by Kate Christensen | Jan 16, 2012
Back in 1980, the year Lennon was shot and Reagan was elected for the first time, it was still fairly safe for teenage girls to hitchhike around Europe. I hitched to the South of France and later Paris with my friend Monica, who was the only other au pair girl at La Mhotte. She was a placid but intrepid girl from Leeds, also eighteen, who earned several times more than I did from the family she worked for, taking care of one small baby instead of four energetic, demanding boys.
Our hitchhiking trips together were weekend adventures, larks. Often a trucker stopped for us, a genial, bored Frenchman who wanted to bask in the company of two girls for an afternoon in exchange for driving them a few hundred kilometers. We understood the deal. When a truck pulled over and stopped for us just up the road, we ran to it so the driver wouldn’t have to wait long, hopped up into the cab, and introduced ourselves with profuse thanks to the driver. We were a good team – two fresh-faced, pretty, friendly, seemingly innocent teenagers, both fluent in French. We were also good at gauging people. We were smarter by far about the world and men than we looked. We obligingly flirted and chatted with our truck drivers, shared our picnic lunches with them, and always arrived safely, exactly where we wanted to go.
In Provence, in the lilac and sunflower fields near Aix, we stayed with an older couple on their spread of land that included an orchard, a garden, a vineyard, and a goat pen. Acquaintances of Monica’s parents somehow, they fed us rounds of their excellent homemade goat cheese of three different ages, young, middle-aged, and old, that they took from wire baskets hanging from trees in their orchard. I had never eaten chevre before; at first it tasted strange, and then, all at once, it was unbelievably good, gamy and creamy.
The sun was hot there, early in the spring. We ate meals outside, lunches of chewy, crusty bread and chevre, salads made with the lettuce they grew, and for supper, a soup or stew, and once, a leg of lamb. We sat at long wooden table in a shady arbor of grape vines. Our hosts were great cooks and had good wine, not that I knew anything about wine, but their local red vin de table tasted fantastic to me. Their stone house was cool and dark and sprawling. I never wanted to leave. I wanted them to adopt me.
During Monica’s and my trip to Paris a couple of months later, we saw a man jump off the newly-built Centre Pompidou. I saw him standing up on the roof. Before I could wonder about this, he fell and hit the courtyard with a hard, wet crunch. We watched as an ambulance came screaming into the courtyard to pick up his corpse. Dazed afterwards, we didn’t say much for a few hours.
It was a strange trip. We walked through the city all day, crisscrossing the Seine. We stayed in a tiny apartment that a guy we barely knew had generously loaned us while he stayed with his girlfriend. We couldn’t afford to eat any meals in restaurants; we lived on those excellent staples of the young backpacker, baguettes and cheese and tomatoes and cheap red wine.
We were attacked by two men, on our last night there, in a deserted side street near the Place de Pigalle. Each of them took one of us by the arm, firmly, and tried to pull us into an alley. I protested in French; they answered in Arabic, which scared me even more for some reason – we had no common language. Monica went passive and quiet, but something exploded in my head, some surge of pure red-hot rage that enabled me to throw my attacker sprawling into the gutter and then to slam Monica’s against a parked car. I grabbed her hand and pulled her, sprinting, back to the apartment, where we both collapsed into bed in hysterical tears.
The next day, having completely run out of money for a train home, I was going to hitchhike alone back to la Mhotte; Monica was going on, by train, to stay with friends in Dijon. It was my first solo hitchhiking expedition. I was too scared to sleep that night, imagining various scenarios, the attempted rape naturally fueling my already paranoid imagination. I had no other way to get back, though, and I was expected on Monday morning, early, to make breakfast for the boys. Just after dawn, I took the Metro to the end of the line, got out, found the highway south, took a deep breath, and put out my thumb.
After a few minutes, a Citroen full of boys about my age pulled over. I got in with some trepidation, but they were a nice bunch of rambunctious French mecs who treated me like a kid sister, lecturing me about hitching alone, teasing me about my bravado when I protested that it was no big deal and complimenting me on my French. Because I had not one sou, they bought me lunch in a roadside place, a ham-and-cheese baguette I ate much too fast, since I was ravenous. They left me off about an hour from home and drove away honking and waving. I was sad to see them go.
My next ride was a lone middle-aged man in an old Deux-Chevaux. I was even more worried this time, but there was only one of him, and he was grey-haired and slight. I was cautiously, warily confident that I could fend him off. I’d beaten two strong would-be rapists last night, after all. So I got in.
