A Homemade Life

by Molly Wizenberg

  Yield: 8 to 12 servings

  RUM CREAM PIE WITH GRAHAM CRACKER CRUST

  Adapted from David and Pam Fleischaker

  you can use a store-bought graham cracker crust, but the flavor of a homemade one is much better.

  FOR THE CRUST

  9 graham crackers, broken coarsely into pieces

  2 tablespoons granulated sugar

  5 tablespoons (2½ ounces) unsalted butter, melted and kept warm

  FOR THE FILLING

  ¼ cup cold water

  1 ¼ teaspoons (about half of a ¼-ounce packet) unflavored gelatin

  1 cup heavy cream

  3 large egg yolks

  ½ cup granulated sugar

  2 tablespoons rum, preferably dark

  Bittersweet chocolate, shaved or finely chopped

  Pistachios, finely chopped

  Preheat the oven to 325°F.

  To make the crust, process the graham crackers in a food processor until they are very fine, about 30 seconds. Add the sugar and pulse to combine. With the processor running, add the melted butter in a thin stream. Process until the mixture looks like wet sand. Scrape it into a 9-or 9½-inch pie plate and press it along the bottom and up the sides, forming an even crust. (It can be tricky to make the sides smooth and square off the top edge, but here’s a method that helps: rest your thumb along the lip of the pie plate to form a ledge, and then use a small ramekin to press the crumb mixture up the side, pinching it at the top between your thumb and the ramekin.) Bake the crust until it is fragrant and just beginning to brown, 15 minutes. Transfer to a wire rack and cool completely before filling.

  To make the filling, pour the cold water into a small, microwavable bowl. Sprinkle the gelatin over the water. Set aside to soften for a few minutes; it will get thick and spongy. Meanwhile, pour the cream into the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the whisk attachment (or any large bowl, if you plan to use electric beaters), and set aside. In a separate medium bowl, whisk the egg yolks until they lighten to pale yellow. Add the sugar and whisk well; it will be thick. Microwave the gelatin on high power for about 20 seconds, until liquefied, then pour it gradually into the egg mixture, whisking briskly. Working quickly, whip the cream to soft peaks. (It’s important not to dally here, or else the gelatin will start to set, and you don’t want that yet.) Gently stir the whipped cream into the egg mixture, taking care to blend them thoroughly. Add the rum, stirring gently to incorporate. Chill the filling until it starts to set: it’s ready when it holds a delicate mound when nudged with a spoon.

  Scrape the filling into the prepared crust. Chill until firm, 4 to 6 hours. Just before serving, sprinkle the top of the pie with a light dusting of chocolate and pistachios.

  Yield: 8 servings

  WHATEVER YOU LOVE, YOU ARE

  My ex-boyfriend Lucas liked a band called Dirty Three. I was always fond of that name, especially for a kind of melancholic, unshaven trio, which is what they are, but they had an album title that was even better. It was called Whatever You Love, You Are. Isn’t that perfect? That album title is probably a good part of why we got together—he told me about it on our first date—but I figure it’s as valid a reason as any. I mean, think about it: whatever you love, you are. I want to believe in that.

  I think about it a lot when I remember those weeks after my father died. More than anyone else I know, he was what he loved. He went after his life with both hands. He swallowed it in gulps, right up to the second they took the plate away. He never apologized, not even when I wanted him to—not for being stubborn, not for the silent treatment, not for leaving us behind. He did what he did, and he was what he was. For his memorial service, he wanted an Episcopal priest, a Catholic priest, and a rabbi. It was so weird and perfect. It wasn’t so much that he really believed in any religion, I don’t think, but more because he loved little bits of all of them. He was a little bit of all of them.

  I wish you could have seen that service. We held it at All Souls Episcopal Church in Oklahoma City, and more than five hundred people came. They filled the place like football fans at a bowl game. They filled the pews from front to back, and then they stood along the walls and in the foyer. My family processed down the aisle, twenty-seven of us in all. I wore my favorite pair of fishnet stockings. My mother wore four-inch heels. We did the best we could. It was a cold, sunny day, very clear, and afterward, when the church bells rang as we filed out the doors, the air almost shook with the sound.

