The moment I step out of the car is the strangest yet. The foreign sound of cicadas and the hot, humid night air hit me at the same time. In the photos, the house had appeared clean, plain, and generally inoffensive, but in person, it reveals itself as one of those charmless, white-carpeted, vinyl-sided houses with faux wood doors, bearing absolutely no resemblance to Dawson’s family’s cozy coastal split-level. I’m glad my new roommate’s not there to register my disappointment.
But I’m exhausted from the drive. I set up my air mattress, call Matt, and fall asleep listening to the whir of the air-conditioning and beyond it, the sounds of the Southern night.
To ensure I can make it to our family’s annual beach gathering, my mom has rented a house at nearby Topsail Beach, which is a short thirty-minute drive from UNCW’s campus. Matt’s flown in for the week as well, so we split our time between the beach house and my new place, where we’re getting me set up.
And though my life feels unmoored, family vacation is the same as always.
When Matt and I arrive to the house in the late afternoon, Bruce, who “doesn’t like the beach,” has gone to get his car’s oil changed. My brother and Jenny are at the beach. And Mom and Grandma, who have maintained their tradition of bringing coolers full of raw meat from home so as not to pay beach-grocery-store prices, are at work roasting two chickens for dinner that night.
Jinx, Grandma’s 115-pound Goldendoodle, who looks like an eleven-year-old boy in a dog costume, is also present, currently eating chicken gizzards Grandma has hand-mixed in with his dry dog food, which she calls gravel. (I’ve never actually seen Jinx eat the gravel, just the human food she’s put in around it.)
Jinx had been a gift from my uncle to keep Grandma busy after Grandpa died. Of course, no one had thought he’d get so big. Because of his size, Grandma’s never been able to control him, and so he’s gotten away with anything and everything. She was a pretty serious hoarder already, but after Jinx’s arrival, her house has been destroyed. Her couches and pillows are torn apart, empty food containers are strewn in the backyard, and shredded newspapers and books with teeth marks cover the floor.
On Grandma’s street, Jinx is notoriously the dog to watch out for, responsible for taking down more pedestrians than the ice-covered sidewalks of Pittsburgh. Grandma herself dislocated her kneecap because he pulled her down one day sprinting for a squirrel. But all of this is of no import to her. She loves that dog and will be damned if he doesn’t share her Wendy’s chicken sandwich and French fries.
Unmarried couples don’t share beds under Bruce and Mom’s not-your-run-of-the-mill-Christian roof, so I’m set to room with Jenny and my brother with Matt. However, since the kids’ bedrooms are tucked away downstairs, we disregard these rules, having a good laugh at the idea of Bill and Matt, six feet and six feet two respectively, sharing one full-size bed.
My non-relationship with Grandma is the same too. We haven’t spoken since Asheville four months ago. We don’t hug upon my arrival. In fact, we don’t greet each other at all. There’s no eye contact during dinner, and no one-on-one conversation between us.
After our meal of roasted chicken, Grandma begins boiling the carcasses for what will become chicken soup. Jinx stands by awaiting his inevitable gravel and chicken dinner. We kids grab some beers and suggest a friendly game of Scattergories.
Mom’s in with a disclaimer: “You know I’ll lose, though!”
“Scatta-what?” Bruce says before declining—he’s got some (Bible) studying to do.
The following afternoon, Matt and I come in from our morning session at the beach, sun-soaked and hungry, tired from getting knocked around by the waves. We head straight to the kitchen to make sandwiches with the supplies we purchased the day before at the little co-op grocery store in Wilmington: turkey, tomatoes, organic mayo, pickles, and thick-sliced bread. But in the kitchen, we find Grandma on hostess duty with a ladle and a bowl asking if we’re ready for soup, as if it’s been decided that soup is what we’re all having for lunch. I can see across from the kitchen bar that it’s Grandma’s standard-issue preparation. There are the telltale carrot circles, celery halves, and those wide, wavy egg noodles.
I have to hand it to her. It smells good, but I’m not ready to give Grandma the pleasure. Plus, I honestly want a sandwich, and I want to make it myself. And like a toddler asserting her independence, I tell her so.
