Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant (16 page)

Sometimes I have the whole house to myself. When he is not looking, when he is not awake or is off playing chess and cannot laugh at me, it is plainest of all: white on white and nearly dry, without a trace of spice. He cannot laugh when I toss noodles with cottage cheese. My mother lives five hundred miles away and cannot watch me eat. When we see each other, she praises me for staying almost the same weight as when I was in high school. I think she might even take credit for that. She has watched me polish off a pot of white rice and sat squinting, as you might at a magic trick. Tossing together pale ingredients now in the empty house—the radiant yield of wheatfield and cornfield and rice paddy and potato patch—I mutter:
I’m making up for lost time
! If I do it fast enough, the copper-haired guy who dreams of vindaloo and chipotle and kimchee will not see. He cannot laugh as he likes to do, pitying my food for being plain. He cannot say it is a kind of crime: a waste, chicanery, as some say about those white-on-white paintings by Mark Rothko.

White-on-White Lunch for When No One Is Looking

1 12-ounce package egg noodles

2 cups cottage cheese

Salt and/or pepper, to taste (optional)

Cook noodles in boiling water as directed on package. Drain in colander. When dry, toss with cottage cheese. Add seasonings if you like, though I never do. It is possible to dress this lunch up by adding canned spinach and garlic, chopped fine. But that would distract from the noodles.

E
ating alone? Ah, that would be luxury.

Cooking alone? That’s an entirely different thing—that I do every night.

Or to be more precise, every night I am the only person in my kitchen whose activities are directed toward producing a meal for group consumption. There are other people in the kitchen, all right, but they are busy doing homework, or playing with the cat, or watching
Jeopardy,
or sneaking snacks to spoil their appetites, or arguing with the cook (me). They never offer to help with the cooking. No, they are simply hanging around, bored, at loose ends, just waiting to be fed.

“What are you going to put on that chicken?”

“What would you like me to put on that chicken?”

“I hate it when you do the tomato sauce.”

“Then what would you
like
me to put on that chicken?”

“Remember the time you made it with sweet peppers and onions?”

“Want me to do that again?”

“I specially hated it with the peppers and onions.”

[
SECOND VOICE FROM THE LIVING ROOM, OVER THE NOISE OF PIANO SCALES
] “Oh, yeah, do the peppers and onions again! That was awesome! Do we have red or yellow peppers?”

“I have green peppers.”

[
SCALES STOP
] “Yuck! Green peppers? Those make me wanna puke!”

Nobody asks—nobody is going to ask—what
I
would like on the chicken. But if they did…

Mushrooms. Yes, definitely mushrooms. I am the only person in this family who will eat mushrooms, and so I never get to eat them. And oh, God, I miss them. Lovely thin slices of portobello mushrooms, delicately simmered in marsala, layered over the top of a perfectly sautéed boneless breast of chicken. Or no, wait, a boneless breast of chicken stuffed with mushrooms, water chestnuts, and oysters. Something not found in any recipe book, something I would make up myself, a culinary experiment, just puttering around the kitchen on a long leisurely afternoon. Something that would take hours to prepare, slicing and dicing and marinating and adjusting the spices. I wouldn’t even care if it tasted good, just so long as I could use the ingredients I wanted, every last exotic one of them. And sit down to eat it
in peace
.

The first time I ever properly ate alone was August 8, 1974. Richard Nixon was due to go on television that night to announce his resignation. My parents, the staunchest of staunch Republicans, had gone out to some party with my younger sister. I stayed home—I wouldn’t have missed that historic night for anything. I made a Special Occasion Meal: eggs Florentine, which I’d discovered at a restaurant in London the previous summer.

I had no recipe, but how hard could it be? I carefully steamed my spinach, poached my eggs, covered it with freshly grated Parmesan. I had a fresh baguette (not easy to find in Indianapolis in 1974, I can tell you) and a glass of dry white wine. I sat down at a TV tray in our den and turned on the momentous broadcast.

I felt like a grown-up at last: I had my own political opinions; I had the right to drink wine. And I was capable of cooking for myself.

When I first had a baby, my husband and I still ate interesting food. The baby was content to have yummy slop spooned to him, though never out of jars—I puréed my own, thank you very much. I took time with the meals I prepared for my husband and me—or for myself, if my husband was working late. That didn’t count as eating alone, because there was an adorable baby, the cutest the world had ever seen, in the room with me.

