by Kate Christensen | May 22, 2012
The first draft of the new book I’m writing, whose working title is Blue Plate Special: the Autobiography of an Eater, is halfway done as of this week. It’s emerging so quickly, I think, because it’s something I’ve been writing in one form or another for many years, in pieces, in essays, in my own head, here on this blog, and now in book form — everything is tumbling into place, interlocking and coming to rest, finally. I feel hyperfocused, turbocharged, like a wind-up toy, charging over or bumping into and richocheting off anything that happens to be in my way.
Consequently, I am rather difficult to live with these days, especially for myself, but also, I imagine, for everyone else.
Our friend Jami is living here with us for the month; she and Brendan are both working as hard as I am. Dingo is busy lying on a chair near me, protecting me from any possible attackers or nogoodniks, growling deep in his throat whenever anyone walks by the window. As far as he’s concerned, that’s his job, and he’s hard at it. Jami is writing upstairs at the desk in the guest room. Brendan works at the dining room table. I’m in the second living room at a small table in one corner; I have a great view of the old Victrola we just got for $200, a Craigslist find, from a bald German gentleman in Falmouth named Mannfred who kept it in his garage for years next to his gleaming new BMW. It’s our new prize possession: a mint-condition 78 record of Marlene Dietrich singing “Lili Marlene” recently arrived from an ebay seller.
The two activities (besides drinking wine, playing fiddle tunes, reading in a bath, and, of course, sex) that most effectively loosen and ease my tightly-wound brain are cooking and walking. Every day, Brendan and I take Dingo over to the Eastern Prom for an hour-long, fast walk across the headlands, down on the bike path, up around the water treatment plant, along a wooded trail, back down the hill to Dog Beach, where we let Dingo say hello to all the other dogs and run along the sand to the rocky outcropping — then we walk the path on the other side and climb the stairs to the monument, and then we tramp back to the car. Dingo can be off-leash for most of it, which we all love. We have a view out over Casco Bay the entire time. The weather has been clear and sunny and cool all week – scintillating, sparkling Maine spring days. Today it’s rainy and cool… but we’re going anyway. Sanity demands it.
But cooking is the best tension-reliever I know of, bar none. When my brain is too full of ideas and images, loaded so full it churns around like a cement mixer, I go into the kitchen and start chopping things. I have a sturdy-handled, big-bladed knife and a big heavy wood chopping board my ex-husband made years ago from leftover ipe when he was making our shelves. Last night, my skull crammed to bursting with words, I stood at the counter and chopped and minced until there was nothing left to cut up for the meal: a big piece of ginger, Serrano peppers, a big white onion. I smashed and chopped so many garlic cloves I lost track, and as I did so, I felt the cement mixer slow down, rock gently back and forth, come to a settled point at which its heavy weight lay in its belly and was still.
I devised a spicy basmati rice, cooked in the shimmering rich and golden chicken broth I had made the night before, with saffron, Serrano peppers, ginger, garlic, and a dash of garam masala. I stewed the leftover chicken from the cacciatore I’d made the other night, pulled from the bones, in a sauce of tomato, spices, lemon, and ginger. Brendan made spinach minced and cooked in butter, garlic, ginger, and onion. With this warm, spicy meal, we drank cold rose and listened to bluegrass; somehow, it all went together.
Sweet-Savory Applesauce
The other day at the soup kitchen, Monica asked me to make an applesauce to go alongside some pork chops for a later dinner. I filled a small red crate with a variety of red and green apples from the big fridge in the pantry, washed them in the small sink, took off the little stickers, then set up a big cutting board with a wet cloth underneath to keep it from slipping. All through my shift, whenever I had a spare several minutes, I stood at my little workstation, happily and steadily reducing that big box of apples to a smallish dice. I prefer to leave the peels on. Cutting them small makes the applesauce smooth and palatable. I also like dicing; I’ll take any excuse to do it.
By the time my shift was almost over, I had filled a deep steam-table pan. I added a big handful of brown sugar, 3 bay leaves, some minced fresh rosemary from the plant in Monica’s office, a good pouring of cinnamon, and another of salt. After I mixed it all together, I poured 2 cups of water over the pan, covered it in parchment paper and then foil, and stuck it into a moderately hot oven to bake for the next hour or two.
