Family lore:

My dad was nine when a neighbor living on the south side of Ocean Parkway offered my grandfather first crack at the gorgeous 1920s Spanish-style house he was putting up for sale because he was moving to L.A. It was around 1934, the Depression was not yet over, and the $25,000 price that Jay Silverheels asked was too steep; my grandfather chose to stay in the two bedroom apartment he shared with his wife and children. Rejecting the man who played Tonto, my grandparents would remain at 602 Avenue T for the rest of their lives; they lived there, and they both died there.

I’m not sure what it was about the place; it wasn’t the view, although the east-facing bedrooms were cooled by the breezes blowing in off Coney Island, and on a clear day you could see the Parachute Drop and the Cyclone. A Knabe baby grand piano sat in the dark living room adjacent to the window and up against a steam radiator, which would eventually cause its deep mahogany finish to bubble and peel, and its ivory keys to craze like porcelain. A posterboard-mounted print of Breugel’s The Harvesters hung above a yellow-striped Duncan Phyfe sofa, popping out of its Rococo frame, concave with the humidity of sixty Brooklyn summers.  By the time I moved in — 1990; a very bad breakup — the Breugel field hands had grown distorted and grotesque, like a passel of rejects from a rural freak show on siesta.

I went to 602 to heal my wounds; I had nowhere else to go. It was where my father, twelve years earlier, had gone to heal after he divorced my mother; he had nowhere else to go. Back then, in 1978, my grandmother was still alive, shuffling around the place in a series of pearl-white vinyl slippers, the kind designed to look like ballet shoes; kitchen to foyer, foyer to bedroom, bedroom back to the kitchen where, one afternoon in 1974, two weeks after I saw Young Frankenstein at the Ziegfield, she served me a whole boiled calves brain on a small white luncheon plate flecked with tiny magenta petunias.

Each of us has an immediate olfactory connection to our grandparents, and mine was launched during the late Sunday mornings of my childhood, when I walked into their lobby at 602; it smelled, perpetually, of chicken fat. Nearly every tenant in the building was religious, and that many people cooking that much griebenes under one roof had taken its toll: the essence of schmaltz had been sucked into the pores of the place. When I came back to 602 in 1990, the building still reeked. I feared for my clothes. I was certain that my cats would stink like a pair of fat Shabbos pullets.

The apartment had been uninhabited for the two years since my grandmother died; my father had moved into his girlfriend’s house a few years before that, but he decided to maintain the place anyway. He left the electricity turned on. The phone stayed hooked up (Essex5-1177). My grandmother’s clothes were still hanging in the closet when I moved in; her makeup and hairbrush were still in the medicine cabinet. When my father checked in on me that first night, his call set off the phone amplifiers that hung near the ceiling in every room — my grandmother was profoundly hard of hearing in her later years — which shook the walls and windows and made the cats shriek; he never had them disconnected after she died. He was calling, he said, to give me some advice for living there comfortably.

“Don’t turn on the stove—“ he warned that first night.

“But what if I want to cook?”

“Use the top burners, but never more than two at a time. And don’t light the oven. I’ll take you to Macy’s tomorrow, to buy a microwave.”

I was suddenly single, bereft, living in my long-gone grandmothers’ apartment along with all of her things — there was an unopened jar of gefilte fish in the refrigerator and a half-eaten box of Coffee Nips on the foyer table, like she had just stepped out to do an errand — and I couldn’t even roast myself a chicken without blowing the place up.

My cookbooks — hundreds of them — were packed in boxes that sat piled up in the living room along with what little furniture I owned; my cookware stayed buried under layers of bubble wrap. There was no reason to unpack it: I couldn’t bake a pie or a loaf of bread. I couldn’t broil a piece of salmon, make a lasagna or a brisket, oven-braise root vegetables or a leg of lamb. I couldn’t bake a frittata or make a pizza, or brownies, or a timbale.

I couldn’t even bake a potato.

We went to Macy’s the next night, and my father bought me a microwave big enough to be an end table.

“There’s a roast chicken setting—“ he said, pointing to its front panel. We took it home, plugged it in, and it immediately blew one of the two fuses that powered the entire apartment.

We went out for dinner to a nearby Chinese restaurant called Karr’s, and ate at a small table near the bar, and got drunk on Gin Gibsons.

“So where do I buy food?” I asked, over plates of shrimp in lobster sauce and pork fried rice.

“On King’s Highway,” he said.

“Is there anything closer?”

“Avenue U—near the F train. But your grandmother never shopped there.”

I couldn’t understand why. It was a short walk; there were no taxis or buses involved in getting there. But during my first week at 602, none of that mattered, because, for the first time in my adult life, I didn’t cook. I ordered pizzas that made my neighbor gasp in horror when the delivery guy passed her in the hallway carrying the grease-stained, white cardboard box stamped SAUSAGE. I ordered Chinese food. I took the subway to Park Slope and ate at a vegetarian restaurant on 7^th Avenue near Union.

But I didn’t cook.

Not once.

A week later, after coming down with a terrible cold I attributed to depression-related stress, I left work early and, trying to walk from the subway station on Avenue U and McDonald Avenue to Ocean Parkway, found myself navigating a wall of fast-moving, tight-lipped older ladies pulling empty grocery pull-carts behind them. It was two o’clock. I was hungry. So I turned around and followed them under the elevated F train tracks to the other side of Avenue U, where my grandmother never went.

There was a cheese shop and a tiny green grocer selling fresh fava beans and baskets of spikey, green Puntarelle. There was a pork and sausage store that also sold fresh and dried pasta; a bakery selling fresh semolina bread dotted with sesame seeds; a fishmonger, and a butcher. The ladies were all doing their marketing, to make dinner that night.

Hoarse, I asked the cheese man for Taleggio; he just shook his head, no. An older woman wearing a jet black cardigan, jet black wool skirt, and suntan pantyhose eyed me up and down like I’d just arrived from Mars.

But don’t go anywhere—the cheese man continued. Just wait a minute.

He went into the back of the store and a few seconds later returned with a demitasse cup.

Drink it all at once—for your cold. Come back tomorrow. I close at six.

Every day, I did my shopping on Avenue U, and every day, the little old Italian ladies in black grilled me about what I was making and how I was making it. Sometimes they nodded in approval, and asked me where I lived, and whether I was single because they had a nice grandson. Sometimes — usually — they corrected me. Fiercely. But kindly. When I said I couldn’t bake anything because the oven might explode, they said You don’t need an oven.

At the pork store and the greengrocer, I bought anything I could cook on top of the stove: there were thick fennel and garlic sausages that I simmered with red wine, grapes, and thyme; fava beans that I boiled and shelled and mashed into a topping for the semolina bread that I toasted in an oil-slicked skillet and then rubbed with garlic; I wilted the bitter Puntarelle in a pot of salted, boiling water, tossed it with orrechiete cooked in the vegetable water, and folded giant spoonfuls of thick, fatty sheep’s milk ricotta into the warm pasta. In the coming months — eighteen of them, before I moved back to Manhattan to get on with the business of my life — my grandmother’s ancient aluminum pots clattered on the stovetop, their bottoms rounded and dimpled with age. I chopped with my great-grandmother’s hockmesser — the four pound, wood-handled cleaver she carried over from Romania; I steamed what needed steaming in a white enameled colander set over a pot of boiling water; I wine-braised spatch-cocked pigeon in an old Teflon fry pan covered with a warped cookie sheet; I dredged Branzino in seasoned egg and flour and slid it into a hot, butter-coated 1930s oval metal casserole that had baked decades of kugel; I drank cheap red wine out of the tiny four-ounce milk glasses of my childhood Sunday afternoons; I drizzled warm, sectioned figs with the dregs of my grandfather’s Slivovitz that I found in the depths of the hall closet, buried behind torn shopping bags bursting with the fading letters that my father had written to his parents from the Pacific during World War II when he was nineteen.

602 was the place I went to get my bearings, and to relearn who I was, just as my father had after his divorce. When I moved out — when it was time to get back to my life — I took nothing with me: not the hockmesser or the Slivovitz, the time-warped Breugel or the juice glasses. I left with my cats, and my cookbooks —still sealed in their moving boxes from the day I arrived — and tucked the stash of my father’s wartime letters in my knapsack. The only other thing I grabbed before I walked out was the sheaf of wrinkled, handwritten notes I’d scrawled while standing in the stores on Avenue U with the Italian ladies, who taught me that sustenance begins and ends with imagination and ingredients, and who forever changed the way I think about food, and what it means to feed myself and those I love despite the obstacles of place, time, and history.

Braised Sausages with Grapes and Thyme

As much as I’d like to say that, like Richard Olney, I once braised sausages in a young tannic red and then roasted them over grape vines plucked from the rich soil of Provence, I can’t: I first made this dish in my grandmother’s apartment near Coney Island, with grapes of unknown provenance and dried thyme that had seen better days when Nixon was in office. Still, the dish is very simple to put together, and over the years I’ve made it in every conceivable permutation: Bratwurst braised in black beer with sliced red onion and juniper berries, and then grilled; mild garlic sausage braised in sweet white wine and then grilled and topped with German mustard; Merguez braised in Ouzo and mint. I’ve even made this with great vegan sausages, and it surprised and delighted my vegan friends. The only hard-and-fast rule about making this dish is that you make it with excellent-quality sausages, be they lamb, pork, chicken, turkey, or vegan. And if you prefer your sausages with a bit of char (the way I do) finish them on a grill or in a stovetop grill pan, and serve them in their braising liquid.

Serves 2 (or 1 with leftovers)

1 tablespoon mild extra virgin olive oil

4 fennel and garlic pork sausages, poked a few times with a fork, at room temperature

3/4 cup dry red wine

1/4 pound red seedless grapes

3 healthy sprigs of thyme

Set a large cast iron skillet over a medium flame, and after a minute or so, slick it with the olive oil. Add the sausages and cook until golden on all sides. Remove to a plate and set aside.

Carefully pour in the wine and increase the heat to medium high; cook until the wine begins to bubble and slightly thicken. Return the sausages and any of their accumulated juices to the pan, add the grapes and the thyme. Reduce heat to low, set a cover on the pan (slightly askew), and cook until the sausages are done, about 8-10 minutes depending on their size. Serve with the grapes and the thyme on polenta, rice, or with slices of garlic-rubbed toast, drizzled with the wine sauce.

Note: If the wine has thickened too much by the time the sausages are cooked, add tablespoons of water (or more wine) — one at a time — and stir to loosen the sauce up.