My new chauffeur turned out to be even more protective and solicitous than the boys. He was a sociology professor at the Sorbonne, a deeply kind and fatherly man who gave me a very frank, touchingly agitated lecture about traveling alone.
“Not everyone is like me!” he said. “There are bad people in this world.”
“I know,” I said. “Believe me. I can’t thank you enough.”
He went more than twenty-five kilometers out of his way to drive me to the front gates of La Mhotte so I wouldn’t have to take my chances with another ride. He waited until I had walked halfway up the long driveway, I suppose in order to make sure no one attacked me before I was safely inside, and then he drove off down the little country road lined with poplars, back toward the highway and wherever he’d been headed.
Flageolets en pissenlits
I love the French word for dandelion greens, which means bedwetters, probably because of their diuretic properties. Our Provencal hosts made this beans-and-greens stew to serve with a rare, tender, garlic-studded roast leg of lamb.
Soak a pound of dried flageolets or navy beans in water overnight and then drain them. In a Dutch oven, heat a tablespoon of vegetable oil or bacon fat (I might throw a handful of lardons in, too, if I had some on hand) and sauté a mirepoix (minced aromatics — onion, carrot, and celery) with two crushed garlic cloves and thyme. Add the beans with enough water or stock to cover by one inch, plus a bay leaf. Cover and bring just to a boil, reduce the heat and simmer for two hours, adding additional liquid if necessary to keep beans covered. When the beans are soft, add 2 cups of chopped pissenlits or other bitter greens and continue to cook for another half hour, until the beans are creamy. Stir in 2 tablespoons of butter and season with salt and pepper to taste. Eat immediately.
by Kate Christensen | Jan 13, 2012
Brendan and I went to Italy in late October of 2009 to spend the winter, writing. We lived most of three months in the large stone villa where Brendan’s aunt and mother had lived as schoolgirls, a former convent up in the Florentine hills, an hour’s walk from the city. We watched the dawn on our first morning, standing out on the bedroom terrace, listening to roosters yelling all over the valley while the sky over the wooded hills turned neon pink and orange.
The place has its own vineyard and olive grove, as well as persimmon trees, rosemary and sage bushes, potted lemon trees, a few scraggly chickens, and a vegetable garden. It was olive season. The air was smoky from the olive branches burning everywhere. Nets lay under the olive trees, and men stood on ladders reaching into the branches all day. When it was time to press the villa’s olives, we went with Fabio, the caretaker, to the Cooperativa Agricola. The huge truckload of olives was dumped onto a conveyer belt that took them into the washer and sorter; they embarked on a long, intricate journey of pressing and turning until finally, two hours later, streams of fresh golden oil poured from a spout to fill eight or nine enormous, stoppered vats. We came home with a glass bottle of freshly pressed, super-virgin, organic oil to keep by the stove. It was bitter and rich and tasted like nothing else on earth. We poured it on salads but didn’t cook with it – it was too raw. For cooking, we used oil from the last year’s pressing, which had mellowed and aged a bit.
The wine from the villa’s vineyard was thin and light and very subtle, almost like liquid Valium. Fabio filled wine bottles for us from the demijohn in the tool shed and corked them with a manual press — he put the bottle in and set a cork in and pulled the lever and presto, a bottle of wine. We drank legendary quantities of it – apparently it was the talk of the village.
There was a tenant in an attached apartment, a Botoxed, boob-jobbed, trout-lipped So-Cal 40-something divorcee who might have seen “Under the Tuscan Sun” one too many times. She held spiritual meetings for her expat friends and didn’t speak any Italian although she’d been there for 2 years. Her poor cringing little son was obviously yearning to be back in L.A. with his friends. She wore a shawl and twitched it self-consciously. I was fascinated by what I took to be her hilariously cartoonlike personality — until she cooked us dinner near the end of our time there. She turned out to be funny, vulnerable, and self-deprecating, totally impossible to dislike. I had probably looked askance at her because I was also a 40-something divorcee, and in those days, I was sad and raw and shell-shocked still over the end of my marriage. All I wanted to do in Italy was escape. Laura’s own situation reminded me too sharply of what I’d just been through.
