by Kate Christensen | Dec 27, 2011
I spend all the money I can afford on food and consider it well-spent and never look back. I feel lucky to be able to eat well. My childhood was spent in semi-genteel poverty, which is to say, my family never had any money, and our neighborhoods could be a bit rough, but we always had a lot of books, music, and fun. Before I was born, my mother was a cellist studying at Juilliard on a full scholarship. She finally decided she wasn’t cut out for the life of a cellist and quit with one semester to go and moved out to Berkeley, where she got married and had three daughters by the age of 31.
During my early years, she was the wife of a penniless Marxist pro-bono civil-rights lawyer (my father) and maker of spaghetti dinners for various Black Panthers and anti-war activists, and then she was a Ph.D candidate in psychology at Arizona State University and a single mother without child support (that father having vanished into the drug-fueled fog of the era), and finally she was a struggling fledgling private-practice psychologist living in an Arizona mountain ghost town, married to an unemployed and later barely-employed architect, and later, she was a very poor single mother again. By the time she moved back East and established herself in a successful private practice and married her third husband, a well-off English professor, my sisters and I had all left home.
During most of our early years as a family, we qualified for food stamps and free lunches at school. We bought our clothes in thrift shops. But we didn’t feel deprived. My mother was young, fun-loving, beautiful, always laughing. She read us stories every night before bed. She wasn’t a hippie, not by a long shot — she espoused none of the trendy spiritual beliefs or practices of the 1970s, she was not into free love or communal living; she was a responsible former straight-A student who put us to bed every night at 7:30 — but she wore sexy clothes, had long hair, threw great poker parties, and loved to take us camping. Indian bedspreads were a prominent feature of our house décor — but so were books and records. Most likely because our mother was a serious cellist, we all studied classical instruments, and my sister Susan studied ballet. We were encouraged, always, to be bold and confident in our undertakings — she didn’t freak out when I made minor explosions with my chemistry set, we were allowed to go into the kitchen and invent things, she gave all our plays and concerts standing ovations, she read and praised whatever we wrote, and she saved all our drawings.
And she fed us very well with the little money she had– before dinner, to stave off our pangs of hunger, we got a plate of cut-up raw carrots and peppers and jicama, which, not knowing any better, we gobbled up as fast as she could dole them out — or a big bowl of frozen mixed vegetables, which we adored and called Frozies. She baked healthy bread and handed us a piece of fruit or a Graham cracker for mid-afternoon hunger. Desserts were given sparingly; we ate no sugar cereal, had no junk food or pop (as we called it in Arizona) in the house, ever. But we weren’t ascetics or puritans. We occasionally had Spam and baloney, and for special occasions, we got to go to McDonald’s or the thrillingly glamorous (or so it seemed to me at the time) local Mexican place, where I always ordered the deep-fried beef chimichangas with a deep-fried sopapilla for dessert.
One of my favorite childhood meals was Farmer’s Fritters. On Friday nights, our mother whipped up a big batch of thin, crisp, tangy-sweet cottage-cheese pancakes. While we ate stacks of them with Aunt Jemima syrup, we told a story, going around the table, with the sliding glass door open to the patio and a warm breeze making the candles flicker. Someone started it, and then we took turns continuing it until it was finished. I wrote the best one down — of course my mother saved it, and I still have it in a box somewhere. My youngest sister Emily has the old egg-spattered recipe card — now she can make Farmer’s Fritters for her own kids.
My Mother’s Anadama Bread
I used to wolf down almost half a loaf of this dark, sweet, soft bread straight out of the oven. I would jaggedly cut into the steaming-hot loaf and slather each piece in margarine and honey and chew it with ecstatic eye-flutters and sighs, the kiddie version of a swoon, standing by the cutting board until I could eat no more.
this recipe comes courtesy of the New York Times…
In a bowl, stir together 1/2 cup coarse yellow cornmeal and 1 cup water. In a saucepan over medium-high heat, bring another cup of water to a boil. Add cornmeal mixture and cook, stirring constantly, until mixture is very thick, about 10 minutes. Stir in 1/2 cup molasses and 2 tablespoons butter. Transfer mixture to bowl of an electric mixer and cool to tepid.