One night, later in the week, I watch as Grandma spoon-feeds Jinx one of her gravel and real-food mixtures. But Jinx, much to everyone’s surprise, is refusing to eat any of it. “You always eat the marinara sauce at home!” Grandma says to him, and then to herself, “I don’t get it. I just don’t get it.”
I can’t help but think that if Jinx, who is at least twenty pounds overweight (which puts him in the obese range for his breed) could talk, he would say something like: “Grandma! Please. I love you and the food you make, but I’m not a bottomless pit here to absorb your Depression-era food hang-ups. And I get full. I am full! So, just leave me be for a little while!”
But then I suppose this is part of the reason why she loves Jinx so much, why he gets her full supply of smiles and hugs, because Jinx will never say that. If anything, he’ll just lie back submissively and expose his belly for her to give a good scratch.
One month later, I turn twenty-six on a weekday in Wilmington without any major pomp or circumstance. When I get home from school, I head upstairs to my room to open a package from Matt. He’s on a Jonathan Lethem kick and has sent me a couple of his books. My mom and Bruce have sent me a check for $250, and last but not least, there’s a box from Grandma. I open it and find a standard Grandma-style birthday card—a seventies-era image of birds sitting on branches. On the inside is a stock birthday-card greeting underneath which she’s handwritten Love, Gram. I dig through the newspaper and find, packed between layers of bundled-up plastic grocery bags, a jar of mayonnaise, about three-quarters full.
I would have been more surprised, but it’s not just any jar of mayonnaise. It’s an organic brand, and I quickly recognize it as the exact jar Matt and I had brought to the beach house now over a month ago. We must’ve left it there. And Grandma, being Grandma, must have collected it, brought it back to Pittsburgh, packed it up and sent it via USPS (non -priority) back to me, its rightful owner, four weeks later.
Grandma has sent me lots of strange things in the mail over the years—an eye shadow kit with fifty different shades to choose from, bundles of Easter seals, and cat-themed calendar tea towels from the 1990s—but this mayonnaise certainly takes the cake.
Without giving it a second’s thought, I put it back in the box, walk downstairs, and throw it into the trash.
Though I won’t ever eat Grandma’s cooking as blindly or as willingly as I once did as a child, in a few years’ time, our relationship will slowly return to normal. I’ll stop refusing her dishes out of spite. I’ll eventually even make some of her famous lady lock cookies alongside her in her own mess of a kitchen. I guess, somewhere along the line, I finally forgive her, and though she never tells me as much, I assume she forgives me too.
I also like to assume that the irony of that afternoon at the beach house wasn’t wholly lost on her either; that when I wouldn’t eat any of her chicken soup, Matt—whom she had so summarily rejected, whom she had so wrongly lumped together with my dad as a bad match for her offspring—had smilingly obliged her, taking a bowl alongside his sandwich and even giving her a definitive “Mmm. That’s good soup!”
While I’m not exactly proud of the way I handled (and would continue to handle) my frustration with my mom and grandma, I do think that it’s normal and natural to come to the point in your adult life where you don’t have to eat whatever your parents or grandparents are serving up. This is my take on the classic chicken noodle soup. I’ve made just a few simple changes, but I really, wholeheartedly believe in these changes—the first being the crushed red pepper, the second being the mushrooms, and the third being the grated Parmes
an on top. Please don’t skip the Parmesan! It takes it from delicious to crazy delicious.
SPICY CHICKEN NOODLE SOUP WITH MUSHROOMS
Adapted from Alice Waters’s The Art of Simple Food
Serves 3 to 4
For the chicken and broth:
2 chicken breasts (bone-in and skin-on if you’ve got them)
2 quarts chicken broth
½ medium onion, sliced
2 carrots, chopped
1 celery stalk, trimmed and chopped
Salt
For the rest of the soup:
Salt
8 ounces dried orzo pasta
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 cloves garlic, chopped
½ teaspoon crushed red pepper
½ medium onion, diced
1 carrot, sliced into rounds
1 celery stalk, diced
8 ounces button mushrooms, sliced
Grated Parmesan cheese
Combine the chicken and broth in a large saucepan and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat to a simmer and skim any foam from the top. Add the onion, carrots, and celery and simmer for 40 minutes—this length of time will work for both boneless and bone-in breasts. Turn off the heat; carefully pull the chicken out of the broth and let cool. Strain the broth through a fine-mesh strainer (discard the vegetables) and reserve it in another saucepan. Skim the fat from the broth and season with salt. Set aside.