And that winter under the Tuscan rain turned out to be a great escape from the past, exactly what I needed. After a euphoric but sometimes rocky beginning, Brendan and I became true friends there. We had a lovely, solitary, productive life in our hermitage in that beautiful but freezing-cold place that cost a small fortune to heat. We were like wacky children together, laughing and singing and babbling in various accents, wandering around in our bathrobes, cooking meals, playing Scrabble by the fireplace.
We took the same walk every day, at around two o’clock: along a high ridge through vineyards and along tiny Tuscan country roads, a big loop that brought us through the village, where we often had a little coffee and bought supplies — clementines, a whole chicken, a broccoflower — and then climbed up the steep hill through a big olive grove and came home again a slightly different way, two hours’ fast walking. On the ridge, there was a memorable view — Florence down below on the left of the ridge and on the right, a lush terraced valley and mountains with long fingers of fog in the high gulches.
We slept in the master bedroom with the doors to the terrace closed, the heat on. We slept deeply in the absolute darkness and silence that was broken only by the zanzara tigre, “tiger mosquito,” but the English translation doesn’t convey the kamikaze-airplane-like quality of this animal. When I heard the zanzara tigre speaking in its hideously intimate deep voice right in my ear, I offered up my arm and hoped it would feed, be appeased, and go back up to the rafters to sleep it off, but its bloodthirstiness was unrelenting; it liked to stalk its perfect spot for hours.
We set up small worktables in the two deep casement windows, side by side against the wall opposite the big, cozy bed, separated by a trunk and an armchair. We spent our days and nights in this room, writing, listening to music, sleeping, watching movies. The huge kitchen was down a stone staircase and at the other end of the house through a long tiled hallway. We cooked enormous feasts in that cavernous room every day, some of the best food I’d ever had.
In January, we went with Brendan’s father, Michael, to Perugia, the medieval mountain town where Michael and his 5 siblings grew up while their father was translating The Odyssey. We had lunch in the Fitzgerald villa, a vast, drafty, very beautiful place with a view all the way across the valley to Assisi, apparently, although we couldn’t see a thing because the day was dark and foggy, so I took Brendan’s word for it. It was a bitterly cold day, and the massive stone house was as cold as a walk-in refrigerator. We all sat hunched for warmth by the fire in the kitchen hearth at a long wood table while Brendan’s aunt and uncle, who lived there with their son, served an Italian Sunday lunch – spaghetti al pomidoro (I gave up and ate gluten in Italy and was therefore bloated and churlish much of my time there, but it was absolutely worth it), then flank steaks and cauliflower — they grilled the steak on the open kitchen hearth. We drank prosecco first with olives and cheese, then Chianti with lunch, then vin santo with dessert: pears poached in red wine and cinnamon and sugar, and the pignoli we’d bought in town before lunch. It was a dreamlike, memorable afternoon.
Marcella’s Pizza
While he was growing up, Brendan learned to make classic, simple, rustic Italian dishes from his father, who’d learned many of them from Marcella, the villa’s now-retired cook and housekeeper: roast leg of lamb served with green pepper-apple-onion curry, Arborio rice, and Major Grey’s mango chutney; tender osso buco; an eggplant-pepper peperonata so silky it melts in your mouth; lasagna made by alternating layers of two sauces, Bolognese and Bechamel; breaded veal cutlets, crisp and thin, with fresh chopped tomato-and-basil sauce. Brendan also makes a Sicilian eggplant pasta known as alla Norma, a pure alchemy of olive oil, garlic, eggplant, basil, and ricotta salata, mixed well into a bowl of hot, freshly cooked pasta and served with more grated cheese.
Together, Brendan and his father reproduced the recipe for Marcella’s pizza, which is the best pizza, and I mean this, that I have ever had. They were never able to replicate her crust; the recipe is a secret, but they do know that it involves the usual flour, sugar, salt, yeast, and water. So all I can say is, make a perfect dough and roll it out perfectly, however you can; I invented a gluten-free facsimile that is of course in no way as good as wheat dough but which is perfectly edible.
Next, open a can of crushed tomatoes and pour it into a bowl. Add olive oil, dried oregano and basil, crushed red pepper, black pepper, sliced garlic (optional), and a touch of salt. Finely chop a handful of black olives, four or five anchovies, and a handful of capers and mix in a small bowl. Slice some fresh mozzarella and roughly chop some prosciutto cotto. First, layer the salty-savory mixture of olives, anchovy, and capers onto the lightly oiled dough. Then the sweet, mild cheese, then the ham, and last, the tomato sauce on top. Bake it hot and fast.
by Kate Christensen | Jan 11, 2012
In 1971, I left my mother and little sisters in Tempe and flew to the Bay Area alone to spend the summer with my father in Oakland. We’d moved from Berkeley the summer before, so I hadn’t seen him in what felt like a very long time, all of third grade – he felt like a stranger suddenly.