In a small bowl, stir together 1 1/4-ounce package active dry yeast and 1/2 cup water until yeast has dissolved. Add to cornmeal and mix on low speed with dough-hook attachment for several seconds (my mother used a wooden spoon). Add 4 1/2 cups all-purpose flour 1/2 cup at a time, mixing for several seconds after each addition. Sprinkle in 1 teaspoon kosher salt and 1/2 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg, and continue mixing until dough completely comes away from sides of bowl, about 7 minutes (my mother turned it out onto a floured board and kneaded it for 10 minutes until it was supple and warm and glossy).
Lightly butter a bowl. Form dough into a ball and place it in bowl. Oil a sheet of plastic wrap and loosely cover dough. Allow dough to rise for 1 1/2 hours, or until it has doubled in size.
Lightly grease 2 9-by-4-inch loaf pans. Press down (my mother “punched” it down and kneaded it again briefly) dough and divide it into 2 equal pieces. Shape each piece loosely into a loaf and place each in a pan. Cover with plastic wrap (or a clean dish towel) and allow to rise for 30 minutes, or until loaves have doubled.
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Bake loaves for 45 minutes to 1 hour, or until bread is a dark golden brown and sounds hollow when tapped.
The recipe says: “Allow bread to cool in pans for 5 minutes, then turn out onto wire cooling rack. Brush all over with remaining softened butter. Serve warm if possible.” But I would say, cram as much buttered, honeyed bread into your mouth as you possibly can while it’s still piping hot.
by Kate Christensen | Dec 23, 2011
Last night, after the sun set and our work was all finished for the day, we opened a bottle of wine and watched the charming, oddly heartwarming old movie “Ball of Fire” with Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck, ate most of a pot of leek and potato soup with Tabasco, and turned in early. My sleep was restless and bad, maybe because the air is so dry this time of year, and the nights are so deep and quiet, sometimes it’s hard to sleep because my thoughts are so loud in my head.
We woke up to shaggy snow heaped over fields and tree branches and a snowy fog with the low sun breaking through to turn it all hazy gold. After coffee and two soft-boiled eggs with a piece of hot buttered toast broken into them (a favorite childhood breakfast that’s cozy and great on winter mornings), I threw together a car picnic, provisions for the drive to New York, which had the added advantage of emptying out the fridge and not having to stop at Panera’s in Connecticut. We drove away at 10:00, our car topped with a thick overhang of wet snow that slid off along the miles of dirt roads through the woods to the main road.
New Hampshire gave way, as it does, to Massachusetts. I fell asleep and awoke in Connecticut, where Brendan and I fell into a bleak knot of depression that didn’t lift until we crossed the New York border. We ate our lunch in near silence, aware that we were losers, that our lives were doomed, and that everything was futile. This may be true, but it seems far less so elsewhere. Does Connecticut have a magnetic anomaly in its atmosphere, or is it just us?
We drove down the West Side Highway, as luck would have it, at sunset. The sky was pink and gold, the river glowed, the city looked lit from within. We put the car in a garage for the weekend — it’s Christmas, dammit. And here we are, in a top floor room, with the view of the church across the street, in our favorite Hell’s Kitchen hotel, about to walk down through early evening holiday-season rush hour to jostle for two seats at the bar of our favorite bistro and splurge ourselves into a happy grinning heap. God, it’s good to be back.
Car Picnic
Car picnics are best when they mimic actual, festive, intentional outdoor picnics — food that’s portable and easy to eat. Variety is essential for morale and sensory distraction. It’s good to have something warm, something creamy, something crunchy, something raw, something salty, and something sweet. To that end, heat up the leftover leek and potato soup from last night and pour it into a wide-mouthed Thermos, adding Tabasco and extra salt. Put the 3/4 log of goat cheese in a Baggie, wash and cut up some carrots and celery, unearth a box of sesame rice crackers, gather up all the dark chocolate in the house, and don’t forget the bag of salted roasted cashews and the rest of the orange juice. Put it all into a big paper sack and store it within reach of the shotgun passenger, who will obligingly feed the driver. In Connecticut, eat most of the chocolate and try to keep perspective: New York is just ahead.
by Kate Christensen | Dec 22, 2011
I’m always disappointed by novels in which the characters don’t eat. Fiction without food is like fiction without dialogue. In fact, I admit that I tend to suspect a novelist of pretentiousness if there’s no food in his or her book – who doesn’t avidly want to know what everyone’s having for dinner? Reading and eating are related the same way writing and cooking are.
