by Kate Christensen | Jan 6, 2012
I turned 8 in 1970, the year my mother got into the Ph.D psych program at ASU, the year we left the Bay Area’s happening scene and political foment and landed in Tempe, Arizona. Back then it was a small, flat, sunstruck town full of potbellied Baptist Republican burghers in cowboy hats, white shoes, and white belts, and their helmet-headed, pant-suited wives. In Berkeley, my little sisters, then 3 and 6, had been in the habit of going naked everywhere along with all the other little kids. Our first trip to the local supermarket caused visible shock waves; they did not go naked in public again.
Until 1976, that is. That was the year we moved up to northern Arizona, to Jerome, a town on Cleopatra Mountain, above the Verde Valley. This former copper-mining town turned ghost town had been reinvigorated in recent years by a scruffy bunch of Baby Boomers — artists, entrepreneurs, and hippies — who bought up the old Victorian houses and opened cafes and pottery shops and hung out drinking beer at the Spirit Room. It was just becoming a tourist destination: Winnebagos and campers jammed the narrow, steep streets in the summertime. In the winters, it was snowy, eerie, deserted. The Verde Valley was in those days a flatland of dull-green cactus and cottonwood trees, bisected into a rough quadrant by the Verde River and Highway 89A. There were a few dusty little towns down there – Clarkdale, Cottonwood, Camp Verde, Cornville, and the trailer-park cluster called Centerville.
My family lived in the ramshackle but beautiful former mansion of the Copper King himself. The Talley House was high up on the mountain, at the top of the cobblestoned, steep little Magnolia Lane, set into the mountainside, so the road wound up and around the back of the house at rooftop level. My mother paid something like two dollars a month in rent to the Jerome Historical Society in exchange for restoring it. She spent many, many hours stripping and refinishing the original woodwork in the kitchen, living room, and stairwell; she had time to do this, alas, because her psychology private practice had hardly any clients — no one there quite knew what to make of a psychologist. Consequently, the Talley House gleamed with gorgeous old wood. The roof leaked, the house was freezing cold in the wintertime, there were broken windows in the sleeping porch, and the plaster was cracking, but I didn’t care; I had always dreamed of living in a house like this – there were window seats in bay windows, hidden porches, Victorian curlicues. The front windows looked out over the whole Verde Valley to the red rocks of Sedona and the San Francisco Peaks and Mogollon Rim beyond.
I started that year as a freshman at Mingus Union High School, down in Cottonwood. Every weekday morning for two school years, I got up at 5:30 to curl my bobbed hair and bangs under, the prevailing style, with a curling iron in front of the propane heater in the kitchen, the only other heat source in the house besides the wood stove in the living room. I made myself a protein shake and two buttered pieces of whole-wheat toast every morning. This shake was made of whole milk, a tablespoon of chalky, sweet Super-Pro powder (very trendy at the time), a raw egg, and a banana.
I left the house at 6:30 and walked a mile and a half down Highway 89-A through the town and along the ridgeback to the Old High School to catch the school bus. During the winter months, it was a dark, freezing-cold walk. I was one of only four teenagers who lived in Jerome; the other three, Desiree, Julie, and Dani, were blonde, bubbly, popular cheerleaders, whereas I was in the gifted program, played the violin in the school orchestra, and had the lead role in all the school plays. Naturally, I was invisible to them. I did all my homework on the long bus ride to school as we wound through the little towns, picking up the respectable children of Clarkdale citizens, then the Indians, Mexicans, and poor white kids from the trailer parks of Centerville, then the “rich kids” who lived in the new development outside of Cottonwood.
Winters could be lonely and cold, but in the summers in Jerome, honeysuckle grew around our porch railings, massive, amazing thunderstorms crossed the Verde Valley every afternoon, and everyone had potlucks. The mid-70s were the golden age of many things, among them the casserole, the naked-adult party, and the uninhibited smoking of marijuana. Those three things went together far too often for my liking. I dreaded the nude-sketching potlucks at John’s sculpture commune near Sedona as much as I dreaded the naked Bacchanalian potlucks at Gary’s hand-made sauna in the Jerome gulch. My unself-conscious Berkeley-born little sisters shucked their togs along with the adults and other kids and joined the crowd while I, a fiercely modest 15-year-old who had been born that way, stayed fully clothed with my book in a corner, averting my eyes from the horrifying display of boobs and nutsacks and butts and, oh my God, penises, dangling softly while dudes squatted over their sketchpads. I craved the invisibility of the school bus at these parties, but of course my family teased me for being such a puritan.
