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Tea and cookies

My happiest moments in San Francisco were spent lying alongside RC in her cozy bed, dozy from her Vicodin, watching tv like invalids. We watched The Office and The Sopranos. We also watched a French movie that tracked the course of a terrible marriage backwards, from divorce to first meeting.

Neither of us could understand what the couple’s marriage was supposed to have been founded on in the first place: deep compatibility? Pure animal lust?  Love? Love wasn’t telegraphed in this movie the way it is in American movies, with wide-eyed staring, breathy whispers and smiles. Maybe the couple was in love and I just have no idea what that’s supposed to look like anymore.

We walked around in Golden Gate Park which, like a lot of other things about San Francisco, is incredibly pretty in the abstract, but grimy and depressing up close.  We walked along a lush forest path, everything extra green and enlivened by the soaking rain that had fallen nonstop for the first two days of my visit.

(Also it was very windy and cold and no one has heat in their houses, I feel obligated to point out!)

Anyway we walked  along, smelling the eucalyptus and pine, avoiding eye contact with the grimy people who live in the park (”It’s like an outdoor music festival with no music,” RC had explained earlier).  We started talking about how she thinks her exboyfriend never loved her. I eventually got her to amend this to: He never loved her, based on her definition of “love.” From what I know about them, this seems accurate. She said she wished she’d never gotten back together after the first time they broke up.

And I remembered, for the first time in a long time, about how, a couple months into our so-intense-so-fast relationship (I’ll never be that young and trusting again!), William had freaked out and tried to break up with me and I hadn’t let him.

I sat on his lap in the kitchen and deployed the biggest weapon in my arsenal. It was the only weapon in my arsenal, actually.  Also it had only just then occured to me. I asked him to imagine me with someone else and, because he couldn’t imagine that, he stayed with me. I wonder whether it should have ended then. I wonder what the past six years of my life would’ve been like.

RC’s relationship totally should have ended the first time it ended, right? Or maybe there’s a purpose to everything she’s suffered since. Does all suffering have to have a purpose? Does any suffering ever have a purpose?

Anyway later we went to a teahouse that had at least forty floridly described varieties of tea on its menu. One had been specially blended for the Dalai Lama. Another was described as being somehow like the thundering hooves of a herd of majestic stallions.

San Francisco!

RC sat across from me, dipping green tea cookies into her $6 chai. “I wonder if I’ll ever date anyone again,” she mused.

I got ready to launch into “Don’t be ridiculous, of course you will, and sooner than you think,” but it was late in my visit and each of us had given the other one so many hollow pep talks by then, all the words had been said so I stopped a few words in.  I ate a bite of cookie.  It was delicious.

“I wonder if I’ll ever love anyone again,” I said.

Then we sat there silently for a while, stabbing our forks into a little puddle of green tea mousse and then into the fudge brownie alongside it.  It was an unexpectedly good flavor combination.  San Francisco does have the most amazing food.

 

Hippie Soup

“This is my little brother Ben. He’s a hippie,” I told Patrick, who owns the friendly cafe a block away from my house where I always feel bad about noticing movie stars, because they have so obviously come here to be safe in a homey little corner of Brooklyn where no one will recognize them. (However, someone once sent a sighting of ME at the Victory to the Gawker Stalker tip line, so this is a delusion on everybody’s part).

“Nice to meet you, Ben,” Patrick said, and told us a story about how he used to steal pot from hippies when he was 11. Then he gave us a free breakfast. I really like Patrick.

Ben rolled his eyes. He doesn’t especially like being called a hippie, but that’s what he is. Personally I would be a little bit flattered if someone called me a hippie, but I guess that’s one of the differences between being a (semi) adult person who has always had a job who, like, has some tattoos and will order her entree with brown rice instead of white if that’s an option and being an almost 22 year old male college sophomore with long, long Jesus hair who has spent time — like, years — living on actual communes.

