by Kate Christensen | Dec 1, 2012
Two days ago, we arrived here at the farmhouse from town. The wind blew around the house all evening and night in moans and ghostly howls. Dingo kept barking at it, and in the course of a night in front of a crackling fire, we watched Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights” video, the one where she dances like an embarrassing 70s suburban mom discovering her inner Wiccan. It is an insidious earworm like few other songs, and it’s now stuck hard in my head, permanently, I fear.
Yesterday was calm and very cold and sunny. Today is the first snowfall of the year. It’s powdered-sugaring out there. Happy December.
We finally ate the very last of Thanksgiving yesterday in the form of the rest of a red cabbage-spicy chorizo-white bean soup made with the second half of the turkey broth. The first half of the broth received the leftover pearl onions in béchamel, along with a chopped leek, a bag of frozen peas, and all the turkey meat I’d pulled off the bird and chopped before I put the bones into the broth. The soups were slurp-worthy and stood up well to the intensely savory, shimmeringly rich broth. The first was creamy, oniony, and filled with bits of green and chunks of meat. The second was purple and porky and full of soft, mealy beans, and we snarfed it, there is no other verb, for dinner, and then lunch the next day.
“I feel like Dingo,” I said at one point, looking up from my bowl with dripping jowls to see Brendan eating rapidly, with canine concentration.
Thanksgiving leftovers are the ultimate reward of hosting Thanksgiving dinner. After I made the broth, I pulled another big bowlful of meat off the simmered bones and added the rest of the cranberry-walnut sauce to it. We mounded this insanely delicious turkey salad on hot toast with mayonnaise and chutney over the course of one lunch and two breakfasts, until it was gone. When no one was looking, I wiped the empty bowl with my finger and licked it.
The rest of the mashed potatoes got turned into little pancakes fried in a cast iron skillet in peanut oil till they were crisp on both sides, then served with two poached eggs on top. The rich warm egg yolk soaked into the light, flaky potato and bits of browned onion.
The question arises in a vague but persistent inner voice once the fridge is empty again: what should we eat after all the holiday fare is well and truly gone? Those leftovers provided a helpful scaffolding for invention, and now I’m feeling lazy and uninspired. There’s nothing much around right now but some gluten-free pasta, a bag of frozen peas, some parmesan from a month ago, and aromatics. So tonight, we’ll have pasta with pea sauce. And there are couple of leeks in the bottom drawer for potato-leek soup, so that’s two days of lunch. But what about tomorrow night’s dinner? What about the next day?
I miss those old mimeographed school-cafeteria menu charts with their soothingly didactic regularity: Monday: sloppy Joes, Tuesday: tostadas, Wednesday: spaghetti with meatballs, Thursday, Salisbury steak, Friday, fried chicken… On days when there was going to be Mississippi mud cake for dessert, I’d spend the morning daydreaming about it in insatiable anticipation. Why was cafeteria milk always so fresh-tasting and ice-cold in its tiny individual cartons?
Anyway. Thanksgiving food eases the transition from fall harvest food to bone-warming winter stews and soups. It got very cold very early this year. The sun sets in the mid-afternoon. Yesterday, there were little ice balls in the lawn, and the streams had a top layer of ice. This morning when we woke up, there were lace frost curtains on the bottoms of the windows. The season of pot roast is upon us.
Stovetop Baked Eggs with Breakfast-Vegetable Stew
Dice an onion. Chop a package of baby Portobello mushrooms and one red pepper. Peel and smash and coarsely chop as many cloves of garlic as you like. Sauté all of it together in a large skillet in half oil, half butter until limp. Add a lot of chopped baby arugula, more than you think you’ll need, in two batches and cover as it wilts down to almost nothing. Add half a box of Pomi chopped tomatoes, a lot of hot red pepper flakes, and salt and pepper. Stir and simmer uncovered for seven minutes, then sprinkle parmesan cheese over it in a layer like an early snowfall. Crack four eggs one by one onto the surface of the vegetables and pour just a jot of cream or half-and-half over each egg yolk. Cover and let bake on medium-low heat until the whites are just barely set and the yolk is still runny. Serves 2.
by Kate Christensen | Nov 25, 2012
I’m the only one up; it’s frosty and sunny outside. Not one wild creature is visible – just dead grass, tangles of bare crabapple branches, and the naked birch trees starkly white down the meadow. For breakfast this morning, I’m making potato pancakes from the leftover mashed potatoes with poached eggs on top. I think they’ll be good with salt and pepper, a little buckwheat flour, an egg to bind them, and some browned minced onion. And I was recently taught how to poach an egg, after more than 50 years of not knowing how easy it is. The secret is to add kosher salt and a little vinegar to the water.
