by Diana Saco
I told Chloe about my new blogging gig, and she was thrilled. She thought having multiple writing projects at the same time was a good idea. She said it would work different parts of my brain and probably fire off creative connections I wouldn’t have otherwise. I filled her in on the story behind the blog. It gave her ideas because to celebrate that evening, she made me zeppoli. They were perfect.
*****
By Day Eighteen, I had turned out my first blog, and the book outline was also coming along. Motivated by the progress I’d made so far, I had even drafted some character scenes.
I finally understood what Chloe tried to explain to me on our trip to Charlton. The secret of writing and of drawing and of baking and of fill-in-the-blank was this. Stop making excuses, and start making it happen. Just do it.
It took me a while to get to this point, but when I did, the truth of it seemed obvious. I always knew I would regret writing a bad novel. But missteps were temporary. I’d get over it. Even if my reputation took a hit, I could always write something else under an alias. In short, I could bounce back from a bad attempt, but there was no bouncing back from never trying at all. If I kept myself from writing a novel, any novel, I’d regret it forever.
I told Chloe about my epiphany.
“Finally!” she said.
She uncorked a bottle of sparkling wine, and we spent the rest of the evening toasting every bad book we ever read and the authors who had the courage to write them.
*****
Twenty-three and half days after the trial, I felt like Athena—the goddess of heroes—emerging out of the head of Zeus fully formed. I was strong. I was brave. I was wise.
And I was on my way to a party with my new girlfriend. Chloe and I were headed over to Farm’s movie house for the annual Halloween party. In a manner befitting my mood, I actually dressed up as Athena. Chloe didn’t think anyone would get it.
“Are you kidding?” I balked. “The toga, the armor, the helmet, the owl. Who else could it be?”
“Well, I get the outfit, but how does Hedwig fit in?” she asked.
“This isn’t Hedwig! It’s the Owl of Athena!”
“Maybe you shouldn’t have gone with a Snowy Owl,” she said. “That’s kind of iconic, don’t you think?”
“It’s the only owl they had at the costume shop.”
“I could paint it brown for you,” she offered.
“Thanks, but I have to return it. Anyway, if people do wind up thinking it’s Hedwig, I can always give it to you to hold.”
“Why would Bellatrix Lestrange be holding Harry Potter’s owl?” Chloe asked.
“Look, just go with it, Bellatrix. You look perfect, by the way.”
She smiled. Not a pretty sight since she had blackened her teeth to match her character.
“Thanks,” she said.
“Maybe we should have matched our costumes,” I suggested.
Chloe scrunched her nose in disgust, which made her look even more like Bellatrix. “That’s so couply. I’d prefer it if we didn’t succumb to certain clichés.”
“Fine with me. I’d hate to have to blacken my teeth.”
“Besides,” Chloe added, “you look cute in your white toga and armor.”
I smiled. “Ready to go?”
“Yup, I just have to grab the treats.”
Again this year, Chloe had made edible eyeballs out of baked meringue and marzipan with lemon curd inside. I looked at them staring back at me.
“Oh! I love your eyeballs.”
“Most people just tell me they love my eyes,” she said, batting her lashes for emphasis.
I laughed.
As I followed Chloe out to the car, I realized that the feelings of uncertainty that had been plaguing me since the trial were finally gone. I did miss detective work, but it was just for a few months. In the meantime, I was gaining a new appreciation for the administrative side of our business. I didn’t hate client billing as much either. The extra time also gave me the chance to slay my other dragons.
I told Chloe about my birthday falling on the same day as Boris Pasternak’s and Jimmy Durante’s. She said it was obvious from the humor in my prose that I had learned to embrace my inner Jimmy. I could live with that. Unfortunately, Farm was present during the discussion and informed us that February 10 was also Lon Chaney, Jr.’s birthday. I barely had time to process that before he launched into party-planner mode and excitedly announced that we would have my next birthday celebration at the Old Mill Movie House with classic Chaney monster flicks playing in the background. I was about to protest when Chloe suggested Farm show the movies showcasing Chaney as each of the four big horror characters—wolf man, Frankenstein’s monster, mummy, and Dracula. The excitement in her voice drowned the protest in mine.
I looked over at Chloe now. She smiled back at me from the driver’s seat, with her blackened teeth and her tangled locks of hair. So this was what normal felt like twenty-three and a half days after a murder trial. Me in hero’s armor and my girlfriend dressed like an evil witch, driving off into the sunset with a stash of tasty eyeballs rolling around in the back seat.
Epilogue: In Defense of Rhubarb
“Come on, Nina, just give it a little taste,” Chloe said.
“I don’t want to,” I protested.
“Why not?” she asked.
“What if I don’t like it?”
“If you really don’t like it, you don’t have to eat it,” she said. “But you should at least try it first.”
“But I’ll get sick, Chloe!”
“No, you won’t. I promise. I washed it really well.”
“It’s not natural,” I said.
“How is this not natural?” she asked.