Anyway, Ben and I took our tea and bagels and walked to the Flatbush Avenue Long Island railroad station, where we caught the train to Rockville Center to attend our grandfather’s funeral.

The funeral home was lame as fuck, not at all like Fisher and Sons. I found myself wondering whether a small cottage industry of Fisher and Sons-themed funeral homes has sprung up to tend to the deathtime needs of hardcore Six Feet Under fans, and whether it would be possible for me to have my funeral at one, and whether I would actually want to do that. I also mused about a lot of more appropriately somber things as I sat on some fake-fancy furniture with my family, facing away from the corner of the room with my grandfather’s coffin in it.

I really appreciate about Judaism that everyone gets buried in the same unvarnished wooden crate. It was jarring to actually see it, though. The funeral director came and made my Dad look in the coffin, which I guess is an important duty that someone has to do. This started a mini-trend of people looking in the coffin: My aunt and my brother both did. “He looks good, he looks good,” my aunt kept repeating. My brother said he wished he hadn’t looked.

I felt like I was being chicken, but I was not about to go look in the coffin.

I have seen the going-out-to-the-graveyard scene in a hundred movies and tv shows but this was my first time experiencing it, and those tv shows and movies have it right, pretty much. People in black stand in the wintry, windswept graveyard looking stoic while a priest or in this case a rabbi says a couple of things, and occasionally the people burst into tears. Again, Judaism has a good aspect: everyone shovels a ceremonial shovelful of dirt into the grave. The dirt makes a loud plopping sound as it hits the coffin. When you see a coffin lying in a grave as you shovel dirt on top of it, you cannot help but realize that the person in the coffin really is dead.

Afterwards, we spent the rest of the afternoon sitting on the couch in my grandparents’ apartment, eating cold cuts and rugelach. For the next few hours, old people and middle aged people were talking about movies they’ve seen recently, what their grandchildren are up to, doesn’t Medicare suck, what medications they’re on, and other old-people topics. I kind of wished that someone wanted to talk about like ‘death, man, what is up with that’ but a funeral isn’t really the appropriate venue for that kind of conversation.

However, the rest of the evening, which I spent with my little brother at my apartment, completely was the appropriate venue for that kind of conversation. We talked, not only about ‘death, what is up’ but also: ‘is the government spying on us at all times (yes)’, ‘capitalism is so so so so bad’, and also ‘consumerism, corporations, and global agribusiness are so so so so bad’. We talked about ‘basically we live in the Matrix’ and about the commune in Hawaii Ben’s hoping to start. It was equal parts bleak and fun and annoying. Along the way, we — or really Ben — made some soup out of the vegetal contents of my fridge. We ate it with a salad and some Irish soda bread.

Hippie Soup (tastes especially good if the only thing you’ve eaten all day is a bagel and some funeral meat)

One can black beans

One can whole tomatoes

a few cloves of minced garlic

a diced onion

Whatever vegetables are in your fridge. I had:

Half a head of Savoy cabbage

Four potatoes

A parsnip

Saute the onion and garlic. Dice the potato but leave the skin on. Remember, you’re a hippie! Slice up the cabbage and the parsnip and add those too. Add the beans and the tomato, salt and pepper, and a bunch of water. Simmer until the veggies are soft.

Irish soda bread

2 cups of preferably bread flour but it’s not like I have bread flour

1/2 tablespoon baking powder

1/2 tsp salt

1/2 tsp baking soda

1 cup buttermilk or failing that, milk or even (this worked!) soymilk with a splash of vinegar added

Preheat oven to 350. Sift together (or just whisk together) the dry ingredients. Add the buttermilk or faux-buttermilk and knead on a well-floured surface for about a minute. Add more flour if the dough is too sticky. Shape into two mini-loaves and place them on a greased cookie sheet, scoring across the top with a sharp knife. Bake for 45 minutes. Try to let them cool before you eat them.

You’d think a hippie would use whole wheat flour but life is too short for that bullshit.

