by Kate Christensen | Jul 17, 2012
Brendan and Dingo and I just spent three days in Western Massachusetts with my best friend Cathi and her husband, Dan. The occasion of our visit was Cathi’s and my first joint reading together, ever, in almost a quarter century of friendship.
She and I first met at a party in 1989 and talked all night. We were both 27 and single and living in New York, and we hadn’t even started writing what would be our first novels. Cathi was an editor at Seventeen. I was an editorial assistant at William Morrow. We wore tiny black miniskirts and high heels. We often met for lunch in midtown: hamburgers and fries, a beer for me, cake for her. I was always late getting back to the office. When she met Dan later that year, I went out with the two of them to inspect him and check him out. They came to my wedding and comforted me when my marriage broke up 12 years later.
Now Cathi and I are middle-aged women who wear comfortable shoes and live in old houses in New England. We’ve published 10 books between us. She and Dan have been married for 20 years. Their kids, Phoebe and Nathaniel, are teenagers now; I’ve known them since they were babies. We live a 4-hour drive apart, so we email each other every day, back and forth, often for the duration of one of our old lunch-hour conversations.
Brendan instantly loved the whole family when they met 3 years ago, and it was mutual; it was as if they’d always known one another. This time around, it felt like a reunion of old friends. And Dingo got along just fine with their two younger, sleeker, stronger dogs after some initial old-man teeth-bared grousing at the adolescent Rico, who tried to hump and French kiss him until Dingo put him in his place. They all ran barking to the door in a flap together whenever anyone arrived as if they were a pack of three: Cathi dubbed them “the Avengers.”
The weather was stultifyingly, paralyzingly hot while we were there. The dogs lay semi-comatose on the cool kitchen floor. Brendan and I parked ourselves at the table and didn’t budge while all around us their life revolved like a family sitcom in which we got to play the childless visiting couple, sipping cold wine and eating all their food.
Cathi, who is the tiniest adult I’ve ever met, and who eats more than almost anyone I know, is a human hummingbird. She buzzed and darted around us, offering plates of ripe cut-up nectarines and watermelon, bowls of boiled red potatoes, while Dan came and went laconically, with wry asides that cracked us up. “Bye, honey,” we called after him as he left to go to work. “Have a good day at the office.”
We ate like kings: Cathi had stocked the refrigerator so full, you had to be careful when you opened the door that something didn’t fall out and hit your foot. The first night, she marinated a huge bowl of fresh chicken pieces in olive oil, lemon, tamari, ketchup, and garlic. Dan grilled them outside while she boiled ears of corn and made an epic salad from lettuce from their garden. Her salads are my favorite, anywhere, anytime: they always have just the right amount of extras — mushrooms, sprouts, cherry tomatoes, goat cheese, sunflower seeds, dried fruit — and her dressing is a rich vinegary-creamy emulsion.
We all sat around the long table and stuffed ourselves. Cathi jumped up after the table had been cleared to fetch an armload of sweets, among them an enormous gluten-free chocolate cookie she’d bought just for us. We usually never eat dessert, but it would have been rude to ignore it when she’d gone out of her way to get it for us, so we fell on it and ate the whole thing with the rest of our bottle of rosé. Meanwhile, everyone else devoured ice cream, chocolate, cake, cookies, and whipped cream: They are a family of avid, gluttonous, connoisseur-like, perplexingly thin and healthy sweets-eaters, as serious about their treats as Brendan and I are about our wine.
The next night, after the reading Cathi and I gave at a local bookstore, we came back to their house. While Brendan made dinner and Dan kept him company, Cathi and I dashed out to the supermarket for a few things: they were out of orange juice, but, more importantly, Phoebe had just had an impacted wisdom tooth pulled and therefore desperately needed a tube of slice ‘n bake cookies. Cathi had meanwhile developed a sudden yen for two kinds of pie and apple turnovers. Nathaniel wanted two kinds of ice cream.
When we got back, the kitchen was even hotter: Brendan was frying flank steaks in butter and roasting a pan of asparagus in the oven. When the flank steaks had arrived at various stages of doneness from rare to medium, something for everyone, he forked them onto a plate and sautéed a minced red onion and a heap of sliced button mushrooms with some fresh thyme in the butter and meat juices, then poured red wine into the pan and reduced it. He poured this velvety, savory sauce over the steaks. While the dogs lay at our feet, panting, we ate this rich, meaty, fantastic meal.
Afterwards, we found it in our hearts to eat the gluten-free carrot cake Cathi had laid in for us, only for politeness’ sake, of course.
