Bon Appetempt: A Coming-of-Age Story (with Recipes!)

by Morris, Amelia

  Similarly, as a Christian, I knew I should be dating a Christian so that I could marry a Christian, and though David grew up Catholic, it was much more of a cultural identification for him. On this topic, I wrote a lot, most of the time not very coherently: “I don’t know what my problem is. I do kinda. I feel like I need to chill with my Christian friends more. Where are they?”

  Occasionally, I made a bit more sense: “I need God in my life more and David just… Sometimes I feel like it’s hard enough trying to figure myself out and what I want to do, let alone have a serious relationship.”

  And as for my never-ending diet? Well, as fate would have it, my randomly assigned roommate in Madrid had had great success with Weight Watchers. Within days of living with her, she pulled out the Weight Watchers literature from her backpack and taught me how to count my points. For good measure, on the last page of my journal, I copied down a long list of foods and their corresponding point equivalent, e.g.:

  ice cream (light) = 3

  (fat free) = 2

  (regular) = 4

  (cone) = 1

  This kind of monitoring left little room for flan and chocolate and churros, although I did make an allowance for tortilla española, clearly unaware of how much olive oil is used in the Spanish classic.

  Despite the fact that I was living in Spain and took weekend trips to Paris (where Mary Anne was studying for the semester), Dublin, and Florence, I didn’t return to Hopkins very culturally enlightened or rejuvenated. Rather, the extra independence had left me in a peak state of mental turmoil.

  Mary Anne and I, along with our mutual friend Sonya, found an off-campus apartment with three bedrooms, three bathrooms, and a gigantic balcony. It should have been a happy time—my first apartment! But instead, I spent the first month back in town isolating myself and breaking up and making up with David. Meanwhile, Sonya and Mary Anne spent it like two normal college kids, studying together during the week and going out on the weekends. They even cooked together, making balanced dinners of rice, broccoli, and pan-fried chicken breasts. And though they always invited me to join in on whatever it was they were doing or cooking, I never did.

  “I’m good,” I’d say, pouring myself another bowl of cereal, convincing myself that I was somehow healthier.

  Sonya had even brought an appliance with her—a rice cooker—and always made sure to cook more than enough rice for dinner so that in the morning she could use the leftovers to fry up one of the dishes taught to her by her Filipina mother: rice and eggs.

  But that year, I truly cannot remember making anything for myself to eat apart from cereal, microwaved oatmeal, or baked tortilla chips and guacamole. By March, however, exhausted by my own thoughts, I began emerging from my cocoon to go out with them on weekends. And since I had typically eaten nothing of substance for dinner, I would get drunk before we’d even left the apartment to meet up with the rest of our friends. And despite my so-called vegetarianism, at the end of these nights, without fail, I would buy a foot-long turkey hoagie with all of the fixings, which I’d eat in the living room of our apartment while rewatching our VHS copy of Far and Away.

  To add to my list of internal conflicts, as part of his spring break, Matt came to visit me that semester during one of the weekends that David and I were back together. Mary Anne, Sonya, and I took him to a fraternity party. It was a horrible decision. Matt didn’t belong in this world of beer pong and flip cup, and it wasn’t just strange to see him there, it was painful. Of course, what was even weirder was going home at the end of the night and setting up a bed for him on the couch while David and I slept in my room. So weird that I apparently couldn’t even wait until the next day to write about it in my journal: “Matt Bookman and David are out on the balcony talking right now. What?!”

  By the end of the semester, much to my disgust, I had finally gained my freshman fifteen. (I’d just done so as a second-semester junior.) Hardly any of my clothes fit me, and I hated myself for it. I had lost control of this thing I thought I had a tight grip on, and on top of that, I was embarrassed that I cared so much, that being thin was such a priority in my life. I cried to my mom so much without giving her the reason why that she offered to pay for me to see a therapist. When a few weeks later I was finally able to tell her that the reason I was so upset was because of all the weight I’d gained, I was hoping she might tell me that I was being silly, that I looked great. But I should have known better. My mom is someone who takes back-to-back spinning classes and who clearly has her own bevy of body image issues. No, instead, she said, “You’re not fat. You’re not skinny either,” before offering to set me up with a personal trainer, a “friend of mine from the gym.” I agreed.