My father had started a commune in his huge Victorian house. I was given my own room on the third floor under the eaves, a small room with a secret passageway behind the wall. There was a tiled koi pond in the backyard. There was a laundry chute in the butler’s pantry off the kitchen, and a dusty green velvet couch in the front parlor I liked to lie on.
I was the only kid around the place that summer. My father, a Marxist activist lawyer, had filled his house with young, righteous politicos, all of whom seemed to revere him. They did a lot of sitting around and talking through clouds of pot smoke. I don’t remember what I did all day, but I do remember feeling out of place and homesick and intimidated by my father, who was charming, charismatic, handsome, and intelligent, but distant and gruff with me. I felt awkward around him, like a big lummox. I wasn’t sure why I was there. Maybe he just wanted to upset my mother by enforcing his custodial rights.
One night, at a dinner at some friends’ of my father’s, as I watched a bearded giant frying an odd dish he called “peachburgers,” which were literally hamburger meat mixed with chopped peaches, I blurted out to the entire assemblage of guests that my father used to hit my mother, and she cried. I remember saying it, I remember the shock I caused, and I remember how angry my father was at me afterwards.
With his girlfriend, a sweet, solid woman named Karen, we took off in a tomato-red VW bus to drive around the Southwest, just the three of us. I remember straddling the Four Corners grid, my hands and feet in four different states. We went to Bryce Canyon, Canyon de Chelly, the cliff dwellings in New Mexico.
I couldn’t stop annoying my father. I pestered him to play cards with me and bragged when I won; I could feel, viscerally, how tense this made him. One night, very late, long past my bedtime, he left the campfire where he’d been talking with a group of people we’d met and found me whimpering and crying outside the bus, standing in the darkness.
“Why aren’t you asleep?” he asked.
“You forgot to feed me,” I said. “No one put me to bed.”
“You’re almost nine years old,” he said. “Old enough to speak up. Don’t let this happen again!”
I recoiled. I hadn’t spoken up because I was not a kid who whined or asked for things, and I was shy with him sometimes. He gave me some yogurt, which I ate in silence, and then he packed me off to my little bed in the back of the bus. I lay there with a knot in my stomach, still hungry, fiercely mortified.
One day, Karen walked me into the desert alone and told me that I had to stop being such a pain in the ass. “Your father can’t take it anymore,” she said. “He’s really at the end of his rope.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I’ll try, I swear.”
After this little talk, which felt like a Mafia hit, things deteriorated. And so, after a summer of looking like a wild animal, rat’s nest hair, dirt-streaked face, ratty clothes, I found myself suddenly, abruptly scrubbed clean, with freshly washed and braided hair, wearing travel-worthy clothes, being driven to the Albuquerque airport.
My father looked at me in the rear-view mirror as he drove. “If the cops stop us, they’ll think we kidnaped you,” he joked.
He had called my mother and told her I was flying back to Arizona that night. She was in the middle of her weekly poker game with her psychologist pals; luckily, she was home, or she wouldn’t have known. She drove to Sky Harbor airport, leaving my sleeping sisters in the care of her sweet, clueless-about-children friend, Fred, who looked panic-stricken at the thought that they might wake up, but who manfully offered to babysit nonetheless.
The stewardess who’d been put in charge of me walked me off the plane, and there was my mother at the gate. I’ve been happy to see my mother many, many times in my life, but this particular reunion stands out.
Farmer’s Fritters
My sister Emily just sent me our mother’s recipe for the cottage-cheese pancakes we all used to love so much on Friday story nights.
This recipe comes from an old index card and is written in our aunt’s handwriting, our mother’s older, deaf, mentally retarded sister, Aillinn, with parenthetical additions by our mother.
1 cup Blossom Time cottage cheese
1 egg (2 are better)
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/8 (is that really an 8?!?!) cup milk
(or a very little cream)
1/4 teaspoon grated lemon peel
2 tablespoon melted butter
1/4 cup flour (+ a little wheatgerm)
Place first six ingredients in bowl and beat well with rotary beater. Stir in flour, drop by tablespoons on greased griddle. Serve with butter and hot syrup. Serves 4.
