A Homemade Life

by Molly Wizenberg

  The first night I was in town, they invited me to dinner. Liz served salmon with caramelized onions and baby potatoes tossed in butter with fresh herbs. We drank until one in the morning. It was only a matter of time before I was baking lemon cakes in their oven and drinking gin and tonics with Liz in the late afternoon while we waited for Doron to get home from work. At night we would sometimes get together for roasted chicken from the butcher shop on rue Oberkampf or a puréed soup with bread and cheese. Liz was having a torrid love affair with the food mill.

  Halfway between our apartments was boulevard Richard Lenoir, where each Thursday and Sunday row upon row of covered stands would magically sprout from the pavement, blossoming into the city’s largest outdoor market. From the Place de la Bastille to the Bréguet-Sabin Métro station, tables unfurled to offer crates of fruits and vegetables, some still splotched with dirt and smelling appealingly of damp soil. Other booths proffered neatly arranged bottles of olive and nut oils, display cases full of sausages and sauerkraut and pâté, straw mats covered with cheese in various stages of ooze, and troughs mounded with nuts, dried fruits, and olives. Liz and Doron had grown especially fond of one Italian vendor who sold a spectacular soppressata. It was heinously expensive—two dozen slices weighed in at 18 euros—but oh, was it ever fine. Anyway, as we discovered, the expense could be easily offset by washing it down with cheap champagne. On Bastille Day, we had an indoor picnic that went on all day. We had goose liver pâté, duck pâté with pistachios, a thick slice of Comté, an even thicker wedge of bleu d’Auvergne, baguettes, tomates confites, red radishes with salt, champagne, and a DVD of Six Feet Under, the first season. One Sunday I made ratatouille, and we ate it on a blanket in the Place des Vosges, with slices of soppressata and Comté from our favorite cheese lady and wine drunk from yogurt jars. I had never before, nor have I since, been so happy to have no idea what I was doing with my life.

  My mother came to visit during my last week. One night, we dressed up and went to dinner at Le Repaire de Cartouche, one of my favorite restaurants. I had taken my father there in the spring of 2002, at the end of my time working in Paris, when he came for a visit. He was tired during that trip, and he had nerve pain in his feet, but we didn’t think much of it. Of course, when he was diagnosed with cancer four months later, we put two and two together: the nerve pain had been from the tumors in his spine. But he was seventy-three that spring, and it didn’t seem weird to me that, at that age, he should be tired, even though he never had been before. He loved Le Repaire de Cartouche. He ordered marinated sardines and tuna with an eggplant tapenade, and we both had rhubarb clafouti for dessert. He wrote everything down on that trip, every dish at every meal, every last detail duly noted. Now I know where I get it.

  That night, after dinner, my mother and I walked to the Pont de Sully, one of the bridges that spans the Seine. The wind was blowing from behind us, and we stood quietly for a moment, looking to make sure that no one could see. Then my mother reached into her purse and pulled out a plastic freezer bag, the better part of my father’s ashes. She unzipped it and held it over the ledge, and when the wind came up just right, we tipped it and let him float down into the river.

  I say that Paris is the place where I’ve been loneliest, and also where I’ve been happiest. But what I mean is harder to say. The thing I call loneliness is delicate and lovely, like a blown-out eggshell. It’s both empty and hopeful, broken and beautiful. Paris couldn’t be anything else for me now, because it’s full of my father. That night on the bridge, I could almost see him, waving over the water.

  The day before I left to return to Seattle, I had lunch with my friend Chris. He’s an American and a technology writer, and he moved to Paris a number of years ago with his wife Martine, a Pilates instructor and fellow writer. I met them when I was working in Paris and went looking for a place to take Pilates mat classes. (I don’t really meet everyone through Pilates; it just seems that way.) They’re about the most gorgeous couple you can imagine, lean and beautiful and très Parisien in all the right ways, in spite of their American accents. That late-summer day, Chris and I met for a send-off coffee at a café in the Marais. We sat on the terrace with our tiny cups, and I told him that I was going to leave graduate school.