I made my escape in the fall of 1978, when I went East to finish high school at Green Meadow Waldorf School in Spring Valley, New York. The adults stayed clothed there, at least in public. Of course, many of them, including some of my teachers, slept with high-school students, but it was the 70s. What did I expect?
Naked-Potluck Lentil-Carrot Casserole
Into an avocado-green crockpot with funky paisley designs, put a pound of dried lentils, three grated carrots, a cup of brown rice, some salt, and a heaping tablespoon of curry powder. Cover with water, turn on, and leave all day. Bring to John’s sculpture commune, get naked, smoke some pot, and serve alongside soybean-mung sprout casserole, broccoli-walnut casserole, tofu-cauliflower casserole, and squash-wheatberry casserole.
by Kate Christensen | Jan 5, 2012
For a three-month period during my 12-year marriage when my husband and I were separated, I went to live in the basement apartment of a house behind a French restaurant in Hunter’s Point, Queens. Technically, I shared a kitchen with the couple who lived upstairs, my landlords, but I never used it; I didn’t feel like interrupting their happy twosome. They were strangers, and I was feeing low and antisocial.
I spent every morning at my desk, drinking coffee and writing The Great Man, while cooks and busboys came out to smoke by the Dumpsters in the courtyard. I sat at my desk below ground level and watched their feet through the window above me. After I finished the day’s work, in the early afternoon, I walked over the Pulaski Bridge to my old house. Dingo had stayed with my husband in Greenpoint, since my new landlord didn’t accept pets. He barked at me despairingly, questioningly every time I arrived. My husband had already left for the day; the agreement was that he did the morning and bedtime walks, and I did the long afternoon ones. Dingo and I sometimes roamed through the parks and the streets of North Brooklyn for hours. Every evening, I took him home and left him, and then I walked back to my self-imposed exile in Queens, wishing I could bring him with me.
Because I had no kitchen of my own, I dined in the unfamiliar restaurants of Hunter’s Point. I had no close friends during this time, or rather, I had allowed myself to drift away from my friends because I was too deeply immersed in the knotty problem of my own life to be good company, so I ate alone. Afterwards, I went back to my underground burrow and stayed up reading as late as I could. Finally, when my eyes started to cross, I went to bed to lie awake and wait for daylight and wonder whether a person could literally go mad from loneliness.
What saved me during that awful, dark time were three things. The first was the mathematically conceived structure of the novel I was working on, which I stole, loosely, from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and which comforted me with its orderly precision. The second was the unquestioned, unswerving love of my dog, and the third was the Thai place nearby, Tuk-Tuk. It became my regular hangout in the evenings. Its vegetable green curry was good and cheap, and the waitstaff was friendly and kind. The simple warmth of the routine – a glass or two of white wine, a vegetable green curry, every night – kept me sane.
Years later, after my marriage ended, when I met Brendan and started to spend a lot of time up in New Hampshire, I sometimes thought of Tuk-Tuk with a funny kind of longing. I didn’t miss that painful, isolated time, and I didn’t miss the place I’d lived in. I craved the vegetable green curry, specifically.
Pork dumplings with scallion-ginger sauce
Rural northern New Hampshire is not known for its ethnic diversity, and its cuisine reflects this. I realized early on in my life in this foreign land, so far from New York City (a completely different kind of self-imposed exile from my sojourn in Hunter’s Point), that if I wanted a Thai or Indian curry or spicy rice noodle soup up here, I had to make it myself. And so, like the Little Red Hen, I did — as well as sushi, pad Thai, and spring rolls with peanut sauce. Brendan and I experimented with recipes, ordered online those ingredients we couldn’t find at the store, and gradually figured out how to make from scratch most of our favorite ethnic takeout items.