When the chicken breasts are cool enough to handle, shred the chicken by hand into bite-size pieces (removing the skin and bones and discarding them in the process). Put the meat into a bowl and set aside.
To finish the soup, bring a pot of salted water to a boil. Add the orzo and cook, as long as directed on the packaging, until al dente. Drain, then rinse the pasta under cold water. Set aside.
Heat the oil in a stockpot over medium heat. Add the garlic and sauté until fragrant, 2 to 3 minutes. Add the reserved chicken broth, the crushed red pepper, onion, carrot, and celery and simmer for 10 minutes. Add the mushrooms and simmer for 5 more minutes, or until vegetables are softened.
Add the shredded chicken and cooked orzo and turn off heat. Taste and season with salt as needed. Serve with grated Parmesan.
Chapter 18
The Joy of Cooking
Though I’m probably close to the median age of students in my program, with my engagement ring on my finger and Matt living 2,500 miles away, I feel simultaneously older and younger. I’m both the mom of the group who goes home early to call Matt and watch Six Feet Under as well as the naïve eighteen-year-old who has arrived at her freshman year of college deeply committed to her high school boyfriend.
Perhaps this is why I’m now feeling very ready to set a date for the wedding—to make it permanent. Neither Los Angeles nor Pittsburgh felt like the right setting for the event. So in my spare time, I take solo visits to potential venues in North Carolina. One of these trips takes me to Bald Head Island, an island at the state’s southernmost tip, reachable only by ferry and where the main form of transportation is golf cart. Not wanting to spend the money on a golf cart rental, though, I walk around on foot. I see Old Baldy, the oldest lighthouse in the state. I see a patch of greenery alongside the marsh just large enough to accommodate eighty to one hundred people. I see a red fox stop in the middle of one of the roads and stare at me. But perhaps what is most impressive is the oyster po’ boy sandwich I eat at the little restaurant at the harbor. It’s fried but not greasy, and the salty brininess of the oysters works perfectly with the mildly spicy, pale pink rémoulade sauce. This is more like the Wilmington I’d envisioned. This is where Dawson and Joey must’ve been hanging out.
I didn’t realize the transformation as it was happening, but as it turns out, I have become a complete and total food snob.
Our little West Hollywood apartment where Matt still resides is situated within two miles of two different Whole Foods. It’s also within walking distance of a Thai restaurant, a Chinese restaurant, and Urth Caffé, which serves delicious and all organic sandwiches, soups, and my personal favorite, a nori plum rice wrap. If we aren’t in the mood for any of those, we could always pick up cheap tacos and burritos at nearby Benito’s. And, of course, Joan’s on Third, whose short rib sandwich recently graced the cover of Bon Appétit magazine, is a five-minute drive away. Heck, we even have a Persian restaurant on speed dial that will deliver hot lamb kofta and mujadara to our doorstep!
In Wilmington, there is no Whole Foods—not even a Trader Joe’s. Instead, I split my shopping between a small co-op grocery store a few miles away and a giant Harris Teeter. And as for my takeout options? There’s a Panera and a Chinese restaurant that looks so sad I don’t even go inside. There’s also a burrito place called Flaming Amy’s that everyone raves about. Though when I try it, it only makes me think I should ask Benito’s about franchising opportunities.
My two roommates are both younger than me. The older of the two, the daughter of the poetry professor, is a graphic designer and isn’t around much. The other, Erica, just graduated from college in May. She’s in my program, though we don’t have any classes together. She’s as sweet as she is tan, which is very. She has dyed-blonde hair and wears heavy black eyeliner and mascara. Her groceries include Diet Coke, bags of frozen, precooked Tyson chicken, and I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter spray. In the mornings, I pour my bowl of organic cereal and try to hide my horror as she spritzes her white toast.
