next to gooey, tart intermingling with sweet, placating comfort bustling with health.
Until then: Proost!
From today's prompt: Comfort food.
Image: Sticky bun with wine. OK, add sticky buns to the short list.
And please don't take me too seriously.
The real thing
My grandmother kept a bowl of plastic fruit in the center of her dining room table. Heavy grapes the color of lime sherbet clustered next to just-so pears and hard-as-Tupperware bananas, bright and artfully speckled. The bowl rested on top of a frilly doily, next to the lazy susan that held salt, pepper and condiments. We removed the fruit when we actually wanted to eat, put it aside during big family meals when my aunt and mother put the table leaf in and camouflaged the maple top with a pad and a heavy vinyl cloth, its plastic disguise.
Fake fruit was an adult conceit that fascinated me, the effort involved to make something look real, down to a sprinkling of brown on a banana or a jaunty fabric leaf still attached to an apple stem. It was a testament to the illusory power of plastic. As a grownup, I wonder what sort of thinking (if any) is behind fruit as decoration versus fruit as actual food. Why not mix the two and put out stuff you can eat? I don’t remember biting into many fresh grapes or bananas or pears at my grandmother's house. Instead there were syrupy fruit cups, ice cream Dixie cups with wooden paddles for spoons, greasy Cheez-Its straight from the box. Lunches materialized out of powder, water, and starch. Dinner fell from a box or the freezer or was handed to us via the drive-thru window at Big Elk Mall McDonald's. My order never wavered: hamburger, French fries, Coca Cola.
Two years after my grandmother's death, there were still TV dinners in the old utility room freezer. When I missed her I craved salisbury steak in a thick mushroom gravy or fried chicken with crisp battered skin, wrinkled peas, potatoes whipped into paste and crumbly apple cobbler for desert. In her life, we celebrated modern technology, the power of the deep freeze, the effects of dehydration on vegetables. After her death, I was subjected more often to my mother's diet regime, which was all about freshness and sauteing in olive oil or real butter, about the taste of a peach.
Over time, I moved closer to my mother's approach to food. In 1995, I gave up most meat (though I still eat fish). Almost ten years later, I attended a cooking school where we cooked with whole grains and natural sweetners. Though my son does occasionally eat macaroni and cheese from a box, he has never tasted McDonald's french fries. I make almost everything from scratch. The freezer in our house contains blueberries, veggie sausages, loaves of bread, and ice cube trays. We have two bowls of real, edible fruit within easy kid reach. Apples, pomegranates, and persimmons intermingle with cooking ingredients, onions, shallots, garlic, with the odd squash or two. The kid may only eat pasta with butter and cheese for dinner, but he also loves fruit, thank goodness.
My grandmother died of a heart attack when I was nine, probably in part because of her chemical, salt and fat consumption, though the smoking didn't help. I wonder how she would interpret my adult self, my diet, my liberal ways. We were so close (I lived with her on an off until her death and she took care of me during school and summer vacations) – would my rebellious teenage years and outsider adulthood have turned her away? If she lived would I never have gone pescetarian? Would I still be ordering hamburgers and French fries crisp with fat?
And if not, would she have loved me anyway?
From a photo prompt.
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 from my job at the college bookstore 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. A boyfriend 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 my boyfriend 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 Martha 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, Martha 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. Martha 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, Martha 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. Maybe Martha 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.
What actually happened 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.