 

Sweet Potato Casserole

Apparently it’s now “traditional” for me to make sweet potato casserole with crunchy pecan topping for Thanksgiving. I made it a few times, I guess, and everyone loves it, probably because it’s loaded with butter and sugar and is for all intents a crustless sweet potato pie. I was a little grossed out by it yesterday, but then, I was feeling grossed out by a lot of things.

I was grossed out by the sadness inherent in a day that’s about the anticipation of a heavy meal that everyone inhales in minutes. I’m also grossed out by the suburbs. What a snob, right? After all, I grew up here among these strip malls and and prefab houses with their potpourri bathrooms and sectional sofas. But this isn’t my home and it hasn’t been for seven years.

Back in New York, my dad’s father is in the hospital and not doing well. Last Sunday I went out to Long Island to visit him. I’ve only had to do this once before; I’m lucky I guess. The other time I think I also panicked beforehand. Actually I used to panic before every time I would be setting out early in the morning to visit my grandparents, because of how much I love them and how irritating they are and how much I feel like they’ll never understand anything to do with my life at all and how inevitably they’ll die soon. William was always pretty good at calming me down.

So the night before I was to go out there, I called him. There was no one else I wanted to talk to. It was the wrong thing to do but I needed to do it. It made me realize that there’s still a part of me that doesn’t quite believe, yet, that we’re not together anymore and that we’re never going to be again. That part of me is kept afloat by the knowledge that somewhere out there, he’s still caring about what happens to me. And that’s what I need to let go of before I can love anybody else.

But the pull of pattern and habit is so strong. Like: settling into being lectured by William felt so normal and natural, just listening to the cadences of his voice as he told me everything I’d done wrong.

When I hung up with him I felt temporarily better, and then I felt even emptier and more alone than before.

We used to have Thanksgiving at my grandmother’s house in College Park. Now we have it at my uncle’s house because my mom’s parents live in a place called Riderwood Village, where the apartment hallways are plushy carpeted and the different buildings have names like ‘Orchard House.’

I used to stay in my old bedroom in the house I grew up in when I came to stay with my parents. Now we stay in a Marriott Residence Inn.

Also I smoked pot for the first time in four months last night, with a 19 year old friend of the family who reassured me that I don’t look old (”I thought you were 22 or 24″) and wanted to talk geopolitics (”I’m just gonna lay this out there: we’re fucked.”)

Some things are traditions and some things are patterns and some things are bad habits. I can’t tell which is which anymore.

This casserole is good, though, in a “it’s bad but you can’t resist and after what you’ve been through don’t you deserve it?”way.

4 cups mashed sweet potatoes

3 eggs

1/2 cup whole milk

1/2 cup melted butter

1/2 cup brown sugar

splash of vanilla

pinch of salt

Topping:

1 1/2 cups pecans

1/2 cup butter

1/3 cup flour

1/2 cup brown sugar

Combine topping ingredients in food processor and pulse a few times until they’re a fun coarse brown topping-looking type of thing.

Beat the eggs, milk, melted butter, sugar and vanilla together, then add potatoes. Plop the orange mix into a buttered casserole dish, top with topping, and cook for a while in an oven (350 for 45? 375 for 30? You want the top to be crunchy basically).

 

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Pork Stir-Fry For One

Can you believe I used to ask William what he wanted to eat for dinner, and offer him options? I did.  And sometimes I’d  skip that and just announce what we were having, and he’d say “Oh come on, not pork stir fry [or whatever] again!”

Mayyybe this is why I’ve been living on sandwiches and takeout and scrambled eggs for the last three months.

Today, though, I decided I would go to the trouble of making a real meal for myself.  I didn’t feel like doing it — my stomach hurt and I felt sad and lonely — but I went to A Cook’s Companion and bought a saucepot with a tight-fitting lid for rice and a shallow big frying pan for stir-fry.  I’d left these things’ analogs, ones I’d used hundreds of times, behind in the kitchen of the apartment where I’d lived with William.  All the things I left behind, I’ve been replacing piecemeal. I tried to do one big shopping trip to replace them all at once right when I first moved in, but inevitably there were a bunch of things I didn’t realize I needed.  In these circumstances, there’s no way to know what you’re missing right away.  You’ll be halfway through a recipe and then realize you don’t have, like, a liquid measuring cup.

