Mary Anne lives with her roommate in a little stand-alone house in a neighborhood in North Seattle, just a short bus ride to her campus at UW. In the morning, we sip coffee while scrolling through Saveur’s website debating desserts. We eventually decide on a pretty-looking chocolate tart and begin making our shopping list. At which point, I realize that I didn’t bring my copy of Living and Eating, and as their recipe for squid ink risotto with scallops is nowhere to be found online, we must tweak the menu ever so slightly to a recipe that is online. Spicy squid ink risotto it is.
If you’ve never spent the day with your best friend gathering ingredients for a giant two-person feast from various different markets, sans car, you really should try it.
We begin by taking a bus to Pike Place, the market made famous to me by the season of The Real World set in Seattle, in which a cast member (who we later find out has been having a secret relationship with one of the producers of the show!) works at one of its seafood stalls. We find arugula, endive, lemons, garlic, fresh bread, and of course, squid, though before we pay for the latter, the fish guys coerce Mary Anne into trying to catch a large whole fish, which they toss to her from the other side of the counter. (This is something they do there, which I also remember seeing in the credits of The Real World.) Mary Anne does not catch it, and we do not feel good about the way it falls on the dirty floor of the outdoor market and then is picked up (presumably to be sold).
We still need Arborio rice, vegetable stock, heavy cream, and chocolate, but we’re most concerned about finding the squid ink, Perail, and the “digestive” crackers for the crust of our tart—all three of which Pike Place doesn’t have. There’s a cheese shop across the street, so we start there. No Perail. But Mary Anne knows of a gourmet specialty shop within walking distance. So, we walk.
Though it’s the end of January, the weather is mild, almost as warm as it is in Los Angeles. The last time I was in this city was right after Dad had been given full custody of my brother and me, and we (my dad, Dolly, Bill, Margaret, Paul, and I) went on our first and last family vacation, taking a train from Pennsylvania to Colorado (because, remember, Dad doesn’t fly), where we rented an RV, then drove to Seattle for the wrestling portion of the Goodwill Games. I was nine. So, in a sense, it’s my first time in the city. And this is my favorite way to be a tourist: doing something I might do if I lived here.
The specialty shop has squid ink but neither Perail nor digestives. We decide to substitute with crème de Bourgogne, which Mare sells to me as “like Brie but creamier and richer.”
We figure Whole Foods will have the rest of what we need. But as a postgraduate student on a budget, Mary Anne isn’t very familiar with the location of the high-priced grocery store. We take the wrong bus and get lost. It reminds us of college, but instead of finding ourselves in the section of Baltimore where The Wire was shot on the way to get my nose pierced, we’re in a very clean and safe-looking section of downtown Seattle trying to find an upscale grocery store.
By the time we do find it, it’s close to two in the afternoon. Still no digestives, but we’re OK with that. We grab some graham crackers instead and head home to start cooking.
Perhaps because the ingredient-gathering turned into a five-bus journey and in comparison, actually cooking them feels like less of a struggle, or perhaps because what we thought was an ultra-ambitious dinner menu wasn’t exactly—like when the weather report says it’s eighty-six degrees outside, but that’s followed by a “feels like seventy-eight”—or perhaps because when you have a free afternoon with nothing to do but cook and you can share the many tasks with your best friend while drinking chilled glasses of white wine, the meal seems to come together almost effortlessly.
By six o’clock, we are eating baguette slices topped with roasted-to-the-point-of-melting, olive-oil-infused garlic cloves. Not too much longer after that, we serve ourselves inky risotto that smells faintly of the ocean alongside spicy arugula dressed in the award-winning combination of lemon juice and olive oil. We switch to red wine and sit down to the decadent crème de Bourgogne and endive, and then retreat from the kitchen and the table altogether for a few hours, slipping out to meet some of Mary Anne’s friends for drinks and dancing.
By the time we return home, it’s late, Mary Anne’s roommate is asleep, and we’re hungry for chocolate tart. We tiptoe into the kitchen, pull our chilled tart from the refrigerator, and then oh-so quietly, cut two triangles for ourselves.
