by Mike Wehner
Why are there so many
Get up
This is complicated
What’s in dashi?
I need you to come shopping with me
Please get up
Are the noodles really alkaline?
Why are the eggs stained?
Now you’re just ignoring me
This is mean
I know where you live
I knew she was at the door before she knocked, Zeke shot his head up and I pulled the covers over my head and covered my crotch. When the knock came Zeke was going to leap and I didn’t want him using my genitals for leverage.
“Good morning,” I said in my best I’m-not-up-yet voice.
“I met your neighbor, she’s nice in a trashy-grandma sort of way,” Erin said kissing my cheek like a black and white TV husband who’d come home after a hard day’s work. “I need some paper.”
She zoomed in and took a knee to greet the dog. Her callused hands smashed his ears down under his jaw and rolled the loose skin back up in a wave. Noses pressed together, Zeke flicked his tongue and she turned her cheek, “at least he isn’t afraid to kiss me.”
I felt violated when she rung with her scarred and bandaged hand—I saw him fall for her. Dogs are the only creatures capable of unconditional love. Maybe we bred them that way, maybe they don’t remember well enough to stay mad. It might be that all the grouchy dogs are the ones with the best memories. Zeke buried his head in her chest and Erin used his ears as handles to hold him off as long as she could. Eventually the giant dog let all his weight bowl her over and then he smashed at her face with his tongue. Erin scooted her butt across the living room floor to avoid him and happily shrieked with each slide across the carpet.
“How do you turn him off?” she said shoving on his nose.
“Say the first part of PB & J”
“Peanut butter?”
Zeke jumped back and sat down, then laid down, then stood back up and barked. “Get me a rubber band too,” she called to me, “I used to do this to my dog when I was a kid.”
The book may have planted the seed, but when she suggested torturing my dog I truly began question whether or not she was evil. That she might not be the bad guy. A demon tried to hide its claws. I snapped my fingers twice and the dog laid down, a trick that only worked holding a jar and spoon. I slid my butt down the wall and sat next to Erin and spooned up a sloppy quenelle of peanut butter. My head set on hers, the air filled with the scent of roasted peanuts and dog drool.
“What’s his name?”
“Zeke,” I said, “any food make you this happy?” The spoon bobbed back and forth with each lick.
“Yeah, peanut butter.” Her smile was so wide I had to turn my head to see it all. What made her happy was making others happy. This is the main reason people cook, it isn’t about feeding people it’s about making people happy.
My toes tingled. A pang of lust. A wave of rage. They say you don’t love someone if you’ve never wanted to kill them.
Her hair was covering my left ear which made it hard to hear anything but the loud squeezes in my chest. I closed my eyes and before John’s body appeared Erin swiped the back of the spoon across my nose. I let her hold me down so Zeke could ripple his granite tongue across my lips while I shook my head and spat.
Drool dotted my cheeks and there was some secondhand peanut butter smeared on the dimple between my nose and upper lip. Erin had me pinned to the ground, holding my wrists out in a Jesus Christ pose, legs crossed beneath her. “At least he isn’t afraid to kiss me,” I said.
Then she kissed me, dug her lips between mine and once they were on solid ground came the force of ten thousand fractured hearts. A rush of too much, too fast, too too. It hurt, she hurt, we hurt. The beautiful disaster we both deserved.
Erin eased the initial charge of her face and bound my hands together in front of her chest, then she brought her nose in to mine and gently pecked in the sweetest of gestures. She wiped the peanut butter and drool from her face, laughing. It was sweet and disgusting. I hated her. And I didn’t.
“I need paper,” she said, “I have to make a list for ramen.” Erin bounced up and looked for something to write on while I stayed on the floor, eyeball to eyeball with my sullen pet who thought I’d just replaced him.
“This won’t work, there’s too much going on,” I said. “You could work on it every day and next year you still won’t have anything you can serve.”