  And it worked. While Sonya and Mary Anne stayed in Baltimore that summer, commuting into D.C. daily for their internships, I went home, got a job at a record store, and met with a personal trainer twice a week.

  I entered senior year thinner than I was at the beginning of junior year, on antidepressants, and finally, firmly broken up with David—thanks in part to all of the phone calls to Matt (who had spent his summer interning at a production company in Los Angeles) and to whom I wouldn’t necessarily explain the situation but who made me laugh and feel normal for at least the duration of our call. But back at school, I had a new problem. I had to figure out what I was going to do next year, after college.

  That fall, I turned twenty-one, the last of my friends to do so. And before we all headed out to a bar to celebrate, I fielded a happy-birthday call from my dad, who used this as an opportunity to remind me that it all went downhill from there. “College is the best it gets. You may not realize it now, but you will, you will,” he said in his standard, quiet, melancholic phone voice.

  “OK, well, thanks for calling!”

  That night, I met a guy named Danny who didn’t go to Hopkins and who I would end up seeing for the next couple of months. He was a few years older, sang in a band, wore thick-rimmed glasses and skinny jeans, and worked in a tattoo parlor—an original hipster. Across his stomach read the words: HELL BENT in gothic-styled block print, because he was, as he told me, “hell bent and heaven sent.”

  So while the vast majority of my friends applied to graduate school and/or office jobs with health plans and retirement accounts, I went to Danny’s shows, hung out with his friends, and took my dad’s advice, making the most of my last year as a college student. I drank a lot, smoked a lot, and stopped going to church and youth group altogether. (I also went ahead and got my nose pierced.)

  I was on a mission to self-destruct, though at the same time, I couldn’t go through with it fully. I mean, I was still the girl who had experimented with alcohol for the first time by drinking three Zimas on a full stomach. Though I contemplated it, I couldn’t go through with getting a tattoo from my tattoo artist boyfriend. I also couldn’t blow off my writing classes. (I was at work on a novel that my favorite professor found “very promising.”) Plus, the previous year, as part of a criminal justice class I had to take for distribution credits, I’d read The Corner, a nonfiction account of life on the inner-city streets of Baltimore by David Simon, the creator of The Wire, which affected me so much that I promised (aloud and on multiple occasions) never to do drugs because I didn’t want “to contribute to that world in any way, shape, or form.” So as drunk as I would get, if anyone pulled out cocaine at a party, I would make a point not to participate. “Geez, guys. Have none of you read The Corner?”

  By year’s end, I had come up with my own idea of what it was to be a writer. Writers wrote, I concluded. And most of them did so while living life just above the poverty line and somewhere in between states of drunkenness and sobriety.

  Inspired by the title of George Orwell’s memoir, Down and Out in Paris and London (which, to be clear, I never actually read) and naïve enough to think that my experience in Madrid, where my housing and meals had been not only set up for me, but also paid for by Mom and Bruce, could somehow be replicated in the real world, I d
ecided that after graduation I would travel. And of course, write. Down and Out in Paris and London, here I come!

  Only I’d already been to Paris and London. This time, I wanted to go to Central or South America. When I said as much one day over winter break to my family, Bruce told me he could put me in contact with friends of his who ran some sort of Christian outreach program in Costa Rica. Even though I’d begun to distance myself from all things Christian, I was still up for a trip to Costa Rica. And at the time, so was Mary Anne, whose plan was to defer a year before enrolling in a graduate program in Scotland.

  Five months later, however, at graduation, Mary Anne and I were hardly speaking to each other. At the time, I’m sure I didn’t see it this way, but now it’s clear to me what happened between us. I’d gained back all the weight I’d lost that summer and more. Plus, after breaking up with Cliff, she quickly fell into a new relationship, while I was boyfriendless for the first time in three years. Essentially, I resented her for detaching herself from my hip, for no longer being on the same page as I was—basically, for not being depressed along with me.