I left not knowing how it turned out; it didn’t matter. I was so soothed and refreshed by chopping all those apples over the past couple of hours, I came home energized, smiling, almost euphoric, and managed to sail through a whole chunk of the chapter about my wretched adolescence.
by Kate Christensen | May 15, 2012
Last Thursday, I started working in the soup kitchen at the women’s shelter, Florence House, here in Portland, Maine. I arrived 15 minutes early, at 10:15 in the morning, feeling nervous but glad to be there; I’d been meaning to do this for months, and here I was. A staff member led me back into a clean, well-appointed kitchen. As I signed my name in the register in the little office, I heard Nick Drake on the CD player, saw a Julia Child quote on a banner (“You don’t have to cook fancy or complicated masterpieces – just good food from fresh ingredients”), and smelled something good cooking on the stove. I almost burst into tears.
After I introduced myself to Monica, the kitchen supervisor, she put me to work. I assembled about 60 cheese sandwiches and toasted them in butter on the grill and set the container into the steam table, loosely covered, to await lunch service. Then I peeled and diced a box of carrots and stored them in the refrigerator. Local supermarkets had donated all the ingredients in the kitchen – Hannaford, Trader Joe’s, and Whole Foods.
From 12 to 1, I stood by the steam table and served two kinds of soup, both made from scratch (broccoli cheddar and tomato basil), along with the sandwiches I’d made, while Kim, my fellow new volunteer, served the salad she’d made, and Monica started the prep work for that night’s dinner.
Monica told us that the other volunteer on that day’s lunch shift, Diane, had just been given the Volunteer of the Year award. Diane spent the whole shift washing dishes in the corner. Every time I needed more, there she was, restocking soup bowls and sandwich plates by my elbow. She did this with immense cheer, unobtrusively; it was not hard to guess why she’d been awarded the honor. The soup kitchen, I could tell right away without having it spelled out for me, has a strong ethic of service, or “mission,” as they call it; it’s not religious, it’s not didactic, but it is humble and without ego or judgment.
I stood in my apron and dished up lunch for all the women who came shuffling up to the service window. Many of them didn’t make eye contact. Many of them looked as if they had been through terrible things, formidable struggles. Even so, they knew what they wanted in their lunch, and they were not shy about demanding it. Some of them said, “Not that sandwich, I want one that’s not so burned.” Some of them asked for seconds, even thirds. They all loved the broccoli cheddar soup.
One of the rules of the place that I agreed to observe when I volunteered was not to reveal identifying details about anyone there. This is not a writer’s favorite promise to make, especially because the singular details and specificity of people are a novelist’s bread and butter. Even so, I can see the usefulness of protecting the anonymity of women in a shelter. But as I stood there dishing up their lunches, I wanted to know all their stories, their histories. I would be lying if I pretended otherwise.
Soup Kitchen Three-Bean Chili
After lunch had been cleaned up, before my shift was over, Monica had me assemble what she called a “three-bean chili” (“It sounds more exciting than ‘vegetarian chili,’” she said. “They complain sometimes when there’s no meat”), for the next day’s lunch, in order to use up various assorted cans of beans she had rattling around the pantry. This chili turned out to be similar to the one I make myself on a cold night when I haven’t bought groceries and want something quick, easy, good, and nourishing.
Saute a chopped onion, a celery rib, and a bell pepper in olive oil with plenty of garlic, cumin, paprika, oregano, black pepper, and chili powder. Add a rinsed can of one each of the following beans: dark kidney, pinto, and black. Add a can of diced tomatoes, a bay leaf, and chicken broth as needed. Simmer for 15 minutes and dish into shallow bowls with plenty of grated cheddar, chopped raw onion, and sour cream.
by Kate Christensen | May 8, 2012
It’s been a long time since I last posted here. For the past month, I’ve been turning this blog into a full-blown book, which has been taking all my time and concentration. I want my editor to be happy. But the call of the blog is a tempting siren song, or maybe I should say a lure to the light, and I can’t stay away.
Brendan’s little brother Aidan lives in West Hollywood just off Sunset Boulevard with his friend Noah. He’s an actor and screenwriter, and Noah works for a big producer. Last night, when Brendan called Aidan to wish him a happy 24th birthday, Aidan expressed, in the course of their conversation, his consternation at the loss of his vicarious source of food envy.
“Reading her blog used to make our frozen pizza dinners taste so much better,” he said. “We’re dying here. We’re jonesing for more.”
Happy belated birthday, Aidan, but I’m not sure I have anything exciting to report, foodwise.
