Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant (4 page)

T
ad had gone to Vermont for an annual golf outing. He and a dozen friends play thirty-six holes a day, eat too much beef teriyaki at a bad restaurant called “Vinny’s” and go to bed at nine. Not my idea of a good time, but he likes it.

Our apartment seemed hollow without him. Already I had grown used to seeing him reading at our dining room table when I came in from work. I had come to love when our hands bumped reaching for the toothpaste at the same time, and the sound—clink!—of him setting a pan of milk on the stove for our morning coffee.

One day while he was away I was working at home and was having a difficult time focusing. The restaurant that I had reviewed had changed its menu just before publication and I was struggling to get another story to unleash itself onto the page. For hours, I clicked back and forth between e-mails and a blank screen.

For a change of pace I went out on our deck to water the flowers. I heard rustling below, where our garbage cans are kept. Our garbage had recently been ransacked and our bank information had been used in a scam. So I leaned over the railing to take a look. A man was lifting a bag of our garbage from the can.

“Hey you!” I shouted. “Hey, you! I see you picking our garbage!!”

The man turned and looked up at me. “What’s that, m’am?” he said.

“I
said
, I caught you picking our garbage. Now get out!!”

“Oh, miss. Are you the new tenant, Ms. Amanda?”

“Yes,” I said, warily. I now noticed that he was neatly dressed in jeans and a fitted polo shirt. “Why?”

“Oh, hello. I’m Gilbert,” he said with a French Caribbean lilt. “Welcome to the neighborhood!”

Gilbert, I knew, was the man who has taken care of our building for years. But we hadn’t yet met.

“Thank you. Nice to meet you,” I said, and slunk inside.

Thoroughly humiliated, I definitely could not write. So I did the only thing I knew would relax me: I went grocery shopping. I walked slowly through the aisles of our local gourmet store, Garden of Eden, taking in bottle after bottle of olive oil, the neatly stacked tins of anchovies and sardines, and the display of cheeses. I picked up eggs and a long loaf of bread. At the greenmarket nearby, I bought garlic chives, fresh figs and a head of butter lettuce that was as tight as a fist. As I shopped, it occurred to me that the menu I was dreaming up was nothing I would ever cook for Tad or for friends. It was less structured and more self-soothing—separate entities tied together by nothing more than the fact that I liked each part. With anyone else, I would feel obliged to make a meal with a beginning, middle and end, a meal that would cohere.

There was nothing guilt-making about the foods I had chosen. They were simply flavors and textures that I love.

My habits are not eccentric. I know many women who have a set of home-alone foods. My friend Aleksandra, for instance, leans toward foods that are white in color. Her signature private dish is polenta. “I cheat and use the five-minute kind,” she says. “But I cook it with a broth made from porcini bouillon cubes. When the polenta starts to form a mass, I add a splash of heavy cream and some Parmesan. If I have truffle butter in the house, I add that. If not, I drizzle the polenta with white truffle oil, off the heat. If I want something really mild—and white—I cook the polenta in milk instead. It is like breakfast, that way, but better. If I were rich, I’d use white truffles and shave them copiously over the polenta. Or maybe I’d wait for John.”

Aleksandra also makes grilled cheese sandwiches with Gruyère and a sprinkling of white wine (before broiling), sliced comice pears sautéed in butter and sugar, coconut sticky rice, pasta with “just a little butter, Parmesan and black pepper,” and before bed, a mug of hot milk sprinkled with freshly grated nutmeg.

My own sister, Rhonda, favors things like rich cheeses, fried chicken, and goose liver pâté on toasts. Her specialty is spaghetti with fried eggs. She fries two eggs and a clove of garlic in oil while she boils spaghetti for one. When the pasta is done, she puts it back in the pot, drops the eggs on top and showers it all with pepper and grated cheese. Then she tosses it with a little pasta water and as she does, the egg yolks crack open and dress the strands of pasta, making it like a rustic, simple carbonara, minus the bacon.

Ginia, a friend from work, has created a dish, which she calls, jokingly, “single girl salmon.” She simmers tiny green French lentils and seasons them with white wine vinegar, lemon juice, salt and pepper. She fries shallots with a dash of sugar until they’re caramelized, then sautés the salmon. The dish gets layered like an entrée at Union Square Café, and she even garnishes it with parsley. It is a model for all single women because it is at heart about taking the pains to treat yourself well.