In my kitchen right now are two loaves of sourdough bread, both from Bread Alone (because the last time I tried to make a sourdough starter, it began with great promise and then turned gray and sloggy, and then I became obsessed with it like it was a small child who had stopped eating. Sam Fromartz and Dan Leader, I’m sure you can help me with this.). On my way home from my Mother’s Day visit in Manhattan, I pulled over at Fairway to pick up two loaves of Latvian black bread from the Black Rooster bakery, which — I’ve been assured by people who know about Latvian black bread — is as close to the real thing as I might get, even though I used to love the pungently sour ebony loaves from the long-closed Juris Kupris Bakery of Bolton Connecticut, which was first introduced to me through Laurie Colwin’s writing, many years ago.

See what happens when I get it into my tiny brain that I might have a gluten sensitivity? I start lining every inch of my kitchen with bread. As a test, of course. Because nothing says pleasure like denial. And hives. But here’s my good news (I’ve been experimenting): bread as I know it — the really good stuff, like real sourdough — apparently does not have to be banished from my life or my home or my plate. I don’t have to don a surgical mask and clean every trace of it from my house the way my bubbe did before Passover. The bad news: I just can’t eat junk bread. And if you’re my age, or near my age, you probably know what I mean when I say junk bread.

Remember that commercial from years ago — it was probably in the mid-1970s — where the sweet, down-home music swelled in the background and some nice, faceless lady in gingham ladled a gorgeous and heart-stopping quantity of melted golden butter right down the center of a loaf of “home-baked white bread” and filled it with “buttery goodness?” That’s junk bread. Any bread that can sit on store shelves for a month and stay soft and fresh with nary a fleck of green mold is junk bread. The diet white bread that my mother used to make my school sandwiches on (which either disintegrated in my hands, covering my prepubescent lap with very wet tuna salad, or my apple rolled over it and by the time I got to school the sandwich took on the appearance of a football shoulder pad designed for a Chihuahua) is junk bread.

I’m not going to go on a rant about what scientifically constitutes junk bread, and why it seems to be a major culprit in the remarkable gluten intolerance/celiac pandemic that is currently impacting virtually every modernized country on earth. But someone asked me recently why now, why so suddenly. Honestly, I don’t think any of us has the answer except for the fact that we — humans, our genome, our ability to metabolize the profusion of chemicals that we’re faced with every day and have been faced with since probably the 1930s (when chemically preserving food for long transports was key to feeding America’s starving millions) but certainly since 1974, when a certain infamous herbicide hit the scene — may have hit the proverbial wall, and the only way around it is to switch gears. For some, that means no more bread, and no more gluten of any kind. I’m one of the other ones; I just have to alter what I eat and how often I eat it, which is fine with me. It just means listening to my body a little bit more closely than I have of late, so I’m looking at it as a sort of lesson: I will be eating bread only when I know it’s great, when I’m feeling good, and when the stuff I’m putting on said great bread actually excites me, the way it did the other day, when I brought home a tub of fresh ricotta from Murray’s and a bag of Mission figs.

Like bread (and butter), fresh ricotta is one of those mundane things that we all just tend to take with a grain of salt, because (like bread and butter) it’s ubiquitous: most of us, unless we grew up in a yurt, have experienced ricotta in virtually every permutation — on pizza, in pasta, in ravioli, in cannoli, as cheesecake, in lasagna — and spooned out of a plastic container found in your supermarket’s refrigerated case next to those blocks of mozzarella that bounce. (You know what I’m talking about.)

But good ricotta is bliss; it’s sweet and milky and fresh and sexy, and once you taste it, you pretty much want to smear it on everything you can. This week, I’ve had it a couple of ways: spread on sourdough toast, topped with a filmy layer of Prosciutto di Parma, and drizzled with strong, peppery olive oil. That was nice. But what was better — and what became dinner the other night — was ricotta spread on sourdough that had been brushed with olive oil and broiled lightly in a cast iron pan, topped with thinly-sliced Mission figs, drizzled with honey, a little bit more oil, and salt and pepper to take the edge off the richness of the cheese and the sweetness of the fruit, and popped back under the broiler for a minute.

Of course, you can make this on any good bread, and you should. And IF you are a gluten sensitive person, or a Celiac, or you’re just being careful, there are dozens of great quality GF breads out there for you to try. So I suggest you make it with whatever you have at hand.

Except junk bread.

Ricotta and Mission Fig Tartine with Honey, Salt & Pepper

The combination of creamy milk, sweet honey and luscious fruit, tangy sourdough, and earthy salt and pepper is a remarkable one, and (with the exception of the sourdough) something I remember reading about in one of Ada Boni’s wonderful books. Or maybe Patience Gray’s Honey from a Weed. Anyway, it’s a nearly biblical combination that is so satisfying and lusty you’ll want a cigarette after you eat it.

Serves 2

extra virgin olive oil for brushing and drizzling

2 large slices excellent quality sourdough, cut in half

1/4 cup very fresh, full fat cow’s milk ricotta

4 burstingly-ripe Mission figs, thinly sliced length-wise into thirds

honey for drizzling

salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste

Place an oven rack approximately 7 inches from your oven’s upper heat source, and preheat your broiler.

Lightly brush one side of each bread slice with olive oil, place oily-side up  in a large cast iron pan, and toast under the broiler until golden, and remove from oven.

Turn each slice over, untoasted side up, and lightly brush with a bit more olive oil. Evenly spread each slice with ricotta and top with the sliced figs. Drizzle with honey and a shower of salt and freshly ground black pepper.

Drizzle with a bit more oil and pop back under the broiler until the bread is golden, the ricotta slightly blistered in spots, and the figs knife-tender. Serve immediately.

“The deeper reason that breakfast inspires me is that we have become so busy maintaining our lives in the working world that we often find ourselves sharing the same house with strangers. The meaning of “home” has disappeared…Since when are business meetings, community gatherings, or basketball practice more important than talking with the people you care about and getting to know them better.”

– Marion Cunningham, The Breakfast Book, 1987

There were piles of it: great, tall rafts of yeasty, caramel-edged white bread sitting high on a Delft salad plate given to Susan by her Aunt Ethel, and particularly appropriate for a tower of toast. When I first came in to the picture, nearly fourteen years ago, breakfast was always toast and tea and coffee. Rather than buy an electric coffee maker just for my purposes, Susan purchased a tiny French press that would produce exactly one small cup of a very dark brew, which she would make while preparing her own very dark, pitch black tea, which she would share in milky spoonfuls with Macgillicuddy, her very dark, pitch black Curly Coated Retriever.

Right before we met, Susan had experimented with brioche, which was too labor intensive and felt a little bit twee. Since then, there has been an extraordinary rye loaf from one of Deborah Madison’s books, Boston brown bread steamed in an empty coffee can, Cuban white bread, Lahey’s no-knead bread (which, while delicious and simple, leaves me cold, as though the very act of kneading humanly imbues the staff with the life), and a Pullman loaf made in the pan that Deborah sent to us a few years ago, which we cherish. Over the years, as we’ve gotten busier, our breakfast bread has given way to yogurt and granola and fruit; to the infrequent poached egg sitting on a hassock of leftover French lentils; to the newspaper; to a Starbucks feta and eggwhite wrap eaten in the car while doing chores after a week at work in New York, away from the house, and each other. Eventually, we started to eat different things for breakfast — Susan might have cereal and milk, I might have smoked salmon on black bread, or leftover brown rice and a fried egg. One Christmas, I considered buying her a sterling silver English toast rack — sort of a metaphysical tether to the quiet, unifying morning meals of our earliest days — but then I realized: we didn’t eat that much bread anymore anyway.

That romance of toast was gone, replaced, we told ourselves, by more practical and clear-headed concerns surrounding carbohydrate intake and fending off metabolic syndrome, and the fact that a whole loaf for two people can go hard as a rock in a matter of a day; without the necessity of breadcrumbs to make or croutons to cut, there just didn’t seem to be much of a point to having it around.

Still, when someone recently asked me what my favorite meal was — I was in Cambridge, reading at the Harvard Bookstore on a frigid, sleeting spring night about two weeks ago — I answered without thinking: toasted bread and sweet butter. 

That romance—the comfort—of having a warm, crisp slice of really great bread slathered with sweet butter in the morning at the table with the person I love is part of who I am. But exactly a week after my reading in Cambridge, it was suddenly something I could no longer eat; after one bite of a delicious buttered crust at a restaurant in Kenmore Square, my throat threatened to close up and I threatened to die.

Just like that.

It’s a sign, I told a friend, weepy and tired.

It’s an allergy, she answered, rolling her eyes.

What does it mean when the staff of life threatens to kill us? What does it mean when the most elemental thing in our lives — flour, water, yeast, salt — necessitates at the least, a Benadryl, and at the worst, an epinephrine drip?

I had been on the road for my book tour, traveling 10,000 miles to thirteen cities in less than two months. Susan was with me for some of it, but then went home from Michigan, to get back to work. Her 95 year old mother is dying of congestive heart failure and lives alone in another part of the state because she fired her caregiver, and now we’re left worrying about her, constantly. My mother lives in Manhattan and, at 110 pounds, can’t bring herself to eat a carrot stick without worrying about her weight. My stepmother is battling lymphoma and I haven’t seen her in a year. My aunt is 95 and I haven’t seen her in a year. My 106 pound Yellow Lab has Ehrlichia. I have a job I love, a 20 hour a week commute, another research-heavy book due to be delivered in late July, a novel to write, and a second food memoir beginning to percolate, about being a Jewish girl with an exigent pig problem and a simultaneous, peculiar attraction to veganism.

But this is always how it happens, I’m told. This is when your body shakes its head and refuses to accept any more stress. You max out. Your cache is full. A ball of swirling cortisol lodges in your chest just between your eighth and ninth ribs, and refuses to leave. A switch gets flipped. Your body demands attention and focus as the business of life picks at you and your time and your energy like a scab. Your immune system shuts down. You are the enemy. You attack yourself.

Your gastro-romantic anchor — warm buttered toast at breakfast — is the devil on your shoulder.

Years ago, when I was in college, when I was playing lacrosse and carrying a five course load and doing badly and secretly in love with someone off limits and my father was ill and I was playing in a coffeehouse almost every Friday evening and I was averaging five hours of sleep a night, I went through two years where everything I ate betrayed me: Bread and butter. Pasta and tomato sauce. Pizza and beer. From 1982-1984, I had a standing reservation at the Boston University health clinic, where I would show up of a lazy Sunday afternoon, and they’d pump me full of adrenaline and send me on my way. Twenty years later, while working at what might have been the worst, most prestigious job of my life — I was surrounded by sadists who took enormous pleasure in workaday torture just for the sheer enjoyment of it — I walked around breathless and in the kind of excruciating, violent pain that made my blood pressure soar and one night nearly caused me to pass out among the guinea fowl into the specialty poultry case at Whole Foods in Soho.