Tonight’s dinner, for example, was aggressively healthy and Whole Foods-inspired, and not likely to cause any drooling deviation from pizza: kale salad with buttermilk dressing. Chopped brussels sprouts tossed in balsamic vinegar, salt, pepper, red pepper flakes, smoked paprika, and cumin, and steamed till soft. And then, the hippie-food piece de résistance, which means most kids would rather die than eat it: a cup of rinsed quinoa sautéed in olive oil and butter with an onion, a whole head of garlic, 2 hot peppers, smoked cardamom, paprika, and tarragon, salt and pepper, then steamed in 2 cups of broth. When it’s a nice hot wet mass, the general color and texture of wood pulp, stir in half a cup of toasted chopped almonds, a quarter cup of mixed olives, and lemon zest. Serve with hot sauce…
It was good, and we gobbled it up avidly, as we do everything, but it had a quality of over-achieving to it; if you ate like this every day, you might plausibly never die, except maybe of boredom, or an excess of fiber and antioxidants and cancer-fighting compounds, which studies will no doubt soon reveal are toxic.
The other night, when our friend Madeleine, one of the few friends we’ve made so far in Portland, came over for dinner, I made a similarly health-on-steroids kind of meal: very fresh local haddock broiled in lemon and capers and olive oil; “forbidden” japonica rice steamed in chicken broth with shallots, garlic, whole cardamom pods, sesame oil, and chili-garlic hot sauce, and a salad of herb mix and avocado in a mustard vinaigrette.
Madeleine used to live in our house. She was the tenant in the downstairs apartment, where we now live, and, because she was moving out, we were able to buy it. We phoned her during the sale to ask her some questions about the place – why was she moving out, was there was anything we needed to know, that sort of thing (she had some stories to tell, most notably about a flood, but luckily, they didn’t deter us). It turned out that she and I had gone to Reed together – in fact, we graduated the same year. We used to play bridge together in the Student Union one summer. We had friends in common. But we’d barely known each other there – I’d always thought she was far too cool for me, which, frankly, she was. But now that we’re middle-aged, these distinctions are evidently moot and have smoothed themselves out.
We’ve been gradually settling into this house. We’ve augmented our furniture with stuff from Brendan’s parents’ barn, his grandmother Sally Fitzgerald’s furniture – a Queen Anne couch with matching armchairs, a secretary desk, a glassed-in bookcase, and Brendan’s grandfather’s old desk. I love the fact that this furniture has deep literary history embedded in its molecular structure: Flannery O’Connor was Sally’s best friend, so I’m sure she sat on the couch and chairs that are in our parlor. Brendan’s grandfather, Robert Fitzgerald, translated The Odyssey and The Iliad, and I love to think that he did so on the desk we’re using, temporarily, as a dining room table. Eating on it, I’m reminded of my freshman year at Reed, when I was held hostage to those books. The other night, when Madeleine found herself at this table, she heard the story of its provenance, and we remembered Humanities 110 – did either of us actually ever read them? The Odyssey, maybe.
This house has its own stories. Brendan has been researching its previous owners at the Registry of Deeds in the Cumberland Courthouse. They are legion, by which I mean it’s changed hands at least 20 times in its nearly 150-year life. Previous owners include an ex-governor of Maine in the late 19th century, as well as members of illustrious old New England families — Coffins, Libbys, Knights, Meserves, and McQuillans. For much of the latter half of the 20th century, the house was an institute — for 30 years, it was a Goodwill Industries home for Down syndrome adults and, before that, it was an old age home owned by a doctor associated with Maine Medical. A sprinkler system and wheelchair-accessible bathroom doorways attest to its institutional history; plaster moldings, high ceilings, and bay windows are evidence of its more distant, elegant past.
Evidently, we’ve taken possession of an old, much-altered, interesting, beautiful structure. Now we’re imposing our own ideas on it, as no doubt others will do after we leave it behind.
Breakfast smoothie
In a blender, put a cup of frozen mixed berries, a cup of orange juice, a banana, and as much yogurt as fits in the rest of the blender before it explodes. Blend. Serves 3.
by Kate Christensen | Apr 6, 2012
There’s a certain time of day, sometime after sunset, when people generally seem to feel the urge to gather together by a fire or a stove or a Hibachi or another common source of heat and food, and hunker down together to eat and drink. People I know who live alone have told me that they’re perfectly fine all day until shortly after the sun goes down. In that hour of oncoming darkness, they feel a sudden awareness of loneliness and a desire to break bread, as it were, with other people. When I’ve lived alone, I’ve felt it, too.
Of course it’s wonderful to eat with other people, but cooking for one, that one being your own damn self, is a useful skill to have for those nights when you’re the only person around. After my husband and I separated, I moved into my friend Jami’s loft, which I sublet for three months while she was out West, and then, when she came back to town, I got my own apartment. I found that when I lived alone, I looked out the window a lot more often than I had when there was someone else in the house with me, as if looking at the outside world were some instinctive way of feeling connected to other people. I became much neater living alone than I’d been when I was married. My husband’s and my house was generally messy and cluttered, dishes in the sink, laundry not put away, stuff covering the dining room table, and I didn’t care, and neither did he. In my own place, I kept everything neat and shipshape. There was no clutter at all.