If you’re many miles from the nearest good Chinese restaurant and you want pork dumplings, do the following:
In a bowl, mix 2 cups flour (I use 1 cup Bob’s Red Mill gluten-free flour, 1 cup brown rice flour, and 2 teaspoons Xanthan gum; this is very good but not perfect and I’m curious about sorghum and millet flours), and 1 cup hot water. Add the water in three parts, mixing, so you don’t add too much, but it’s pretty much the right amount. Form a firm ball of dough, knead it a bit, wrap in plastic, and let rest 20 minutes.
Mix 1½ lb. ground pork with ½ cup minced scallions and a tablespoon each sesame oil, rice vinegar, and gluten-free Tamari. Stir in one direction only so you don’t perturb the meat.
Unwrap dough and cut in half. Rewrap one half and roll/slice the other into 12 pieces. Then, on a well-floured board with a well-floured rolling pin, roll pieces one by one into 3” sort-of squares. Fill each with a tablespoon of the pork mixture, wet edges with a moistened fingertip, and fold together and crimp.
Add 1 tablespoon of peanut oil to a hot wok and tilt the wok to coat it. Fry 6 dumplings in 1 layer till golden on 2 sides, about 2 minutes a side. Add ½ cup of water, cover, and steam for 7 minutes. Repeat with 6 remaining dumplings. Do it all again the next day with the rest of the dough.
Serve with Sriracha hot sauce, a soy-sesame oil dipping sauce, and
Francis Lam’s scallion-ginger sauce
I make this in quadrupled batches because it’s so unbelievably good, but you don’t have to. The proportions are: 1 oz. peeled, sliced ginger for every bunch whole scallions and ½ cup peanut oil. In a Cuisinart, mince ginger and stop before it becomes a paste. Do the same with the scallions. Put the scallions and ginger into a big, tall-sided pot – the taller the better, because this is going to be a flash mini-volcano. Add a lot of salt and mix — it should taste slightly too salty. Heat peanut oil until it smokes. Pour the molten oil into the pot and stand back. When it calms down, stir, let cool, and put into a jar. This amazing sauce keeps for a long time in the fridge and is fantastic on just about everything.
by Kate Christensen | Jan 4, 2012
In the spring of the year I lived in France, when I was 18, I hitchhiked one weekend with my six-foot-tall, blond, eccentric Swedish friend Elisabeth, a seminary student at La Mhotte, to visit a Count in a medieval northwestern French village somewhere… I can’t remember the name of the village or how Elisabeth knew the Count or what his name was or why we went, but I do remember that the Count lived in a rambling medieval house built on the road that wound through the village, the upper floor acting as a bridge, spanning it, curved on its underside so cars passed underneath an arch and between the outer stone walls of the first story, so traffic literally drove through the house.
The Count was a fat, sardonic, lonely man with a pendulous, wet lower lip like the wine connoisseur’s in the brilliant Roald Dahl story, “Taste.” He was married to a tiny, much younger Japanese woman whose name I’ve also forgotten. She confessed to Elisabeth, who had befriended her and won her trust, that he beat her and treated her cruelly. The Count confessed to me, who had befriended and perhaps charmed him by discussing novels and poetry with him, that he was in desperate need of real companionship and hoped I would come to live with them. I balked and demurred, but I was secretly, weirdly flattered. Since my own father had disappeared for good when I was nine, I’d been open to a replacement. In my early years, I’d been my father’s makeshift son, the closest thing he got to a boy (he had five daughters with his two first wives); older men often provoked in me the urge to try to replicate what I had (certainly mistakenly, I see now) taken to be a kind of male-bonding fellowship with my father.
The morning after we arrived, the Count’s little Japanese wife took Elisabeth and me to gather stinging nettles, les orties. We wore white cloth gloves and pulled weeds from the side of the road and put them into a big straw basket, being careful not to brush them against our forearms. When it was full, we carried it into the big kitchen, where the Japanese wife taught us to make nettle soup. We washed all the sand and grit off and chopped them into small pieces while a diced onion sautéed in lots of butter in a soup pot. Then we added the nettles, chopped potatoes, and enough water to cover it all and boiled it until the potatoes were soft. Then we added some cream, salt, and black pepper. We ate it that night for supper. It was surprisingly good, velvety and savory. I remember we had a plain lettuce salad and a loaf of chewy boule and a board of good cheese to go with it, and wine of course.
