by Kate Christensen | Aug 21, 2013
I’m writing this at a small table on the screened porch with all the windows open, listening to the dry tambourine rattle of cicadas in the trees while the sky whitens with heat after a cool, clear, slightly pig-manure scented morning. Classes start next week; every day brings a fresh wave of SUVs driven by parents, all of whom look to be about my age, unloading wholesome-looking kids and bedding and lamps and duffel bags onto sidewalks outside dorms and student houses.
It took us three days to get here from New England. Brendan drove; I navigated, kept things organized, offered frequent drinks of water, sang geographically appropriate songs (“And we know every inch of the way, from Albany to Buffalo,” for example, or, “Hey, ho, where did you go, Ohio?”), and phoned ahead to make hotel reservations. The first day was all gorgeous and green and full of sinuous mountain vistas and small-town picturesqueness—New Hampshire, Vermont, upper New York State. We ate lunch at the famous Blue Benn Diner in Bennington, Vermont; I had a BLT on gluten-free toast and a lot of cold, strong, unsweetened iced tea.
At sunset, we stopped in Syracuse and checked into the Parkview, a comfortable old “dog-friendly” hotel downtown. After we got Dingo walked, fed, and settled back in the car, because he refused to wait in a strange room with all those weird noises around him, we went to a nearby pub for a healthy, excellent dinner, quinoa-stuffed zucchini for me, duck breast for Brendan. Afterwards, we repaired to our hotel bar for a nightcap.
The next day, we turned north just before Buffalo and took a detour to Niagara Falls on a slow, wide boulevard instead of the Interstate. We drove past eerie miles of shuttered, once-glam vintage motor courts, used-car lots (“Bad credit? No problem!”), and dubious-looking fast-food places we’d never heard of.
We parked in the town of Niagara Falls in front of a restaurant that looked like a Swiss ski chalet and set off in search of grandeur. Right away, we found it. We crossed a bridge over the wide and turbulent river rushing down to the falls, then went through a small wooded park to the next bridge and crossed back to the other side. Then our luck changed. Our hunger levels, which had been manageable before, now took a turn for the dangerous. Some bird took a big wet shit on Brendan’s shoulder. Across the river, on the Canadian side, there appeared to be a Shangri-la of outdoor cafés and a glistening small metropolis, but over here on the New York side, it was tragically Disneyfied, the natural beauty wrecked with garish signs and ticket booths.
We’d been planning to eat at the ski chalet restaurant where we’d parked, but when I went in to get some water for Dingo, I saw that it was dark and overpriced and full of unpleasant odors. No way were we eating there, even if we keeled over from low blood sugar.
Now crabby and annoyed at this entire place, but determined to get a gander at the damned thing we’d come so far out of our way to see, we dragged poor Dingo (it was too hot to leave him in the car) past tourist-trap snack bars and tchotchke shacks down to the lookout point. And then magically, our moods lifted; we felt zingy and euphoric. We stood a few feet away from thundering tons of free-falling water sliding over the edge of the enormous horseshoe-shaped cliff and pounding into the seething pools below. Everyone’s hair stood on end from the ionic charge.
We grinned at each other. “What a perfect place to commit double suicide,” said Brendan.
“Then who would take care of Dingo?”
“Good point,” said Brendan.
Since most of the non-touristy restaurants in Niagara Falls seemed to be Indian for some reason, we ate odd, overly spiced, but ultimately edible chicken tandoori, lamb roghan josh, and curried vegetables with cashews and drank big fat glasses of passable Chianti. Dingo lay at our feet in the shade and drank ice water.
Then we drove back to the Interstate and hightailed it on out of there. We soon left New York State and crossed into a small strip of Pennsylvania.
“It’s the Bitch State,” I said. “Do not speed in the Bitch State. They will swoop on you if you go one mile over the speed limit.”
“Pennsylvania is one of my two least favorite states,” said Brendan; he didn’t have to add that Connecticut was the other one, because I already knew that.
“Just don’t speed,” I said.