All my life, as far back as I can remember, food and words have been intertwined. Like a lot of kids, I had to read the back of the cereal box while I ate the cereal. This compulsion, however, extended for me into other areas not everyone seemed to need to explore. The greatest pleasure I knew when I was little, and this is saying a lot, was to eat along with characters in books I was reading, or to write about characters who ate what I wished I could be eating. This may still be true.
As a skinny, bespectacled elementary-school student in Tempe and Phoenix in the 1970s, I spent summer vacations escaping the 100-plus-degree heat in various deeply air-conditioned libraries. I was always hungry back then, and still am; reading made it worse, and still does. I remember the keenly piercing brain-hunger that would grip me whenever a character in a book ate anything – an urgent craving for the pemmican in Swallows and Amazons (which I imagined as a chewy kind of Spam), the Turkish Delight in The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe (I pictured pillowy glittering candy that tasted like perfumed nuts, and I wasn’t far off) the dripping sweet flesh of the enormous traveling fruit in James and the Giant Peach, or some miniature version of the gigantic, caloric, wonderful Little House on the Prairie breakfasts, which seemed to consist of equal parts carbohydrates, cured meat, pickles, and preserves. Part of the excitement of all this food was the stuff that preceded or accompanied it — pirate sailing games, a sleigh ride in snow with a glamorous, dangerous witch, a perilous journey in an oversized fruit, the hard work and terrible weather of nineteenth-century Midwestern farm life. With travel, danger, and adventure comes food; this is a great tradition in much of children’s literature, a lesson I absorbed well and completely.
My first grownup-style faux pas, at least the earliest one I remember, was related to reading and eating. It was, in fact, entirely the fault of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which I snuck off and read during an overnight at a friend’s house. As a budding hermit, I used these overnights as an excuse to read whatever books my friends had that I didn’t; in fact, now that I think of it, I have many memories of sidling away from my hostess to read her books as fast as I could before she noticed I was missing.
I finished Charlie in my friend’s bedroom beanbag chair and ventured back into the light, blinking with the force of the imagined taste of chocolate. On my way to the glass sliding doors that led to the backyard, where my friend and her sisters were playing, I ran into their mother. “Hello!” she said cheerfully. “What’s up?”
“I just finished Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” I confided. “And I am craving chocolate now like crazy.” I wasn’t asking for chocolate, mind you; that would have been rude. I was simply answering her question, and I expected her to understand this; no polite kid asked for things in another kid’s house. I expected her to say longingly, “I know exactly what you mean,” looking off into the middle distance as she viscerally remembered the book’s lascivious, melting descriptions.
“Well, sorry,” she said instead, her cheer undaunted, “I don’t have any!” And off she went, leaving me in a state of cringing mortification.
This may have been the first time it dawned on me that not everyone’s brain was wired like mine.
Pot Roast from “The Joy of Cooking”
I made this easy but excellent dish as often as I could in junior high, when my mother, who was then working about sixty hours a week doing her psychology Ph.D internship at the V.A. Hospital, had my younger sisters and me each cook dinner one night a week. I never got tired of either making or eating this pot roast; I have no idea how my family felt about it, and I didn’t ask. It was always delicious and flavorful and never dry. It always satisfied my infernal twelve-year-old ravenous gluttony.
Preheat the oven to 325 degrees unless you’re using the stovetop method. Rub a 3-4 pound chuck (or other) roast with garlic. Dredge in flour. In a Dutch oven or cast-iron pot, heat 2 tablespoons of vegetable oil “over lively heat.” Brown the meat on all sides, but don’t let it scorch. When the meat is half-browned, add 1 chopped carrot and 1 rib of diced celery and an onion stuck with cloves, says Irma, but I always skipped the celery and added 3-4 carrots peeled and cut into chunks, a large quartered onion without cloves (hated them), and 3 peeled quartered potatoes. When meat is browned, spoon off excess fat (always left it in). Boil a cup of dry red wine (in those days, it was Gallo), a cup of stock, and a bay leaf, and add to meat. Cover and bake 3 to 4 hours or simmer on top of the stove. Turn meat several times and, if necessary, add additional hot stock and season to taste. When the meat is tender, spoon off excess fat (or not), remove bay leaf, and serve with the pot liquor as it is or slightly thickened with sour cream.