  The service was led by an Episcopal bishop named Shannon Mallory, a family friend who my father had, in those last weeks, named his “holy man.” That he even had a holy man is hilarious—a contradiction in terms, really, since I never once saw him go to church or synagogue, and he didn’t even believe in global warming, much less Jesus Christ. But Shannon was a former patient, one of the ones my father cured, and over the years, a friendship had grown between the two of them. They’d even traveled to Israel and Jordan together once, when Shannon led a tour. When Burg was sick, Shannon came by every few days, and the two of them would tell dirty jokes while Shannon drank Scotch. At the end of each visit, he would ask my father if he wanted to pray. I’d never seen my father pray before. But he would close his eyes, and then Shannon would lean over the bed, whispering softly, one hand on the crown of my father’s head, their noses nearly touching.

  I’ve been to memorial services where no one seemed to want to talk about the person who’d died, where he or she was sort of abstracted, reduced to general descriptors like “caring,” or “kind,” or “beloved.” I wanted to talk about him. I wanted us all to talk about him. I wanted to remember how he laughed, half-gasp and half-gag; how he loved raspberries and osso buco; how he liked to read Gary Larson cartoons and had infinite patience for A Prairie Home Companion. I wanted to have him there with us, just for a few minutes.

  So Shannon wore his robes and stood at the pulpit, talking and telling stories in his familiar, gentle voice. My siblings and I each stood up and spoke. Shannon’s backup singers, as I privately thought of the priest and the rabbi, were okay, too; just right, really. The priest, like Shannon, was a former patient, but he and my father didn’t know each other all that well. It was a little strange to have him there, but even that strangeness seemed fitting. Everything that had happened that fall was strange. The rabbi, for his part, didn’t know my father from Adam. He even mispronounced his name during the service, referring to him as “Maurice” instead of “Morris.” But that was okay, too. My father hadn’t been much of a Jew for the past fifty years, so it was only appropriate that the rabbi fudge his name.

  For my part, I chose a poem called “Yes, But” by James Wright, an American poet who died in 1980 after a short but intense battle with cancer, like Burg. The year before his death, Wright spent nine months traveling in Europe with his wife, waking up early to write poems. I think Burg would have liked to do that, too, if he’d had more time. He’d have eaten his weight in croissants. He would have also liked the fact that Wright’s poem allowed me to say “making love” in a church in Bible-belted Oklahoma. I can almost hear him laughing now.

  When I went back to Seattle, I enrolled in a grieving group at one of the local hospitals. It met every other Saturday from ten to noon. I was the youngest person in the group by a good twenty years, and I cried the hardest by far. I had the Kleenex box on lockdown.

  The whole time is a blur, to be honest. The only part I remember is the baking. Those Saturday mornings, I would get up early and bake. First it was brownies, and then some kind of cookie. I remember buying strawberries, too, and making tiny fluted tartlets, vanilla bean pastry cream spooned into shells and topped with wedges of strawberry. I even made soup once, a pot of Italian vegetable soup with white beans, and forced my fellow group members to sip it from Dixie cups at ten o’clock in the morning. Someone should have had me on lockdown. When I called my mother to tell her, she laughed so hard that she actually hooted like an owl. My eyes were swollen from crying all the time, but I was the
Official Grieving Group Food Pusher. I am so my father’s daughter. Whatever you love, oh yes, you are.

  ED FRETWELL SOUP

  when my father was sick, Ed Fretwell, Barbara’s husband, brought us a pot of this soup. It was full of Swiss chard and carrots and plump beans, hearty and reassuring, one of the best soups I’d ever had. When the first batch was gone, we called to ask for more, and Ed delivered it the next day. He and Barbara had first tasted it, he told me, on a trip to Italy in the late 1990s, when it was served to them at a winery as a light lunch. They were so smitten that they asked for the recipe. It is best described as an Italian vegetable soup, but I call it Ed Fretwell Soup. Ed died a couple of years ago, and it feels good to remember him this way.

  For the white beans, I highly recommend Rancho Gordo (www.ranchogordo.com), a California company specializing in heirloom bean varieties. I know it seems fussy to order beans by mail, but it’s worth it. Their marrow beans (nothing to do with bone marrow; don’t worry) are especially wonderful in this soup.