“Let’s not care about authentic, let’s just make something that tastes good. It’s an interesting concept, something to get people talking about which we need right now. That asshole Jamie is probably posting more garbage as we speak,” Erin pointed to her phone.
“The only people who read blog comments are the ones who go there to crap on people to begin with.”
“What about this,” Erin held up my grief journal, “can I write in here?”
Don’t scream. Don’t overreact. I got up deliberately and took the journal from her hand and leafed through it like it wasn’t a murder confessional. What else was around here? No photos. I deleted all my social media accounts last year. I had a somewhat common name so if you searched it on the web you’d have to scroll through several pages of paintings from a superhero artist to find a picture of me and the ones that showed up were at least ten years old. I have a shaved head and round face from drinking too much beer. I look extra fat and extra young, there’s no way she could spot me. The book, what did I do with that book?
“No, this is a journal and recipe book,” I said, “sit, you want something to drink?”
I got some paper so Erin could scribble down her ideas for defiling Japanese cuisine while she drank lemon fizzy water.
That list went with us to the Asian market where their oddball marketing was too much resist—we had to make a second trip to the car to carry all the bags. I got the mayo with the creepy baby and a jar of fermented black beans that looked like shoe polish. Erin bought funny looking bok choy and a jar of powdered pig that looked like the stuff lining my childhood Easter baskets.
◆◆◆
The shift was business as usual at the restaurant. Erin changed into her bossy black slacks and ordered me around the stainless steel track like all the other employees. It was a slow night, when Emily asked for her usual meal of pork schnitzel with lemon, I served her a breaded sponge instead.
She sat at the empty bar fighting to get her knife through the breading. When that failed she grabbed it with both hands and took a bite.
“Alex?” she said. The entire crew held their breath. I kept a straight face, hands slapped tables.
“Yes Em?”
“There’s something wrong with my schnitzel.”
“What is it?” I said.
She pulled the breading off.
“What the hell is this?
The entire kitchen burst into a fit of playground laughter.
“Oh you asshole, I’ll get you back.”
A wave of, “ohhhhs,” came from the staff. These cute little jabs didn’t always go well. Last week Tommy got another server to chew and swallow a bit of kitchen towel wrapped in bacon. It was so chewy the guy was moving his mouth in a circle trying to get a bite on it and then gave up and glugged the whole thing down.
When Tommy told him about the joke the server punched him right in the face, his eye was still half black.
Mike came in the front door at eleven to walk Emily to her car. He did this every night she worked. Mike treated Essen like he was part of it, he’d walk into the back and talk to the cooks or go behind the bar and squirt himself a diet soda if Emily made him wait.
“Alex, how you been?” Mike said.
“Best night ever, I got Em to eat deep fried sponge.”
“Oh shut up,” Emily said, “I only bit into it.”
“You guys are crazy, I heard someone got punched over something like that,” Mike said.
Tommy walked over. “Yeah, I heard you got a guy to eat shi
t, we’re still working up to that,” Tommy said. He bit into the towel over his shoulder and tussled with it.
“We should get together man, have a guy’s night,” Mike said.
“My best friend is flying in this weekend, come out with us.”
“Sounds good, hit me up this week.”
◆◆◆
Back in the kitchen Erin had the bags from the Asian market up on the prep table. The deadbolt clunked on the back door as Erin ushered Tommy out. She shuffled back to me and I watched the empty doorway, eager for her to appear.
Wearing a white V-neck tee with arm holes twice the size of her arms she came towards me with a bottle of Irish whiskey and two empty glasses. Whiskey was a skill I never acquired because I was lazy, bourbon was a skill I never acquired because it’s pretentious, and scotch was a skill I never acquired because it’s impractical. Just because something is far away or takes a long time to make doesn’t make it good.
Erin was a whiskey girl, but I wasn’t a whiskey guy. Our relationship had serious flaws but it stood a better chance than any pair of whiskey people. She slid me a glass.
“Where do we start?” she said.
“With some sleep?”
