Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant (18 page)

W
hatever you do, on your first night in the new apartment, do not cook salmon. The fish smell will move in, like an unwelcome roommate. When you return from your first day of your new bad job, it will be there to greet you—hovering in your still unopened boxes, your sofa, your new walls.

You won’t understand. In the old converted schoolhouse far out in the country, you cooked this dish all the time—broiled salmon and rich butter sauce, sautéed broccoli and herbs—the tall kitchen windows letting the smells out as soon as they entered.

But things are different now. You don’t have a life-size kitchen anymore; you don’t have big, hopeful windows; you don’t even have a room for your bed. That whole first week, you will lie on the far side of your bed.

On the far side of the freezer, the rest of the salmon.

There are rules for cooking for yourself in a New York apartment:

• 1. Don’t cook that which leaves its smell behind.
  Think not only of the salmon, but of garlic—its small, slippery madness—of Cuban food, which makes you sick anyway, of soft, round cheeses.
  
• 2. Don’t prepare what doesn’t keep easily.
  Your freezer is the size and the width of a pencil case.
  
• 3. Do involve peanut butter whenever possible.
  A jar will run you $3.99—a bargain in this city!—and can be used for everything from peanut butter pie to the world’s easiest pad Thai sauce: 1/2 cup of peanut butter, 2 tablespoons of vegetable oil, brown sugar, soy sauce, red pepper flakes to taste.
  

You need music to cook to, especially under less-than-ideal conditions. Break it out. Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan for soups. Bruce Springsteen for stews. Turn up “Atlantic City” when you’re making beef stroganoff. (Forget the package of onion soup mix. Cut fresh onions, let them simmer in ? cup of olive oil, 1/2 cup of water; one chopped portobello mushroom.) The heat coming from the stovetop is making you flushed. To find balance, cover your radiator with the red beach towel that has survived six apartment moves. Pour yourself a second glass of wine. Hum along.
Put your makeup on, fix your hair up pretty, and meet me tonight in Atlantic City.

Stop humming.

Remember.

Nobody cooks in Manhattan. But don’t let this discourage you. Many people don’t do anything here but stumble and race and hope, waiting for their real lives to begin. There is the neighbor to your left, who moved into her small studio just until she got married. She is sixty-seven. There is the one to your right still trying to finish a documentary about the making of
Star Wars.
They are good people. Smile at them in the hallway. Leave them fresh coffee. Remind yourself that you are back here to do something hard—go to medical school, write a novel, become a clown. It’s really something closer to the second, but you like to pretend it’s the third. You like to pretend it’s becoming a clown. The circus, after all, scared the crap out of you growing up, the same way not ever managing to finish this manuscript scares the crap out of you now.

Buy yourself books named things like
Quit Clowning Around
! Buy yourself a red nose.

Smile, all the time.

Avoid thoughts of the boyfriends and half-boyfriends you cooked for in the various cities and half-cities where you found them. (London liked seared tuna and wasabi green beans; L.A. liked roasted chicken stuffed with lemon; and New England—how cold it got in New England!—liked your father’s French toast: challah bread soaked in butter and two teaspoons of vanilla, sliced peaches on top.)

Think instead of your great Southern mother—whose smallest meals involved three courses and clean white china—and who taught you that cooking is something you do for others: cooking and caretaking, all locked up, one simple promise. Add this to the list of things you blame her for.

To cook for yourself—beyond a plate of macaroni and cheese, beyond heated-up beans—feels like an impossible luxury. Tell yourself whatever you need to tell yourself to do it anyway: it will save you money and time (the right dish can last you several dinners and a long, good lunch). It will save you. Don’t think too much about the rest of it—the part that cooking for yourself represents—that you matter, even when no one is watching. That you have never, before now, thought to cook for yourself, thought to be there for yourself in so many ways you naturally have been there for everyone else. Make a grocery list instead. Head to the store. Stock up on tinfoil. And before you know it, you have stopped thinking and started doing. Which, as you are starting to figure out, is the first step to making anything become real.

The dish you’ve chosen is chicken Parmigiana. This is a dish that is hard to do badly. But there is a world of difference between doing it not badly and doing it right.

First, there are the homemade sauces
:
one for the chicken, a lighter one for the accompanying pasta. Start with the chicken’s sauce: plum tomatoes and fresh oregano, onions, grated pecorino cheese. Let simmer on low heat. Blend olive oil, roasted tomatoes, and basil in a bowl. The pasta sauce is ready. Bread the meat in eggs and milk and crumbs. If you are feeling frisky, add a little coconut extract.