These are thin and crisp and taste like home, long ago.
by Kate Christensen | Jan 10, 2012
At about the same time I outgrew children’s books, I became addicted to detective novels. In many ways, they’re the adult version of children’s adventure stories – instead of going off on adventures in giant peaches or in boats or behind the wardrobe, there’s a crime to be solved. In the tradition of Huck Finn and Pippi Longstocking, a fictional detective is very often not a decent, responsible citizen; he’s a loner, sealed off with nogoodniks and perps in a shadowy underworld of lawless derring-do, tracking the murderer by trying to think like one. Often a former cop who’s been kicked off the force for breaking the rules and flaunting protocol one too many times, often picking up the pieces of a failed marriage, the detective is courageous and intrepid but flawed, self-destructive, prickly, hard-drinking, at odds with everything.
And almost all fictional detectives know how to eat. Marlowe arms himself for stakeouts with ham-and-cheese sandwiches and a bottle of whiskey, V. I. Warshawski escapes danger and makes a beeline for a Hungarian goulash at the Golden Glow; Kinsey Millhone girds her loins for trouble by slapping together a peanut butter and pickle sandwich. Robert B. Parker’s Spencer eats as grandly as he spouts half-pretentious literary allusions, and I like him for it; I hate his psychotherapist girlfriend, however, because she nibbles at a lettuce leaf and calls it a meal. Smugly self-denying asceticism is a character flaw for me akin to meanness or hypocrisy. Likewise, if I have one criticism of Dick Francis, it’s that his narrators are jockeys who have to make weight and therefore are career anorectics; there’s never enough food in his novels, although his heroes often crave it, which endears them to me.
Growing up, I was raised on homemade bread, cottage cheese, and Graham crackers. I got Trix, Ding-Dongs, and Coke only at my luckier friend’s houses, and our Halloween candy was parceled out to us so slowly it lasted until Christmas (and would have lasted longer had our mother not pirated much of it after we were in bed). I was hardly deprived, but the point is, I wasn’t allowed to eat whatever and whenever I wanted. Writing about food, I discovered very early on, gave me a sense of heady power that was in some ways even better than reading about it. I couldn’t always have what the characters I read about ate, but I could feed my own characters all the things I wasn’t allowed to have.
In my first story, “My Magic Carpet,” written when I was 6, the narrator and her sister go around the world and into outer space on a magic carpet and get home in time for “tea,” as I called it, budding Anglophile that I was. Getting home in time for a big meal was evidently the happiest ending to an adventure story I could come up with.
When I was 13, I wrote a short novel called Life Can’t Be a Penguin that might be pegged these days as a YA thriller. The 13-year-old heroine and her brother go into the remote Arizona desert on the heels of their evil band teacher, a kidnaper and possible murderer. After the scary parts are over, after everything has resolved itself, they end up in a diner and order almost everything on the menu. I remember hungrily listing with the bottomless appetite of pubescence every conceivable thing I myself would have ordered in such a situation – French fries, baked beans, chicken, hamburgers, meat loaf, blueberry pie, ice cream, etc. I wasn’t trying to be funny; I wrote it in vicariously swooning, single-minded earnestness.
I still let my characters have things I generally can’t or wouldn’t eat myself. In my own kitchen, I admit to a preponderance of gluten-free, organic, hormone-free, sustainably caught, free-range, cage-free items, but the characters in my books eat with anachronistic, cheeky, devil-may-care defiance – cheesy, meaty pasta and cheeseburgers with fries, kielbasa and chorizo and as much bacon as they damn well want.
Stakeout Provisions
Take a loaf of rye bread, a package of pastrami, a package of sliced Swiss cheese, a jar of mayonnaise, and a jar of mustard. Slap together three thick, hearty sandwiches oozing with mayo and wrap them in wax paper. Put them in a big paper sack with a large bag of potato chips, a small pack of chocolate doughnuts, an apple, and a bottle of rye whiskey. On the way to the address in question, stop for a large Styrofoam cup of strong, black coffee. Add whiskey to it. Drink it and eat the doughnuts as you drive.