And this is how we finish our meal, standing at the counter in the dimly lit kitchen, whispering and nodding in approval at what we’ve accomplished.
The entire premise of the blog was based on comparing two finished versions with the expectation being that my version would always be worse. And in terms of aesthetics and the photography, this was objectively accurate. My version did look worse.
But back at home in Los Angeles, when I begin to write up the post about the dinner Mary Anne and I had made together, I know something has changed. I no longer resent the beautiful if not extremely unrealistic images of finished recipes found in gourmet food magazines and cookbooks. Because these images are what got me in the kitchen; these images are what inspired me to start cooking, and now, a year later, I am grateful to them. A year later, cooking is no longer a novelty hobby. I must admit I enjoy it. I enjoy the whole process—from grocery shopping to eating the results, and even, on some days, in the repetitive nature of washing the dishes at the end of the night.
In his colossal French Laundry cookbook, which I once found adversarial, Thomas Keller writes: “These recipes then, although exact documents of the way food is prepared at the French Laundry, are only guidelines. You’re not going to be able to duplicate the dish that I made. You may create something that in composition resembles what I made, but more important—and this is my greatest hope—you’re going to create something that you have deep respect and feelings and passions for. And you know what? It’s going to be more satisfying than anything I could ever make for you.”
When I talk about enjoying the process, please don’t get me wrong. I’m not talking about sitting at my laptop with a huge smile as I write or whistling as I struggle to carry all the groceries through the front door in one go. We all know that anything worthwhile takes work, no matter how much you love it. And I know that most days I would rather go to People.com and decide who wore it better than open up the Word document that houses this book. The best way I can describe what I mean by enjoying the process is to talk about making risotto. This isn’t exactly new territory—a lot of people enjoy the process of making risotto—but let’s talk about why for a moment. I think part of it’s in the satisfaction of partaking in a process that’s proven to work: you add a ladle of broth to the pan; you stir and stir until the rice absorbs it. You repeat. You see the results as the rice fattens and softens, all the while knowing that this process is feeding you—both body and soul. And with this specific risotto recipe, there’s the satisfaction of your whole house smelling like Thanksgiving. I’m not sure why this is, but it’s pretty amazing.
RED WINE RISOTTO
Adapted from John Pawson and Annie Bell’s Living & Eating
Serves 4
1 bottle red wine
Small bunch of flat-leaf parsley
¼ cup olive oil
1 onion, chopped
1½ cups Arborio rice
2 cups chicken stock
1⅓ cups grated Parmesan cheese, plus a little extra to serve
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
Bring the wine to a boil in a medium saucepan. Meanwhile, wash, dry, and chop the parsley and set it aside. Bring the wine down to a simmer and keep it simmering as you pour the oil into a large saucepan over medium heat. Add the onion and cook, stirring occasionally, for 5 to 6 minutes, until softened and translucent. Add the rice and stir for a minute.
Get out your ladle and pour one ladleful of the simmering red wine onto the ric
e. Stir gently until it’s absorbed. Continue this process, at no point letting your rice drown in the wine, until all of the wine is absorbed. Also, while you’re ladling and stirring, bring the chicken stock to a boil and then down to a simmer as well. Once all of the wine is absorbed, start ladling in the chicken stock using the same technique. It should take between 25 and 30 minutes to get all of that liquid—both the wine and chicken stock—absorbed.
While the rice is still on the moist side, turn off the heat and stir in the Parmesan and butter. Taste for seasoning. Serve immediately with a healthy handful of the chopped parsley on top and perhaps just a bit more Parmesan.
Chapter 25
Crêpes Are Pronounced Krehps, and If You Make Enough of Them, You’ll Get a Gâteau
After watching an episode of Julia Child and Jacques Pepin’s PBS show, Cooking at Home, I’m inspired to make crêpes. I’m not sure how old Julia is during the filming of the series, but she’s definitely older than any host of a cooking show I’ve ever seen before. She often gets a bit winded just standing there talking. And yet at the same time, when she and Jacques make crêpes side by side on separate burners, she keeps up with the much younger chef, crêpe for crêpe, flipping them sans spatula and with the kind of ease and nonchalance that I have when pouring myself a bowl of cereal each morning.