After supper, while Elisabeth helped the wife with the dishes, the Count took me up to his study, a book-lined room in the bridge part of the house whose two windows, on either side, looked right down at the road so headlights and taillights showed in them. He poured me a cognac, which I sipped while he had a cigar. We discussed literature. His English was much better than my French. I didn’t dislike him, but I was wary of him. Even so, I was thrilled to be drinking cognac with a Count in his library. It felt like a scene in a novel.
Hitchhiking home the following day, as we stood by the highway with our thumbs out, Elisabeth told me she was disappointed in me for flirting with the Count.
“I didn’t flirt with him,” I said.
“You did,” she said. “You should be careful.”
The Count’s crush on me, if it can be called that, which upset me greatly at the time (he kept telephoning me at la Mhotte long after I stopped taking his calls), seems tame and harmless now, by comparison, to things that happened to me later in my life, much more severe misunderstandings.
And Elisabeth’s disappointment in me likewise seems benign to me now. I should have taken what she said to heart, as a warning, instead of feeling misunderstood and miffed. Now that it no longer matters, now that I’m past making trouble, I see what she was trying to tell me.
Rabbit stew
I was a vegetarian when I first went to France, being at the age of trying things out that weren’t necessarily compatible with my character and inclinations. I was confronted one morning with a whole rabbit, sinewy and red, and was taken through the steps of turning this poor creature into a lapin a la cocotte for dinner. When it was done, I sat at the table with the family I worked for, eating buttered egg noodles with grated cheese and watching them devour the stew I’d made, and then, after I’d cleared everything away, I stood in the kitchen over the pot of leftover stew, of which there was hardly any, and forked a small chunk of rabbit into my mouth. I couldn’t help myself. Then I ate another bite, and then I finished the stew. I was never a vegetarian again.
Chop, or have the butcher chop, a rabbit into pieces.
Fry three or four cut-up slices of very thick, fatty bacon in a skillet or Dutch oven until they’re crisp and all the fat has rendered. Remove the bacon with a slotted spoon and munch on it as you make the rest of the stew – in the bacon fat, sauté a large chopped onion and 2 cloves of garlic. Add the rabbit pieces and sauté till they begin to turn brown-gold. Sprinkle them with three tablespoons of flour and sauté them for about five more minutes, turning.
Add a cup of beef broth, ½ cup of red or white wine, 2 teaspoons minced parsley, 1 teaspoon dried thyme, salt and pepper, and 1 bay leaf. Simmer, covered, for an hour, adding more broth as necessary. Serve over buttered egg noodles, paired with a green salad, with plenty of good table wine. Serves one svelte French family and one carnivorous fille au pair.
by Kate Christensen | Jan 3, 2012
At the end of a hard, interminable, raw winter day a while back, when it was too late to schlep to the store, in need of a quick hearty feast, I invented an easy, unorthodox cupboard-supper version of puttanesca: I opened a 24-ounce can of fire-roasted tomatoes, simmered these with herbs and lots of red pepper flakes, a minced onion, a nice fat dollop of red wine, two tins of sardines, an oversized handful each of chopped black olives and chopped marinated artichoke hearts, a pound of chopped spinach, and a chopped bunch of parsley. Meanwhile, I boiled some broth, whisked in some polenta and herbs, added lots of parmesan cheese and butter, then baked it in the oven for 45 minutes at 350. The spicy, insouciant, brackish sluttiness of the dish cheered me up more than I would have dreamed possible.
The above paragraph contains not one letter “g,” and I did that on purpose to make a point – I’m fairly sure the omission is unnoticeable. Cooking without gluten is akin to writing without a crucial letter: it’s tricky to do, but if you succeed, no one should notice or feel deprived. It’s a minor trick, and when it works, it’s invisible. The only real payoff for the effort is my own relief at knowing I will be free, for another meal, of the dreaded reaction to gluten.
I discovered my intolerance to gluten in the summer of 2003 reluctantly, with the help of a naturopath. Soon after I gave it up entirely, I recognized that gluten had been the cause of my foggy brain, insomnia, and ongoing deep depression, as well as my constant, distressing stomach bloat. Of course, after giving up wheat bread, semolina pasta, and pizza, my subsequent sense of loss caused a whole other form of grief, and for a long time I went through the classic seven stages — denial was a self-defeating, pointless blip on the radar, anger lasted longer than any of the others, and acceptance arrived in stages, hard-won.