By the end of September, I realize that I’m not only a food snob, but I’m a hungry and helpless one at that. Without the occasional turkey BLT from Joan’s or Matt’s weekly giant-size bowl of pasta, the vast majority of my diet is comprised of things you might find in a United Airlines snack box: hummus, pita chips, peanut butter, carrots, cheese, and a few squares of chocolate. Sure, I’ll occasionally find a ripe avocado and mash it up on toast or heat up an Amy’s Organic pizza, but neither of these are exactly the kind of meals one can call rib-sticking.
Then, one day in early October, in the waiting room of the auto shop where I’ve taken my car to get an oil change, I pick up an issue of Real Simple and begin flipping through it. A full-page photo of a bowl of rigatoni pasta with broccoli, Brie, and pine nuts stops me in my tracks. The Brie is melting and seemingly covers every ridge of the rigatoni and broccoli florets. The pine nuts are glistening and toasted. And when I read the recipe, I’m surprised to find that those are the only ingredients: Brie, pasta, broccoli, and pine nuts. As soon as my car is ready, I take myself to the nearest Teeter.
Sure, I’ve baked cookies here and there, but this is my first time working from a recipe to make something savory, and I treat every direction extremely seriously, e.g., the recipe calls for pine nuts and I assume the recipe is no good without them. So, despite my meager budget, I spend the $7.99—what seems to me an astronomical price—for a small bag of the teardrop-shaped nuts and grab the rest of the ingredients.
Upon closer inspection, I see that the list of ingredients calls for broccoli that’s already been steamed and pine nuts that have already been toasted. Never having done either of these things, I have to Google how to steam broccoli (sans steamer) and how to toast pine nuts. I leave nothing to multitasking, waiting until my pot-simmered broccoli is tender before moving on to toasting the pine nuts in a dry skillet over medium flame.
The recipe tells me to chop the Brie “with rind” into one-inch pieces. Up until this moment, I’ve been one of those people who eats around the rind. I consider removing it, but again, I decide I must listen to the recipe exactly. Who knows what’s liable to happen if I don’t?
I cook and drain the pasta according to its packaging, put it back in the hot pot, and then add my chopped Brie, steamed broccoli, toasted nuts, salt, and pepper. While I stir the pasta and watch the Brie melt almost magically into some kind of one-ingredient pasta sauce, though I don’t yet realize that this meal will mark the beginning of my love affair with cooking, that I will make this dish at least a dozen more times before I grad
uate (quickly coming to the conclusion that it doesn’t need the pricey pine nuts), some part of me at least does realize that this is exactly what I need.
Because at the moment, my life is unsettled enough. I’m living in a ten-by-ten-foot room with a mattress, a bookshelf, and a pegboard with Martha Stewart’s “Wedding To-Do Checklist” pinned on it. But there is nothing unsettling about a steaming hot plate of pasta made by yourself for yourself.
Because while Matt and I choose to live on opposite coasts in order to continue to throw ourselves at potential careers as artists against separate tides of resistance, I can at least cook myself a proper dinner. I can at least do myself the favor of boiling fat rigatoni noodles until al dente and then watching as the heat from these drained noodles melts the Brie, coating everything it touches.
BRIE PASTA
Adapted from Sara Quessenberry, Real Simple Magazine
Serves 4 (or 1 generously, with plenty of leftovers for the next two days)
Kosher salt
1 pound broccolini (about 2 bunches)
1 pound dried rigatoni
8 to 10 ounces Brie cheese
Freshly ground black pepper
Get your water boiling for the pasta and salt it. Use a big pot (5 or 6 quarts is best, as this is the pot everything will end up in).
Rinse the broccolini under cold water to clean it. Trim the very ends of the stems and then cut into bite-size (or slightly larger) pieces. I like to do this by using kitchen shears and then just dropping the cut pieces into the skillet I’m going to use to steam them.
Once all the broccolini is in the skillet, give it a couple pinches of kosher salt and add about an inch of water to the bottom. Cover the pan with a lid 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—al dente, like the pasta.
Bon Appetempt: A Coming-of-Age Story (with Recipes!) Page 11