  It was clear that we were no longer going to be traveling together, yet if I didn’t go on this trip, my post-graduation plans would begin and end with returning to Mom and Bruce’s house in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, just like I’d done the summer before. Not able to accept that as my fate, I decided to go to Costa Rica by myself.

  My college friends who watched me pour bowl of cereal after bowl of cereal find it ironic that I now derive so much pleasure from cooking and writing about food. And, of course, I do too. I started cooking Sonya’s rice and eggs dish based solely on those three words, rice and eggs, as I have no recollection of ever eating her version. I have no idea how much my dish resembles the original, but I do know that cooked rice lightly coated in garlicky olive oil with a fried egg (and a runny yolk) on top is an absolute delight. Serve it with some manner of steamed or sautéed green vegetables and sriracha, and who knows? You may even like yourself by meal’s end.

  RICE AND EGGS WITH BROCCOLINI AND SRIRACHA

  Serves 2 generously

  2 cups sushi rice (short-grain white rice) or, even better, about 4 cups leftover already-cooked rice

  2 or 3 eggs

  1 bunch broccolini, rinsed

  Salt

  2 tablespoons olive oil, plus more if needed

  3 cloves garlic, chopped

  Freshly ground black pepper

  Sriracha sauce

  If you don’t have leftover already-cooked rice on hand:

  Rinse your rice. (This is one of those tasks that as a beginner cook I skipped but that I never ignore now, as I know it leads to better rice—rice where each grain seems to hold its own, resisting clumpy mushiness.) Put the rice in a bowl and cover with cold water. Using your fingers as a dam, pour out just the water and repeat two more times.

  If you have a rice cooker, cook your rice in it. If you don’t have a rice cooker, I’m sorry! (I also really think you should get one. I’m not usually an advocate for kitchen gadgets, but if you make rice fairly often, a rice cooker is so worth it. Plus, whenever I make this meal, I always prepare extra rice so that the next day, I can take a tortilla-size sheet of nori, put some leftover rice on top, put some sliced avocado on top of that, maybe some cucumber too if I have it, roll it up, and eat it like a taco—dipped in soy sauce, of course.)

  If you don’t have a rice cooker, put your rinsed rice in a large saucepan and add 3 cups water. Bring to a boil, then reduce the heat to a simmer, cover, and cook for 20 minutes. Turn off the heat. If you have time, let your rice hang out in the pot with the lid on for at least 10 minutes before frying it.

  Place the broccolini in a skillet, give it a couple pinches of salt, and add about an inch of water to the bottom of the pan. Cover the pan and heat over medium heat, checking on it after a few minutes. You want the water to be simmering but not boiling. Once it’s simmering, it’ll only need about 5 more minutes. You want the broccolini to be just tender. Once it is, drain and set aside.

  Grab a large nonstick skillet. (Cast-iron works really well here because I typically use this same pan to fry my eggs.) Add the oil and heat it on low to medium heat, making sure it covers the surface of the pan. (You can always add a bit more olive oil if it doesn’t.) Add the garlic and a pinch of salt. Stir until it’s fragrant, 2 to 3 minutes, then add the rice. Turn up the heat just a tad and mix the rice all around in the pan until each granule is coated. Give it a few more pinches of salt as you stir. This should take 3 to 4 minutes.

  In the interest of fewer dishes to clean, I like to divvy up the rice between two plates at this stage and fry my eggs in the same pan I just used. If the pan looks dry, add a bit more olive oil (it’s OK if there’s still a bit of rice stuck to it). Crack the eggs into a separate bowl and then slide the eggs into the pan. Reduce the heat to low and cover. The eggs are done when the whites are set but the yolks are still runny. This can take anywhere between 2 and 4 minutes. (But remember, runny yolks are key here!)

  Once they’re done, place the eggs on top of the rice. Season the eggs with a bit of salt and pepper. Add the broccolini to the plates. Make sure to serve with sriracha. (The best bites include a mixture of rice, egg, broccolini, and a touch of sriracha.)