Then came a brief, shining respite: in March of 2009, shortly after Brendan and I fell volcanically and precipitously in love, I took the train up from New York, where I lived, to Boston. Brendan picked me up at South Station and we drove the long miles north to the White Mountains of New Hampshire, high and floating, with loony grins. We turned onto the dirt road that runs by the lake — it was the end of March, mud-and-ice season, starkly beautiful. Wet sunlight shone on bare mountains through charcoal clouds; the lake surface was choppy in a stiff, cold breeze. We turned into a dirt driveway, pulled up to a barn, and walked across frozen grass to a cozy farmhouse.
Inside, Brendan opened a bottle of chilled orvieto, pulled a peperonata out of the refrigerator, and then he wrapped cantaloupe in prosciutto and assembled a caprese. We fell on this cold feast, eating with our hands, standing up by the counter. It was still winter, but to us, it was torrid tropical spring. We drank the first bottle with the food, talking and talking, and then we drank another, sitting by the fire, and here the Victorian curtain goes down.
Luckily for us, even in our handicapped condition of intoxicated, jibbering mania, we could talk – and eat, and cook. In our early days, I made a chicken tagine, which didn’t come out so well, and then a merguez and lentil stew with artichoke hearts, which did. Brendan made pork tenderloin in prune and rosemary sauce, then orechiette pasta with broccoflower — at his urging, I ate it, and nothing happened. Apparently, the love drugs protected me. I have since, of course, regained my gluten intolerance, but the immunity was wonderful while it lasted.
Broccoli rabe
This bitter, savory green is perfect alongside any traditional pasta dish.
Wash and trim the stems off 1 pound of broccoli rabe. Chop coarsely and steam in a big pot, covered. When it’s wilted, remove and, on a large wooden cutting board, chop to smithereens with a mezzaluna. In a large skillet, sauté 4-5 halved garlic cloves in plenty of olive oil until they begin to brown. Add the very finely-chopped greens. Salt to taste. Let sit over low heat, stirring occasionally with a wooden spatula, until it turns soft and dark green.
Orechiette with Broccoflower
Chop a broccoflower (a neon-green broccoli-cauliflower hybrid with dizzyingly otherworldly conical whorls that looks like a Star Trek vegetable) into bite-sized pieces. Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil. Add broccoflower and simmer for 5 minutes. Add 1 pound orechiette to the broccoflower in the water and follow directions on package for cooking, usually 11 minutes.
Meanwhile, peel 8 cloves of garlic. Chop roughly and sauté in hot olive oil in a large skillet on low heat. Add salt, pepper, and crushed red pepper. Let the garlic just begin to brown – don’t overcook.
Drain the pasta and broccoflower and add to the large skillet and toss with the oil and garlic. Add generous amounts of parmesan, more salt, black pepper, and crushed red pepper to taste, stir, and cook on low heat for 2 minutes. Serve hot with more cheese and pepper. This simple but luscious meal serves 2 voracious people.
by Kate Christensen | Jan 2, 2012
Seven years ago, my now ex-husband and I adopted a trembling, formerly homeless, possibly abused young dog. We named him Dingo, because that’s what he looked like – a skinny, wild, intelligent, aboriginal canine with enormous bat ears and almond-shaped brown eyes that bugged out slightly like a chihuahua’s, and an earnest furrow between his brows. He weighed a skeletal 27 pounds and was not housebroken and spoke no English and appeared to be unfamiliar with stairs, puddles, furniture, and domestic life in general. After he graduated from obedience school, we kept training him on our own. He was so eager to learn and so easy to teach, we figured he was a doggy genius, until it dawned on us that he would do anything – anything we asked of him – for food.