  I wanted to do something with food, I said. That was what I kept coming back to, after everything else. At the end of the day, when I was exhausted and fed up and unsure of everything, food was a certainty. It was what I thought about, what I cared about, what I wrote about, what got me out of bed in the morning. (I mean that. I get up for the sole purpose of eating breakfast. I don’t know why else you would.) It was so obvious, and so utterly terrifying. In my wildest dreams, the ones also populated by lions and masked men chasing me with live chain-saws, I thought I might want to write for a food magazine. But I had no idea what to do.

  “Why don’t you start a blog?” he suggested. “It’ll give you something to be accountable to, so you can’t give up right away. And it’ll be a kind of portfolio. You can show it to editors someday.”

  I had no real idea what a blog was. Maybe a clue, but only the foggiest. Chris told me how to set it up and assured me that it would be easy.

  So I flew home. The next day, I started a blog. I’d sneaked a sachet of my favorite chocolate-dipped orange peels from Paris in my suitcase, and it was sitting on my desk that day. Not having much else in the way of title ideas, I named my blog “Orangette,” after the French name for those orange peels. It was a pretty name, I thought, and since my hair color is a vague shade of orange, sort of auburn-meets-red-meets-brown, it seemed fitting. “Tomme de Savoie” was the only other contender. It’s the name of one of my favorite cheeses. I worried, though, that no one would be able to pronounce it, and I wasn’t terribly keen on being known as “Tom de Savings,” or “Tummy D. Savoy.” Who knows, maybe I missed the boat on that one. But I don’t think so.

  DORON’S MEATBALLS WITH PINE NUTS, CILANTRO, AND GOLDEN RAISINS

  this recipe was, relatively speaking, one of the first I wrote about on my blog. A few months after our summer in Paris, Doron e-mailed to tell me about a dinner he’d made, a meal of Mediterranean-style meatballs with a lemon-and-garlic yogurt sauce.

  “It was one of my finer moments,” he wrote. Then he described the recipe.

  Doron makes these versatile meatballs with ground turkey, but I’ve tried them with chicken, too, and they’re especially good with lamb. It’s hard to go wrong. One pointer, though: if you go with turkey or chicken, use a mixture of breast and thigh meats. Many butchers offer both, and the extra fat in the thigh helps to keep the meatballs moist. I usually use about half breast meat and half thigh.

  Also, about bread crumbs: they’re easy to buy, but they’re just as easy to make. When you have a day-old baguette or other plain bread lying around, trim off and discard the crusts, cut the soft center into coarse cubes, and spin them in a food processor until you have fine crumbs. (Only process a couple of handfuls at a time, though, or the machine tends to over-heat.) Stored in the freezer, they will keep for a couple of months.

  FOR THE YOGURT SAUCE

  1 cup plain yogurt (not low fat or nonfat)

  3 tablespoons lemon juice

  1 medium clove garlic, minced

  ¼ teaspoon ground cumin

  ¼ teaspoon salt

  FOR THE MEATBALLS

  ½ cup minced yellow onion

  ¼ cup chopped fresh cilantro leaves

  ½ cup chopped pine nuts

  ½ cup golden raisins, halved or coarsely chopped if large

  ½ cup fine bread crumbs

  1 large egg, lightly beaten

  ½ teaspoon salt

  1/8 teaspoon ground cumin

  1/8 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

  1 pound ground turkey, chicken, or lamb (see headnote)

  About 4 tablespoons olive oil

  First, make the yogurt sauce. In a small bowl, combine the yogurt, lemon juice, garlic, cumin, and salt and whisk
to combine. Set aside at room temperature to let the flavors develop while you make the meatballs.

  To make the meatballs, combine onion through black pepper in a large bowl. Add the ground meat and, using your hands, break it up into small chunks. Then massage and gently knead the meat to incorporate the ingredients. Mix until combined, but do not overmix: meat gets tough easily. With damp hands, gently pinch off hunks of the mixture and roll into 1½-inch balls. Set aside on a large plate. (Raw meatballs can be covered and refrigerated for up to 1 day. Or place them, not touching, on a rimmed baking sheet and freeze until hard, then transfer them to a heavy-duty plastic bag and freeze for up to 2 weeks.)