(You’ll be going through the motions and halfway through, realize that some key component is missing.  But you’ll go ahead anyway because what are you supposed to do, go to bed hungry?)

When I first started to develop this staple of my repertoire, I was reading a lot of Ayun Halliday’s zine, the East Village Inky, and sort of fantasizing that someday, not soon but soonish, I’d be living her life — brownstone Brooklyn, two kids, adoring husband — with William. I definitely never admitted this, even really to myself.  But why would you live with someone — why would you stay with someone for six years — if you didn’t somewhat think that they were the person you’d end up with?  Of course I talked a big game about not believing in marriage. But I had detailed, specific ideas about proposals and weddings that I would never have told you about if you’d held a gun to my head.

Anyway, Ayun’s zine had some ideas about what to do with “1/4 lb of ground pork” that I later combined with a Cook’s Illustrated recipe for a Chinese-ish stir-fry made of sliced pork tenderloin.  First you cut up a quick-cooking vegetable or two into bite-sized pieces.  I like: baby bok choy or Savoy cabbage or snow peas or red bell pepper or bamboo shoots, or a combination.  Then you take a something like 1/4-1/2 lb of ground pork and sprinkle it with soy sauce and cooking sherry and mush it around. In a bowl, you mix together a little more sherry, 1/2 cup chicken stock, 1 tablespoon oyster sauce, 1/4 tsp cornstarch, 1/4 tsp white pepper, a splash of rice vinegar and a splash of sesame oil.  In another bowl you mix a bunch of finely chopped garlic and ginger with a splash of peanut oil.  Then you stir-fry the pork til it’s done, remove it from the pan, stir-fry the vegetables, shove them to the side put the garlic-ginger mixture in a little plop in the pan with them, count to 20, then stir it all around, add the pork back in, dump the sauce on, cook it all together, then serve over white rice, topping with scallions.  This is probably my favorite thing to make and eat.

Except every moment of the preparation process (he used to tell me I couldn’t cook rice, well look at how well this rice turned out, must have been that old pot) and every bite (I am putting this bowl down on the coffee table and it’s my bowl, I’m not serving anyone else first) reminded me of William.  I was just finishing up the dishes when R.E.C. called.  “Are you at home? Check your email.”  She’d shown her ex (I forget right now what his secret-blog alias is!) her latest post, and, I guess, this blog, for the first time, and his response had made her cry and think and try to analyze.

We talked about the feeling of being alone, and how weird and uncomfortable it is to live for yourself when you’re used to living for someone else. Living for yourself is, I guess, some people’s default mode (male people mostly).  You should always be living for yourself, I’ve heard.  But how to shake this feeling of being so small and so uncared-for, the feeling of “nobody cares what I do or think or feel”?

“I could choke on a bone tonight and nobody would notice for days and Doree’s dog would eat my face,” I told R.E.C.  She laughed. “You do know that you’re actually quoting Bridget Jones’ Diary right now, right?”  I paused in my pacing around the rooftop and put out my cigarette (since nobody cares what I do, I’ve been smoking a little bit).

“Well the worst part about being single is realizing that all the cliches are true,” I told her.

The other worst part about being single and living a cliche is that you start thinking exclusively in song lyrics sometimes.  Like: “You really can’t give love in this condition still you know how you need it.”  And: “I’ve been throwing my arms around every boy I see. They only remind me of you.”