The turkey’s been stripped to its chassis. The Brussels sprouts and kale salad are gone. The rest of the sausage-sage-bread crumb stuffing went back to Brooklyn with Rosie. I ate the last piece of persimmon pudding for breakfast yesterday. Rosie’s curried butternut bisque with butter-fried sage leaves and crème fraiche is a distant, dreamlike memory, as are Rosie’s and Jami’s voices. We did not stop talking all week except to laugh, eat, or drink. How did we have so much to say to one another?
Yesterday, late morning, after we dropped Jami off at the airport, we took Dingo for a walk on the Eastern Prom and then went to J’s Oyster, a warm, loud little place on the wharf, to meet pals of Rosie’s, fellow eaters and drinkers and appreciators of mollusks and bivalves. The five of us crowded around a little table in the back corner. I had a double rye on the rocks. Rosie and I sat shoulder to shoulder with our little paper cups of melted butter and feasted on steamed clams, after pulling the black condoms off their necks and swirling them in hot water to wash off the grit. We ate big, knobby, clean-tasting raw oysters with cocktail sauce. Then we ate whole lobsters, small and lurid red and just the slightest bit tough but incredibly delicious, dismantling them with nutcrackers, picking every fleck of meat from their body cavities. When I finished, melted butter was running down my chin, and I felt feral. Rosie looked exactly the same way. We grinned at each other. I had poppy seeds in my teeth from the coleslaw, and I didn’t care.
We dropped Rosie off at the airport and drove the hour or so back to the farmhouse. We arrived just after sunset. The silence felt deeper than it usually does. We built a fire and, miraculously somehow hungry again, ate turkey sandwiches on hot toast with cranberries, chutney, and mayonnaise. Brendan mixed a batch of Autumn Bonfires, Rosie’s invention: one part each whiskey, applejack, and apple cider with a dash of bitters, shaken over ice and garnished with an apple slice. We drank these and polished off our sandwiches and reminisced about how much fun it had all been.
I love Thanksgiving. I love the endless day of cooking. We woke up early on Thursday morning to the smell of sausages and onions frying and came downstairs to find Rosie’s stuffing underway and a hot pot of coffee on the stove. We opened a magnum of cava and drank mimosas; we listened to “Blood on the Tracks” while I made buckwheat blini for breakfast. We ate the first batch with creme fraiche and salmon roe and chives, and then the rest with some spectacular cheeses, a soft mild cow cheese and an ash-veined goat.
I steamed persimmon pudding for two hours in a Bundt pan set into a big pot. Rosie stuffed the turkey with all the odds and ends in the pantry, part of an apple and part of an onion, other fruits, some herbs, and put it into the oven with a big knob of butter perched on its top. We savored the term “knob of butter” out loud to each other for a while.
While Rosie cooked, Jami, Brendan, and I walked Dingo down to the lake, through the dense woods to the dock and big rock we jump off to swim in the summertime. As he always does in that spot, for reasons that are wholly mysterious, Dingo went into paroxysms, there’s no other word for it, of joy, leaping about and grinning and panting and behaving like a humpy rabbit, curving his whole body into flying apostrophes of excitement. He never falls off the dock into the lake, another mystery.
At home, Brendan and I wrestled a béchamel into existence with a lot of vigorous whisking and judiciously careful pouring of gluten-free flour into melted butter, then hot milk into the roux. Brendan added the boiled pearl onions. I steamed a heap of trimmed, halved Brussels sprouts, then set them face down into hot pork fat with a whisper of maple syrup to caramelize, then tossed them with crisp bits of pancetta. Rosie pulled the turkey out and we all admired its crackling, golden-brown doneness. Her stuffing was photographed and pronounced magnificent.
The meal was not mishap-free. Brendan was unhappy with his pumpkin pie with walnut crust. We turned the oven too high after the turkey came out, so my yam chunks burned, and so did Rosie’s japonica-liver-pomegranate stuffing. I put too many raisins in the kale salad and there was possibly a bit too much lemon vinaigrette. The turkey, a free-range Vermonter, was not as epically delicious this year as it was last year; the meat was a bit diffuse, or something.