  Warm 2 tablespoons of the oil in a heavy large skillet over medium heat. Add about half of the meatballs, taking care not to crowd them. As they begin to color, turn them gently with tongs and lightly shake the pan to roll them around, so they get some color on every side. Don’t worry if a few of the pine nuts fall out into the pan; that happens. The meatballs are ready when they’re evenly browned and feel pleasantly firm, but not rock-hard. You can also cut one or two of them in half, if you like, to make sure they’re cooked through.

  Transfer the finished meatballs to a plate lined with a paper towel. If the skillet looks dry, add the remaining 2 tablespoons oil. Cook the remaining meatballs.

  Serve hot, warm, or at room temperature, with the yogurt sauce.

  NOTE: Leftover meatballs are delicious. I eat them cold, straight from the refrigerator, or warmed a touch in the microwave, with a dunk in yogurt sauce.

  Yield: about 30 small meatballs, enough for 4 servings

  PRETTY PERFECT

  I have this funny thing about recipes. When I find one that I like, I have a hard time trying others. Take lentil soup, say. If I make a lentil soup recipe and like it, I’m apt to stick by it, for better or for worse. Sometimes, after quite a while, I will cave in and try a new one, but in most cases, I would be just as happy to rest on my laurels and sit there, eating that same lentil soup, forever. This is not good behavior, I am told, for someone who supposedly cares about cooking. I’m supposed to be more curious, more devil-may-care, more like my father. Sometimes I am. But most of the time, I’m not. I’m loyal and sentimental and possibly even boring. When something clicks with me, I want to keep it around. That goes not only for recipes but also for facial cleansers, chocolate, and men.

  But about the recipes. My sister Lisa’s Scottish scones are another good example. I prefer scones over all other morning breads, and of the specimens I have sampled, hers are my very favorite. They are solid, tidy things, with a dense, tightly woven crumb that tears apart into fat, flaky layers. They bear a close resemblance to biscuits, only a little less dainty and delicate. They’re the kind of thing you’d expect to eat before setting out for a rousing, ruddy-cheeked hike in the Highlands. Scones seem to run a spectrum these days, with the fluffy muffin type at one end and, at the other, the sturdy, Old World biscuitlike variety. My sister’s rest delectably among the latter, which is exactly where I want them. Forever.

  This can be tricky, as you might guess. I have a lot of cookbooks, and they demand my attention. You wouldn’t believe how pushy they are. They lie next to my bed like fat, lazy dogs. They stretch and yawn all over my lap. Sometimes they even yap about scone recipes that aren’t my sister’s. And sometimes, because I am occasionally sort of curious, I listen to them. I try something new. And then I go back to those same scones.

  Like Doron’s meatballs, Lisa’s scone recipe was one of the first I posted on Orangette. It’s a classic. My sister got the recipe from a Scottish girlfriend of hers, and with it, this girlfriend offered a piece of advice that I should probably pass on to you: do not knead the dough more than twelve times. That’s the magic number, she said; any more, and the scones will be tough. I tend to lose count and therefore cannot confirm the truth of this, but Lisa swears by it, and she would want me to tell you. She’s a wonderful cook and baker, so really, listen to her. She has five children and a job in a museum on Long Island, but still she manages to grow her own asparagus and rhubarb and make eggplant salad, blackberry upside-down cake, and Indian-style chicken with cumin. She was twenty-two when I was born, the first child from our father’s first marriage, and though we live on opposite sides of the country and in very different circumstances, we have been trying to spend more time together in recent years. I grew up an only child, but I like being able to say that I have a sister now. I have a little fantasy that one day we will meet for a weekend in New York, just the two of us, and we will eat pastries and go to museums, and she can tell me everything she knows, which is a lot more than I know, about art history. But that would take quite a bit of orchestration, so instead we write letters and talk on the phone about recipes, which is a close second.

  In our family, Lisa’s scones have come to be a Christmas tradition, unspoken but sacred. Each December, she takes the basic formula and spins it into a half-dozen multihued varieties, from dried apricot to cinnamon, blackberry, raspberry, currant, and dried cranberry. Then she tucks them carefully into plastic bags and freezes them until Christmas Eve. If she is traveling for the holidays, they come with her, naturally, in a cooler in the trunk. Come Christmas morning, when the coffee machine sputters to life, we spread the bags on the countertop and circle them like vultures, ready to claim our share. Warmed briefly in a low oven, they’re perfect for eating with one hand while tearing at wrapping paper with the other. For me, actually, they’re pretty perfect in general, which is why I have such a hell of a time getting excited about another recipe.