We could not have sped if we’d wanted to: everyone evidently knew about the Bitch State. Not one vehicle around us went above the speed limit until we all crossed into Ohio, and then it was a happy Interstate free-for-all again.
A few hours later, we ate dry–rub BBQ and drank margaritas at a joint called Shorty’s in Toledo. Then we spent the night at a La Quinta Inn. Our waitress at Shorty’s and the hotel staff reminded me with a shock of remembrance that Midwesterners are the friendliest, warmest people on earth. Where does this niceness come from? What does it mean? It seems so genuine, so true. But how can it be?
The next day, we planned to drive straight to Iowa City without stopping, but somehow, because the air conditioning in the car was making my left eye stream with irritation, so I had to keep my eyes shut and couldn’t navigate properly, we found ourselves on the South Side of Chicago, taking a detour to a highway that would eventually, we hoped, lead us back to the Interstate. It looked a lot like the Ninth Ward of New Orleans. It was mysterious and strange. I tried and failed to resist the temptation to sing a couple verses of “The Night Chicago Died.” My eye oozed and burned.
Bombing along 80 again, we rolled down the windows and turned off the air conditioning and did not stop or turn or take a detour again until we came to the North Dodge exit into Iowa City. We rolled through wide streets and parked in the driveway of our new 1930s bungalow and unlocked the door and came in, shellshocked and dazed.
We had been planning to buy groceries and cook dinner in our new kitchen on our first night here, but this was suddenly out of the question. After we fed Dingo and walked him around the block and unpacked, which didn’t take long, because we hardly brought any stuff, we went out to a nearby tapas place. This being the Midwest, there was a decided whiff of Chef Boyardee about the stuffed pequillos, but the cocktails were strong and excellent and the bacon-wrapped dates were as good as they always are.
We walked home and fell asleep almost instantly. This was Saturday night. It’s now Wednesday. Since we got here, we’ve walked several times past the two places where I lived more than a quarter century ago: the ground floor of a shabby house just down the street from where we live now, and, up at Black’s Gaslight Village, the apartment my friend Sally nicknamed “the doublewide,” in the back of the main house on the second floor.
I was a whole different person back then. And I’m not the only thing that’s changed around here. The New Pioneer Co-Op, which was a fledgling little market in a shed in 1988, is now a state-of-the-art operation, a big, roomy emporium full of organic produce and beautiful cheese and fresh fish and grass-fed meats and excellent wine. The workshop itself, which used to be housed in the Soviet bloc-era English-Philosophy Building in ugly classrooms with fluorescent lighting, now resides in a handsome Victorian house on the river, with a modern, bright annex and library. There’s a great new café a few blocks away that has baristas with lip piercings, free-trade coffee, and leather couches; Brendan has already set up shop there.
And the Hamburg Inn, which was my old haunt 27 years ago, now has gluten-free buns.
by Kate Christensen | Aug 12, 2013
Back in the late 1980s and early 90s, when she lived in the East Village and belonged to two modern dance companies and worked long shifts as a waitress at various restaurants, my sister Susan coined the expression “Boat Day.” This was a day during which she floated on her bed all day in her pajamas, surrounded by books and magazines, gratefully accepting the cups of tea and plates of food her then-boyfriend was kind enough to bring her. She was not sick, she was in perfect health, but she needed some time out, a restorative day of rest, solitude, and contemplation.
During that same era, when I also lived in the East Village and had started writing my first novel and was working as an office temp all around the city, I coined the term “Soul Spa Day.” This was a day during which I lay in the bathtub for hours, replenishing the hot water as necessary, reading detective novels and anything by M.F.K. Fisher, drinking tea while it was light out, then wine when it got dark, and slurping bowls of minestrone I’d made the day before from the contents of my kitchen cupboard.
During these days of doing nothing, fittingly, Susan and I also both played a lot of Solitaire and listened to NPR or mix tapes on our boom boxes. And we screened all our calls and didn’t call anyone back until the next day.
We both still do this, decades later. Boat Day, Soul Spa Day – whatever it’s called, sometimes you need a 24-hour break from life.