“A vegetable that you cook like a fruit? A red stalk with poisonous leaves? A tart plant that you have to work hard to make sweet? Everything about rhubarb is just plain wrong,” I said.
“It’s the tartness that makes it so wonderful in sweet desserts,” she countered.
“I’m part Cuban and part Italian. That makes me genetically predisposed toward sugars.”
“Which is why I asked you to make a flan. Custard and rhubarb go very well together,” Chloe said.
“I’m dubious about that combination,” I said. “How do I know the oxalic acid in your rhubarb isn’t going to eat through my silky smooth flan?”
“There’s no acid in my rhubarb,” Chloe said, acidly. “Come on, Nina. You slice a piece of flan for each of us, and I’ll put some of the rhubarb compote on the side.”
“I have a better idea,” I said. “How about I eat the flan, and you eat the rhubarb.”
“You’re being silly,” she said.
“Where did you get the rhubarb, anyway?” I asked. “I thought the season was over.”
“It is, but Jeff and Joanna freeze some of their leftovers. I got it from them.”
“Great! You’re feeding me rhubarb-sicles from a pair of nudists!”
“Be nice,” she said.
“I am nice,” I took a breath. “Frankly, the Munch case made me leery of ever eating anything with rhubarb. Didn’t it put you off?” I asked.
“Yeah, but that’s why I want to get back on the horse. Tomorrow, I’m going to recreate the galette recipe from the bake-off—minus the poison, of course. I want to know how it turned out. And you’re going to eat some of that, too,” she added.
“I just don’t want to get a stomach ache again. It was awful.”
“That was the poison, not the rhubarb. Get a grip, Nina. You can’t spend the rest of your life living in fear of a vegetable.”
I studied the rhubarb photo in the recipe application that Chloe had open on her tablet.
“You know what this looks like, don’t you?” I asked.
Chloe glanced at the picture. “Actually, it looks like Swiss chard, especially the ruby red variety.”
“No,” I said. “It looks like celery that’s gone red with embarrassment.”
She laughed. “W
hy would rhubarb be embarrassed?”
“Probably from being mistaken for a frivolous fruit. No self-respecting vegetable would be caught dead in a dessert.”
“Really? How about carrot cake, zucchini bread, sweet potato pie?”
“Your point?” I asked.
“My point is, open your mouth.”
I opened my mouth—reluctantly. I pinched my nose and shut my eyes, half expecting a tart, fibrous, red celery stalk to be shoved in. Instead, Chloe treated me to a spoonful of chunky sauce that reminded me of sour apple candy and watermelon juice. It wasn’t just a food or a flavor. It was an ordinary experience with extraordinary overtones. It started out disappointingly normal and then had an unexpectedly tangy finish. It was like a dance taking place inside my mouth, sweet swirling around tart, and then tart dipping sweet, and then sweet and tart doing the paso doble up one side of my tongue and a samba down the other. I wanted a slower tango to capture the flavor, but it was too dynamic. It was a taste that wouldn’t sit still.
“Again,” I said reverently.
Chloe smiled in understanding. She lifted another spoonful into my mouth so that I could repeat the experience.
This was rhubarb. And it was good.
Nina's Collection of Recipes from Millsferry's Kitchens
Alita’s Simple Flan Recipe
(Chloe’s new favorite)
All cooking is chemistry. You measure quantities of specific ingredients. These are the elements of your recipe. You then mix them together changing the molecular structure of the resulting solution. If you also boil, freeze, hydrate, dissolve, ferment, leaven, or dehydrate your ingredients, you put them through an additional process that’s meant to induce more chemical reactions. This is cooking.
Excellent cooking is more than chemistry. It's alchemy. A superb chef takes common substances and transmutes them into something precious and spectacular. Great chefs also win medals. And they earn money for what they do. In those senses, too, they literally turn basic elements into gold.
I had already formulated this way of thinking about excellence in the kitchen when I learned of a more direct connection between cooking and alchemy. I was translating my grandmother's flan recipe for Chloe, when I got stuck on baño de Maria. The direct translation into English is “Maria’s bath,” which sounds gross in relation to food. No wonder English-speaking chefs—who tend to be Francophiles anyway (as if the only truly great chefs were all French!)—use the French term bain-marie.
Being a wordsmith by nature, I was curious about the etymology of the bain-marie. It turns out that the double-boiler was one of several alchemical devices invented by an early chemist named Maria the Jewess or the Prophetess, who was believed to have lived in Egypt sometime between the first and third centuries. Some consider her the first true alchemist of the Western world. Chloe and I just thought it was cool that a woman was doing science way back when and inventing an apparatus we still use today.
For flan, the bain-marie is indispensable. It slows the cooking, keeping the custard texture smooth and creamy. The perfect flan has practically no bubbles in it. And when you serve up a piece with that light honey-colored caramelized sugar drizzled over the top, trust me—your friends will think it’s pure gold.