My food writer friends who are gluten intolerant — some are diagnosed Celiacs, some aren’t — nod when I tell them these stories; they recognize them, have lived them, and have come out the other side. Two of them initially were diagnosed after enormous systemic stress — new babies, hormone imbalances, work, chronic sleep deprivation, books due, family issues, running on empty — hit all at once. One, after a lifetime of living at a fevered pitch, sought answers for the pain her body was constantly in.  These friends removed the gluten and they got better. The mere act of having to cook and think about food, and feed themselves and their families with an almost meditative focus, slowed them down. And they learned to eat again, happily. Deliciously.

This aggravates some gluten free naysayers. I have no idea why;  it’s as though people with dodgy immune systems have no right to feel good, to enjoy food, or to be able to sing the glories of the mundane — the bread and butter of our lives — from every mountaintop. We turn them into pariahs because of the peace they find in the kitchen and at the table, and the joy they feel at wanting to share it despite their bodies sometimes not cooperating.

Of course, this joy also comes at a price: these gluten free people actually have had to become scientists. Rather than give up, they have had to learn to think about food in a different way: they’ve learned how to make breads and doughs from ingredients that, traditionally, can’t be made into breads and doughs. They’ve learned how to do it well, and in some cases, brilliantly. My friend Shauna Ahern is a master at it; when her new, extraordinary book falls open to the mind-boggling biscuits and gravy recipe, you can literally feel her steadfast resolve to continue to really love food, to find joy in it, and to send that message to her young daughter, and to anyone who stands still long enough for Shauna to preach to them through her words and her food, and that’s one of the things that I adore about her. Sometimes it’s been difficult for her, and sometimes it hasn’t, but she’s never, ever, ever given up hope in her message. My friend and author Erin Scott is all about the beauty and lushness of sharing fresh, gluten free food at the table; her recipes are breathtaking in their simple, remarkable elegance. And so the message among my gluten free friends and colleagues, whoever they are, is invariably the same:

Food is good. Food is home. Food is peace. Slow down. Eat. Be together. Love.

Would that we could all think that way.

So, after traveling 10,000 miles in less than two months, dealing with family crisis after crisis, worrying about my stepmom and my mom and my mom-in-law and Susan, and the two of us lately being like ships that pass in the night, and my deadlines, and my dog, and the fact that my car payment is a day late, I ate the staff of life at a restaurant in Kenmore Square and my throat closed up. A day later, a piece of German sunflower bread spread thickly with avocado and sprinkled with Maldon salt made my eyes swell shut. A day after that, I grabbed a bagel outside my office in New York, and went home sick. I’m not a celiac — I’ve experimented with sourdough bread and long-fermented pizza dough with success — but I do think my body, after so much travel and agita, has waved the white flag. It said stop, so I stopped.

I’m coming back to myself, slowly, and listening a little bit more closely to what my body is telling me: and I believe that all the stress I’ve been under — good and bad — has pitched me ass over elbow and screamed at me to slow the F down. So I’m being careful, and getting a lot of help from wonderful, smart friends like Erin and Shauna, and Shauna’s book, which is never too far away from me at any given time. Reading it and cooking from it — whether I’m probably only mildly gluten sensitive or not; the recipes are so great that one needn’t have a gluten issue to cook from it, it’s that transcendent — just makes me feel good, and joyful.

Ultimately, it was not the possibility of never having pizza again, or never being able to have a slice of garlic-rubbed, grilled country bread,  or a corned beef sandwich on rye at Katz’s, that undid me when I was in the throes of my body freak-out ; it was the thought that my favorite breakfast in the world — buttered toast, stacked high and warm, eaten quietly with cups of tea and coffee and shared at home with the person I love most in the world — was just a sweet memory, how much I’ve missed it, and how very much I need it, gluten or no, especially when the world spins far too fast.

Gluten-Free Biscuits and Sausage Gravy

(Excerpted from Gluten-Free Girl Every Day, © 2013 by Shauna James Ahern and Daniel Ahern. Reproduced by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. All rights reserved.)

© Penny De Los Santos

Gluten-free Biscuits and Sausage Gravy

For years, I looked at photos of perfect biscuits—flaky, with a rise like a skyscraper made of butter and flour—and despaired. How would I ever be able to do that without gluten? My friend Nancie McDermott, a great Southern food writer, put me at ease when she told me this: “You want to know why those biscuits always turned out perfect? Because those girls had to make them every morning for years.” It’s practice that makes great biscuits, not gluten.

This recipe reads long but don’t be intimidated. I just wanted to share everything I have learned the past years so your first attempt if more successful than mine. There are only a few things you need to know: work with everything cold, don’t twirl your biscuit cutter when you cut into the dough, and have fun with this. Even misshapen, lumpy biscuits sure taste good when smothered in sausage gravy.

280 grams All-Purpose Gluten-Free Flour Mix (page 31), plus extra for dusting

1 teaspoon whole or powdered psyllium husks (page 33)

1 tablespoon baking powder

1 1⁄2 teaspoons kosher salt

8 tablespoons (1 stick) cold unsalted butter, plus more for greasing pan

3⁄4 cup buttermilk

1⁄4 cup whole milk yogurt

2 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted

Sausage Gravy (recipe follows), for serving

Combining the dry ingredients. Whisk together the flour, psyllium husks, baking powder, and salt. (I like to put them in the food processor and let it run for a few minutes to aerate the flours. You can also use a whisk and bowl.) Put the dry ingredients in a large mixing bowl. Put the bowl in the freezer.

Cutting the butter. Cut the cold butter into 1⁄2-inch cubes. Put the butter in the freezer too.

Preparing to bake. Preheat the oven to 425°F. Grease a 9-inch cast-iron pan or skillet (we use butter—you might like oil instead).

Mixing the butter and flour. When the oven is fully preheated and been at that temperature for 10 minutes, take the mixing bowl with the dry ingredients out of the freezer. Dump the butter cubes into the flour mixture. If you own a biscuit cutter, use it here to cut the butter into small chunks, roughly the same size as lima beans, as you toss them with the flour. You can also use 2 knives to serve the same purpose. My favorite technique is to use my hands. Put your hands into the flour, palms up. Pick up some butter chunks and gently massage them into the flour, pushing your thumbs forward and your fingers toward your thumbs. Do this, picking up new pieces of butter, until all the butter is the size of lima beans. (If you want fluffier biscuits than flaky, keep going until the entire bowl is filled with coarse crumbs of butter and flour.)

If you’re new at this, try the food processor. (And if you’re going to do that, put the bowl of the food processor in the freezer instead of the mixing bowl.) Put the butter cubes into the bowl of the food processor. Pulse the ingredients together, about 7 times, until the butter chunks are about the size of lima beans. Move the flour mixture to a large bowl.

Adding the liquids. Make a well in the center of the ingredients. Mix together 1⁄3 cup of the buttermilk and the yogurt in the well, then stir the liquids with a rubber spatula, moving in gentle circular motions, incorporating the flour as you go. The final dough should just hold together, with all the ingredients moist. If there is a bit of flour left on the sides of the bowl, add a dribble more of the buttermilk, then combine, then a dribble more if necessary. If the dough grows too wet, don’t fret about it. Just add a bit more flour. You’re looking for a shaggy dough, not a smooth round.

Kneading the biscuits. Sprinkle a little flour on a clean board. Turn out the dough on the board and sprinkle with just a touch more flour. Fold the dough in half, bringing the back part of the dough toward you. Pat the dough into an even round. Turn the dough 90 degrees, then fold the dough in half again and pat. This should make the dough fairly even. If not, you can fold the dough a third time. Pat out the dough to a 1 1⁄2-inch thickness.

Dip a 2 1⁄2-inch biscuit cutter into a bit of flour and push it straight down into the dough, starting from the outside edges. Do not twist the biscuit cutter. Cut out the remaining biscuits. Working quickly, pat any remaining scraps into another 1 1⁄2-inch thick dough and cut the last biscuit.

Move the biscuits to the prepared cast-iron pan, nudging them up against each other. If you nestle the biscuits alongside each other, edges touching, you will have taller biscuits after baking. (They have nowhere to go but up!)

Slide the skillet into the oven and bake the biscuits for 6 minutes. Rotate the skillet 180 degrees and continue baking until the biscuits are firm and light golden brown, about another 6 to 8 minutes. Remove the skillet from the oven and brush the tops of the biscuits with the melted butter. Let them rest for 10 minutes while you make the sausage gravy.

Feeds 4 to 6, depending on how many biscuits you want.

Sausage Gravy

1 teaspoon unsalted butter (you can also use oil, if you prefer)

1⁄2 pound sausage (try the lamb sausage on page 201)

1 1⁄2 cups whole milk (you can try nondairy milks here)

1 1⁄2 to 2 1⁄2 tablespoons sweet rice flour

Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper

Cooking the sausage. Set a large skillet over medium heat and add the butter. When it’s foamy, add the sausage, breaking it up with the spatula so it covers the bottom of the skillet. Cook the sausage, stirring occasionally, until entirely browned, about 10 minutes. Take the sausage out of the pan and put it on a plate. You’ll need it in a moment. (If you’re in a rush, you can also leave the sausage in the skillet and make the roux around it.)

Heating the milk. Set a small pot on medium heat. Pour in the milk. Bring to a gentle simmer, then turn down the heat. Cover the milk to keep it warm.

Making the roux. Take a moment to measure the amount of fat you have left in the pan. (After you’ve made this a few times, you’ll know by sight.) You want a little more flour than fat, maybe by 1 teaspoon. So, if you have 2 tablespoons of fat, put in 21⁄2 tablespoons of sweet rice flour. And if you have more than 2 tablespoons of fat in the pan, take some out. Scatter the flour over the fat.

Whisk the flour and fat together. With gluten-free flour, you won’t make a tight ball of roux, so don’t overcook it trying to get it there. Simply stir and push the roux around the pan, cooking it to a blonde color.

Making the gravy. Pour in 1⁄2 cup of the milk. The roux will now tighten up and form a ball. Don’t worry, that’s what gluten-free roux does. Keep stirring. Add another 1/2 cup of milk and stir, breaking up the ball of roux gently. Add the rest of the milk and whisk it vigorously to break up any lumps. Turn up the heat to medium high and stir constantly until it comes to a boil. Turn down the heat to medium-low and let the gravy simmer, slowly, until it thickens, about 5 minutes.