Yesterday, I woke up with a to-do list as long as my arm and an impending (temporary) move to Iowa City three days away and an enormous backlog of emails and messages to respond to, following a very happy but very busy and chockfull summer of work and travel and activity and interviews and family visiting and deadlines.
Lying there, waking up, I felt no desire to do anything productive at all, all day. In fact, I felt rebellious and lazy. I got dressed and walked Dingo along the sidewalk in the sparkling, lush, sweet Maine summer morning.
“I don’t want to pack yet,” I said when I got home. “I don’t want to run errands.”
“Let’s go to the beach,” said Brendan. “Let’s have a picnic.”
Less than four minutes later, we were in the car, bathing suits on under our clothes, wearing our straw beach hats, headed for Cape Elizabeth. Dingo rode in back along with the beach towels.
On the way, we stopped at the lobster shack we call the Mail-Order Bride’s because of the busty, artfully made-up Russian woman we assume is married to the owner; she sits behind the counter and rings everything up with a fatally bored expression that says, “For this I leave Russia? To work in lobster store and be married to Maine man?”
They have excellent lobster salad at the Mail-Order Bride’s: mounds of fresh, tender, perfectly cooked meat bound lightly with good mayonnaise, served on some iceberg with thinly sliced ripe tomato, nothing else. We also got a big bag of Cape Cod sea salt-and-cracked pepper potato chips, a bottle of chilled rosé, and two bottles of water, mainly for Dingo.
And then we headed for Ferry Beach, forgetting in our excitement that they have a strict no-dogs rule in the summertime between 9 and 5. When we got there, the parking lot was full, so it was moot. We were out of luck. We drove a bit aimlessly around the back roads, wondering how to sneak onto a beach somewhere. No luck there, either.
“I know,” said Brendan. “The Inn by the Sea. They take dogs. We can use their beach.”
A minute later, there it was, the place where I took Brendan for his 30th birthday on a weirdly hot March day last year; Dingo came along too, and got to dine with us in the lobby restaurant alongside all the other dogs and stay with us in our room, where the staff had provided him with a soft dog bed and treats.
Now we parked in their lot and walked Dingo down their wooden boardwalk to the beach, and then we saw the no-dogs signs there, too. So we set up camp at a picnic table in the shade by the beach and ate our lobster and potato chips and drank our wine. The air was sweet and fresh and cool; the sunlight filtered through the branches of the trees to dapple the ground.
After lunch, we walked Dingo back to the car and left him snoozing in the backseat with all the windows rolled down. Then we came back to the beach, unrolled our towels, and lay in the sun in our bathing suits until we were baking hot. Then we walked into the green, clear, cold, lapping waves of the north Atlantic and paddled around. Back on our towels in the sun, we dozed, tingly and zinging and euphoric from lobster and wine and seawater.
After we woke up, we collected Dingo and drank more cold rosé on the porch of the Inn, sitting on a wicker couch with a view of the ocean, enjoying the fresh breeze in the shade. From the dog menu (yes, they have a dog menu), we ordered the “Meat Roaf” for Dingo. A big bowl of rice, ground beef, minced carrots, peas, and beans was set down next to his smaller bowl of ice water. Dingo stared at the waiter as if he might be an angel from heaven, then stuck his nose into the bowl and didn’t look up again until it was empty.
Then we humans were hungry again, so we drove to the new, fancy oyster place in town and sat outside in the bright sun and ate two dozen briny local mollusks with mignonette and cocktail sauce and drank cold muscadet.
After that, it was time for another nap; I awoke in pitch darkness to find Brendan shaking me gently. “You’ve been asleep for four hours,” he said. He had walked and fed Dingo; he had been up for two hours already. I discovered that I was wide awake and ravenous, so we went to the corner bar for their juicy, savory burgers with gluten-free buns and pimiento cheese.
This midnight supper was the perfect ending to our outdoor Boat Day, the Soul Spa Day of seafood and naps and potato chips and ocean air and sand and wine.