You are barefoot now. You are wearing a long summer dress. And the countertops—once bare themselves—are covered with vegetable leaves and peppermint sticks, fancy oil bottles and broken pieces of baguette. Understand, if only in a distant way, that this is not a mess.

Take the chicken from the oven and rest it on the stovetop to cool. Lick your thumb. Then lie down on the couch to rest yourself, if only for a minute, wrapping your dress around you like a blanket. You don’t plan to fall asleep there. As you do, though—fall asleep—reflect briefly that we rarely plan to do the things that most need to happen.

When you wake up, it is three in the morning. You close the window, pad over to the fridge. Wrap up the chicken and wrap up the pasta, placing them neatly together in a soft blue container. Rest it on the fridge shelf, under that soft blue light. Close the refrigerator. You are too tired right now to give the dish its proper due.

So you save it. For tomorrow.

Let’s talk about tomorrow.

How well it goes. Something good happens at work—something really good happens. The details don’t matter. (Even clowning is pretty boring to the nonclown.) What matters is the feeling. And the feeling is like the first time you blew a bubblegum bubble, or made noise when you whistled. It’s like the first time you heard the Clash.

Suddenly, anything is possible.

And so you call your oldest friend, a botanist, to help you celebrate (botanists know how to party, after all), and the two of you head to a nearby bar to drink mint juleps and watch the Kentucky Derby. Or: maybe it is too beautiful to be inside and the two of you head up the Aqueduct trail for a celebratory bike ride.

The point is: you fall down. Hard. (Both bars and bikes precipitate this in you.) You fall, the spokes in the bike catching at your ankle. And when you look up, you see him, just standing there. He has bright blue eyes that match, a little freakishly, his bright blue bike. He also has the nicest smile you’ve ever seen, which he shines right at you. And it’s the weirdest thing because in all the cities and half-cities where you’ve found boys, you’ve never had the feeling that you have now. You can’t do anything wrong.

The following thought will flash through your mind, briefly, before you lose it forever: it’s related. The great work victory and this nice meeting with a blue-eyed person
have to be
related to the many hours you spent cooking the day before. All for yourself. How could it not be? You are wearing it on your face, like a badge. (Literally on your face. You raced out of the house, a little piece of tomato on the side of your cheek, a little piece in your hair.)

“Are you okay?” he asks.

“I think I am,” you say, brushing yourself off. Smiling back at him.

In the background, your botanist friend eats a leaf.

Eleven
P.M.
The silliest and best time to eat by yourself.

All the windows in your New York apartment are open. Your stereo is tuned to country music. You are cuddled on the couch in your thick white socks with your soft blue bowl of chicken Parmigiana.

This is when the phone rings. This is the most important part.

You don’t answer it. Even though it may be the blue-eyed person. Even though it may be something about work. Even though it may be flowers or promises ready to be kept or the hope of an easier tomorrow. (It does turn out, in a way you couldn’t have prepared for, that tomorrow will get easier. That there is good news on the other end of that phone. That your dreams, if not coming true, are coming closer.)

But know this. Even if someone tells you it is corny later. Even if someone tells you that it is a coincidence. Good things happen, because right then, when you need to most, you sit still. You sit still in your seat—Willie Nelson and Loretta Lynn dueting in the background; the fast May heat swimming around you. And for you—for nobody else—you take a first, great bite.

THE BEGINNING

I have friends who begin with pasta, and friends who begin with rice, but whenever I fall in love, I begin with potatoes. Sometimes meat and potatoes and sometimes fish and potatoes, but always potatoes. I have made a lot of mistakes falling in love, and regretted most of them, but never the potatoes that went with them.

Not just any potato will do when it comes to love. There are people who go on about the virtues of plain potatoes—plain boiled new potatoes with a little parsley or dill, or plain baked potatoes with crackling skins—but my own feeling is that a taste for plain potatoes coincides with cultural antecedents I do not possess, and that in any case, the time for plain potatoes—if there is ever a time for plain potatoes—is never at the beginning of something. It is also, I should add, never at the end of something. Perhaps you can get away with plain potatoes in the middle, although I have never been able to.