But still, we had nothing at all to complain about. This year was one of intensely hard work for all four of us, and it seems to be paying off, all around. We sat around the table and toasted one another and gave thanks one by one and then feasted, our plates heaped and mounded and brimming to their edges, the kerosene lamp lit. Then, with plates of cakelike, moist persimmon pudding with whipped cream, we lounged on the couches and chairs in front of the fire with after-dinner wine, still talking. We talked and talked into the night, as if our words somehow repaid to the world the pleasure we’d just had in eating.
The next day, of course, we awoke to find leftovers to eat and so much more to say. And that night, too, we sat by the fire all together, talking.
And now, back to real life, potato pancakes, and turkey soup.
by Kate Christensen | Nov 6, 2012
A while ago, I woke up, bleary-eyed and generally unrested because my sleep patterns are irregular at best, to a golden fall morning, crisp and sweet as an apple. Dingo was, as usual, instantly wide-awake and raring to go out. While he pranced and downward-dogged and panted around me, licking my feet to hurry me along, I pulled a sweater and some jeans over whatever I wore to sleep in, plus my socks from yesterday, and shoved my feet into clogs. Hair unbrushed, glasses on, I put his leash and collar on him and a coat and scarf on me and took him out through the mudroom to the back alleyway and off we went.
I let Dingo trundle me around our block, jerking my arm as he suddenly stopped to pee, making me wait while he sniffed a drooping plant with full concentration. I scooped up his neat turds with a long-practiced swipe of the bag and carried it in the hand that didn’t have the leash. Never do I feel more clear about the power dynamic of our relationship than on the morning walk.
Back at home, I fed him his breakfast – grain-free salmon super-expensive kibble with homemade stew that contains more nutrients in one serving than the average human adolescent consumes in a month. Then for dessert I cut up part of an apple and threw each little tidbit at his head. He caught each piece in midair with a snap of his jaws like a piranha and chewed joyfully. In Dingo’s world, everything is always just fantastic, unless I’m packing a backpack to go somewhere and leave him behind, or there are scary noises outside, or he doesn’t get to come in the car with us, or he has to go to the vet. In Dingo’s world, that’s as bad as it gets.
A huge mug of coffee in hand, I came upstairs and subsided into my desk chair and checked the news. It’s Election Day. It’s a “razor close race.” How can it be that Romney has a single supporter, let alone half this country? How can that be? The gulf between us feels unbridgeable. I don’t even want to talk to them to try to understand them, although, like a five-year-old, I do wish they’d all be struck by lightning and suddenly agree wholly with my own views.
I would characterize my political stance as Pollyanna socialist libertarianism. Why the hell, my stuck-phonograph-needle political thinking-track goes, can’t we all marry whoever the hell we want as a matter of course, be treated and paid and respected equally no matter what our sex, color, or belief system, and get, among other things, a good free education, free medical care, decent jobs with excellent benefits, especially for parents, and GMO labels on food? Why the hell not? It makes no sense to me that we can’t. I am clearly naïve. I should move to Norway.
Anyway, tonight, as the election returns come in, booze and food will be my refuge and comfort and distraction from agonizing stress, as always. We’re going to drink strong Dark and Stormys, and Brendan is making fettucine Bolognese, which is one of the best things I know of in the world. If Romney wins, I’ll have seconds, then thirds, and then I’ll move to Norway.
Brendan’s Election Night Bolognese
Make a soffrito: 1 large onion, 2 carrots, 2 celery stalks diced finely and sautéed in olive oil on low heat for about 15 minutes, until very soft. Turn up the heat and add a pound of ground beef or veal and sauté, stirring, until browned, about 5 minutes. Add 1/3 cup red wine and cook for another minute or two until it cooks off. Then add a box of Pomi chopped tomatoes and 2 tablespoons of tomato paste, and generous amounts of salt and pepper. Let cook on medium-low heat for 15-20 minutes.
Toss with 1 pound hot, freshly cooked gluten-free fettucine (Le Veneziane is the best brand we know of) and serve with grated parmesan and a crisp, lightly dressed salad.
Eat as slowly as you can, allowing this comforting, savory, luscious food to coat your esophagus. Works to alleviate biliousness and anxiety, at least temporarily.
by Kate Christensen | Oct 31, 2012
It feels weird to have my innermost dread feel so manifest on Halloween, a day we usually enact symbolically and ritualistically from the safety of so-called normal life by wearing costumes to work or school or the grocery store, dressing up as figures of death or horror, fantasy, chaos, or satire, enjoying the shock of seeing a witch or a ghoul or a zombie or a vampire at a school desk, in the cereal aisle, in a cubicle on the phone. The mundane made terrifying is the nature of the deepest fears I have. Today, I imagine many people here on the East Coast won’t feel much like dressing up. It cuts too close to the bone.