And now the summer is over, and our To-Do lists are longer than ever.
by Kate Christensen | Jul 23, 2013
Tonight, I’m planning to make monkfish (the lobster of fish) cut into chunks and sautéed in olive oil, sherry, clam juice, garlic, onions, red peppers, and tomatoes, with blanched slivered almonds and parsley. I’ll serve it over boiled red potatoes, cut up and lightly doused in olive oil and kosher salt, along with a mesclun and radish salad. We have a bottle of Provencal rosé getting cold in the fridge.
It’ll be a pink-and-red dinner: who said red was the most appetizing color? Whoever it was had a very good point.
I haven’t cooked in so long, I hope I remember how. But meanwhile, I’ve been talking, writing, reading, and thinking almost exclusively for the past two or three weeks about food: in hotels, airports, on planes, in restaurants, at readings, at parties, and in cars.
On Friday, I got back from a wildly fun, exhausting book tour to promote Blue Plate Special. For part of it, I traveled with several fellow Doubleday writers and our editors, flying together from city to city, staying in the same hotels, and attending cocktail parties with booksellers in the evenings, a stroke of genius on the part of the publicists.
In San Francisco, at the strong urging of Charlotte Druckman, my friend and editor at medium.com, and the author of the fantastic book Skirt Steak, about female chefs, I took BART to the Mission District to eat lunch at Bar Tartine. I ordered the apricot soup and the Vietnamese chicken salad and drank a clean, crisp Riesling while I waited for the food to arrive. The soup was tart and creamy and cool, and I loved the hell out of it. The waitress told me it was an Eastern European specialty. The salad was equally good, but enormous, so I had half of it boxed up and stuck it in my bag.
Then I walked through the sunny, cool afternoon to Omnivore Books. Charlotte had told me that I’d love the owner, Celia, and had warned me that I would spend far too much money there. She was right on both counts; I wanted to stand in that small, clean, bright, book-lined room all day, pawing all the food literature and talking to Celia, who is a rare books collector and an expert on all aspects of culinary writing. But I restrained myself somewhat and bought the five books I didn’t think I could live without: Food and Drink in America, The Salt Book, A History of Food in 100 Recipes, Consider the Fork, and The Scavenger’s Guide to Haute Cuisine.
In Seattle, two days later, my Doubleday cohorts (we nicknamed our tour Rolling Thunder ’13 with no small degree of self-mockery; we trashed not one hotel room that I know of) all flew home together and left me on my own to give a reading that night. I felt a bit blue and lonely without them all.
But then Molly Wizenberg, author of A Homemade Life, the forthcoming Delancey, and the blog orangette.com, came by in her car to my hotel and picked me up and whisked me off to lunch. We sat at the counter of The Whale Wins and drank rosé and shared several small plates – freshly made headcheese, roasted cauliflower salad, plump grilled sardines, carrot and fennel salad. It was all so good, I swooned over every bite, even though it was hard to stop talking long enough to eat. The roasted cauliflower salad in particular was so unbelievably delicious and so surprising, I kept dissecting its components mentally in order to fully appreciate it: pungent chewy cauliflower, crisp sliced radish, green garlic aioli, cilantro vinaigrette, smoked paprika oil, and a softly cooked egg on top, whose yolk added an undergirding of rich fat to the mingled flavors of the sauces and vegetables.
That night, I gave a reading at the Book Larder. I walked in to find that they had made, in advance, the bacon cheddar biscuits from Blue Plate Special to serve to the audience. The bookstore smelled of bacon fat; I gave my reading standing behind the island of the store’s kitchen. Afterwards, we all stood around, talking about food, of course. I could have stayed there all night, but I had to get to the airport for a red-eye to New York, so I said my goodbyes and flew back across the country, still smelling of fresh bacon fat.
The next night was my book party, which my generous friends, Jami and Rosie, threw for me at Jami’s loft in South Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Rosie made a vat of beautiful watermelon-jalapeno-lime tequila punch and assembled a spread that made me want to burst into an operatic aria of joy and gratitude: deviled eggs, a magnificent array of cheeses and sausages and olives and radishes and grapes, and “devils on horseback,” dates stuffed with goat cheese, wrapped in bacon, and baked. Jami ran around putting everything together; my friend Tavia, the actress who read the audiobook, had sent a huge bunch of beautiful lilies that perfumed the hot summer air. My friend Steve showed up with a gorgeous loaf of his garlic-rosemary bread, and Stefan brought his signature quinoa-kale-chicken-pine nut salad. I was in heaven.