All right, then: I am talking about crisp potatoes. Crisp potatoes require an immense amount of labor. It’s not just the peeling, which is one of the few kitchen chores no electric device has been invented to alleviate; it’s also that the potatoes, once peeled, must be cut into whatever shape you intend them to be, put into water to be systematically prevented from turning a loathsome shade of bluish-brownish-black, and then meticulously dried to ensure that they crisp properly. All this takes time, and time, as any fool can tell you, is what true romance is about. In fact, one of the main reasons why you must make crisp potatoes in the beginning is that if you don’t make them in the beginning, you never will. I’m sorry to be so cynical about this, but that’s the truth.

There are two kinds of crisp potatoes that I prefer above all others. The first are called Swiss potatoes, and they’re essentially a large potato pancake of perfect hash browns; the flipping of the pancake is so wildly dramatic that the potatoes themselves are almost beside the point. The second are called potatoes Anna; they are thin circles of potato cooked in a shallow pan in the oven and then turned onto a plate in a darling mound of crunchy brownness. Potatoes Anna is a classic French recipe, but there is something so homely and old-fashioned about them that they can usually be passed off as either an ancient family recipe or something you just made up.

For Swiss potatoes: Peel 3 large (or 4 small) russet potatoes (or all-purpose if you can’t get russets) and put them in cold water to cover. Start 4 tablespoons butter and 1 tablespoon cooking oil melting in a nice heavy large frying pan. Working quickly, dry the potatoes and grate them on the grating disk of the Cuisinart. Put them into a colander and squeeze out as much water as you can. Then dry them again on paper towels. You will need more paper towels to do this than you ever thought possible. Dump the potatoes into the frying pan, patting them down with a spatula, and cook over medium heat for about 15 minutes, until the bottom of the pancake is brown. Then, while someone is watching, loosen the pancake and, with one incredibly deft motion, flip it over. Salt it generously. Cook 5 minutes more. Serves two.

For potatoes Anna: Peel 3 large (or 4 small) russet potatoes (or Idahos if you can’t get russets) and put them in water. Working quickly, dry each potato and slice into 1/16-inch rounds. Dry them with paper towels, round by round. Put 1 tablespoon clarified butter into a cast-iron skillet and line the skillet with overlapping potatoes. Dribble clarified butter and salt and pepper over them. Repeat twice. Put into a 425? oven for 45 minutes, pressing the potatoes down now and then. Then turn up the oven to 500? and cook 10 more minutes. Flip onto a round platter. Serves two.

THE MIDDLE (I)

One day the inevitable happens. I go to the potato drawer to make potatoes and discover that the little brown buggers I bought in a large sack a few weeks earlier have gotten soft and mushy and are sprouting long and quite uninteresting vines. In addition, one of them seems to have developed an odd brown leak, and the odd brown leak appears to be the cause of a terrible odor that in only a few seconds has permeated the entire kitchen. I throw out the potatoes and look in the cupboard for a box of pasta. This is the moment when the beginning ends and the middle begins.

THE MIDDLE (II)

Sometimes, when a loved one announces that he has decided to go on a low-carbohydrate, low-fat, low-salt diet (thus ruling out the possibility of potatoes, should you have been so inclined), he is signaling that the middle is ending and the end is beginning.

THE END

In the end, I always want potatoes. Mashed potatoes. Nothing like mashed potatoes when you’re feeling blue. Nothing like getting into bed with a bowl of hot mashed potatoes already loaded with butter, and methodically adding a thin cold slice of butter to every forkful. The problem with mashed potatoes, though, is that they require almost as much hard work as crisp potatoes, and when you’re feeling blue the last thing you feel like is hard work. Of course, you can always get someone to make the mashed potatoes for you, but let’s face it: the reason you’re blue is that there
isn’t
anyone to make them for you. As a result, most people do not have nearly enough mashed potatoes in their lives, and when they do, it’s almost always at the wrong time.

(You can, of course, train children to mash potatoes, but you should know that Richard Nixon spent most of his childhood making mashed potatoes for his mother and was extremely methodical about getting the lumps out. A few lumps make mashed potatoes more authentic, if you ask me, but that’s not the point. The point is that perhaps children should not be trained to mash potatoes.)

For mashed potatoes: Put 1 large (or 2 small) potatoes in a large pot of salted water and bring to a boil. Lower the heat and simmer for at least 20 minutes, until tender. Drain and place the potatoes back in the pot and shake over low heat to eliminate excess moisture. Peel. Put through a potato ricer and immediately add 1 tablespoon heavy cream and as much melted butter and salt and pepper as you feel like. Eat immediately. Serves one.