Finishing the gravy. Add the sausage back into the gravy. Pour in 1⁄4 to 1⁄2 cup of water and stir. (If you only had a tablespoon of fat, use 1⁄4 cup.) Simmer the gravy slowly, allowing the water to blend fully with the gravy, 10 to 15 minutes. This will help to more fully cook the flour and let the taste of the sausage be the strongest. Add salt and pepper to taste. (We like a lot of pepper in our gravy.)

]]> http://www.poormansfeast.com/archives/my-morning-toast.html/feed 26 http://www.poormansfeast.com/archives/my-morning-toast.html http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/PoorMansFeast/~3/qAygHCXLPmQ/home-boston.html http://www.poormansfeast.com/archives/home-boston.html#comments Wed, 17 Apr 2013 23:52:15 +0000 Elissa http://www.poormansfeast.com/?p=5695

It’s so quiet, 

and empty, when he’s left. I feel like a landscape, 

a ground without a figure.

- from Stag’s Leap by Sharon Olds

There’s a certain place in Boston that I can smell from a million miles away. I can see it with my eyes closed; I can feel it with my hands.

Walk north along Arlington Street until you get to Marlborough, where gorgeous 18th and 19th century brownstones line both sides of the road. Make a left onto Marlborough and walk one block west, to Berkeley, to the corner where First Church in Boston has stood since 1868. If the weather is wet, step into the arcade and wait for the rain to pass; if it’s cold, follow the arcade around the corner to the Marlborough Street entrance, and stop in the narthex. Look up. Breathe. Listen to the quiet.

I did this every morning, afternoon, and evening during the late spring and early summer of 1984. I had just finished my junior year at the College of Arts and Sciences at Boston University, and was working as an administrative assistant for a medical practice on Marlborough Street. Sometimes I rode my bike to work along the Charles from my apartment near B.U.’s West Campus; sometimes I took the T. But no matter how I got to my office on Marlborough Street just west of Berkeley, I stopped in First Church‘s arcade for a small rest, and to gather myself for the day. It didn’t matter to me that I am Jewish; it was a place of profound calm and reason, and it gave me comfort.

When I started working in Back Bay, in mid-April of 1984, a month before my friends graduated — most were a year ahead of me — the trees along Marlborough Street had already burst into color; if I stood in exactly the right place in the arcade and the wind picked up a little bit off the river, I could smell the sweetness of the magnolias and the cherry blossoms, and the flowers in the Public Garden a few blocks away. I remember a small sliver of time when I would stand in the church’s arcade and close my eyes, lay my hands flat against the cool brown stone, and inhale beauty and peace. Nothing could touch me; I was safe.

That was the year that I had grudgingly become an adult: I chose to stay in Boston for the summer rather than return home to New York. My friends — the five people I’d met the day I moved in as a freshman — were graduating and leaving, and I was suddenly alone. I had silently, surreptitiously fallen in love for the very first time in my life; no one knew. It was unspoken, uncomfortable, and unrequited; I kept her picture — soft focus, black and white — tucked into the back flap of a leather portfolio where it remains today, living in the depths of my mother’s Manhattan hallway closet, buried in a waxy tan cardboard box marked SCHOOL.

My father moved me in to the studio apartment I’d found on Commonwealth Avenue, upstairs from a long-closed Eastern Mountain Sports. He took me to Beacon Hardware and bought me a set of blue and white Corelle-ware, service for eight; inexpensive, Colonial-style flatware; a few wooden-handled Chicago Cutlery knives (one of which I still have and love); a saucepan, a stock pot, and a saute pan, all Teflon; and a box of twelve, timeless Picardie glasses that he told me made stemmed wine glasses redundant. And then he took me food shopping for what he considered staples suitable for a single girl: a jar of olives, a jar of pickled onions, a bottle of gin, a can of anchovies, a can of sardines, a box of dried spaghetti, a can of tomato sauce, and a dozen eggs.

I’m not sure what he was thinking, other than that he was obviously reliving his bachelor days: after the war, my father worked in Boston for a few years and lived at The Eliot Hotel, where his kitchen consisted of a single hotplate and a refrigerator large enough for a cocktail shaker. On nice days when he came to visit me, we’d stroll down Commonwealth Avenue, past The Harvard Club. We’d stop at The Eliot, where he would peer in and smile, transported to the years of his youth. He’d stand and stare, close his eyes, and remember what being young and carefree felt like.

I learned how to cook for myself that late spring of 1984, in that small apartment, on a Harvest Gold electric stove. The object of my affection — a brilliant Italian cook who had learned at her mother’s knee — had left the city, and was replaced in my life by Julia Child, who I would watch on WGBH re-runs every day, sometimes twice a day. I took notes; I went to Conran’s and bought myself a white, wire pot rack which my father installed on my kitchen wall. On Sunday nights, with Charles Ryder and Sebastian Flyte and their naughtiness high on the catalogue of grave sins blaring in the background on PBS, I developed a signature dish which I made and re-made, over and over again, for myself: veal scallopine stuffed with pancetta and shallots and Gruyere, rolled, tooth-picked, dusted in flour, pan-seared, and braised in dry Marsala mounted with enough sweet butter to clog the Callahan Tunnel. I ate by myself at a shellacked pine trestle table meant for six; it shook like Alvy Singer’s every time the Green Line rumbled past the window and headed west, away from Boston, towards the safety of the suburbs.

When I graduated a year later, I was ready to leave; I was done. I wanted to get out into the world, and to live. I was through with the small, beautiful city where I’d spent four years getting my life bearings, and trying to stand and walk like a toddler. I was done with the reminders, everywhere I turned, of college things, and that old familiar pain, as someone once sang, of someone I loved who didn’t love me back, whose loss compelled me to fill my empty hours with the nearly suicidal richness of intensely overwrought food cooked badly and eaten alone.

Yet all these years later — after working in New York publishing for decades, going to cooking school, working at Dean & Deluca during the craziness of the late 1980s, finding the love of my life, settling down, getting older and watching the people around me get older — returning to Boston warms me; the thought of the city alone wraps itself around me like a blanket. Boston is my True North; my desire to leave was the result of time, not place. And so when my recent book tour — not quite nearing its end — brought me to the Harvard Bookstore for a reading on April 12th, I packed in seconds and left Connecticut far earlier than I needed to. I checked in at the Park Plaza, dropped my bags, and went back out; it was sleeting, and I immediately worried for the runners who would be converging on the city three days later.

Soaked to the skin and freezing, I was pulled like metal to magnet across Arlington Street towards Marlborough, to my little private spot of peace and reason in First Church’s arcade. I closed my eyes and breathed in the smell of spring rain and early dogwood. I laid my hands flat against the cold brown stone, and wept to be home.

Elissa Altman will be reading from Poor Man’s Feast: A Love Story of Comfort, Desire, and the Art of Simple Cooking on Saturday, April 20th, at Wellesley Books at 4 pm; and on Monday, April 22nd at noon at Northeastern University, and at 7 pm at the BU Bookstore. 

Newtown, Connecticut -> New York: 78.6 miles

New York -> Chicago: 790.2 miles

Chicago -> Los Angeles: 2,015.5 miles

Los Angeles -> Santa Barbara: 124.8 miles

Santa Barbara -> Berkeley: 323.5 miles

Berkeley -> San Francisco: 13.8 miles

San Francisco -> Portland: 635.5 miles

Portland -> Seattle: 173 miles

Seattle -> Ann Arbor: 2,303.3 miles

Ann Arbor -> Minneapolis: 648.2 miles

Minneapolis -> Chicago: 408.6 miles

Chicago -> Iowa City: 222.6 miles

Iowa City -> Hartford: 1,098.4 miles

Hartford -> Newtown: 48.4 miles

(8,884.4 miles logged from March 15th through March 30th)

It runs in the family: we travel to learn, to experience, to see, to visit, to eat. After the War was over, my father purposely took a job that would keep him moving around, because he was always looking and searching and walking, like an eternal flaneur. (The reason for this is revealed in the book.) One Sunday afternoon in 1948, he showed up in his Plymouth at my grandparents’ house in Brooklyn, tossed them in the car, and drove them cross country, just like that.

You’re going to live and die in this two bedroom apartment in Coney Island, and never see America, he told them. They couldn’t argue, so off they went. Someplace, I have a picture of them standing in front of the Hoover Dam, looking a little bit surprised. They ended up in California four days later and just in time for the Rose Parade, where my Orthodox cantor grandfather waved at Jane Mansfield riding up high on the backseat of a pink Cadillac convertible. He yelled Hey Janey Baby, and she waved back, or so my father swore.

And this is the kind of thing that happens when you travel; you get sucked out of your mundane day-to-day and into extraordinary circumstances involving extraordinary people living their own mundane lives. Because, like my dad, I love seeing the world in extraordinary circumstance, and meeting some people with whom I would likely otherwise never cross paths, I love to travel. So when my publisher, Chronicle Books, sent me on a long book tour for Poor Man’s Feast, it was thrilling; it was also arduous, but in a good way — the kind of arduous that resulted in my coming back to my hotel room, bone-tired, sitting down in a series of stiff gingham hotel wing chairs, and thinking long and hard about what happens when a stranger with whom (on the face of it)  you share virtually nothing in common comes up to you at a book reading on the other side of the country, and suddenly she’s telling you about her food, and her family, and how the table has been transformative for her. Differences fall by the wayside: she doesn’t care about your color or your religion or your ethnicity or your politics, or even if you’re married to someone of the same sex. The mash-up of food and storytelling, of conviviality and sustenance breaks down barriers and kicks down walls, and for that, I love my job.

I’ve been traveling nonstop since I left Connecticut on March 15th to attend the Edible Institute in Santa Barbara (I know; poor me) — a convocation of Edible Communities publishers, speakers, thinkers, film makers, writers, and pretty much anyone who has dedicated their life to issues of food justice, organics, and sustainability. Logistically-speaking, it was a crazy trip: I left Connecticut early in the morning — it was still pitch black outside — and flew through Chicago and Los Angeles before getting to Santa Barbara that night. Pea-soup fog hugging the Central Coast nearly stranded me with dozens of other travelers, but we made it even though I arrived too late to attend a taco party on the beach with my friend and Edible keynoter, Marion Nestle. Instead, the plane that I was on — it’s interior lights held in place by heavy duty packing tape — touched down, I checked in, and settled myself in at the hotel bar for a meetup with my friends Kurt and Kim Friese, of Edible Iowa River Valley. Attending Edible Institute every year is my balm and my breath; it reminds me, in a world teeming with naysayers and greensheening, how important and difficult the work of sustainability really is, and that we can never look away, not even for a second.