As I stood there talking and reading to the crowd of good-looking, brilliant friends, feeling buoyed aloft on warm waves of goodwill, literary camaraderie, and plenty of punch, I got teary-eyed at one point. “It’s so good to see you all,” I said. “New York will always feel like home, no matter where I live.”
A few days later, I went to Chicago for a reading, and afterwards went out to dinner at the Hopleaf with my titian-haired (in homage to Nancy Drew), witty friend Gretchen, who appears in Blue Plate Special as the poet at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop who took me to truck stops for midnight suppers, and several of her friends. We sat around a small table upstairs. Starving yet again, I ate grilled baby octopus with fingerling potatoes, artichoke, lemon aioli, and chorizo oil and split a carafe of Spanish white wine with Gretchen’s friend Beth. The octopus was tender and crunchy and crackled between my teeth.
The next night, in Miami, alone at the Coral Gables Biltmore (which might be the most beautiful hotel I have ever stayed in), after two interviews, during which I talked about nothing but food, and before that night’s reading, during which I would continue to talk about nothing but food, I found myself ravenous once again. I went downstairs to Fontana, a Mediterranean restaurant on the romantic stucco-and-palm tree inner courtyard. I drank Sancerre and ate a filet of sole with lemon butter and a simple salad. As I ate, a monsoon hit. I was sitting just under the portico by the fountain. Raindrops spattered my table; lightning flashed. I asked for another glass of wine.
by Kate Christensen | Jun 22, 2013
One night this past winter, I was down in Boston with the generous, hilarious, down-to-earth master chef Barbara Lynch. I’m writing Barbara’s memoir with her, so I’ve been spending a lot of time in her world this year, getting to know her friends and family, her restaurants, her old hangouts in Southie.
After a dinner party at her old Southie pal Norton’s townhouse, during which Barbara made one pizza after another in his brick oven (the one with goat cheese and lemon-vinaigrette arugula salad was by far the best pizza, gluten-free or otherwise, I’ve ever had; it was her first stab at gluten-free crust), we all packed off to the Quencher, one of Southie’s oldest and most beloved establishments. Barbara thought it would be educational for me, plus everyone there has known her forever, so I could dig for material.
The Quencher is a dark, crowded, cozy dive bar. I sat with Barbara’s first cousin Nancy, a stalwart regular with a handbag full of knitting and birdwatching binoculars. Her husband had already gone home. She was drinking beer.
I’d been drinking red wine all night.
“What am I going to drink that goes with red wine?” I wondered aloud to Barbara, who handed me a vodka and soda, which doesn’t at all, but I was so happy, I forgot about not mixing.
After three of these, I was properly shitfaced, but I didn’t want to go home. I wanted to stay there all night, bantering with Nancy, who was openly skeptical of me but hilarious and frank (“How has Southie changed since the seventies?” I asked her earnestly, trying to be an A-student little memoir-writer; she blinked at me for a full beat then mused aloud, “Why the hell did Barbara hire you?” at which point I fell in love with her) but closing time came, as it always does, and Kristen Kish, a stellar gorgeous ninja of a person who recently won “Top Chef” and is now chef de cuisine at Menton, Barbara’s fine-dining restaurant, drove us back to Barbara’s pied-a-terre in Fort Point.
Barbara and I stayed up even later with a bottle of red wine, talking and talking. I staggered upstairs and fell asleep sometime in the early morning and did not move until early the next afternoon. I staggered down at 1:00 to find Barbara cooking, of course.
“There you are,” she said, peering at me anxiously. “I just told Kristen that I think I might have killed the writer.”
She gave me coffee and sparkling water, which I drank while she finished making whatever she was making. It turned out to be potato pancakes – light, crisp, fluffy, savory – with kale and poached eggs.