I thought of the hour after sunset as a hump I had to get over, a period of restless bleakness during which I yearned for company. I wanted to go out and eat in a restaurant just to be around other people. Suddenly I missed my husband, missed being married. On some especially blue evenings, I almost, but never actually, wished I had a roommate. And I regretted the solitary nature of the writer’s life – other people, normal working people, spent their days with coworkers, rode the subway home with a crowd, walked through thronged streets. I worked at home, and here I was. Of course, I had Dingo, but a dog just doesn’t cut it in the blue hour.
To shake this sense of desolation, I went into the kitchen and started chopping things. I made just enough dinner for me, a simple and comforting and filling meal — one broiled chicken thigh, or even two, with a baked sweet potato and a side of garlicky red chard, for example, or cauliflower curry over basmati rice served with cashews, Sriracha hot sauce, and cilantro, or a puttanesca with gluten-free pasta and plenty of anchovies, capers, olives, and hot red pepper flakes. In those days, I ordered groceries weekly from Freshdirect. I always had plenty of food in the refrigerator and cupboard because I’d planned ahead; keeping my kitchen well-stocked was another effective bulwark against loneliness.
When the meal was ready, I heaped up a plate, sat at a table set for one, and feasted. I looked out the window at headlights and taillights streaming beneath the spangled struts of whatever bridge I was looking at; Jami’s loft in South Williamsburg had a view of the Williamsburg Bridge, and my apartment on Monitor Street in Greenpoint had a view of the Kosciusko Bridge. I daydreamed about falling in love again. Sometimes I put music on. Sometimes I lit a candle. Sometimes I wolfed down the food so I could get back to my email. I always drank wine.
These meals for one had a counterintuitive, resonant coziness. Eating by myself in my own apartment, single and alone again for the first time in many years, I should have felt, but did not feel, sad. Because I had taken the trouble to make myself a real dinner, I felt nurtured and cared for, if only by myself. Eating alone was freeing, too; I didn’t have to make conversation, I got to focus on my food without thinking about anyone else’s needs at all, and that made it taste even better. I didn’t have to share my dinner or worry about taking too much food: it was all mine. I could sing along to the music and wear pajamas and eat with my hands and drink the whole bottle of wine and lick my plate clean. Who would know or care?
Dingo lay at my feet, and little by little, as the evening went on, his company became, once again, sufficient. When I was done with my food, if there was anything left and he was allowed to have it, I gave him a scrap or two. Then he and I went out into the now-dark evening and made our rounds together, ambling along the sidewalk. I waited while he sniffed intently at tree trunks, lampposts, and bushes and deposited a squirt of pee on everything, lifting his leg as high as he could get it and often missing the thing itself, unwittingly sending his little stream out into space to land on the sidewalk or street. He squatted; I hovered behind him with a bag at the ready, scanning for the nearest trash can.
Then we went home again and spent the rest of the evening together. I read a book or wrote emails; he lay nearby and watched me. He always turned in before I did.
Sleeping alone was another luxurious pleasure that should have been depressing but wasn’t. I got to hog the covers, sprawl across the whole mattress, use all the pillows, and move around as much as I wanted without worrying about disturbing anyone else. No one snored in my ear or talked in his sleep. No one woke me up. No one stole the covers or accidentally nudged me with his leg or got up and creaked the floorboards on the way to the bathroom. After my satisfying solitary dinner, I was the captain of my bed, the master of my sleep. But even so, I longed for a bedmate – the urge to fall in love again became stronger and stronger as the months went on.
Then, of course, I met Brendan, and that was the end of the blue hour, cooking for one, eating everything all by myself, watching the cars streaming over the bridge, and daydreaming about falling in love.
Corn and monkfish chowder for one
In a tablespoon of butter, sauté one chopped celery rib, half an onion, diced, 2 minced garlic cloves, and half a chopped green or red pepper till soft. Add 2 cups of fish stock or low-sodium chicken broth, a bay leaf, a pinch of thyme, a dash of cayenne, and plenty of black pepper. Add one good-sized potato, cubed. Simmer, and when the potato is soft, mash some of it in the pot to thicken the soup. Add ½ cup of corn and one medium-sized monkfish filet cut into bite-sized pieces. Simmer till the fish is cooked through, 5-10 minutes. Taste and adjust seasonings. When the chowder is done, take out the bay leaf, stir in ¼ cup of half and half, and dish into one large bowl. There should be enough in the pot for seconds. Avail yourself of Tabasco and fresh parsley if you want to.
by Kate Christensen | Apr 1, 2012
On Thursday, we drove down to pick up my mother at Logan Airport in Boston. She’d flown in from Amsterdam, where she’d been for the past month, and where my sister Susan lives with her husband and two sons. She was stopping off with us for a week on her way home to Oracle, Arizona. She’s gone on a vegan diet recently. On her first night in Portland, we took her to the Green Elephant on Congress Street. On her second night, I hauled up the wooden patio table from the basement and set it up in the new dining room and lit candles. For our first official meal in the new house, Brendan made pasta with pea sauce, grated parmesan optional.