Erin wasn’t going to be deterred by sarcasm. She was prettier now than before, her hair sunset red, the color when that big exploding ball is almost retired for the day. When she reached across the counter to grab a towel I looked down her shirt, my first ogle.
I took my drink to her side of the table so we could stand hip to hip like an old couple on the same side of a booth in their favorite diner. She was wearing a touch of citrus perfume on her neck. Erin mirrored my pose, put her hand up on mine and weaved her fingers over the top. We turned in towards each other and our hive mind said let’s play. And that is what we did, played with our food.
We made cloudy broth that stunk and lingered in the nose. Suntan gold dashi that smacked my lips and coated the stomach better than the most tannic wines.
Failed noodles that broke apart in the heat of the soup. Roasted red pork that bordered on being as good as it looked.
We swapped spoons full of successes, failures and a whole bunch of maybes.
She guessed, I tested, she felt, I counted, she messed, I cleaned.
The overwhelming joy of the creative pursuit overcame all anguish and bound adversaries. With each iteration of bastardized ramen we got further away from what was customary and closer to our own kind of authentic, a bowl of soup that was honest to us but betrayed convention. It wasn’t perfect but nothing ever is. I’d created a lot of stuff in my life but this was the first time that I attempted art; the difference being that art is never finished because it’s never perfect. At dawn, after six different revisions, we abandoned the noodles and the soup. In that tired moment where all my senses had a three second lag I remember one clear thought: I’d be alright if this was every night, forever. No soup is so good you can eat it forever. And anything you eat forever will eventually kill you.
Grief Journal
FINAL ENTRY
Essen Ramen Version 6.0
Speck Dashi
Makes 4 quarts
Ingredients:
- 3 quarts chicken broth (unseasoned)
- 1 quart root vegetable nage (unseasoned)
- 1 package dried konbu
- 1 cup dried Shitake mushrooms
- 1 cup spitzmorchel mushrooms
- 1 lb. smoked pork jowl bacon
- 1 cup pork sung
- ½ cup dried shrimp
- ½ cup dried scallop
- Deep fried chicken carcass
- 1 whole link smoked Hungarian sausage
Dashi (broth)
1. Reconstitute dried konbu in a bowl of water for 45 minutes, if salt packed change the water every 15 minutes and wring dry.
2. Combine broth and bring to a boil and shut off heat. Let konbu steep in broth for 60 minutes and remove.
3. Pulverize mushrooms, shrimp, and scallop in food processor
4. Braise sausage and speck in the broth, covered, over medium-low heat for 2 hours and remove.
5. Raise heat to medium and pour in all dried ingredients, cover and let cook for 1 hour.
6. Strain and refrigerate
Tare
Ingredients
- Apple butter
- Gochujang
- Soy sauce
- German Märzen beer
1. Over medium heat reduce 6 ounces of beer by half until thick like syrup
2. Add (3) tablespoons apple butter, stirring constantly
3. Add (2) tablespoons soy sauce, keep stirring!
4. Finish with (1) tablespoon. of pepper paste and turn heat off after it is stirred smooth
Red pork
Ingredients
- Pork loin
- Salt
- Sugar
- Paprika
- Olive oil
- Garlic heads
1. Remove all fat from loin
2. Mix ⅓ cup salt, sugar, and Hungarian paprika in bowl
3. Rub loin with olive oil and cover all sides with spice mixture
4. Roast 350° for 4 hours with whole heads of garlic in pan
6 Minute egg
Using a thumbtack, poke a single hole in the bottom of a fresh egg. Bring pot of water to a boil and place egg in a poaching basket and then set in water. Pull from water just before the timer hits six minutes and shock in ice bath. Let sit in ice bath for three minutes, don’t let them sit too long or the film on the inside will adhere and make peeling difficult. Store in 1:4 mixture of soy and water.