Susan joined me in California the day after I arrived, and when the Institute was over, we drove north to the Bay Area; I kicked off my tour with a reading at the remarkable Omnivore Books, which houses a hand-curated selection of cookbooks and food-related titles so spectacular that I could happily move in. We had lunch with my author, Erin Scott, and her husband Paul, at Burma Superstar in Oakland; the Scotts live in Berkeley with their children, who attended the Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School, where Alice Waters’ Edible Schoolyard was born. (Extraordinary.) We were staying with my dear college friend, Juliana, her lovely partner, David, and their two cats, a bird called Heizel, and a brindle pitbull named Odetta. Juliana was an art major in college; I remember her spending a lot of time stretching canvases. Many years after graduation, she decided to go to veterinary school, which resulted in her practicing in Oakland where she has spent considerable time rehabilitating pit bulls. (Extraordinary.) David is a computer guy who moonlights as a tuba player of great merit. (Also extraordinary.) Before we left, Odetta ate a very expensive bag that Susan had just bought for me to celebrate the publication of my book. Odetta is a pit bull of huge intelligence, but also smug humor: Celebrate the publication of your book? Who cares, you ridiculous human. It’s all about food. 

The day after my Omnivore reading and a great dinner at Contigo, we flew to Portland, where we were picked up by my friend, Diane Morgan, author of Roots and many, many other great cookbooks. Following an (extraordinary) lunch at Pok Pok — I’ve already dreamt about the roast chicken stuffed with lemongrass — we visited Clive, where Diane had recently purchased an (extraordinary) espresso machine requiring a vast amount of knowledge regarding the nuanced act of making a single cup of coffee. The Man With The Glasses who worked there talked gravely about being in the pocket — that place where your coffee is neither bitter nor sour — and it involving pressing A Button on The Espresso Maker and letting water drain out of the machine for 26 seconds (not 25, not 27). Diane took notes. Susan and I considered buying an artisanal espresso tamper made out of sustainably harvested wood, but I was sure it’d put me over my weight limit. Fred and Carrie, if you’re listening: it took a village to make coffee from this machine the next morning, after Susan spent half an hour quietly trying to reattach the basket to the gasket. The coffee was delicious, as was my signing at the mind-blowing Powell’s that night, where a young woman came up to me and asked if I was Harris Wulfson’s Cousin Lissie.

I am, I told her, and I tried not to cry.

Extraordinary.

Over the next week and a half, I visited places I’ve never been to; I finally broke bread with people I’ve only ever spoken to electronically (Tara Austen Weaver, Jill Lightner, Faith Durand), and others I see far too infrequently (Becky Selengut, Shauna Ahern, Barbara Marrett, Stevie Boggess, Amy Feigen Noren). There were some slow nights, and some outright surprises (one lady at the Cooks of Crocus Hill event in Minnesota introduced herself as having stolen a container of green peppercorns from Dean & Deluca while I was working there in 1988), and even some great standing-room-only readings. There were astonishingly good meals both large and small, and a dinner at Delancey with Molly Wizenberg that proved to Susan that the very best pizza in the world is made in a small restaurant in Ballard, by people so completely devoted to simple ingredients and the process that, with the elemental combination of fire and flour/yeast/water/salt, they produce something truly extraordinary.

There were high moments and low: feeling shaky and nearly undone by exhaustion, I craved a steak in Minneapolis and against my better judgement, ordered one at the hotel restaurant. It arrived hanging off the plate, a mammoth Flintstone’s rib-eye cooked expertly (which, let’s face it, is not what you expect from a hotel restaurant); next to me sat two newspaper journalists, one of whom had been just laid off from her job. She drank a chocotini neat, and blamed the depression she simply cannot shake on Newtown, where I live. I thought about introducing myself; instead, I ate half the steak, drank a middling Malbec, and went to bed.

My tour ended where it began: sharing some wine again with Kurt and Kim Friese, who embody the very word extraordinary. Beyond publishing Edible Iowa River Valley, they are the owners of Iowa City’s Devotay (which has been at the epicenter of this small city’s thriving culinary scene for sixteen years) and fixtures at the NewBo City Market in nearby Cedar Rapids. They know absolutely every person remotely involved in the Iowa food and literary communities; when Kurt called to say that the famous Prairie Lights Bookstore wanted me to read there, I levitated. I spent only twenty four hours in Iowa City: it’s not about the baseball, and it’s not about Greg Brown, or even about the writer’s program at the University of Iowa. I’ve learned that, plain and simple, I just love this state for reasons I have trouble explaining.

Somewhere towards the middle of my tour, Iowa Public Radio’s Charity Nebbe and I talked, for the better part of an hour, about Poor Man’s Feast; we talked about food and my father and my childhood, about Susan and her family, and how I came to be transformed by this thing called the plate. And then she talked about the thing that surprisingly hadn’t yet surfaced outright during the many readings and radio interviews I’d given, the thing that people had otherwise danced around: that Poor Man’s Feast was my love story — mine and Susan’s. That it was also the story of a love affair between two mature women, and what did I hope that people might take away from that part of the story.

I stumbled and stammered.

When Charity and I spoke, the DOMA hearings had just started; the issue of same sex marriage was being talked about all over the country by people with vastly differing opinions on it. I live in a state where the fact of who I am isn’t an issue. But, out on book tour, facing hundreds of people I’d never met in American cities I’d never visited, I didn’t know what to expect. Ultimately — surprisingly — it didn’t seem to matter. As Charity said, This isn’t the kind of love story we read often; for most of us, this is the kind of love story we live.

Extraordinary.

And, after nearly 9000 miles on the road, that was the most delicious thing of all.

My cousin Howard, who is a very smart man, sometimes says that: Life unfolds.

At moments when I’m trying to shoehorn my life into going a certain way, I remember that Life unfolds, and that at the end of the day, I have very little control. The best that I can hope for is balance and some level of equanimity. Sometimes it works out that way, and sometimes it doesn’t. You can plan your life to the Nth degree, and even if the gods smile down upon you  and yours at least most of the time, other times they won’t. Don’t get too comfortable, my old friend David Rakoff used to say. Years ago, when we were associate editors together at HarperCollins, I once told him that I thought he always looked worried. After the good comes the bad. After the bad comes the good, he said softly. Sometimes they show up together. You just never know, darling.

A week ago last Thursday, our phone rang at five in the morning. Susan and I were already awake, stumbling around, getting ready to start our day; neither of us is, by nature, a morning person, but when the phone rings in what is technically still the middle of the night and there are plenty of older people in your life, it has the same effect as having a bucket of ice water dumped over your head.

It was Susan’s mom; she was sick. She sounded terrible. She’s 95. She lives alone. We jumped in the car and raced up to northern Connecticut to see her. When we arrived, we found her stretched out on her enormous flowered couch, a brightly colored Afghan pulled up to her chin. She was gray, and complaining of extreme exhaustion, arm pain, queasiness, and back pain. Ten feet away, I could see how hard and fast her heart was beating; next to her, on a tray table, was a china plate with a few half-eaten Saltines. There was a cup of milky coffee. Her next door neighbor had arrived before we got there and thought that maybe a little bit of breakfast would perk her up.

I knew that she’d had a heart attack.

A hair-raising ambulance ride, ten hours in the emergency room, and one overnight stay in the hospital later, Helen went home, and Susan began the torturous process of hiring round-the-clock care for her while simultaneously trying to honor her mother’s wishes. Which include not having any round-the-clock care. You can pretty much guess how that conversation went, and continues to go. And we learned while we were in the emergency room waiting for a bed to become available that my father’s girlfriend, Shirley, had been taken to a hospital in Florida where her sons and daughters-in-law chewed on their fingers while waiting to learn why, exactly, she was having debilitating dizzy spells.

It was all too much. Is too much.

I went home, picked up the dogs and drove back up to Helen’s house, and we stayed for a few days, organizing, arranging, picking up medications, creating a care schedule, and cooking bland, salt-free food. I made a dish I now refer to as Poulet Roti a la Eisenhower, which involved a melange of beige spices that were purchased the same year that the great general moved into the White House with Mamie.

Things stabilized, mostly. Helen has been having eh days, and bad days. There are some caretakers she likes, and others she loathes. The last thing she said to us as we walked out of her house last weekend was Bye-bye now….and don’t take my car keys…

We got home and collapsed. Susan, who hates using the telephone more than I hate going to the dentist, made more care-related calls. I handed her a small glass of Armagnac. I sucked one down and packed us up for work in New York the next day. We got into bed; the alarm went off at 5.

And then we remembered, while we were on the train about twenty minutes before the sun came up: this is a joyous time for us. Poor Man’s Feast comes out on Tuesday. I’m going on an incredible, old-fashioned book tour starting on the 16th, and Susan is coming with me (barring disaster) for the first leg of it. I’m spending all of this week emceeing Organic Gardening‘s culinary stage at the Philadelphia Flower Show; next weekend, we’re supposed to be attending a dual party in Virginia, honoring both my Aunt Thelma’s 95th birthday and my cousin Russell‘s engagement to his beloved, Dawn. Every minute not spent working in New York City or on my book tour or in Philadelphia is being spent in northern Connecticut, making sure that Helen, who is keeping a sharp eye on her car keys, is comfortable and safe. And making sure that Susan can somehow be good to herself, and find peace and calm in the face of the inevitable.

As for me, I’m trying to stay healthy while I support the woman I love, I ready myself for this tour and my publication date, and our families get older. And life unfolds around us.

Duck Confit with French Lentils and Watercress

It’s easy, when life gets crazy and you have no time, to grab bad stuff — even though you know you shouldn’t. That bag of potato chips. The white bread. The processed cheese singles in your mother-in-law’s refrigerator that will help you stave off your crashing sugar. At times like this, you don’t want anything heavy; you want bombs of flavor and texture and protein that happen fast, that you can put together without thinking or fussing. I’m not a great believer in buying prepared food of any kind, but I’ve found that it’s nice to always have a few packages of D’Artagnan duck confit in the refrigerator; the quality is super high, and while it’s very easy to confit legs and thighs yourself (go here for Paul Grimes’ wonderful step-by-step video), sometimes you just want to be able to get a delicious small meal on the table quickly. Let the duck legs come to room temperature while you prepare the lentils and clean the greens; I love to use watercress here because the peppery bite cuts through the richness of the duck and lentils, but you can also use baby arugula if it’s available. If there are leftovers of both lentils and meat (there probably won’t be), pull the duck meat off the bone, fold into the lentils, and serve the next day on frisee drizzled with a light vinaigrette. If all you have left are the lentils, reheat them in a stick proof skillet and top them with a poached or lightly fried egg, drizzled with a drop of warm (not hot) red wine vinegar.