*****
Serves 8 (if you want to share)
Ingredients
Caramelized Sugar Syrup
1 cup granulated sugar
2 tablespoons water
Flan
1 can sweetened condensed milk (14 oz)
1 can evaporated whole milk (12 oz)
5 eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1/4 teaspoon lemon zest
Preparation Syrup
Mix sugar and water in small pot (clear pot with spout preferred)
On a stovetop, bring the sugar to a boil over medium high and cook just until the sugar liquefies and turns a light golden color (don’t overcook). Or microwave for about 6 minutes adding cooking time in 30-second increments until the sugar reaches that same light golden color. Do not touch or taste; the caramel will be hot.
Using oven mitts, pour the syrup into a baking dish or individual ramekins, carefully rotating the pan to coat the sides.
Preparation Custard
Preheat oven to 350 F.
Beat eggs just until blended.
Whisk or blend in the remaining ingredients. Avoid over blending and producing froth.
Strain the mixture into the baking dish.
Cover and seal the dish with aluminum foil.
Place in bain-marie, with water about halfway up the sides, and bake for 1 hour (45 minutes if using ramekins). Add cooking time in 10-minute increments until the flan sets. Toothpick will come out with moist custard particles rather than wet liquid.
Cool to room temperature and then chill for at least 4 hours (12 hours would be better). Turn over onto serving platter being sure to drizzle the caramel syrup over the top.
Chloe’s Rhubarb-Peach Galettes
(Nina’s new favorite)
Yes, these are the infamous galettes from the Millsferry Annual Bake-Off—minus the oxalic acid.
Makes two 9” galettes. Serves 12.
Ingredients
Pastry Dough
2 and 1/2 cups organic flour
1 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon organic sugar
1 cup cold organic unsalted butter
2 cups cold water and ice cubes
Fruity Layer
4 cups chopped rhubarb (1/2” pieces) = 1.5 lbs or about 10 medium stalks
5 coarsely chopped peaches
1 cup sugar
1 tablespoon molasses
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
Gingersnap Crumble
2/3 cup old-fashioned rolled oats
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 cup sugar
3/4 teaspoon ground ginger
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg
Pinch of ground cloves
Pinch of salt
Pinch of freshly ground pepper
2 tablespoons molasses
Custard Topping
2 cups whole milk
1/2 vanilla bean, sliced and scraped
3 egg yolks
1/4 cup + 2 tablespoons granulated sugar
2 tablespoon cornstarch
1/4 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
Pinch of salt
Preparation Dough
Cut butter into small cubes and then place in the refrigerator until needed.
Do the same with the ice water.
In a large mixing bowl, mix all the dry ingredients.
Using a pastry dough blender, cut in the chilled butter, scooping and blending until mixture is course. Don’t overwork the dough. The butter does not need to be incorporated evenly.
Add about 5 tablespoons of the ice water and mix using spoon or hands. Working quickly, continue adding water (usually up to 10-12 tablespoons total) until flour starts to stick together, then stop.
Half the dough, form into two balls, and place in parchment baking paper.
Refrigerate for about two hours before rolling.
On sheet of parchment with a little extra flour, roll out each ball quickly to desired size of galette. Cover with a second piece of parchment paper and roll up the sheet. Place in the refrigerator while rolling out the second galette and until ready to build the galettes.
Preparation Crumble
Mix all ingredients and set aside.
Preparation Compote
Mix together all ingredients in a Dutch oven and cook covered on low for 15-20 minutes.
Increase heat to medium and cook uncovered to thicken to jam-like consistency, stirring occasionally (about another 15-20 minutes).
Let cool.
Preparation Custard
Combine milk, vanilla beans, and the vanilla bean pod in a very heavy saucepan. Heat on medium-low to medium heat until the milk is hot and small bub
bles are forming around the sides of the pan.
Meanwhile, in a medium mixing bowl, whisk egg yolks until frothy. Add the sugar, cornstarch, and salt and continue stirring until well combined and a lighter yellow color.
Stir a cup of the hot milk into the egg mixture and beat to combine.
Pour the tempered egg mixture back into the remaining milk in the saucepan.
Reduce heat to low to medium-low and cook the custard, stirring frequently, until thickened, about 15 to 20 minutes. Watch carefully, stirring constantly towards the end to make sure the eggs don't overcook.
Remove the saucepan from the stove.
Whisk in vanilla and stir the custard for another minute or so to release some of the heat.
Allow to cool. Refrigerate until ready to serve.
Galette Assembly and Baking
Preheat oven to 350 F.
Roll out one of the doughs on a baking sheet, leaving it on the parchment paper.
Spread half the gingersnap crumble.
Spoon half the compote.
Fold the edges toward the center in overlapping turns.
Repeat for other galette.
Bake for about 35 minutes or until edges have started to brown.
Cool to room temperature and garnish with dollops of the chilled or room-temperature custard.
Scotty’s Sweet and Spicy Tuna Melt
(Bruno’s favorite)