  Chapter 9

  The Wrong, Long Path

  While I was away at college, Mom and Bruce downsized to a two-bedroom condo, and so it was from Bruce’s newly set-up third-floor office where I hesitated for a few minutes before finally purchasing the round-trip ticket to San José, Costa Rica, leaving Pittsburgh in mid-June and returning six weeks later. I hesitated not only because I was going alone but because my plans included nothing more than spending some time in the city, volunteering, maybe making a friend or two, and traveling to the coast. It scared me, but what was scarier was not going. Because if I took away Costa Rica, all I was was an unemployed liberal arts graduate.

  I arrived in the capital with the bare minimum: a backpack full of clothes, my journal, a Costa Rican guidebook, the address of a hostel, and the phone number of Bruce’s Christian friends. But the minute the taxi dropped me off at the hostel, I knew I’d overestimated myself.

  The hostel in San José issued me a twin bed, which was part of a bunk bed, which was in a room with five other bunk beds. As far as I could tell, I was the only one traveling alone. Wasting no time, I retrieved the notebook with the phone number of the Costa Rican Christians from my backpack.

  But when I called, I got a Spanish recording telling me to hang up and dial again. I figured I was doing something wrong, like not using the proper city code. I tried the number again, slightly differently. Still nothing. I tried again and again, finally asking the person working the front desk for help. Still, I couldn’t get through. In the common area, I logged on to one of the computers and sent an e-mail to the address Bruce gave me, explaining I’d arrived and that the phone number I had for them didn’t seem to be working.

  In the meantime, I tried casually hanging out by the pool with a book in hand, pretending to be OK with the fact that I was there alone, as if I hadn’t just spent an entire semester at college drinking too much in order to avoid feeling a moment of such loneliness. I lasted maybe a half hour.

  In need of some cash and food, I decided to venture out. A couple of blocks away, I found a bank, withdrew some colones, picked up groceries, and got whistled at by various passengers in cars driving by. Back at the hostel, I ate my dinner by myself and checked my e-mail. There was nothing waiting for me.

  From the semi-comfort of my twin bunk bed that night, I put together a plan B. According to my guidebook, I could take a bus to any one of the beach towns. I decided that’s what I would do if I didn’t hear anything from the Christians in the morning. After all, if I was going to be alone, I might as well be alone at the beach, right?

  But in the morning, before I even checked my e-mail to see if anyone had responded, I realized that I didn’t have my bank card. Instantly,
I knew I’d left it in the ATM machine. And instantly, I knew the jig was up. Within the half hour, I packed up my things, checked out of the hostel, and hailed a cab to the airport where I paid a 125-dollar fee to change my return ticket to the very next flight out of San José.

  Of course, I could have gone back to the bank and tried to retrieve my card. I also had a credit card I could have used. Basically, if I’d wanted to make it work, I could have. But that’s the thing. I didn’t. In fact, the relief I felt upon changing my ticket and knowing I was going back home was overwhelming.

  When I think of the mishap now, I can’t help but think of Freud’s theory on such mistakes, how they are manifestations of unconscious thoughts and impulses. I wasn’t ready to jump to this conclusion at the time, but the truth was that I simply wasn’t the kind of freewheeling, laidback, outgoing person who could travel around a foreign country by herself. I didn’t want to take a bus to the coast so that I could be alone at another hostel even if it was near the beach; I didn’t want to volunteer with Bruce’s Christian friends even if they did get in touch with me. The truth was that I didn’t want to be there, period.

  At the Pittsburgh International Airport, I called my mom from a pay phone. It was late, and I could tell from the way she answered that I’d woken her up. I tried to sound sick. I told her I was in Pittsburgh, that I hadn’t been able to get in touch with Bruce’s friends, that someone from the hostel must have stolen my bankcard, and that I’d gotten food poisoning. I told her I hadn’t known what to do so I’d gone to the airport and gotten on the first flight home.