Serves 2 with leftovers

2 confit duck legs and thighs, prepared

1/2 cup diced smoked bacon (the best quality you can find, and the meatier the better)

1/2 cup minced shallots

1/2 cup diced carrots

1/2 cup diced celery

1 cup dry red wine

2 cups French lentils

6 cups chicken stock

2 tbsp. fresh thyme leaves (or 1 tbsp. dry)

1/2 cup chopped tomatoes

1 tsp. unsalted butter (optional)

Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste

as much or as little fresh watercress as you’d like

Place the duck legs on a plate, drape loosely with foil, and let come to room temperature while you make the lentils.

Put the bacon in a room temperature medium Dutch oven over medium heat, and cook the bacon until crisp; if it renders too much fat, carefully wipe some of it out using long tongs and a paper towel. Add the shallots, carrots, and celery to the pan and when the shallots go translucent — about 5 minutes — pour in the wine. Simmer uncovered until all of the liquid evaporates, about 15 minutes.

Fold the lentils into the pan, give them a stir, and pour in the stock. Add the thyme, and simmer uncovered for approximately 35 minutes, until the lentils are tender but not mushy. Remove from heat and stir in the tomatoes and optional butter. Taste for seasoning, and set aside.

Place the duck legs and thighs skin-side down in a large, dry heavyweight skillet, preferably cast iron set over medium heat. Cook without moving the pieces, until much of the duck fat renders out into the pan, about 10 to 15 minutes. Turn them over and continue to cook for another 6 to 8 minutes. Serve immediately.

Now that I’m closing in on the publication date of Poor Man’s Feast (March 5th…good heavens), I’m also talking to a lot of people who want to know (usually in a snapshot of just a couple of seconds!) what, exactly, the book is about. It’s not easy to distill two years of writing, a year of editing, and a lifetime of taking notes (both mental and not) into the blink of an eye, and so I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this story — what this story is, who and what it’s about — and the best that I can manage to come up with is this: it’s about growing up at odds with the concept of simplicity in all its meanings and measures — but certainly gastronomically — and being transformed by compassion, hunger, and love.

My beloved dad, who I wrote about long before I lost him in 2002 (and copiously since) was, for many years, a very big believer in the power of fancy: fancy stuff, fancy life, fancy food. It’s probably in part what brought my parents together, since my mother believed in it too, and to a large degree still does. Every Saturday morning when I was a child, my mother would go out to the beauty parlor to have a touch-up, and my father would squirrel me away for a secret, fancy lunch someplace in Manhattan, just the two of us.

I mean fancy fancy, like Cote Basque fancy. Or, early on, Le Pavillon. There was one place on West 46th Street that had upholstered pink silk dupioni walls. Weird fancy.

It wasn’t always a great idea, necessarily: it was the early 1970s. Business wasn’t good anywhere. But it was important to him nonetheless, and I looked forward to our clandestine lunches with a certain amount of yearning. Not at all in a Nabokovian way, mind you. It’s just that when a young girl is spirited away for secret lunches with her dad that wind up being one part education (he mysteriously knew the names of all the mother sauces, and what turned an Espagnole into a Bordelaise. Why did he know this? I still have no idea.), one part undivided attention, and one part covert operation (my mother was never supposed to know that we were luxuriating over gigantic French calorie bombs while she was out having her color done), the world for her is suddenly perfect, even if it’s not.

Years later, after the divorce, he met the love of his life, Shirley, who was and remains a staunch believer in the complete opposite of fancy: getting past and beneath the pretty and safe surface of things (which makes sense; she’s a shrink) she finds little value in ornament, psychic or otherwise. The (mostly vegetarian) food that she eats is often plain, but simple, and good. That was how she cooked for him — and the way she still thinks about things generally speaking —  and in the twenty years they were together he became happier and healthier than he’d ever been before, thanks to her: his life had become simple, and with that simplicity came a hard-won peace. The fancy stuff was still there from time to time, but only when appropriate. He knew he was loved — fancy or not — and so his life and what he chose to surround himself with, ultimately, was simple. And that included the unfettered, quiet food that he came to love.

My story runs parallel to my father’s; it took me years — thirty-six of them — to find the person who would become my spouse. When we met, I was fancy; she was not. I cooked annoyingly twee and tall food that I tortured into noisy verticality whenever I could; my prized possessions included eight timbale molds and a kitchen blowtorch. Susan made perfect poached eggs and served them to me on white toast. The first time she did it, I watched with rapt attention: she didn’t use any of the contraptions that stores sell for poaching — you know, the little silver egg trays that look like tiny soap dishes, that you’re supposed to lower into the simmering water, or the special pot with the separate egg compartments, or those little green silicon egg cups. She used a battered Revere pot, an egg, and the back-end of a wooden spoon. It’s almost fourteen years later, and the way I think about food and life — what’s important, what’s not, and why comfort and simplicity are the best revenge and can often be found in the most unexpected of places — has changed forever, and it’s largely because of Susan, her quietness of spirit, and the way she deals with the world around her. Including me.

But the funny thing is that the concepts of simple and peaceful have recently become seriously commodified: look all over Pinterest, and you’ll see ostensible simplicity everywhere— spaces shoehorned into bare-bones minimalism, and painted in monochromatic palettes. A crop of new, wonderful print (imagine that!) magazines — I’m totally hooked on this one and this one and this one — are laden with gorgeous, de-saturated photography promising calm and serenity. Basic, elemental dishes — beautiful heirloom beans drizzled with a bit of really good olive oil — served in chipped coffee bowls, are ubiquitous. And they’re a pleasure to see; they accurately represent the way we cook in our home. Still, I sometimes worry that commodified simplicity will become fetish, and ultimately an over-stressed trend. I’m not sure what I can do about that. Trends evolve, but one thing is for sure: it says a lot that so many of us aspire, long and hard, for peace and placidity in our lives.

As for us, all we can do is keep it real in our house, and in our kitchen. And that’s what Poor Man’s Feast is about, ultimately.

A few weeks ago, a formerly very fancy, newly single friend called me to discuss an ingredient emblematic of simple, real food: the dried bean. She was finally beginning to appreciate the loveliness in a bowl of beans with a little olive oil, but had never made them for herself. She had a bag of them sitting on her kitchen counter. Should she soak them, or not. If so, should she do it at room temperature or in the fridge. Could she freeze them after she soaked them, or after she cooked them? Could she freeze them in their liquid, or not? Should she add an onion, or shouldn’t she. How about a bay leaf? Would a pressure cooker be better than a slow soak? She’d read something about the way Italians cook them in a glass bottle buried in the glowing embers of a fireplace. Where would she find embers? Someone once told her that adding salt would make them tough. She sighed heavily.

She sounded weepy, and completely exhausted. She was undone by these beans.

Listening to her, I realized that in the furious struggle to de-fancify her life, she was doing the exact opposite: she was succumbing to the noise. The fancy still had its grip on her.

Maybe, I said, you just haven’t met the right guy yet. 

 Erin Scott’s Simple Pleasure of a Pot of Beans

(adapted from Yummy Supper)

One of the fringe benefits of being a cookbook editor is that I get to be surrounded by remarkable recipes pretty much all the time. Most of them are very good, but some of them are complete game-changers, like Erin Scott’s beans. This recipe, which arrived as part of Erin’s manuscript for her upcoming Yummy Supper: 100 Fresh, Luscious, and Honest Recipes from a {Gluten-Free} Omnivore resulted in beans that were gorgeously creamy and flavorful; the addition of smoked salt is totally inspired. Make sure you use the best dried beans you can find; I prefer Rancho Gordo‘s Good Mother Stallard beans. Thanks, Erin!

1 pound dried beans

1 head garlic, cloves separated and peeled

1 dry bay leaf, or 1/2 teaspoon dried epazote

1 tablespoon smoked sea salt

Place dried beans in a medium saucepan, cover with cold tap water, add the lid, and let the beans soak overnight. (I soaked them unrefrigerated.)

When you’re ready to cook the next day, make sure that your beans are covered by at least 2 inches of water; there’s no need to drain the soaking water if it still looks clear—just pour in a little more if necessary. Bring the liquid to a boil, then turn the heat down to maintain a nice simmer. Skim off any foam that forms on the surface; once the foam subsides, add the garlic, bay leaf or epazote, and smoked salt. Partially cover the pot, and simmer until creamy and tender (but not mushy).

Serve them:

Warm, drizzled with olive oil and black pepper

Topped with a poached egg

Turned into a gratin dish with a couple of sausages, topped with breadcrumbs, and cooked until golden (aka Fake Cassoulet)

With the exception of Zach, my lovely cousin-by-marriage, we are not football people in my family. Zach is a Wisconsin-born, prominent Ann Arbor neurologist and you know how that goes: Packers and Blue paraphernalia everywhere. Don’t get me started on the foam cheese heads. Zach and his wife, my cousin Lauren, came to Thanksgiving one year at Lauren’s parents’ house in Virginia, and a little while before dinner, he dragged us all outside to the street to toss around a football that seemed to materialize out of thin air. We ran around in circles, like crazy people, trying to intercept each other, dropping the ball, and generally tripping over ourselves. I tried to get the pigskin away from Susan, who was on my team, and then I ran into the side of my cousin Bob’s BMW.

My father used to tell jokes about Jewish football players and Jewish hockey players and Jewish downhill skiers. And so I don’t ever recall watching one Superbowl as a child; it just wasn’t on our wavelength. While I knew that Joe Namath was purported to wear pantyhose to stay warm on the field, I couldn’t possibly tell you what a first down was anymore than I could speak to you in Swahili. Even now.

First down! someone announces, and then everyone yells YAY. So I’m assuming it’s a good thing.

When I was in college, I twice attended Superbowl parties at the sprawling Upper Fifth Avenue apartment of a man called Herman, who was one of my stepfather’s friends. Herman was a hard-drinking garment center kind of guy who looked like Finster Baby, and had worked his way up the ladder; his incongruous girlfriend, called Bunny, was tall and thin and wore frosted Palm Beach pink lipstick and her stick straight silver hair pulled back in a George tied with a ribbon of black velvet. Long before the coin toss, Herman and his man friends would repair to the bedroom and get polluted on the pitchers of Blood Marys he begged me to make for them (the only cocktail I knew how to assemble, and I did it well, even at eighteen) while watching the pre-game show on a small Sony Trinitron; Bunny and her friends and my mother and I stayed in the living room, drinking white wine spritzers and singing show tunes around her black Steinway baby grand. We nibbled on macadamia nuts and orangettes and dainty finger sandwiches; the guys ate individual, gargantuan turkey legs ordered from a nearby deli while sprawled on Herman and Bunny’s white Italian enamel California king, which Bunny had thoughtfully covered earlier in the day with a clear plastic dropcloth. Every once in a while, Herman would stumble out of the bedroom, hand me the empty pitcher, and growl MAW BWOODY MARWYS BABY…

And that was pretty much the extent of my formative Superbowl experience.