When the baby graduated to solid food, I was excited at first about the prospect of introducing new foods to my child. I’d pick up the kitchen phone and call my husband with the news, like dispatches from the war zone.

“The peas are a hit!”

“He likes the poached salmon!”

“You should have seen his face when he tasted the sautéed leeks!”

And then I pushed my luck too far. Couscous—what toddler wouldn’t like couscous; it’s just baby-sized pasta, right?…Well, have you ever tried to surgically remove an entire dumped plateful of couscous from a wicker chair seat?

The grilled fish, mesclun salad, and wild rice gradually morphed into fish sticks, carrot sticks, and Rice-A-Roni (the San Francisco Treat!). A second child was born, and I now faced the task of cooking three meals a night—one of puréed slop, one of buttered pasta and chicken fingers, and one ragout of rabbit forestière. Three meals was obviously too many. One had to go. Guess which one went?

My husband works late much more often now. Hmmm. Not that I blame him, considering the kinds of meals he could expect if he did hurry home.

“Mommy, why is the meat so crusty?”

“Yuck, Mom, why is the rice so slimy?”

“Mom, this has boogers in it.”

The answers are simple:

1. The meat is crusty because you were teasing your brother, and while I was trying to stop World War III, I forgot and left the meat in too long.
   
2. Marcella Hazan told me you’d like that slime in the rice.
   
3. Boogers give you protein—eat them all up now.
   

None of which makes me feel any less guilty when I see them wolfing down goldfish and graham crackers half an hour after they supposedly ate dinner.

If I didn’t know the people I was cooking for—if I were, for example, a chef in a restaurant—I wouldn’t have to take their tastes into account. But, oh, I know them, I know them very well. I know that Tom won’t eat any cheese except for grated Parmesan, which he must grate himself. The only fruits Grace will eat are bananas, raisins (but not the grapes they are made from), and apple juice (but not the apples it is made from). Hugh is okay with fish—well, salmon, at least—but the others think it’s poison, so if I cook fish (meaning salmon), I have to make another entrée for the non-fish-eaters.

Fish. Oh, fish. Please, not salmon for once, but a lovely fillet of red snapper, lightly grilled, with a fine dusting of Cajun spices on top. Served on a bed of wild rice (with just a kiss of slime), and butternut squash on the side, puréed baby-food smooth. On a real china plate, not a scarred melamine plate with the Power-puff Girls ka-powing around the rim. I wouldn’t even need wine, not really; I’d be content with mineral water, chilled just enough to frost the sides of a crystal goblet. And maybe a little music in the background…some Coltrane would be nice…

And come to think of it, I don’t even want my husband home for this. No sirree, he is not invited. This is a party for one. He’d want to talk about his day at work, and I do not want to talk. I want all the talk, all the chatter, all the yammering, all the HOLLERING—to cease. I want to listen to the Coltrane, and savor the food in silence—every chewy grain of rice, every velvety slurp of purée, every sip of the pure clean cold water, every moist flaked morsel of fish.

Well, they did eat fish at one time. Sorta. There was that tuna pasta salad I used to make—my own recipe, a riff on something I had at a luncheon once, with canned tuna and cooked pasta, garnished with chunks of raw bell pepper and canned mushrooms, seasoned liberally with grated Parmesan and bottled vinaigrette. In desperation, I threw this salad together for the kids one night and to my great surprise they fell in love with it. Refinements crept in over the months—tricolor rotini became the pasta of choice, only yellow and orange bell peppers could be used (the green ones make them puke, remember?)—but those were questions of shopping, not cooking. This dish was easy to make and a reliable crowd pleaser.

Tuna pasta salad had one other huge thing to recommend it—it could be Made Ahead of Time, a perfect solution for the nights when a teenage babysitter was coming over. Efficient Chef Mom whips up a delectable and healthy tuna pasta salad before the babysitter gets there, and dinner is literally a snap. Picture me in my June Cleaver starched shirtwaist with pearls and a frilled apron, snapping my manicured fingers.

So of course, I couldn’t resist. I made tuna pasta salad every time my imagination faltered—which, face it, got to be pretty damn often. Until one night I heard the dreaded words:

“Oh, no, not tuna pasta salad again!”