When we split up, we agreed to share custody of Dingo and have done so for the past three and a half years. These days, Dingo weighs a healthy 45 pounds, has gone grey at the muzzle, and is a mellow, well-mannered gentleman, but he remains as passionately, single-mindedly food-obsessed as ever. He has no sense of humor about food. He’s not one of those hilariously antic, clowning dogs who entertain for treats, nor does he beg with seductive whines and cute, obsequious expressions. He’s quiveringly aware of everything that happens in the kitchen. He knows his rights and exercises them without overstepping: he licks the beaten egg bowl, for example, and is always on hand to do so, but he doesn’t chew on cooked bones, so he never asks. Maybe because he grew up on the street, he won’t go near anything toxic: he has no interest in raisins, chocolate, onions, almonds, or avocado, even if they fall on the floor near him.
He understands that he’s supposed to lie at our feet while we eat, but sometimes, when it’s a meal he loves, especially chicken, he forgets himself. His nose nudges my thigh and I look down to see him sitting right next to me looking up at my plate, his face alight with quasi-religious exaltation, but he’s not begging, exactly. His feelings about food are so similar to mine, I can’t help feeling that there’s some sort of essential kinship at work here.
Coq au Rococo
This baroque, multi-step, multi-day recipe is a mash-up/amalgam of Brendan’s and my original separate chicken methods and is possibly Dingo’s favorite dish, item, event, and occasion, and also the love of his life, or one of them, anyway. He cashes in for days on end. Not only does he get the fresh chicken neck up front, later on he gets boiled giblets and carrots, and the next day, table scraps after we’ve eaten our fill a second time, and the day after that, cartilage and unusable but edible bits from the bird when it’s pulled from the broth, and the day after that, he gets warm soup broth ladled onto his kibble and he can lick our soup bowls clean. This recipe is very generous to people as well.
Preheat the oven to 475.
To the dog, give the raw neck of a large, whole chicken. Set giblets aside for now.
Cut into bite-sized pieces 3-5 shallots and half a lemon, peel still on. Put into a bowl and add a bunch of fresh chopped basil, 8 cleaned, halved baby bella mushrooms, the juice of the other half of the lemon, 8 peeled whole garlic cloves, and a big handful of good juicy olives. Mix well with olive oil, salt, and pepper. Stuff both cavities of the chicken with this mixture and place into a large, well-oiled roasting pan.
Peel 5 carrots, 5 parsnips, and 5 potatoes, and cut them all in half. Toss them well in salt and olive oil, then arrange them around the chicken in the roasting pan. Put whatever remains of the stuffing mixture on top of the vegetables.
Rub the chicken with olive oil. Put a chunk of butter on top and cover loosely with aluminum foil. Bake for 20 minutes, then uncover and turn the oven down to 350.
While the chicken roasts, put the giblets into a smallish pan with herbs, crushed garlic cloves, a quartered onion, and celery and carrot chunks. Take the limp juiced half lemon and pare and mince its zest and add to the pot. Add a dollop of red wine, and salt and pepper. Cover with cold water plus one inch. Bring to a boil, then simmer until the vegetables are limp, about 45 minutes. Strain the broth and use it to baste the chicken and vegetables during the last half hour of cooking. Feed the cooled, cooked giblets and boiled carrot pieces to the dog in whatever way you like. Make sure they’re not too hot.
When the bird is brown and crackling and cooked just to the bone and still tender, pull it out and put it on a carving board and let it sit for half an hour while the vegetables keep roasting in the pan. Pull out the stuffing; if it seems underdone, add to the pan in the oven.
Carve the bird and serve chicken pieces with root vegetables and stuffing to garnish. A crisp simple salad is nice afterwards – up to you.
Save the bones. Reheat and repeat this meal the next day, and on the 3rd day, strip off all remaining usable meat and trim and chop and set aside. Put the rest of the chicken, including all bones, into a big soup pot with onions, carrots, celery, parsley, garlic, herbs, lemon zest, red wine, and tomatoes. Cover with cold water plus one inch. Simmer uncovered, skimming as necessary, for 2 hours, then let sit for 2 hours. Strain through a colander over a second pot, pressing and turning the vegetables and bones with a slotted spoon to squeeze out all possible liquid. Discard the soup stuff. The dog will helpfully eat any cooked carrots and chicken scraps you might otherwise throw away.
Use the clear, savory-sweet, fresh broth to make a soup with potatoes and other vegetables and all of the chicken pieces the dog didn’t get. Garnish each bowl with a squeeze of lemon juice and a dash of hot sauce.