by Kate Christensen | Dec 21, 2011
Last night, we had nothing in particular in the house for dinner, so I threw together a “cupboard supper” out of roots and tubers and frozen things. It was, I’m not exaggerating, a sublime meal. Cupboard suppers always are, for some reason. We ate every scrap and washed it down with rioja, then port, then hard cider. I felt it was my duty to drink up all the liquor in the house, and Brendan kept me company. I was holding a sort of wake for my friend Michael, who died of a heart attack in his sleep 2 nights ago at 49. He was the best guitar player no one’s heard of. He took terrible care of his body. He didn’t eat much food or drink water, and he could put away more liquor than you’d think was humanly possible. He also smoked constantly, and he did God knows how many drugs, or what kinds, but it’s unclear whether taking better care of himself would have prevented his heart attack. He was adopted and didn’t know his family health history. According to the coroner’s report, his arteries were hardened, and his heart was a “ticking time bomb.”
I loved him. Everyone did. He lived in New Orleans and came from Philadelphia. He was an instigator of three-day benders, a sly, brilliant provocateur, a merry chuckler, a generous friend, one of the great eggs. No one could have thought he’d live forever, or even for long, but he had an aura of indestructibility, permanence, like an institution. My memories of Michael piled up like billowing cloud-pictures in my head last night, the way they do when someone dies, with a finality: these are all the memories there’ll be of him, no more.
Today we’re hosting a small afternoon party in honor of Brendan’s friend, Colie, who died a year ago at 29 — a solstice party in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, in Brendan’s family farmhouse, the house he was born in, in this beautiful, remote place where he and Colie grew up together. They believed in druids, they played Battle Beasts, and they had each others’ backs all their lives. Last time we saw Colie, he described the wedding he wanted to have, some day when he met the woman he’d marry. We’re going to have that wedding ourselves, for him.
Colie died in a car accident not too far from his house. He was on his way to buy a Christmas tree. He wasn’t wearing his seat belt, and his car went off the road — no one knows how or why.
There’s no easy way to say goodbye to a friend who dies unexpectedly and suddenly and young — Michael and Colie were both self-destructive, and, paradoxically, fully alive. They were free of bullshit, both of them, unencumbered by dogma, obligatory proscription, and niceties. They were two charming, wild, badass, generous, straightforward, kind, brilliant, funny men, and I am going to bake a big, fat, juicy, amazing ham today in their honor.
Cupboard Supper
You get a phone call from your ex-husband telling you a beloved old friend has died. You haven’t bought groceries in days, and it’s time to make dinner, and it’s too late now to shop, and you don’t feel like going out. Look in the freezer; look in the pantry and cabinets; check the basket where you keep potatoes and onions. You have the makings of dinner, it’s just a matter of figuring out where they are.
Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. You’ll want a hot oven, no matter what you find.
From the freezer, unearth a package of frozen chicken thighs and that ancient half-bag of peas. Dump the peas in a pot with some water. After thawing the package of chicken in a bowl of hot water for 15 minutes, put the thighs on a cookie sheet with some peanut oil and salt and pepper.
From the basket on the counter, take five potatoes that are beginning to sprout and a yellow onion that’s in pretty good shape. Wash and trim and cut the potatoes into wedges, peel and slice the onion. Spread them on a cookie sheet with peanut oil and salt and pepper them. Put them into the oven.
After a while, timing it so they’re all done at the same time, put the thighs in the oven on a lower rack. Boil the peas, eventually. Throw a bit of butter on them. Make a dipping sauce for the chicken and potatoes out of a dollop of ketchup mixed with a dollop of mayonnaise.
Serve up two big platefuls of everything. Eat it all. Wash it all down with whatever you have on hand — rioja, port, and hard cider will do nicely. Toast the recent dead with every sip.