“How do you poach an egg?” I asked, licking my plate with my forefinger, my hangover vanquished. I had never poached an egg before, I realized.
The trick, she said, was to crack an egg first into a teacup and pour it all at once into lightly boiling water into which you’ve put some vinegar, a good jot. Do them one at a time and scoop them out after a few minutes with a slotted spoon. And she showed me.
Since I started hanging out with Barbara last fall, I’ve felt myself stepping up my cooking game. I’ve never spent time with any world-class chefs before, if only because I’ve never had the opportunity. Barbara cooks like a natural. She never went to cooking school. She cooked for and with Todd English for many years, but by the time he hired her, she was already formed: She’s self-taught and self-invented, but she cooks as if she had been taught by a Tuscan nonna. Somehow, she’s absorbed the vernacular and infused it with her own ideas. I think she’s a genius.
Anyway, I learned to poach an egg from Barbara Lynch, and thanks to her, I feel that I am a world-class egg-poacher. Since that breakfast, I’ve been poaching eggs like mad, and I have never once fucked one up: my poached eggs are always perfect, soft and coalescent, with melting, buttery yolks.
Today, Brendan got up at 6 and went off to the café on Congress to work. I woke up hungry at 8:30. I drank coffee and read the New York Times online. At 10:00, I washed 5 organic Yukon Golds and put them in a pot to boil. By the time Brendan got home with a bottle of cold sparkling rosé, they were perfectly cooked.
“How did you know when to come home?” I asked.
“How long have we been together?” he answered. “Anyway, how did you know when to put the potatoes on?”
“How long have we been together?”
Inspired by my long-ago breakfast at Barbara’s, I mashed the hot, soft potatoes in a metal bowl, skins on, and put the bowl into the freezer to chill. Then I sautéed 4 crushed, chopped garlic cloves and a large minced shallot in olive oil. When it was all brown and just starting to caramelize, I added it to the cool potatoes and mixed it all up and put it all back into the freezer.
Then I sautéed a pound of baby spinach (that’s what we had instead of kale) with kosher salt in some chicken broth, covered, stirring every so often. When the spinach was dark green, I dumped it into a metal colander over a wide shallow glass bowl and poked at it with a wooden spoon to squeeze out all the moisture.
Meanwhile, I put a saucepan of water on for poached eggs. I added a fat jot of white wine vinegar plus a generous pinch of salt for good luck, as I always do. When it boiled, I turned it down to a simmer and poached the eggs one by one, cracking them first into a teacup. They all came out perfectly….
To the mashed potatoes, I added 2 beaten eggs, a dash of half-and-half, 1/3 cup of fine buckwheat flour, kosher salt, and fresh-ground black pepper. Then I heated a slick of peanut oil in the large cast-iron skillet. When a bit of potato sizzled, I turned down the heat and spooned 4 big glops of potato pancake mix into the pan and flattened them with the spatula and left them to cook while I poached the eggs, one by one.
Inspired by Barbara’s breakfast, I served a Florentine: onto a potato pancake went a big heap of spinach, then a poached egg, then another pancake on top. Brendan poured glasses of cold sparkling pink wine. We toasted to Southie.
by Kate Christensen | May 24, 2013
The kitchen will be done today, except for the stained glass window. It’s been a long, slow process, three months of hard, painstaking work for our contractors, three months without a kitchen for us. Everyone has been remarkably patient and cool-headed throughout, maybe because we all knew we were creating something beautiful, and that doesn’t happen overnight. Most of the materials we used were old, “repurposed,” they call it – the 1880s ceiling tin Brendan found for sale in Ohio and had shipped here, the first-growth pine floorboards from an old 1770s barn wall we bought from an old-wood guy in Cape Elizabeth, the maple the contractors used to build the kitchen cabinets and the wainscoting in the dining room, which came from a 100-year-old mill floor in Biddeford. We bought our appliances second-hand, cheap and in excellent shape, from a guy up in Poland Spring who has a barn full of barely-used, traded-in stuff.