I began to see larger and larger mounds of the pasta left to grow cold and cement itself to the edge of their plates. Tom came to the amazing realization that tuna pasta salad contained tuna, and he began to pick out the shreds of tuna from around every whorl of the pasta (shells, rotini, you name it—no pasta shape was concave enough to hide tuna from the prongs of his fork). At long last, tuna pasta salad was removed from the active roster, its number retired, its jersey hung in the rafters.

I’m not even going to try liver.

My mother made awful liver. It tasted like shoe leather, and we only had it once, when I was six; we all spit it out on our plates and that was that. The Great Liver Rebellion had a profound impact on my young mind: I resolved that I would never make my children eat something they hated.

I will have to say, I did eventually eat liver again. In graduate school, I was invited to dinner at a professor’s house and we were served liver—which took amazing nerve on the part of that professor’s wife, I thought. But this wasn’t just liver, it was thin scallops of calves’ liver, exquisitely sautéed with a glaze of soy sauce and wine, and it melted in my mouth. From this I deduced (a) that my tastebuds might have matured since I was six, and (b) that my mother was a rotten cook.

I immediately went and taught myself how to cook liver that way. When I was a young single, in my first apartment, I cooked it many times. I learned all the secrets my mother never knew, about buying the right cut from the butcher and timing the sautéing just right. I discovered that liver went very well on a bed of brown lentils and chopped roasted carrots. I could cook it so that it melted in my mouth, that silky texture, that earthy savory taste. When I cooked it for myself, I made sure to sit at the table, light candles, and have a really good book to read while I dawdled over my meal, eventually polishing off every lentil, every speck of carrot. It was a perfect way to leave the office behind, to say to the world,
I am a grown-up. I don’t have any papers due. I didn’t bring any work home tonight. My evening is mine.

I could never cook it for my children. I just couldn’t bear it if they spit it out.

I used to think the situation would improve once my children started to develop a palate. Well, they’re developing palates, all right—they’ve decided, for example, that the chicken cutlets I make myself, breaded with a mixture of fresh breadcrumbs and freshly grated parmesan cheese, are infinitely better than the Tyson frozen chicken patties they used to get. No matter that Mom has to separate eggs and beat the whites to a froth to coat the chicken before dredging it in the breadcrumb mixture; no matter that she has to lovingly tend the frying pan while said breaded cutlets are swiftly browning to a not-quite-crisp state of perfection. The homemade chicken cutlets are better, that’s all they know.

Well, yes, of course the homemade chicken cutlets are better. Anyone could taste that—anyone with a palate, that is. I prefer the homemade ones too. But now I face a half-hour of intensive labor instead of the fifteen seconds it used to take to toss the frozen slabs into the toaster oven. No wonder I don’t feel like I’m making any progress.

I’m not much of a mathematician, but even I can calculate the inverse ratio between the amount of time it takes me to cook a meal for them and the amount of time it takes them to eat it. Laboring over made-from-scratch macaroni and cheese makes no sense when they swill it down as fast as they do the stuff from the blue box. (Either way, I have to make two batches, one macaroni with cheese and one macaroni without cheese, for Tom, the no-cheese-eater.)

Not that I have anything against the stuff from the blue box. There is a time when mac-’n’-cheese from the blue box totally hits the spot. You know what? Canned ravioli hits the same spot—that place at the back of your throat where a glut of salty or sweet or glutinously gummy food jams up for a moment and you feel gloriously sated. All right, I’ll admit it, swilling it down is the preferred method of eating this sort of guilty-pleasure food. You just keep shoveling it in, and all the synapses start to buzz and the endorphins come a-rushing, and all’s right with the world. For at least four and a half minutes.

And that rush, too, is best enjoyed alone, damn it.

One summer night, at a cottage we were renting on Cape Cod, the woman who lived next door mentioned to me that she was going to be alone for a few days. Her husband and teenage son worked in Boston during the week. Eager to be the good neighbor, wanting to make sure she wasn’t lonely, I invited her over for dinner with me and my three small children.

She gave me such a look. “Why, uh, thanks…but you know, I think I’ll just stay in.”

“No, but really, I have this big ham I was going to cook—”

She grinned. “But I was looking forward to it, actually. Sometimes you just need to curl up with a plate of scrambled eggs all by yourself. I never get to do that. It’s like heaven. You know what I mean?”

Well, I didn’t until she said it. And there hasn’t been a day since then that I haven’t thought wistfully of that plate of solitary scrambled eggs.

“Mom, can I stay at Amanda’s through dinner? Her mom can drop me off at eight. We did our homework together. Please, Mom?”