  And a word about broth: I find that most commercial vegetable broths have a strange, too-strong flavor. So far, there is only one that I like: the “No-Chicken Broth” made by Imagine. But whatever you choose, be sure to taste it before you use it. If you don’t like the flavor, make your own, or use water.

  Last, note that this recipe makes a lot of soup. If you don’t have a large soup pot—say, 8 quarts or even 12 quarts—I suggest halving the recipe.

  1 pound dried white beans, such as cannellini or marrow beans

  2 large cloves garlic, peeled and smashed under the side of a knife

  3 fresh sage leaves

  Water

  4 tablespoons olive oil

  2 medium yellow onions, finely chopped

  4 stalks celery, finely chopped

  8 medium carrots, sliced into thin rounds

  2 medium zucchini, trimmed, halved lengthwise, and sliced into ¼-inch-thick half-moons

  4 cups vegetable or chicken broth

  ¾ pound Swiss chard (about 1 small bunch), stalks discarded and leaves coarsely chopped

  ¾ pound green cabbage (about ½ of a medium head), trimmed and coarsely chopped

  One 28-ounce can whole peeled tomatoes, drained and chopped

  1 tablespoon salt

  Best-quality olive oil, for serving

  Finely grated Parmigiano-Reggiano, for serving (optional)

  Put the beans in a medium bowl, and cover them with cool water by at least 1 inch. Set aside at room temperature, uncovered, for 6 hours or overnight.

  Drain the beans, and put them in a Dutch oven or other (approximately 5-quart) pot. Add the garlic, sage leaves, and 10 cups cold water. The beans should be covered with water by at least 1 inch. Place the pot over high heat, and bring it to a boil. Boil for 5 minutes, then reduce to a simmer and cook, uncovered, stirring occasionally, for about 1 hour. Skim away any brownish foam that rises to the surface.

  While the beans cook, start the rest of the soup. In a large (8-quart or more) soup pot, warm the olive oil over medium heat. Add the onions, celery, and carrots and cook, stirring frequently, for 10 to 15 minutes. Add the zucchini and broth, increase the heat to medium-high, and bring to a simmer. Then add the Swiss chard, cabbage, and tomatoes, cover the pot, and simmer gently, adjusting the heat as necessary, for 1 hour. At first, it will seem as though there is far too little liquid for all the vegetables in the pot, but don’t worry: the vegetables will give off a good amount of water as they cook, and it’ll even out in the end.

  After 1 hour, add the cooked beans and their cooking water, discarding the sage leaves. Add the salt and stir well. Simmer for another 30 minutes to 1 hour, stirring frequently, until the beans and vegetables are very tender and the broth has taken on a creamy pale orange hue. Taste, and add salt as needed.

  Serve with a hearty glug of good olive oil over the top of each bowl and a dusting of Parmigiano-Reggiano, if you like.

  NOTE: Refrigerated, this soup will keep for up to a week, and it gets better with each passing day. It also freezes nicely.

  Yield: 10 to 12 servings

  SUMMER OF CHANGE

  I remember saying to people, during that year that I lived alone in Paris, that the city felt like my second home. It was a plain enough thing to say, but in retrospect, it seems odd that I should have said it, since I hardly even know where my first home is. I guess it’s Oklahoma, technically, but that never seemed quite right. My parents were from the East Coast, and they never really thought of themselves as Oklahomans, so I didn’t either. I was raised to know that I would leave, and that, in fact, I was supposed to. It never occurred to me to stay.

  I think that’s why I’m such a sucker for the Bruce Springsteen album Born to Run. Swap out Springsteen’s motorcycle and the backstreets of mid-seventies New Jersey for an airplane and mid-nineties Oklahoma, and you’ve got me. Mine is not quite so sexy a story—no chrome wheels or wind in my hair—but you get the idea. Six days after my nineteenth birthday, I was gone. I spent the next four years in college in California, with a stint in Paris in the middle. Then, when college was through, there was Paris again. I’m still not sure where home is. It might be Seattle, though I can’t be certain. My second home, though, is always the same. Paris.