Ramen
Ingredients
- Dashi Speck
- Tare
- Broth braised Hungarian sausage
- Broth braised kebacklespeck
- Red pork
- Alkaline noodles
- Kimchi Saurkraut
- 6 minute egg
- Sliced red radish
- Green onion
To plate: Put a twisted lump of kraut in the center of the bowl and spoon (3) tablespoons of warmed tare over the top. Fill around the kraut with fully cooked alkaline noodles, pulled speck and green onion. Pour dashi over the top to cover and then float a slice of red pork, thin slices of radish and sausage, and a soy marinated egg that has been sliced in half with a string. Essen.
Twenty-two
Erin and I tumbled down the street hand in hand, my right foot stuttered because it was tired and the left because it was unsettled.
“I need breakfast,” she said and tugged me around a corner by my wrist.
The sun threw orange-red light over the city from below the horizon. A garbage truck was the only car on the street.
“Nothing is open,” I said.
“It will be by the time we get there, we are going the long way home.”
“To where?”
She pointed towards a bicycle rack along the dock, I turned away. We looked like we’d been in an all-night food fight. Erin used my shirt as a towel to annoy me, that playful thing girls do when they want to touch you but don’t want to be nice about it. The pepper paste swiped down my shoulder stunk and a puff of flour was stuck to my neck like chalk from a shot put.
Erin flopped up on a concrete planter, phone to her ear. She stuck out her arm and swatted at me, hey I want to touch you but don’t talk. I stood there like an idiot and mouthed questions real slow—who are you call-ing, where are we go-ing, I’m fuck-ing tired. Each ing bore my teeth which I didn’t like to do because my gum line sat lower than was appropriate.
Nobody ever called me gummy or said my teeth were too small, it wasn’t too low for people, it was too low for me. I obsessed over the traits I had no control over. Weight didn’t concern me, I could move that slider in any direction. Gum line length. The extreme thinness of my ankles. Hammer toes. These were my obsessions. I never take my socks off in front of people, especially girls. John never would have dated me.
“Emily is coming to get us,” she sa
id. Erin hooked her heels around my calves to pull me close, “you smell like shit.” She shoved me away.
I wiped her face on my shirt. She struggled for a second and then turned her cheek to rest it above my belly button in a wet spot. I wound her hair in my fingers, row by row, her face half buried in my mess of a chest.
“This is so,” she struggle to find the right word, “nice.”
Every time she tugged me close the concrete ledge of her seat mashed my crotch. I stuck out my butt and clung.
“What is?” I asked.
“Having someone to hang on to.”
“I’m really uncomfortable right now.”
“That’s what makes it so good.”
◆◆◆
Emily pulled up with a scowl on her face. She stared us down while we walked around the car, letting us know it was simultaneously too early and too late.
“Jesus, I hope you guys didn’t screw looking like that,” Emily said with sunglasses low on her nose. “I knew you were going to be a thing.”
“Emily, stop it,” Erin motioned to sit in back with her, “we need food.”
“It’s five in the morning, you haven’t slept and are covered in god knows what, I am taking you home.”
“It’s egg, your sister used me as a towel,” I said.
“I’m sure she did,” Emily said.
I sat behind the driver’s seat and her chunky blond curl bobbed out the side of the headrest. It was the same twist that had broken free and saved her life. A fortunate ripple of hair that grew slower than the rest. A golden spin that smelled most like Emily’s hand; forever being tucked and tucked again behind her ear.
“Emily where is Mike, are you a thing yet?” Erin said.
“No, I can’t get over what he used to do.”
“Kill people?” I asked.
“He never killed anyone in the Navy,” Emily said.
“But that’s what you do in the Army, Erin said it was the Army.”
“He was a mortician, in the Navy.” I thought she was joking.
“That’s what someone who killed people would want you to think.” I said.
“I want eggs,” Erin said, “in Sausalito.”
I imagined Sausalito as some sort of kitschy restaurant where all the dishes are based on sauces with pun filled variants. How do you want that eggs benny? Classic, Arnold, or Pope?