In the front seat of your 1974 Chevy Nova, at 11 p.m., without taking your eyes off the suspect’s darkened windows, eat one of the sandwiches, washed down with handfuls of potato chips and sips of whiskey. Repeat at 4 a.m. At 7:45 a.m., eat the last sandwich and the rest of the potato chips and finish whatever’s left of the whiskey. When the suspect appears in his doorway at 8:27 and heads for his 1972 Camaro, throw the apple out the window, put your car in gear, and tail him.
by Kate Christensen | Jan 9, 2012
At 29, I was a bit like Dingo when I first got him: skinny, skittish, unsure of how to behave, wild, afraid to trust, and most comfortable on the street. I’d been in New York for more than two years and had never had a nice meal in a good restaurant. I had been living for the past year and a half in a 300-square foot studio apartment with a cold, depressive, barely-there boyfriend. I had absolutely no money; I worked as an office temp when I could get work, could hardly make my student loan or credit-card minimum payments, and could never seem to get out of debt.
I ate most dinners alone at home – a lot of it takeout, rice and beans with extra hot sauce, deli soup, mu shu vegetables, slices of pizza, as well as the few odd little things I cooked for myself — squid with rice or steamed vegetables with baked potatoes. I used to walk by restaurants, bistros and elegant Italian places, and peer furtively inside, dying for anything on the menu – but even if I’d had enough money to eat there, I didn’t think they’d let me in. Some childish part of me believed that good restaurants were for other people, real people who knew how to order properly.
Back then, I had just started my first novel, In the Drink. Very early, before I had to go to work, I would leap out of bed, having lain awake much of the night on a hamster wheel of panic. I had to write a novel. I had to get published. I was turning 30 in August, and this birthday loomed in front of me: if it came and went, and I hadn’t achieved anything, I was afraid I would explode in a white-hot burst of frustration.
I made myself strong tea in a large porcelain pot I’d bought in Chinatown. I sat at my little table and drank cup after cup as I read what I’d already written, despaired, edited, chewed my cuticles, and finally wrote another new page, then another. Sometimes I felt electric with joy at the words that came from my fingers, and sometimes it felt agonizing and terrifying, and I left the house in the same panic I’d been in all night. And, at whatever stupid job I had to go to, I jotted down ideas as they came to me in the big hard-bound notebook I always kept with me.
As a kid, I wrote heaps of poems and plays and stories freely and happily, with gusto, as a natural offshoot of reading. During the years I spent in school, goals were set for me: creative-writing assignments in high school, creative writing classes and a creative thesis in college, then MFA workshops and thesis. Now, I was on my own. No one cared whether I finished a novel or spent the rest of my life as an office temp. Writing this first novel was crazy-making; I was sure there must be some secret method, something all the other novelists knew, the key to the kingdom. I was obsessed and driven and frenzied, sure I’d never figure it out. Then, the next day, I caught fire with excitement. I laughed out loud as I wrote and walked through the city afterwards feeling exalted.
A couple of years later, not surprisingly, I was still working on In the Drink. My 30th birthday had come and gone and I was still not published, still not married, and yet somehow I hadn’t exploded in a white burst. I was now, for the first time in my life, making good money, working on the fiftieth floor of the World Trade Center as the secretary for the legal department of DKB Financial Products, the swaps-and-derivatives subsidiary of Dai-Ichi Kangyo Bank. I paid off my debts. I spent my downtime at my job writing at my desk, looking out over New York Harbor.
That year, I met my future husband, a man who understood that restaurants were democratic, open to anyone who could fork over the money it cost to eat there. It was the mid-90s, a golden time, financially speaking. He was raking it in as a building contractor, renovating Upper East Side apartments, building shoe stores and designers’ showrooms. We met on weeknights after work and took turns treating each other to dinner.
He took me to restaurants and ordered for us both: steak frites, artichokes, frisee salads with lardons and a poached egg, steak tartare, raw oysters, asparagus. He took me to Coney Island for raw clams at Ruby’s, then over to Brighton Beach for lamb soup, pelmeni with sour cream and sautéed onions, blini with caviar. We went to the Savoy for roast chicken, to a tiny Italian place on Jane Street where the owner made his own wine and came out to pour it for us; we ordered his excellent venison and fresh pastas. I inhaled all this food; I would have rolled around in it if such a thing had been possible.
Rice and Beans
From a Puerto Rican takeout place, order a big aluminum dish of rice and beans with chicken and extra hot sauce. From the deli next door, buy a six-pack of Bass Ale. Try not to haggle obnoxiously with the deli guy over the price, and fail. Also fail to convince him that his prices are criminal; buy it anyway. Bring this feast home, take off your shoes, eat everything alone at your rickety little table and wash it down with cold beer. Wriggle your feet and shiver with hard-won happiness.