Another woman I know says that even if she orders in, she always sets her table with a place mat, china, silverware and linen napkin. I have a similar ritual. I do not eat standing up, and I do not watch television. And when I cook I refuse to use more than one pan. A great meal alone is joyous but ending it with a lot of dishwashing diminishes the effect.

My home-alone dinners are often composed of one or two flavors, prepared in a way that underlines their best qualities. Eggs are high on the list. I rarely eat breakfast but I adore eggs and there are very few opportunities to eat them at other times of day. So I might poach one and lay it on a nest of peppery or bitter greens. I might toss a poached egg with pasta, steamed spinach and good olive oil, and shower it with freshly grated nutmeg and cheese. Or, I might press a hard boiled egg through a sieve and sprinkle the fluffy egg curds over asparagus.

It’s not traditional comfort food, but it works for me. I like rich, full flavors paired with clean bitter ones—a gentle lull and a bracing finish. I might boil pasta and toss it with grated cheese, nutmeg and butter, and follow up with a baby arugula salad. When artichokes are in season, I will steam one and dip its leaves one by one into homemade mayonnaise. It’s a messy, time-consuming dish to eat, but no one is there to fidget. I am the cook, waiter and dining companion.

In the winter, I have made hearty salads of smoked mackerel and red-skinned potatoes and accompanied them with braised leeks. I like to sauté sausages and eat them with a mound of broccoli rabe, a lemon wedge and olive oil; and assemble platters of prosciutto, mortadella and duck liver pâté with a tuft of parsley and caper salad. I might roast carrots and beets, and dip them into ricotta seasoned with olive oil and sea salt.

Dessert is a must. Sometimes I’ll buy a Pithivier or cherry and almond tart, or toss peaches with sugar and sour cream. I might have cookies, and I am a sucker for caramel ice cream. But my preferred dessert is a bar of dark bitter chocolate and a glass of Cognac.

This night, I was looking for foods to soothe my embarrassment about Gilbert. I had been daydreaming about the truffled egg toast from ’ino, a paninoteca in Greenwich Village. It’s a thick piece of white bread blanketed under a layer of gently cooked eggs and a cloud of truffle oil. I dropped a nugget of butter into a sauté pan the size of a saucer. I whisked a few eggs with a little crème fraîche and poured it into the pan. Then I began stirring it over low heat, stirring in circles and zig-zags and figure eights. The eggs warmed and turned a lemon yellow on the edges.

I remembered a story I once did about making scrambled eggs with Daniel Boulud. He prepared his in a double boiler, whisking the entire time, so that the eggs became more like a custard than like any scrambled eggs I had ever seen. They were extraordinarily delicate. I like to treat myself well, but as I mentioned, I do have a one-pan rule. I wasn’t about to pull out my double boiler. My effort to improvise was working fine, anyway. The eggs, with patience, formed into fluffy curds. I put a slice of bread in the oven to toast, and when the eggs were ready, piled them on top of it. I sprinkled on the truffle oil and then let it sit for a minute so the heat from the eggs would moisten the bread.

I left the butter lettuce as whole ruffly leaves and turned them in a bowl with sliced garlic chives and a gentle dressing. I poured myself a glass of pale yellow Fino sherry; the glass began to sweat instantly in the summer heat. The toast calmed my nerves. I carefully ate my salad, carving the leaves into manageable pieces. I heard a door shut outside but otherwise it was silent.

I’d had so many meals like this since I moved to New York. Sometimes they were glorious feasts. Sometimes they were a chore; I would force myself to cook to fortify my independence and to commit to a satisfying life on my own. From now on, they would become an infrequent occurrence. I would miss the dinners, but not life alone.

For dessert, I dropped a spoonful of
dulce de leche
over vanilla ice cream and placed an orange zest cookie on top as if it were a
tuile.
Then I went out on my deck and ate it with a small spoon. I couldn’t duck Gilbert for the rest of the time we lived here, I thought. I should bake him cookies or a cake to apologize. I’d ask Tad about it. He was coming home in the morning.

My last night home alone as a single woman was nearly over. The next time I would be married.

DINNER FOR YOU, WHEN THERE’S NO ONE TO SHARE IT WITH

Truffled Egg Toast

DINNER FOR 1.

1 teaspoon butter

3 eggs

1 teaspoon crème fraîche

Sea salt

1 slice country bread (not too chewy, not too sour, but sturdy)

White truffle oil

1. Melt the butter in a tiny skillet over very low heat. Whisk together the eggs and crème fraîche. Season with salt. Pour this into the skillet and use a whisk or wooden spoon to stir it, making sure to cover the entire bottom surface. This will take at least 10 minutes, so be patient. If you do it too fast, the egg will dry and the curds won’t be as silky. Toast the bread and put it on your favorite dinner plate.
   