Summer breakfast
Spread mayonnaise on a piece of hot toast. Slap a slice of deli Jarlsberg and two thick slices of perfectly ripe tomato on top with salt and pepper. Devour with a sweet, creamy iced coffee.
by Kate Christensen | Jul 10, 2012
For a couple of years, Brendan and I have batted around an idea for a TV show called “Cougar Kitchen” — scripted, but imitating a reality show, with a sexy, bitchy older woman and a sexy, obedient but slightly seething younger man.
The cougar in question, a toned, sultry actress in her 40s, would wear babydoll silk negligees with stiletto feather mules. She would perch on a stool with her legs crossed, smoking a cigarette and holding a wineglass, her hair loose and wild around her almost-bare shoulders, as if she had just arisen from bed and would return there as soon as she’d eaten her fill – three bites, because she’s always watching her figure — of the feast her paramour was being instructed to prepare for her.
“Chop it rougher, baby,” she’d say. “Large dice! I didn’t say mince!”
The much younger man, wearing only boxer briefs and an apron, would be played by a 20something actor with cut-glass musculature and satiny skin and the pouty, smoldering hotness of Tim Riggins on “Friday Night Lights,” but with clean hair and a tan.
“You want large dice?” he’d say to his mistress. “I’ll give you large dice.”
And then the camera would cut out for a while, as if it had toppled over in the heat of their passion. When it came back on, she’d be splayed on the counter, spatchcocked where he’d left her, panting and slitty-eyed and spent, and he’d be chopping things into large dice, his apron unsullied, his hair adorably mussed.
Suffice it to say, this scenario generally does not play out in our own kitchen. When Brendan cooks, for one thing, I do not presume to boss him around. Also, I do most of the cooking, and I don’t wear negligees when I make dinner, and I don’t smoke.
Also, unless something happens to remind us that I’m almost 20 years older than he is, something very specific and outside the usual course of things, we almost completely forget about it.
At the beginning, when we first got together, we were self-conscious about being around other people in public. Would they treat us weirdly, look askance, make unflattering assumptions about us? In fact, they did, but only people who knew us, a few friends and family members. We have never, not even once, encountered any awkwardness or judgment from strangers. Everywhere we go, when we meet people, they instantly get that we’re together, and they don’t seem to think anything is amiss about it. It’s not that I don’t look older than Brendan: I certainly do.
Once in a while, in the late afternoon, if we both get our work done early and feel like going out, we go to the New Orleans place, 2 blocks away, for Happy Hour. We sit in a booth looking out at the street and order plates of spicy barbecued chicken wings with ranch dressing along with silver tequila cocktails made with passion-fruit juice and hot Thai pepper slices. We devour the wings, attack them like hyenas, and leave neat piles of stripped bones on our plates. We drink the first cocktail and get our order in for the next one, and a dozen oysters, before Happy Hour ends at 6:00. If we forget, our waitress reminds us.
Last time, we ended up sitting there for 4 hours, several rounds of drinks, and, later on in the night, a shared plate of mixed barbecue with coleslaw and fries. We were talking, as I recall, about our work: what we’re writing, what we want to be writing, how we wrote when we were 13, how we’ve both experienced the depressing horror of writing badly for an extended length of time, and how I’m not Brendan’s mentor, not in any way at all, even though I am technically ahead of him. It’s the same as it is with cooking: he knows what he’s doing.
At the end of the night, our waitress brought the bill.
“How long have you guys been together?” she asked us.
“Three and a half years?” we said in almost-unison.
I wondered if maybe now was the time we’d find out what people really think, looking at us together.
“Well,” she said, “you just match.”
Cougar Kitchen Frittata
Make sure you each have a fresh mimosa. Have your smoldering, half-naked young man chop into large dice the following: 2 small red potatoes, 1 red onion, 1 red pepper. Have him grate 2 medium carrots and half a cup of gruyere. Instruct him to beat 6 eggs, well. By now, the butter he put into the large cast-iron skillet should be almost melted. Make sure he stirs all of the salted, peppered, spiced vegetables frequently with a wooden spoon while they soften and start to caramelize on low heat. This will take a while. Have another round of mimosas. When the vegetables are cooked, tell him it’s time to pour in the beaten eggs. Turn off the camera for a while.