  There’s been so much said and written about Paris that it’s daunting to hazard a statement of my own. That city just has something. I can’t think of any other place so idealized, so longed for, so sighed over. My Paris isn’t always such a sweet one, with kisses à la Doisneau on every street corner, but I like it better that way. It’s the place where I’ve been loneliest, and where I’ve been happiest. Sometimes I’ve been both at the same time. It’s where my father introduced me to croissants and pain au chocolat. It’s where I met my first love, and where, six weeks later, when he stopped calling, I sat on a bench at the Champ de Mars and filled an entire Kleenex mini-pack with my snot and tears. It’s a place where even crying feels romantic somehow, where heartbreak makes you feel like a part of history. It’s who and where, for a long time, I wanted to be.

  Whenever I don’t know what to do, Paris is where I’ve gone. I guess it shouldn’t have surprised me to find myself there in the summer of 2004. When my father died, everyone told me the same thing: Don’t make any big decisions for the first year and a half. Don’t change anything. Just get through it. Not knowing what else to do, I obeyed. I went back to Seattle. I went back to school. But every time I thought about the years that lay ahead, the dissertation and the defense, my eyes glazed over. I was on track to be a cultural anthropologist, but I hardly knew what for. I didn’t want to teach. I wasn’t even sure I was interested in anthropology. What I was really interested in, it turned out, was France. So a year and a half after Burg died, I went to Paris.

  I had gone to graduate school to study power relations and the body, the way that medicine and other social institutions act on our bodies to mold them into docile “subjects.” Just writing that, just now, I almost nodded off. That’s how excited I am, and was, about what I was doing. I’d started down that path because of a philosopher named Michel Foucault, a Frenchman with some very dark, intriguing, and, some might say, sexy ideas about the way societies function. He also happened to have a seemingly bottomless supply of black turtlenecks and a penchant for social deviance. He was fascinating, an object of study in himself. The salient part, though, is that he was French. I think that’s why I followed him down the path in the first place. I planned a dissertation in which I would apply his theories to a study of national health insurance in—you guessed it—France. My three years in graduate school, I now know, amounted to one big excuse to go back to Paris.

  So I saved my money, and in the summer of 2004, I went for five weeks. I was ostensibly there to do pilot research, preliminary studies for my dissertation. I would write my master’s thesis upon my return, take my general exams, and then, assuming all went well, return to France for more extensive research. These five weeks were to be
the foundation for all of it. The timing was perfect: the National Assembly, France’s equivalent to our Congress, was in debate over the social security system, one part of which is national health insurance. The first morning I was there, one of the experts I wanted to meet was on television, even, talking about the very issues I wanted to understand. I couldn’t have planned it better if I’d tried.

  That first week, I worked so hard. I read the papers, collected posters and signs, and conducted interviews. I’d rented the same tiny studio that I lived in two years earlier, and my landlord, who lived next door, was an especially good interview subject. He worked for the government. It was like taking candy from a baby. My research was all but doing itself. It was easy. It was perfect. I was bored stiff.

  To reward myself for such diligent work, I’d spend afternoons visiting chocolate shops or taking long walks through the city, stopping at boulangeries here and there to sample the wares. I wrote long e-mails home, detailing my lunches, snacks, and dinners. I sat on a bench in the Luxembourg Gardens and read cookbooks until dark. By the second week of the trip, I knew I was doomed. I’d stopped buying the newspaper. My research notes were crowded with addresses for pastry shops and kitchen supply stores. I wasn’t even pretending anymore. I was quitting graduate school.

  Paris has a way of getting your priorities straight. For a place that clings vehemently to its history, it certainly helped speed mine along.

  My friend Elizabeth likes to call it my “Summer of Change.” That sounds a little like the title of a Judy Blume novel, a coming-of-age story with budding breasts and first crushes, but it fits. Liz lived down the hall from me during our freshman year of college. In the summer of 2004, she and our friend Doron, who studied with me in Paris during our junior year, happened to be in Paris at the same time that I was. She was there to go to design school, and he was doing an internship at a law firm, and they were sharing a sixth-floor walk-up on rue des Rosiers. For those who like falafel, you’ll recognize the address. Their apartment was only three doors down from the famous L’As du Fallafel, purveyor of some of the finest fried chickpea balls this side of Israel. Even if all you knew was that, you could guess what kind of summer it was.