I still don’t quite understand the whole thing; I know that if the Giants are playing, I’m supposed to be happy. I know that I’m supposed to watch the spectacular soft drink ads because the media buys are something like $8 million dollars for a 30-second spot, but they invariably irritate me because I loathe Big Soda and everything it touches. Still, I love — I mean really love — going to our neighbor’s big Superbowl bash every year because it’s the one time every winter where I throw caution to the culinary wind and eat what can be simply defined as Superbowl Food. Translation: if you put a tray of pigs in blankets in front of me, I will inhale them like a Hoover. One year, I stood around my neighbor’s heavily laden dining room table while the game blared on the giant television set across the room, and ate six of them in one go before I realized what I’d done. I felt such shame; nobody noticed. They were too busy shouting YAY when the man in the black and white shirt said FIRST DOWN.

Last year, Susan and I decided to make a few healthy options. We put them out on the big food table at the party. No one went near them. The healthiest people on the street didn’t even go near them. Instead, everyone gorged on wings and cocktail wieners and chips and salsa. Even we didn’t eat the healthy stuff, which we wound up carrying back to our house, untouched.

This year, our neighbors decided not to have a Superbowl party tonight — the season has just been too busy and crazy and fraught for everyone. This morning, I finally admitted to Susan that I did not know what FIRST DOWN meant, and she actually didn’t believe me. She explained it; I told her that I’ve gone through my entire adulthood thinking that the two opposing teams just tried to make touch downs endlessly, until either they reached the end zone or their ball was intercepted and everything started all over again.

Not so much, she said.

Do you have any interest in watching? I asked.

Not so much, she admitted. And we agreed: as non-football people, the only reason to ever watch the Superbowl is to be with friends and eat pigs in blankets, exactly once a year.

Still, this year — even without the party — we have to tune in for at least a portion of the game: the children from our local Sandy Hook Elementary School, including our friend Curtis’s lovely little girl, are singing America the Beautiful. So it would have been wrong not to prepare something at least a little bit Superbowlish. Tonight, I’m oven-smoking the ribs that came from the local pig we split this year with Mark Scarbrough and Bruce Weinstein. Both grills are covered with snow, so we’ll see how this goes, and how often I’ll have to whack the smoke detector with a broom handle while the man in the black and white shirt says FIRST DOWN and Susan says YAY.

 Spicy Dry Steam-Smoked Pork Belly Ribs

From Edible Dallas & Fort Worth: The Cookbook

copyright Carole Topalian, 2012. Image used by permission. 

Last year, I had the honor of working closely with two dear friends of mine, Tracey Ryder and Carole Topalian — the founders, CEO, and president of Edible Communities  — to produce a series of regional cookbooks representing the remarkable publications Edible Brooklyn, Edible Seattle, Edible Dallas Fort Worth, and Edible Twin Cities. Not only did I come away with a passel of new food pals all over the country (meaning you, Jill, Angelo, Rachel, and Terri) I had the pleasure of contributing my pork rib recipe to the Edible Dallas & Fort Worth: The Cookbook, which was a huge distinction, considering I am a Jew from New York who has never set foot in the Lone Star State (or, as my Texan friends like to say, I’m all hat and no cow). This method — you massage the ribs with an incendiary, smokey rub, then wood-smoke them, steam them, and finish them on the grill — yields meat that is dense yet tender; any leftovers can be pulled off the bone and folded into rice and beans, or tucked into a corn tortilla. My beverage of choice with these ribs is a crisp cold wheat beer, or a very dry Cava.

Note: This recipe calls for pork belly ribs, but I’ve also made them with country ribs, St. Louis-style ribs, and baby backs. If the rub seems is too spicy, reduce the amount of cayenne by half.

Serves 4

For the dry rub

1/4 cup Turbinado sugar

2 tablespoons dry mustard

1/2 cup sweet pimenton

1/4 cup garlic powder

1/4 cup finely ground sea salt

1/4 cup cumin seeds, toasted and ground

1 tablespoon ground Szechuan peppercorn

1 tablespoon finely ground black pepper

1/4 cup ancho chili powder

2 tablespoon cayenne

For the ribs

8 pork belly ribs, or 1 rack

Special tools

Hickory wood chips

Smoker

Roasting pan with rack

Make the dry rub by placing the sugar, mustard, pimenton, garlic powder, sea salt, ground cumin, ground Szechuan peppercorn, black pepper, chili powder, and cayenne in a large metal bowl. Wearing rubber gloves, toss everything well with your hands.

Place the ribs in a glass baking dish — a lasagna dish is perfect — and using your hands, massage the rub into the meat on all sides. Don’t hesitate to go overboard. Cover the dish with plastic wrap and refrigerate for 24 hours. (Any extra dry rub can be stored in an airtight jar in your pantry for up to 4 months.)

Remove the ribs from the refrigerator, loosen the plastic wrap, and let them come to room temperature. Meanwhile, soak 6 cups of good-quality hickory chips in water for at least an hour.

If your smoker box is attached to your grill, turn it to medium and add about a cup of the smoked wood chips. Turn the left-most burner to medium and place the ribs on the grill grate over indirect heat. Close the grill lid and maintain the grill at a steady temperature of about 275 degrees to 300 degrees F for 1 hour.

After an hour, add another cup of the soaked wood chips to the smoker and continue to cook the ribs for another hour. If the wood chips seem to be burning too quickly, turn the temperature of the smoker down a bit. Continue to add chips for another 3 hours, turning the ribs after 1-1/2 hours on the grill.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Transfer the ribs to a platter and let them come to room temperature. Place a rack in a small metal roasting pan and fill the pan a quarter of the way with water. Place the ribs on the rack, cover tightly with foil, and place in the oven to steam for 30 minutes.

Remove the ribs from the oven and place them back on the grill over medium heat for another 30 minutes, turning them frequently. Serve warm, with bowls of your favorite sweet sauce on the side — and a lot of napkins.

It’s been a while since I’ve written, and I could come up with every excuse in the book: I’m getting ready for an extensive Poor Man’s Feast book signing tour in March and April (dates to come; I’m starting out west in some of my favorite spots in the world, and I hope to see many of you and have the chance to thank you for reading in person); my day job as an editor has gotten very busy; I’m writing a new book (more on that later; it’s a bit surprising although not in a Fifty Shades way); I had the flu; Susan had the flu; now my mother has the flu. All of these excuses are valid, certainly. Still, I feel like my Life, cap L, has started to run amok, like it’s a separate, stand-alone entity with a mind and Filofax all its own. This is what happens, I guess, when you don’t pay attention to the immediate life, small L, that is your existence; instead, you get sucked into a vortex that keeps you spinning like a Dervish and struggling to keep your head above water until you pass out in bed each night and wake up the next morning to start all over again. Rinse, repeat.

I’ve been reading a lot lately about something called shenpa, which translates more or less to “attachment.” Pema Chodron explains it more accurately as “getting hooked.” It’s a sticky feeling, she says; for me, it’s that old familiar grind that I get in the pit of my stomach that churns and growls when someone says something mean or outrageous to me, even if I know deep down that it’s their mishegas that’s causing them to say it, as opposed to my own (and believe me, I have plenty). I want to fix them, or help them, or just make things right, dammit, and I lay awake nights, worrying, propelled by a kind of psychic adrenalin rush. Shenpa is an unspecific compulsion, and therefore can be relatable to anything; it’s like not being able to scratch an itch, or not being able to refuse a drink if you’re an alcoholic, or not being able to keep yourself from getting engaged and sucked-in. You take the bait, whatever that bait is, and you’re off and running. Shenpa is a taxing, raging, unforgiving beast: it’s the devil on your shoulder. It’s like running a marathon while chained to a boulder. Forget about your day job — if you’re stuck in a shenpa-driven cyclone, there aren’t enough hours; there isn’t enough energy coursing through your veins. Best to step off the track, to pause, to breathe.

I know when shenpa has me by the throat by the way I cook, and the way I interact with Susan. My brain goes elsewhere; I go through the motions. Standing at the stove, I get distracted by something; suddenly, I absolutely have to check my Facebook page, or my Twitter feed, or my email to make sure that that person I’m engaged with in a psycho-emotional digital drama hasn’t responded, because then I have to respond. I’m making dinner for us, and those gorgeous pork chops (from the local spotted pig we had raised and slaughtered for us, and for which we had to purchase an expensive upright freezer)  that are sitting in the blazingly hot, 1932 Griswold skillet we inherited from Sue’s Aunt Ethel cook for a split second longer than they should because I wasn’t present in either mind or body. Shoe leather. Very expensive, artisanal, locally-raised, hormone-free shoe leather. Susan has lit the candles and set the dinner table with our pearl-handled Laguiole steak knives, which can’t even saw through the meat. She smiles and touches my hand and tells me it’s really okay. Honoring the pig and all that? Yeah. I’d really like to, I think to myself, but I can’t right now.

Shenpa, you crazy bastard, how are the kids?

Thirteen years ago this weekend, Susan and I went out on our first date; we found each other on-line and corresponded for three solid months before meeting, which contradicts Timothy Egan’s assertion in his recent New York Times blog post, The Hoax of Digital Life, that on-line dating is “only the start of what led us down the road” of “commitment-free, surface-only living.” We were both proceeding cautiously: my last serious relationship — with a highly conflicted physician — had ended disastrously ten years earlier. Susan’s, also disastrous, had come to an end more recently. And while all of the people I met on line (unlike Manti Te’o‘s poor deleted girlfriend ) actually existed, they were not without their issues: one was married (to a man) with three children. Another chained her ancient Bichon to her radiator every night — just out of reach of her water bowl —to keep it from wandering around her apartment and peeing on her couch. Another was looking, she told me, for just a plutonic relationship. And then, there was Susan.

She was simultaneously shy and hilariously funny. She had a large dog — a Curly Coated Retriever named Macgillicuddy — with whom she shared her breakfast tea (lightly sweetened, with milk) and who, when she shook her head, would launch long strands of drool onto anything or anyone that happened to be nearby. Susan read Jane Kenyon and Donald Hall and M.F.K. Fisher, and kept an ancient, threadbare copy of Larousse Gastronomique on her nightstand. She had been a charter subscriber to Saveur, and remembered that Peggy Knickerbocker had written the article about the Old Stoves of North Beach. She loved stinky cheese, and simple food. She was in publishing, like me; we had mutual friends who never thought to introduce us. Eventually, we discovered that we had seen each other before — in 1986 — on a softball field (where else?) in Central Park, where my team (Avon Books) was being trounced by her team (Dell Books), and I had laughed at her because she was wearing bright red Sally Jesse Raphael glasses and matching knee braces.