2. As soon as the eggs have formed soft curds and are loose but not raw, spoon them onto the toast. If some of the egg tumbles off, that’s fine. Sprinkle with truffle oil, and let sit for a minute before digging in. (Eat with a fork and knife.)
   

Single Girl Salmon

ADAPTED FROM GINIA BELLAFANTE

A FINE FEAST FOR ONE. DOUBLE IT IF YOU HAVE A GUEST.

Ginia came over one night to show me how she makes this dish, a marvelous confluence of salmon, lentils and shallots. Tad was home, too. We stood close by with glasses of rosé in hand as she went to work, chopping shallots, peeling garlic, tipping lentils into a pan. She moved quickly, like a line cook who was dressed like a model, in heels and a vintage dress. Ginia is a fashion writer.

“One of the reasons I like this dish,” she said, “is that it’s so easy. One garlic clove, one shallot, one bay leaf, one piece of salmon.”

“It’s like a pound cake,” I said. Pound cakes are always even proportions of butter to sugar to flour.

She began by simmering lentils, and when they were done, she seasoned them with an alarming amount of salt. “You can never have enough salt,” she said. “Vinegar, too. I sometimes add lemon juice as well, to create a complex acid.” She’s no slouch when she’s alone.

Next she sautéed coarsely chopped shallots in a pan with oil and sugar, stirring vigorously as if she were washing a window. When the shallots were done, she returned the pan to the stove.

She turned to me: “What happens now is the following: we stick in our little salmon friends and then we sear them at a high heat so we can get the skin off.” Ginia has made the salmon often enough to fine tune it. Salmon renders a lot of fat and the skin just gets in the way, so she figured out a way to quickly render the fat and then swiftly scrape up the skin, leaving the salmon to finish cooking. She could ask for skinless fillets, but then she wouldn’t have enough fat to fry the salmon. This way, the fat serves as a cooking medium and the skin protects the fish for most of the rigorous sautéing.

When the salmon was done, Ginia laid it on top of the lentils and began layering shallots, parsley and a generous squeeze of lemon juice. The lentils were bright with acidity, the salmon was sweet and that sweetness was echoed in the shallots. Tad and I toasted Ginia, then dug in.

? cup tiny green French lentils

1 clove garlic

1 bay leaf

Sea salt

Freshly ground black pepper

2 tablespoons olive oil or walnut oil

1 tablespoon white wine vinegar

1 tablespoon lemon juice

1 large shallot, chopped

Pinch sugar

17-ounce fillet salmon, cut from the center (ask to have a square piece, rather than a skinny slice)

1 teaspoon chopped flat-leaf parsley

Lemon wedge

1. Rinse the lentils, then pour them into a small saucepan with the garlic clove and bay leaf. Cover with water (about 1/2 inch above the lentils). Set a lid on top, slightly askew. Bring to a boil, then adjust the heat so it is at a simmer. Cook until the lentils are just cooked through but still have a little bite, 15 to 20 minutes. Ginia does hers so they are like firm peas or al dente pasta.
   
2. Drain the lentils and put them in a bowl. Season generously with salt and pepper. Pour in 1 tablespoon of olive oil, the vinegar and the lemon juice. Fold and stir the lentils for a minute, so the seasonings blend well, then taste them. They should be quite tangy, because salmon is fatty and you will need something to sharpen it up. Ginia continued tasting the lentils every few minutes and adding more lemon juice as she prepared the shallots and salmon.
   
3. Place a small skillet over medium heat. Swirl in the remaining 1 tablespoon of olive oil and add the shallots. Drop in a pinch of sugar, then stir as the shallots cook, turning them over and over, until they’re soft and have a glazed and golden look. Transfer to a plate and place the pan back on the stove over medium-high heat. Season the salmon with salt and lay it skin-side down in the pan. Let it cook for 1 minute. It will begin to render its fat and the skin will crisp and stick to the pan. When it is crisp, use a spatula to scrape up the skin. Ginia scrapes it up, quickly turns the fish and removes the skin from the pan. This may take one or two tries the first time around. Continue sautéing until the salmon is cooked on the edges and has just a thin line of pink running through the center.
   
4. To serve, spoon the lentils onto a plate. Lay the salmon fillet on top, and dab on the shallots. Shower with parsley and squeeze over a wedge of lemon.