Last night, here in the farmhouse in New Hampshire, I made a stew of sweet potatoes and green chard in a spicy cashew sauce (cashews, hot red peppers, garlic, ginger, vegetable broth, and fresh thyme, simmered together and whizzed in the blender) over brown basmati rice, with a side of oven-roasted, salted kale. Tonight’s menu is bean burgers (white beans, oats, olive oil, a splash of almond milk, chili powder, and salt in the Cuisinart, formed into patties then fried in peanut oil till crisp and light) with cottage fries, spiced sweet and regular potatoes, and, on the side, a red-leaf lettuce salad with sautéed portobellos and shallot-mustard vinaigrette.
“A vegan feast,” I said.
“Can’t we just say ‘a feast’?” said my mother.
It’s a fun challenge, cooking with yet another dietary restriction. No gluten, no animal products – there’s still a lot to eat. I don’t miss anything, at least not yet – although today I felt a mysterious resurgence of a longtime urge to buy a meat grinder and make my own sausages.
Over dinner last night, we looked at photos from throughout my childhood – the early years in Berkeley, the mid-years in Arizona, late adolescence on the East Coast. My mother was, in every single one of these pictures, younger than I am now – something that always gives me a little start. I’m surprised not by her youth back then – she has always seemed young to me, all my life, even now that she’s 75 — but by how old I am now. Probably because my mother had kids and I didn’t, I always think of her as older than I am, at every phase of her life and mine.
When I woke up this morning, I remembered the paper route I had in seventh grade. After school, on weekdays, I delivered the Phoenix Gazette – an afternoon paper — the Arizona Republic was the morning one — to various ranch houses in our neighborhood. On Sundays, though, the Gazette put out an early-morning edition, so I showed up at the station before dawn on my sturdy three-speed blue Schwinn with its three baskets, front and sides. I had the biggest route on my station and was the youngest carrier and the only girl, so I wasn’t popular with the older boys. It didn’t matter that I’d worked hard to expand my route, going door to door in my free time and drumming up new customers. I was the skinny, bespectacled girl in braces and braids who had the biggest stack of papers to fold, and so they acted as if I didn’t exist.
The Sunday Gazette had to be assembled section by section and rubber banded. Our station was an empty lot. In the light of the streetlamps, in the chilly desert darkness, we yawned and loaded up our bikes and the canvas carrier bags we slung across our chests. The boys talked and joked amongst themselves. I worked as fast as I could to get out of there, then pushed my laden bike into the street, mounted it, and was off. I loved those silent, empty, sweet-smelling, predawn mornings, alone with my bike, my thoughts. I told myself stories under my breath as I rode along, sang songs, daydreamed about the people whose newspapers I threw onto their dewy lawns.
When I finished my route and all my baskets were empty, I rode through the bright morning sunlight and the church-going traffic over to the McDonald’s on Bethany Home Road, which was already open, and got myself a chocolate shake. I drank it on my bike as I rode home. I always got home in time for the Top 40 countdown with Casey Kasem on KUPD. It was 1974, so that meant Olivia Newton-John, Chicago, War, Anne Murray, the Ojays, Paul McCartney and Wings, Elton John, Cat Stevens, and Helen Reddy. My sister Susan came into my room and we listened together, singing along earnestly to every song. Sundays meant pancakes in our house; and we all took turns making them. We used the Joy of Cooking recipe, which involved beaten egg whites; they were crisp and thick and fluffy and addictive. We smothered them in margarine and Aunt Jemima’s. I generally ate so many I was nearly comatose for the rest of the day – my record was twenty-seven at one sitting.
Years later, my mother told me that on a few Sundays, at the beginning of the school year, when I first started my route , she got up at 4:30 along with me, silently, so I wouldn’t know, to make sure I was safe. She got onto her own bike right after I left the house and followed behind me to the station. She waited, hidden from my sight, while I put the papers together and loaded up my bike, and then she followed at a distance while I wove my way through the wide, sleeping Phoenix streets. I never had any idea she was there.