  That said, if you like a scone that bursts with butter—a scone-cummuffin, I would say—these may not be for you. They will happily accept a pat of butter, but they don’t foist it upon you. I think of them as the ideal blank slate, because you can flavor them with almost anything. Maybe that’s why I never get tired of them. One of my favorite versions includes bits of sweet-hot crystallized ginger and the merest slip of lemon, wintry and warming. If you’re the sentimental type, like some of us, there’s no need, ever, to do them another way.

  SCOTTISH SCONES WITH LEMON AND GINGER

  feel free to play with the flavorings in this recipe. In lieu of the lemon and ginger, you could try orange zest and currants, or Meyer lemon zest, or diced dried apricots, or dried cranberries or cherries, or pistachios, walnuts, or almonds. I also love this recipe with a couple of handfuls of whole, frozen berries, even though they make the dough a mess to work with. Don’t thaw them first: the colder, the better. The dough will be wet and sticky, and you won’t be able to knead it much, but the finished product, filled with jammy pockets of soft fruit, is worth the trouble.

  2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour

  2 teaspoons baking powder

  ½ teaspoon salt

  4 tablespoons (2 ounces) cold unsalted butter, cut into ½-inch cubes

  3 tablespoons sugar

  2 teaspoons grated lemon zest

  ¼ cup finely chopped crystallized ginger

  ½ cup half-and-half, plus more for glazing

  1 large egg

  Preheat the oven to 425°F.

  In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, and salt. Using your hands, rub the butter into the flour mixture, squeezing and pinching with your fingertips until the mixture resembles a coarse meal and there are no butter lumps bigger than a pea. Add the sugar, lemon zest, and crystallized ginger and whisk to incorporate.

  Pour ½ cup half-and-half into a small bowl or measuring cup and add the egg. Beat with a fork to mix well. Pour the wet ingredients into the flour mixture, and stir gently to just combine. The dough will look dry and shaggy, and there may be some unincorporated flour at the bottom of the bowl. Don’t worry about that. Using your hands, squeeze and press the dough into a rough mass. Turn the dough, and any excess flour, out onto a board or countertop, and press and gather and knead it until it just comes together. You don’t want to overwork the dough; ideally, do not knead more than
12 times. There may be some excess flour that is not absorbed, but it doesn’t matter. As soon as the dough holds together, pat it into a rough circle about 1 inch thick. Cut the circle into 8 wedges.

  Place the wedges on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper or a silicone baking mat. Pour a splash of half-and-half into a small bowl. Using a pastry brush, gently brush the tops of the scones with a thin coat to glaze. Bake for 10 to 14 minutes, or until pale golden. Transfer them to a wire rack to cool slightly, and serve warm, with butter, if you like.

  NOTE: If you plan to eat them within a day or two, store the scones in an airtight container at room temperature. For longer storage, seal them in a heavy plastic bag or container, and freeze them. Before serving, bring them to room temperature. Either way, reheat them briefly in a 300°F oven. They’re best served warm.

  Yield: 8 medium scones

  PROMISE TO SHARE

  I don’t know of any more appropriate way of saying this, so I’m just going to do it: I hate, hate, the notion of a secret recipe. I don’t usually throw the h-word around like that, but this is one instance where I’ve got to put my foot down. I do not like secret recipes.

  The whole idea is sort of ridiculous. Recipes are by nature derivative: rare is the recipe that springs, fully formed, from thin air, without the influence, wisdom, or inspiration of other prior dishes. Recipes were made to be shared. That’s how they improve, how they change, how new ideas are formed and older ones made ripe. The way I see it, sharing a recipe is how you pay back fate—in the karmic sense, if you believe in such things—for bringing you something so tasty in the first place. To stop a recipe in its tracks, to label it secret, just seems mean. And isn’t cooking about making people, on some level or another, feel good? It seems to me, then, that it only makes sense to give people the means to continue feeling good. By which I mean the recipe.