The contractors never once quailed at these materials, never complained about the unorthodoxies of using them. They rose to every challenge, scraped and sanded and then painted the ornate old squares of ceiling tin they’d carefully jiggered into place and cut to accommodate the overhead lights, planed and sanded and endlessly poly’ed the rough, weatherbeaten dimensional countertop planks into smooth, richly golden expanses. The patinaed copper from the 1902 bathtub Brendan bought from a guy north of Waterville has been siliconed to the bartop with sandbags and clamps. The old copper was curved; they’ve subdued it and wrested it into place.
As of yesterday, the wavy sort-of-opaque glass is in the upper cabinet doors. The (new) porcelain sink has been set into the countertop and hooked up. The tall wooden door with beveled glass and carved details that used to hang in the front entryway is now a swinging door between the kitchen and the foyer. Right now, they’re downstairs, grouting the Mexican tile backsplash, replacing the glass in the door to the mudroom, shaping the copper edges around the bartop, and then, I think, they’ll be done.
Later this afternoon, when they pack up their tools and drive away, we’ll wander around the big, cavernous-feeling, dazzling room, slightly befuddled, dazed with the joy of having our kitchen and dining room, which were so ugly before, be so beautiful now, all one big room instead of divided, with two more windows and the brick chimney exposed, freshly painted a warm neutral buttery color, everything gleaming and rich with history, every detail exactly what we’d wanted all along.
The kitchen feels as if it’s been in the house forever; our aim was to have people walk in and assume that, feel it instinctively. Our house is old and tall and beautiful, and it wants to feel comfortable and attractive in its outfit; it also wants an outfit befitting its dignified age. Before, the kitchen was all pink granite and white melamine, white appliances and a hideous Brazilian cherry floor. The dining room was no great shakes, either. The walls were painted a cold sky blue. The huge side window was Sheetrocked over. The house chafed and protested against this bullshit with every joist and beam; we could almost hear it. Ridiculous as it sounds, I can’t help thinking that it’s rejoicing in its new duds, even preening a little, and I don’t blame it.
Tomorrow, we’ll unpack the boxes of cooking utensils and pots and bowls, baking pans and cookie sheets and wooden spoons, glasses, cups, plates, and the bags of staples, rice and lentils and pasta. We can slot the spices into the indented maple ledge built into the back of the island, empty the corner of the living room where all the kitchen stuff has been stored since February, move the table and chairs back into the dining room, rearrange the couch and armchairs around the fireplace in the living room, vacuum and mop and dust and hang pictures.
Once that’s all done, the inevitable question is sure to arise. What should we cook to inaugurate our new kitchen? What should its first meal be?
Our friend Rosie will be visiting this weekend. She is a brilliant, accomplished, knowledgeable cook, a famous bartender and inventor of cocktails, but despite that, she’s never intimidating to cook for or to mix drinks for, because she is impeccably philosophical. She wants to be pleased; she wants to enjoy our hospitality. A couple of years ago, I forgot to trim the strings off some sugar-snap peas I had sautéed with green beans to go alongside Brendan’s roast. And my Dauphinoise was too dry, because I hadn’t used enough cream. We ate our meal, picking peapod strings out of our teeth, putting away plenty of Dauphinoise despite its flaws.
Mid-meal, I broke down and apologized.
Rosie shot back, “Julia Child said, ‘Never apologize at the table.’ I never do. You shouldn’t either.”
And that was that.
Therefore, I know that whatever we make, Rosie will not complain; she will eat enthusiastically and without criticism. Even so, I’m not going to try anything new or complicated. I’m superstitious. It’s the First Supper. It has to be good. My mind keeps drifting to my current favorite standby, which is foolproof, easy, fast, no-fuss, comforting, and delicious: Haddock filets cut into bite-sized pieces and marinated in lemon juice and harissa spices, then added to a skillet in which chopped chorizo and leeks have been sautéed in olive oil and white wine. The fish is poached till it’s tender and cooked through, then this smoky, spicy stew is served over wild rice cooked in chicken broth, with garlicky steamed red chard alongside.
I’m already drooling at the thought of digging into a plateful tomorrow night; we’ll light candles, open the windows, dim the chandelier.