I spent the night of the hurricane at my laptop, glued to updates from friends and news media in and around New York City, sending and reading emails, watching footage of the Atlantic City boardwalk washing away, a transformer at Con Ed exploding and terrible floods in lower Manhattan and Brooklyn. Meanwhile, I worried more than ever about the outcome of the next election, something I have no control over beyond my one New Hampshire vote. It matters who wins. I am terrified.
Brendan had to go out to L.A. this week for meetings, so it was just Dingo and me up here in my study together while the wind whipped around the house and glass broke down the street and metal clanged and things blew past. I kept reassuring Dingo, who stared at me wide-eyed every time he heard anything unusual, which was all night long. “It’s okay,” I told him. He clearly did not believe me and chose to believe his own ears instead. “It could be a lot worse.” He stared at me, unblinking.
It was true, though. This was all the way up in Maine: how bad could it have been down in New York, I kept thinking, where the real storm was? Unlike thousands of other people up here, my power didn’t go out; no trees around me fell. I was lucky, but it’s an odd kind of guilt to realize your own damage is so minimal when other people lost so much, went through so much. It reminds me of post-tornado photos I’ve seen — an untouched house sitting on its lawn while next door is a gaping dirt pit where the neighbor’s house used to be. You never know when it’s going to be you. It could always be you. When it’s not you this time, it could be next time. No one is ever safe, and luck is really just freak chance.
When suppertime rolled around, as it always does, even during hurricanes, I went down to the kitchen, Dingo barreling down the stairs ahead of me, barking with the excitement he shows before every single meal of his life. I doled out his kibble, his cup of homemade stew. He whimpered and mooed as I mixed them together, then set upon his dinner as ravenously as if he were still a skeletal, starving street dog instead of a well-fed elderly gentleman from a good home. He has no dignity where food is concerned. I feel much the same way.
On Saturday, before Brendan left, knowing this storm was coming, I had stocked the kitchen for the week with groceries – one small thing to be glad of. After I fed Dingo, I made myself a stiff Dark and Stormy: a slew of ice cubes, half a bottle of Maine Root ginger beer, a huge slug of Gosling’s, and the juice of half a lime. I looked out the kitchen windows at the gigantic, thick-trunked, very old ash tree, whose branches we had trimmed a month or two ago. It stood there, barely moving in the strong, hard gusts, and all its leaves were already down and raked and bagged, another small thing to be glad of.
To take my mind off everything going on in the world out there, I cooked myself a ridiculously huge dinner of mussels in coconut milk and chicken broth with onion, garlic, ginger, turmeric, cayenne, coriander, Thai rice noodles, red pepper, and mushrooms. I dished myself up a big bowlful of this brothy, briny, warming stew, added lime juice and Sriracha, and ate it at the counter with my laptop. Too full for seconds, I emptied the remaining mussel shells and put the pot in the fridge for tomorrow.
It was time to take Dingo out. We stood at the door of the mudroom together, his leash on, poop bags in my jacket pocket.
“Ready?” I asked him.
He was not ready, it appeared.
“Come on,” I said. “We can do it.”
I opened the door into a powerful gust of wind and pulled him outside. The wind was so strong it plastered his ears against his skull and lifted my hair in a swirl above my head. We went to the end of the alleyway driveway and turned onto the sidewalk, which had become a wind tunnel.
Instantly, he emptied himself of everything he had.
“Good boy,” I said, and we headed back for home.
I gave him a treat, then made another Dark and Stormy and took it upstairs with my laptop. I sat there all night long, reluctant to go to bed. My laptop screen felt like a window into reality – my way of feeling connected to the people I loved, the city I will always feel part of, the ongoing online conversations that so many of us participated in all night, those of us who could, as if that could somehow help something, someone. It was yet another small thing to be glad of, but I held onto it.
by Kate Christensen | Oct 16, 2012
I walked into the soup kitchen last week to find that I was the only volunteer that day for lunch, and Monica was on vacation. Her substitute, Jordan, runs the teen center. He had two chowders heating in the oven when I arrived, one corn, the other fish.
“How do you feel about making biscuits?” he asked when I came in.