When the eggs are set but the top is still wet, turn the camera back on so the audience can watch him sprinkle the cheese over it and run it under a hot broiler. When it’s golden-brown and puffy and tender, have him serve you a small piece while he devours the rest to keep up his strength, which he will need.
by Kate Christensen | Jul 7, 2012
I walked in to the soup kitchen on Thursday morning to find Monica, the kitchen manager, almost in tears, in a state of awe. There were 10 or 11 boxes on the floor by the steam table, the most beautiful produce I’ve ever seen, glistening and alive and gorgeous and colorful — lettuce, radishes, kale, chard, spring onions, garlic, broccoli, cauliflower, scapes. Florence House was just awarded a grant worth $100 a week, which pays for a full membership in a farm collective share. The collective is local, in Portland and right outside. They train immigrant women to farm. For several minutes, Monica and Alison and I stood there beaming at each other and at the vegetables.
For lunch, we used up all the vegetables that were already there to make room for this incredible new stuff. I augmented a steam table pan of leftover fried rice with a medley of chopped carrots, onions, celery, and peppers, stuck it into the oven to heat, then made two big stir fries, one vegetarian, one with many pounds of donated Whole Foods organic chicken. When it was noon and time for lunch, Alison held down the serving while I did dishes and prepped radish greens. I hadn’t known radish greens were edible. They’re mildly peppery, a little like arugula.
Meanwhile, Monica was breaking down the shipment of farm-collective vegetables. Then, using a fish tub full of vegetable scraps, she made a stock for a spring onion and potato soup.
I am always so happy to be there, to feed homeless women such nourishing, well-cooked food. And it feels good to work so hard. I’m a writer who usually works in a chair at a desk. At the end of a three-hour shift of nonstop dishwashing, pot-scrubbing, chopping, serving, and cleaning, I feel tired and relaxed, as if my brain has had a real break. I imagine that it would be hard do this for a living. Volunteering is profoundly and essentially different from working for pay. It’s pure, and it’s egoless, and it allows for a rare, happy sense of being in the pocket, in the flow of life, without thinking about anything.
My sister Susan runs a yoga center in Amsterdam. She’s told me that just about anything can be yoga — it’s all in the state of mind. I didn’t understand what she meant, then, but I think I’m starting to now. In my rudimentary understanding of what my sister was talking about, it seems that the practice of yoga can create an impersonal, transcendent love.
I love the women at the center from some deep core in myself I haven’t had much experience with before. It gives me an odd and powerful joy to rinse their plates, to mop up milk or soy sauce spills from the dining room floor, to clean the tables where they’ve eaten. The more menial the task, the closer I feel to something rich and mysterious and new. It feels like a blessing, this work.
It’s not about me at all. I’m the one who’s grateful, to Monica of course, and to the women who volunteer alongside me, but mostly to the women who eat at the Florence House soup kitchen. The troubles they’ve been through, the pain they’ve experienced, the difficulties they struggle with, the things they lack and yearn for – those are deeply private, and I can’t know them. I can only look into their faces as they take their plates of food, or as they return their used plates to the dish window. I don’t know exactly what it is I am receiving from them. I can’t put it into words. It feels like a pure exchange of love. They always thank me. I always thank them back.
Soup Kitchen Stir Fry
From the fridge, take all the fish tubs of chopped or sliced vegetables and chop and slice up everything that hasn’t been prepped yet. Assemble your flavorings: the carafes of teriyaki and soy sauce and the jug of corn oil and the jar of roasted pureed garlic and the little thing of Five Spice powder.
When everything is ready to go, heat a giant drum pan over two burners. Pour in about a cup of oil. When it’s hot, throw in a wad of garlic and a heap of aromatics: onion, carrots, celery. Stir. After two minutes, add chopped peppers, cauliflower, mushrooms, broccoli, zucchini, and summer squash. Stir, sprinkle with soy sauce and Five Spice powder until it smells really good. Keep stirring. Add a heap of well-washed, minced farm-share radish greens. Stir like mad. The drum pan should be over half full.
When the stir fry is cooked but not overcooked, get someone to help you lift the pan to divide the contents between two deep steam table pans. In one of them, leave room for the chicken. Put the pans into heated steam table slots and cover them.
Return the drum pan to the heat. Add a cup of corn oil. Stir fry all the chopped chicken, adding teriyaki sauce at the end. When it’s cooked, add it to one of the vegetable stir fry pans and mix together.
Florence House also is home to a number of hard-working, well-trained service dogs, registered emotional-support companions. Make sure to leave enough chicken out of the teriyaki sauce for anyone with a dog who asks for it.
by Kate Christensen | Jul 5, 2012
When we got to the Eastern Prom yesterday morning before 10, the whole place was buzzing. The entire street that runs along the promenade was blocked off, and men in reflective yellow vests directed cars to park on side streets. On the great lawn that slopes steeply down to the beaches and commands a view of the harbor, bay, and islands, a stage and band shell had been erected with music stands arranged in a fan shape for the Portland Symphony. A gigantic blow-up lobster bobbed in the breeze.