It’s good to be alive, it’s good to make a hearty dinner out of nothing, and it’s good to drink, remember, and cry.
by Kate Christensen | Dec 20, 2011
It’s that dark, hibernating time of year. We recently moved to a small northeastern seaside city where we know almost no one. We’re writers, but food is our greatest passion. Brendan, a native New Englander by way of Italy and California, is an expert cook who eats with as much excitement and gusto as I do. I cook improvisationally and eat indiscriminately. I lived in New York for twenty years, so this is a strange new land for me, but the rumor that Portland, Maine has more restaurants per capita than any other American city is a bit of a thrill.
As soon as we moved into our house on the West End, we got down to it: Caiola’s, the Back Bay Grill, Miyake — the sushi place and also the noodle house — Petite Jacqueline, J’s Oyster, the Front Room, Artemesia, Bonobo’s Pizza, Boda, Local 188, the schmancy, expensive Greek place on Congress Street, Bintliff’s, Hot Suppa, the Blue Spoon. We haven’t been to some highly recommended places — most notably Hugo’s, Fore Street, the White Cap, and the Pepperclub — but we’ll get there.
Our favorite restaurants in town, so far, are Saigon, a simple, cheap place that makes some of the best beef pho we’ve ever had (and they deliver!), savory boiling-hot beef broth with fresh thin-sliced beef, rice noodles, mint leaves, and bean sprouts; Artemesia for brunch, where you get huge mimosas and cozy, cheerful huevos rancheros; J’s Oyster, a crowded warm little place on the wharf that serves up lots of booze and huge buckets of succulent steamers with bowls of hot water and melted butter; and Miyake Sushi, which is costly but worth it — the $25 lobster roll is the most decadent treat in town, the sushi is sublime, and they make their own gluten-free soy sauce. Boda serves solid, easygoing Thai food, Hot Suppa has authentic, down-home jambalaya, the Front Room’s salads are fresh and good, and Bonobo’s gluten-free pizza is greasy but delicious. The Greek place, Emilitsa, has tender octopus, excellent lamb, and great spanakopita — it’s expensive, but it’s the real thing.
There have been some disappointments. Brendan got sick from the overly rich fare at the Back Bay Grill (although the bartender there, a charming red-headed cutie, makes a wicked, icy martini) – overpriced food that’s too fatty and too salty makes us feel like chumps while we’re eating it and bilious afterwards. And our brunch at Bintliff’s the other day made us stare at each other in consternation — how do you make a lobster frittata that’s literally inedible? Their chef can, and did. Petite Jacqueline’s $21 meuniere was a slab of bland white fish fried in butter and slathered in half a pint of thick cream-and-lemon sauce with 5 or 6 capers. But the steak au poivre was pretty damn good.
We’re off to New York for Christmas to have the brilliant steak tartare at Balthazar and some affordable, excellent sushi at Takahachi. We look forward most of all to a roast and Yorkshire pudding Christmas Eve dinner at our dear friend Rosie Schaap’s. New York eating at its best has a joie de vivre, an expert ease, a feeling of celebration, kibitzing, and excitement. Going to a favorite restaurant in New York is like embarking on an adventure; they’re on their toes down there, they have to be. It has its share of crappy restaurants, but the good ones are memorable, formidable, legendary.
We can’t wait to discover more legendary food in Portland. We’ve only just begun to eat here.
Lobster Frittata
serves 2, with leftovers
Clean and dice a good-sized leek. Mince a shallot or a handful of chives. Dice a red pepper and two medium red potatoes. Saute it all in a cast-iron skillet over medium heat in half high-quality oil, half butter — just enough fat so nothing sticks. Sprinkle with salt and black pepper, fresh dill or tarragon if you have it, and paprika. Beat six very fresh eggs with a dollop of sour cream. When the vegetables are soft and beginning to brown, pour the egg mixture over them. Place 1 cup of cooked lobster chunks into the pan into the wet egg mixture. When the eggs have set but are still wet on top, run the pan under the broiler to finish cooking. Serve with hot buttered toast.
Note: Do not drown the frittata in plasticky, cheap cheese; do not throw the lobster on top at the last minute as if it were an afterthought; do not undercook the eggs so they’re a runny mess; potatoes perk the whole thing up. Bon appetit!