“I feel fine about making biscuits,” I said, with private misgivings, which I kept to myself. The machismo of the kitchen, even a soup kitchen, does not allow for fear of wheat. I’d keep my mouth closed while I made them, try not to breathe the flour dust, scrub my hands and sponge off my clothing afterwards, and hope for the best.
Jordan handed me a handwritten recipe he’d copied off the Internet for a large enough quantity of biscuits for today’s lunch: 8 cups flour, ¼ cup baking powder, 2 cups oil, 4 cups milk, but only 1 teaspoon salt. He went back into the office, where he was working on the teen center’s weekly menu.
The oven was already hot, so I got out a big bowl and measured the flour from the huge sack on the pantry and carried the bowl quickly back out to the kitchen, leaving behind the inevitable puffs of flour dust in the air, trying not to breathe any of it. I rolled up my sleeves and averted my face as I stirred in the baking powder and a good shaking of salt, a lot more than the recipe called for, because 1 teaspoon of salt was not nearly enough for all that flour.
I considered the “2 cups oil.” If I used oil, I could stir the batter with a spoon and drop the biscuits onto the cookie sheet with a smaller spoon. I wouldn’t have to touch the dough. I could get it done and into the oven quickly. I’d be safe from flour contamination.
But they wouldn’t be biscuits. They might taste all right, but biscuits involve creating an alchemy of starch and fat that you can only get by rubbing them together by hand until they’re blended.
The soup kitchen has no butter, only margarine. I took out a 2-cup block, unwrapped it, and cut it into the flour mixture. Then, using my bare, clean hands, I rubbed and rubbed it into the flour. It took a while. Toxic, dangerous flour covered my arms up to my elbows, hung in puffs in the air in front of my face. I didn’t stop until the magical alchemy happened and I had grainy, fatty, yellowed flour, ready for the milk.
I made an indentation in the flour, splashed in some milk, worked it into a paste, added more milk. I didn’t measure the liquid: another secret of real biscuits. The flour will tell you how much it wants. When I had a ball of clean, firm dough, not too sticky, not too dry, I got out a big board and set it by the bowl. I filled the measuring cup with more flour, not even bothering to be prissy about it anymore: I was too intent on my project to care by now.
I floured the board and turned the dough ball out onto it.
“Jordan,” I called, “is there a rolling pin in this kitchen?”
He emerged from the office. “You can just drop it onto the sheet with a spoon,” he said. “They come out fine.”
“I have to make them my grandmother’s way,” I said with a laugh. Did my grandmother even make biscuits? I have no idea. I was referring to some mythical grandmother, an old-fashioned Midwestern farm wife who got up at dawn to feed her hard-working family breakfast with real American biscuits.
I patted the dough until I had an inch-thick layer, which worked fine in the absence of a rolling pin. Then I took a drinking glass and cut out the biscuits one by one. I took the leftover scraps, patted them into another layer, and cut them out. I did a third round, and then they were done.
I arranged them on the sheet and baked them. They came out puffy, golden, moist, and light.
Later, during lunch service, a tall, elegant black woman with a strong Southern accent approached the window.
“I’ll take another biscuit,” she said. “Girl, you made these biscuits?”
We smiled at each other. “Yeah,” I said.
“These are real biscuits!” she said. “Like my grandmother used to make. I haven’t tasted these since she was alive!”
I gave her two more.
Chicken Dinner
The other night, I roasted a chicken. I stuck a cut-up lemon and a handful of pitted olives into its cavity, squeezed lemon juice over its peppered skin, and put two big pats of butter on top of it. I surrounded it with whole peeled shallots and halved peeled carrots and parsnips set into a coating of olive oil, covered the pan with foil, roasted it at 500 degrees for 20 minutes, then uncovered it and turned the oven down to 350.
I made a broth with the pile of parsnip and carrot peelings and tops, the shallot peels and ends, the gizzards from inside the chicken, pepper, and salt, simmering it until it was sweet and earthy. I strained it and whisked polenta into it and let it cook until it thickened, then stirred in a lot of minced fresh basil and parmesan cheese.
When the chicken was moist inside and crackling outside, and the root vegetables were soft and had begun to caramelize in the chicken fat, and the polenta was cheesy and savory and redolent of basil, we ate.
Afterwards, I poured the chicken fat that was left in the pan into a coffee cup and put it in the fridge. Tonight, I’ll fry wedges of red cabbage in it until they’re soft and browned and velvety, just like my mythical grandmother would have done.