Trash drums lined with blue Portland city trash bags had been placed all around the parking lots, when usually you have to look hard to find even one. Flags and banners flew. The lawn was green and lush and almost empty still, but in a few hours, we’d probably have to fight for a spot on the lawn to watch the fireworks. Down below, along the footpath, a temporary fence was being put up next to the train tracks, evidently so children and drunks couldn’t stumble in front of the little Polar Express train that glides along the bay and back, whistle blowing, smoke puffing, tourists waving from bench seats facing the bay.
After our walk, we went shopping for picnic provisions. We lugged our bags into the kitchen when we got home. I put things away while Brendan sat down and got back to work. He is editing my just-finished book, so I left him to it and started cooking.
The night before, we had made Downeast Duck, the dish we’d envisioned on our walk last week: duck breasts pan-fried until the fat renders, cubed Yukon Gold potatoes cooked in the duck fat till they’re crisp, julienned zucchini poached in butter and chicken broth, and a salad of blanched snap peas in a thyme vinaigrette. I had made a good glaze for the duck: rhubarb, cherries, maple syrup, cognac, thyme, ginger, and red wine, boiled well and pureed in the blender.
There was plenty of glaze left over. To about one third of it, I added equal parts horseradish and ketchup to make an unexpectedly fruity but oddly sublime dipping sauce for large wild-caught shrimp, simmered for 5 minutes with lemon juice, garlic, Old Bay, and a dash of cayenne, then well chilled.
To go alongside the spicy drumsticks, baked in the oven, I made a potato salad with half small yellow, half small red potatoes, boiled till soft, doused in apple cider vinegar, and chilled. To them I added chopped hard-boiled eggs, chopped wrinkled black olives, plenty of capers, the rest of the marinated chopped snap peas from the night before, chopped celery, and an anchovy-mayonnaise dressing. It was crunchy, rich, salty, and savory.
I roasted two bunches of asparagus in salt and peanut oil a hot oven and made a very simple dipping sauce for them, a lemon-garlic-paprika mayonnaise.
By then, Brendan had edited the first chapter. As a reward for both of us, I opened a bottle of cold rosé and poured us each a glass. He went on to Chapter Two; I made dessert. I chopped the rest of the rhubarb and cherries and stewed them in orange and lime juice and a bit of cognac until they were soft and the alcohol had long ago cooked off. I added the rest of the glaze to give the compote some silkiness and a whiff of thyme and ginger. I let it sit on the stove so it would be warm when it was time to eat it with a little maple yogurt on top.
The sky darkened suddenly, as if a gigantic dirigible the size of the peninsula had just parked overhead. Standing up at the counter in the now-dim kitchen, we sampled the shrimp cocktail while I poured us each a second glass of wine, and we got back to it. Brendan finished editing my second chapter just as I finished cleaning the kitchen and packing everything into containers for our picnic.
Then the storm hit. Rain heaved itself out of the sky. Lightning and thunder cracked and boomed and popped, as bright and loud as any fireworks. We went into the twin living rooms and looked out the big front windows at the empty, flashing street, its gutters gushing with rivulets. Treetops bounced and tossed.
We ate our 4th of July picnic on the enormous, poufy, extra-comfy gold couch we inherited from our friend Madeleine and dubbed the QE2. Such a dramatic storm naturally called for a second bottle of wine, so we opened another one, put our feet on the bamboo coffee table I bought on ebay 5 years ago, and set our plates on our laps. We licked chicken grease off our fingers and watched “Friday Night Lights,” which seemed like a nicely patriotic activity. We toasted our country, and New England as well for good measure, and the fact that we live in such a good place.
by Kate Christensen | Jun 26, 2012
Of course, being a dedicated eater, and a woman, I’ve always had to reckon with the risk of weight gain, to balance sensual indulgence with sensible moderation.
I was a skinny kid, a happy glutton who ran around outside for hours a day. That all changed when I left home for the first time. At 16, a homesick teenager, I glutted myself on homemade oily nutty granola with whole milk, whole-wheat toast thickly paved with cream cheese and strawberry jam, meatball subs on long, soft white rolls dripping with meat juice, entire big bags of Doritoes, and calzones, those soft bricks of dough encasing melted, oozing white cheese. And those were just my after-school snacks. (As meager compensation, I took to drinking Tab, the ubiquitous diet soda of the era, but of course it didn’t help.) Soon, not surprisingly, I was not fitting into my jeans anymore. Being 16, I squeezed myself in anyway and hoped for the best and looked marshmallow-like.