It was a bitterly cold Saturday afternoon in 2000 when Susan and I finally met, at the Paley Center for Media in Manhattan; we sat through episode after episode of very early I Love Lucys — the ones with the Philip Morris ads — and had dinner that night at Titou, in Greenwich Village. Over cassoulet and duck confit and wine, we discovered our mutual fanaticism for roots music — we loved Hazel and Alice, and Emmylou Harris, and Ralph Stanley. She discovered that I hated beets; I learned that she hated cilantro although she adored Vietnamese food, which I found peculiar. And when we met the next morning for brunch at Christine’s Polish Kitchen in the East Village, we sat for four hours over plates of kielbasa and pierogi and eggs.

I can tell you what she was wearing (dark blue cable knit sweater). I can tell you the exact color of her eyes (green). I can tell you that we developed a sort of tunnel vision that morning; we couldn’t hear anything or anyone else around us, and when Svetlana, our nice Polish waitress with the white blonde braids asked us if we wanted more coffee, she had to repeat herself twelve times before we heard her. And I can tell you that when Susan noticed a tiny, quarter-inch long scar at the base of my right middle finger (the result of a freak accident when I was in sixth grade), I was done for.

Cooking for someone you love — planning what to make; shopping; standing in the kitchen and mincing and dicing and chopping with focus and undivided energy and attention — this is the very opposite of shenpa; it’s a presence of life and brain and heart that nothing can disrupt — not Facebook, not Twitter, not email, not some weird psychic energy suck that threatens to ensnare your mind and refocus your attention on things that don’t really exist. After that brunch, I knew that I wanted to cook for Susan and Susan alone, every day, and every night. I wanted to cook well, with love, and attention. And the following weekend, I did. I have, ever since.

Mostly.

We started thinking about it months ago. Late October, maybe.

By the time we’d sent out invitations, we were looking at a small New Year’s Eve brunch party.

For fifty people.

Our house isn’t very big, so I don’t know what we were thinking. But we just kept saying oh, but what about so-and-so, and so-and-so. Out of those fifty people, there were going to be a lot of little kids. And five dogs, including Molly O’Neill’s two Bearded Collies and Mark Scarbrough and Bruce Weinstein‘s large Lassie-type Collie who, when he was here last, couldn’t figure out if Charlotte-the-Cat was something to play with and then chew on, or just chew on.

Round about December 17th, as the year came barreling to a close amidst unspeakable tragedy in my town, thoughts of going over the fiscal cliff, editing a cookbook, writing another book and planning my tour for Poor Man’s Feast, I woke up with a scratchy throat. Two days later, I was running a high fever. Unfortunately, the nice-if-slightly-obtuse folks at my local walk-in weren’t quite convinced that 103 was high enough to give me the Tamiflu that probably would have shortened the duration of what was clearly the flu. I never finished my Christmas shopping and instead stayed in bed for a few days groaning — Susan poured cup after cup of tea down my throat and draped me with cold compresses that sizzled when they hit my skin; and then I made the executive and slightly delusional decision that I was somehow well enough to attend Christmas dinner at Susan’s cousin’s house in northern Connecticut. A few days after that, still coughing my head off, we drove down to New Jersey to attend the funeral of one of my mom’s cousins; moments after we picked her up and I started coughing, my mother began to rummage around in the velvet-lined pocket of her thirty-year-old sable jacket — the same one she wore the night she met Craig Claiborne at the Dean & Deluca opening party. It’s entirely possible that the vintage Halls cough drop she extracted from her pocket as we headed into the Lincoln Tunnel also attended the Dean & Deluca party that night in 1988, when Mr. Claiborne dragged her over to the meat case to look at the lamb chops and she had no idea who he was or what they were looking at or why.

“Just take this cough drop,” she implored, waving it around. “You’ll feel SO much better.”

“It’s covered in fuzz–” I hacked.

“So I’ll wipe it off–” she answered, rubbing at it with her gloved hand.

“I don’t want it—” I coughed.

“They’re very good you know—Halls is a very good brand,” she insisted.

“I don’t want it–” I shouted, hoarsely. Susan kicked the back of my seat a little.

“But you’ll like it–” she whined.

“But I DON’T. WANT. IT.” I coughed some more.

My mother stuck her fingers in her ears, pouted, and put the Halls back in her pocket until we were in the car again, headed home after the funeral. For three solid hours we sat in a traffic jam so bad that we traveled only fifty feet, while my mother continued to extol the virtues of this furry grail-like cough-suppressing talisman that for all its cultural ubiquity might as well have emerged from her pocket adhered to a Sweet ‘n’ Low packet stolen from the table during a pre-Studio 54 dinner at Artie’s Warehouse in 1986, making it two years old by the time it arrived at the Dean & Deluca party. After dropping my mother and her sucking candy off at her apartment on the Upper West Side, Susan and I drove back to Connecticut, stopped for mediocre take-out Chinese food, and got home after ten.

My head ached; my skin hurt to the touch. My body was clearly not very amused. I got into bed, certain that I would be in fine form for the New Year’s Day party for fifty that was in my near future.

But I was not. And a day later, Susan started to cough and run a fever.

These things happen, of course, especially when you’re a swirling mass of grief-stricken exhaustion who has been overcome by general year-end hysteria manifesting itself as a race to the finish line while your immune system guffaws in your face. I have a long and weird history of getting sick after experiencing tragedy, but it was generally never followed by a party for fifty.

“We have to cancel,” I said to Susan, who was also now flat on her back and sick as a dog.

“We can’t.”

“Don’t be such a Yankee. You think these people are going to want to spend New Years’ Day in a petri dish? We can barely stand up–”

“We can’t cancel,” she insisted. But a day later, lying in bed and groaning along with me, Susan agreed: we had to call the party off. Still coughing and fluish, I started calling and emailing.  (And naturally, the one person who didn’t check her email showed up, bless her heart, marching down the driveway wondering why there were no other cars around.)

So, the party called off, we wheezed a sign of relief, slunk back to bed, and then realized that we had the following sitting in the fridge and pantry, just waiting for a plan:

a two-rib, five-pound, dry-aged standing rib roast for New Years’ Eve with our best friends (they were sick too);

three dozen eggs for deviled eggs for fifty;

five pounds of dried black beans for Deborah Madison‘s famous black bean soup;

seven pounds — two whole sides — of fresh salmon for the Gravlax I was planning on curing;

two pounds of English cheddar for vats of pimiento cheese we were planning on strategically placing in opposite corners of the house during the party, with boxes of their attendant Club Crackers.

Laying there wondering when everything (but the dried beans) was going to spoil and how many hundreds of dollars worth of food (that not even my  neighbors would want; they can hear us cough through the window) we were going to lose, I got a good case of what my grandmother used to call shpilkes. So I got up and started to cook, in fits and starts. Mostly fits.

“Make the rib roast,” Susan yelled from the bedroom, “and you can make a miroton. We have tomatoes and onions.” So I did.

“You could make the Gravlax from one of the sides of salmon and parcel it out to our neighbors once it’s cured, and just poach the other side of salmon,” she said. “And we can just sort of pick at it for a few days.” So I did.

“You could make the pimiento cheese,” she said. “—maybe just a small batch, and then make rarebit from the rest of the cheddar?” Her voice went up, like a little girl’s. It doesn’t matter how sick Susan is; she is ever hopeful if there’s pimiento cheese in the house, even if dairy is the last thing that anyone with the flu really needs.

By New Year’s Day, we had by-passed what I called “primary dishes” all those years ago in my first book — the celebratory things you’re supposed to make from celebratory ingredients, like standing rib from a standing rib, or poached salmon from a side of salmon, decorated with little slices of cucumber for the gills — and went straight to the secondary dishes, like miroton, that you’re supposed to make from leftovers. And although Susan couldn’t taste a thing — as of this writing she still can’t — it was her suggestion for what to do with some of the poached salmon and the container of take-out white rice left over from a few nights earlier that eased us into New Years’ morning, and 2013: she asked me to make kedgeree, without the curry or the currants or the egg, which of course makes it not real kedgeree. But neither of us cared. I made it Asian-style, drizzled with a little sesame oil and kimchi furikake, and we sat at the dining room table with cups of strong black tea, staring out at the snowy New Year, hoping for peace and health in 2013. And then we went back to bed.

It’s been a mind-boggling seventeen days since I first got the flu, before Christmas. And I’m still not there yet, still working in fits and starts, still hobbling around my house in my pajamas, like Walter Matthau in The Sunshine Boys. My mother is also still haranguing me about her Halls, as though all anyone needs to set themselves on a straight course to good health is a precious vintage cough drop, coated with a rime of disco-era lint, time, and a few stray strands of fur. Her unflagging belief in the power of marketing over science marches on, as ever.

As for us, we’re planning on revisiting the party sometime in February; planning is all we can do.

Asian Salmon Kedgeree with Peas

 A dish dating back to well before the days of the British Raj, this combination of rice, leftover flaked fish, curry, and hard-cooked eggs is, for most Americans, counterintuitive. In fact, it’s absolutely delicious, comforting and easy to put together, and should you somehow find yourself filthy with fish (especially strong-flavored flakey fish, smoked or not — but smoked bluefish, trout, salmon, and haddock work really well here), it’s a great way to use up at least some of it. This dish can easily be doubled and tripled, if you suddenly find yourself with visitors.

Note: Furikake is a Japanese rice seasoning; the Kimchi version, made from dried kimchi (Chinese cabbage, chiles, shallots, onions, ginger, garlic, chives, carrots, radish, apple, rice flour), sesame seeds, turnip greens, wasabi, and seaweed, provides a nice bit of texture and a hit of strong flavor to the Kedgeree. We love it on almost everything rice-related.

Serves 2

1 tablespoon grapeseed oil

2 scallions, white part only, chopped

1 teaspoon grated fresh ginger

2 cups cooked white rice

8 ounces cooked salmon, flaked

3/4 cup peas, frozen or fresh

1 tablespoon tamari

roasted sesame oil, for drizzling

Kimchi Furikake rice seasoning, to taste

Heat the grapeseed oil in a large stickproof skillet over medium heat until it ripples, and then add the scallions and ginger, cooking until soft, about five minutes. Add the rice to the pan and stir constantly until heated through; add the fish, peas, tamari, and sesame oil, and reduce the heat to medium low. Continue to cook for three to five minutes, until the flavors have melded. Spoon into heated bowls and sprinkle with the furikake. Serve immediately.