 

Sandwich

Scuttlebutt and I had just gone to Target, where she’d bought a vacuum cleaner. She’s nesting right now: around the same time I was breaking up with my boyfriend, she was moving in with hers. For most of the five years I’ve known Scuttlebutt, she’s been my incredibly single friend, always reliable for some drama at a party involving, like, making out with some dude in the bathroom or on the roof or being peeved because some dude made out with some other girl instead of her in the bathroom or on the roof. She was also the kind of friend who could be subtly — almost subconciously — deployed as a researcher when someone incredibly not-single (like, uh, me) was curious to know what a male mutual acquaintance would be like in bed. She really never failed in this regard, and some of her findings were extremely amazing.

Anyway, we were walking across Flatbush and she was sort of clucking and mother-henning me about a recent mistake (maybe not a mistake? probably a mistake) I’d made. “Never say you’re not going to have sex with them and then weaken. It doesn’t matter about having some bullshit third-date rule or not — you should do what you want when you want to do it. But if you do have some rule for yourself, that’s fine. Just don’t, like, tell them about it, and then break your own rule! You need to at least seem like you’re in control,” she scolded.

“That’s what I’m bad at, the seeming,” I told her. She gave me a long stare. “This is such a weird role reversal,” she finally said, and smiled.

It’s true: I’ve spent years hearing about her indiscretions and doling out advice that I was probably pulling out of my ass/some magazine I’d read/some feminist book, and she has spent years listening and then not following my advice.

Anyway, I headed up Atlantic and she headed towards the subway back to Greenpoint. Probably she was going to cook a delicious meal in her big new kitchen with the beautiful glass-doored cupboards. Walking home, I realized I had no desire to order takeout, nothing in the fridge except a Brita filter, a thing of soymilk, and a container of grated Parmesan, and no energy to cook anything real. So I stopped at the inexplicably crap-ish health food store and bought the ingredients for a sandwich.

White bread that is organic so, you know, it’s not SO bad. Sometimes whole wheat bread is just too depressing

Those presliced Applegate Farms cheese slices (cheddar, pepper jack)

sprouts

safflower mayonnaise (Hellman’s is better but: health food store)

avocado

dijon mustard

Combine into sandwich. Eat alone while typing.

 

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Pork Chops

These pork chops aren’t a metaphor. They’re just pork chops. I made them for Lori on the one month anniversary of living in my apartment as part of the first real meal I’ve cooked here, which kind of blows my mind.  But today I went to the grocery store and bought some staples and ingredients and right now I’m cooking meal number two.  This one’s just for me.  I guess I broke the seal.

I got my pork chops from the famous Los Paisanos meat market, which is actually namedropped in the cookbook this recipe is loosely adapted from, Daisy Cooks! by Daisy Martinez. I love Daisy.  I feel like her attitude about cooking jibes perfectly with mine: she loves big flavors and minimal ingredients, and she avoids fussy sauces or intricate techniques.  Also all her recipes are perfect for a crowd and pretty cheap to make.  This recipe in particular is a budget special: you can probably get everything you need to make it for around $7.

Ingredients:

Adobo, which you can make or buy.  I recommend “make” because the idea of MSG grosses me out and it’s hard to find supermarket adobo that doesn’t have any.  It’s a pretty great thing to have around, cause you can just rub it on any meat or poultry, cook it however you like and then poof: dinner is served.  So: combine 6 tablespoons kosher salt, 3 tablespoons onion powder, 3 tablespoons garlic powder, 3 tablespoons ground black pepper, and 1 1/3 teaspoons oregano, and store it in an empty spice jar.

2 bone-in pork chops

2 oranges

1 lemon

a few crushed garlic cloves

apple cider vinegar

Rub your pork chops down thoroughly with the adobo.  Then make a little bath for them in a shallow container using the juice of the oranges and lemon, a healthy splash of the apple cider vinegar, and the garlic cloves.  Let that sit out on the counter while you get the rest of dinner together, or stick it in the fridge if you’re not going to cook dinner for more than an hour.  Flip them over a couple of times.

When you’re ready, sautee the chops over medium heat in peanut or canola oil, cooking until golden on both sides.  Serve with rice and beans or salad or platanos or salad or all of the above.  Savor the delicious flavor of finally getting your kitchen operational!