Back home again during the summers, the weight went away as I reverted to my family’s sensible habits of small portions and a lot of exercise. It wasn’t rocket science, I found out.
At 18, living in France during the year after high school, homesick again, I found plenty of solace in food. Frenchwomen may never get fat, but I haven’t got a drop of French blood that I know of. I was an au pair girl in the countryside in the Allier district; being around kids, especially 4 little boys who didn’t finish their food, it was very easy to overeat to keep from throwing out their leavings. Nursery food is both comforting and fattening, and French nursery food is irresistible: buttery scrambled eggs with brioche; tartines made of baguette and Nutella, that cracklike chocolate-hazelnut goo; 4 platefuls at a time of uneaten roast chicken with potatoes au gratin — I was the family dishwasher; instead of scraping it all into la poubelle, it seemed so much more responsible to eat it. Soon, I was husky again.
In college and graduate school, I didn’t eat much. During my late 20s and 30s, I stayed very thin, although had a few bouts with weight gain. These happened when I was depressed, playing a lot of computer word games (and by a lot, I mean obsessively: during my Boggle addiction, I saw many dawns; Scrabble, the next addiction, was more of a daytime thing, but whole blocks of hours went by without my budging), and feeling stuck in some way. New York City offers plenty of comforting food, on every street corner, in every deli, or – if you don’t want to leave the house, as I often didn’t – there’s always Freshdirect.
The year I turned 40, when I was training for the New York City marathon and running up to 21 miles a day, I paradoxically, unfairly started gaining a lot of weight. I felt like I had a 10-pound water balloon around my torso and hips. I ran the marathon wearing this water balloon. Of course, I was carbo-loading during training because I thought you were supposed to eat mounds of bread and pasta, along with soy sauce for sodium intake.
It turned out, I discovered a year later, thanks to a naturopath, that I was gluten intolerant, and one of the side effects of gluten allergy is bloat. It was, literally, a water balloon. I went off gluten completely, and it magically melted away. And that, I figured, was the end of my battle with weight gain.
Then I turned 47. This was almost 3 years ago. My mother, who is always a reliable guide to the mysteries of getting older, had warned me about this. That year, after a lifetime of having a flat stomach, about which I had always felt annoyingly smug, I got my comeuppance: suddenly I had a poofy belly and a little muffin top over the waistband of my tight jeans. It just happened, as if my body had been programmed for it. I hadn’t changed my eating or exercise habits.
As problems go, this is a minor one. But I had recently fallen in love with Brendan, who is almost 20 years younger than I am. If there was ever a time when I wanted to look as young and cute and trim as possible, it was now, goddamn it. But when I tried eating less and exercising more, I lost weight, but not the poof. It wouldn’t budge.
As my late 40s went on, I left New York and moved up to New England with Brendan. We are both passionate cooks and eaters. He is 6 feet tall and thin and just turned 30, and I am 5’ 7” and turn 50 in August: the math is simple. He can eat more than I can: I’ve finally figured it out.
But for a while there, until a couple of months ago, I pretended otherwise. It made it easier that Brendan would say, “But I love you like this, you look so much better now than when I first met you, you were so scrawny then. Eat, eat. I adore you.” What woman could resist that? Not me.
But this winter, I came back from a three-day trip to New Orleans and recognized that I had hit an all-time high of weight gain. It’s a number so alarming, I can’t even say here what it was, but trust me: it was cause for concern, as was my stomach, which was suddenly not adorably poofy, it was a gut.
Gradually, since then, I’ve begun to revert to my old lifelong habits, learned from my mother and Michael Pollan: Eat well. Not too much. And not too many carbohydrates. Thank God, I’ve been losing weight, and I’m starting to feel like myself again. But the roll is here to stay. I have almost managed to embrace it.
Weight Loss Lunch
In a big bowl, mix 2 cups fresh mesclun, 2 ribs chopped celery, 1 grated carrot, and 1 sheet of chopped nori (sushi seaweed). Toss lightly with a dressing of sesame oil and rice vinegar. Wave a log of goat cheese over it so a few crumbs tumble in. Savor them as you eat the entire salad. Follow with 3 big cups of nettle tea, which tastes like mulchy bogwater but has magical diuretic properties.