The two of them show me how to make crêpes Suzette as well as a gâteau de crêpes, which is essentially a stack of crepes with some sort of filling in between each layer, the entirety of which you might cover in a chocolate sauce. Julia and Jacques stuff theirs with thin layers of jam and chopped nuts, but Julia says (and repeats) that you can fill it with whatever you like. When Jacques cuts out a wedge, revealing what must be one of the top ten prettiest slices of food in existence, I know I have to make one.
(Full disclosure: I have actually made one before, but I cheated, using the Kenny Shopsin method of dipping flour tortillas in a mixture of heavy cream and eggs and frying them up as a sort of crêpe-imposter. It was delicious, but it also wasn’t a true gâteau de crêpes, now was it?)
I like Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s directions on how to make crêpes. For starters, he refers to them as pancakes—a British thing I presume—which reminds me that that’s all they are, just a French word for thin pancakes. Second, in The River Cottage Family Cookbook, he tells us, “Sooner or later you’re going to want to toss them. Don’t do it with the first of a batch. Wait until the pan is used to cooking the pancakes before you try to toss one.” I like the idea of waiting for the pan to be ready. And soon enough, I’ll know exactly what he means.
By the summer of 2010, Matt’s and my life together is as stable and consistent as it’s ever been. I’m working four or five days a week at the ceramics store, and while I don’t see a future there per se, it allows me the time and the freedom to cook, to post a new recipe every Sunday on Bon Appétempt, and to work through my professors’ notes on my novel. Though my thesis passed and I now have an MFA, I also have pages of my professors’ edits to consider before I try my hand at sending it out into the publishing world.
And though Matt did take the LSATs in the winter and he did well enough to get into some of the better law schools, when it looks like he is going to be offered a permanent position at the PR company where he’s been regularly temping for months, we decide to postpone the application process. In his spare time, Matt has been working on his own book with Geordie, turning the fairy-tale script into a young adult novel. All the while they are still meeting with Disney to develop a new show called Supersonic McMaverick.
For the first time in our lives, we have figured out a way for our day jobs to support our art. For the first time in two years, we can breathe financially. And by our second anniversary, we can actually celebrate. We’re doing it—for richer or poorer!
As for Bon Appétempt, I can’t say that I have tons of readers relying on my weekly updates, but I rely on my weekly updates. Writing a novel can be rewarding, like solving some kind of lengthy word problem, but it can also feel like a drawn-out fool’s errand, like a bunch of moveable and deletable words on a computer screen.
The blog, on the other hand, feeds me with not just one tangible product but two. There is the food, which is undoubtedly getting better, and then there is the blog post, which I can publish by myself whenever I feel it’s ready to go out. Not to mention that the aesthetics of the site are improving, as Matt is now the official photographer.
Just as Jacques and Julia did, I brush my nonstick pan with butter and ladle the thin batter onto one side of the pan. I quickly swirl the pan around so that the batter spreads to the edges and then wait until the edges appear lacy. When I think that side has cooked enough, I double-check by pulling up the edge of the crêpe with the fork. When it becomes a bit mottled brown, I grab hold of the crêpe with my thumb and forefinger, directing it across the pan to its other side. Matt, who is standing nearby, is impressed.
“Nice work.”
But Mr. Fearnley-Whittingstall is right. After successfully cooking a little stack of crêpes via this method, I do want to toss one.
In the video, once Jacques thinks one side is cooked enough, he whacks the side of the hot pan to loosen the crepe before tossing it, but I’m not that brave. Instead I grab the pan by the handle and give it a strong jerk. When the crêpe responds by slipping around in the pan, I tell Matt, “OK, I’m gonna flip it.”
It’s a strange feeling. Though I’ve never flipped a crêpe with just the flick of my wrist before, my wrist seems to know what to do. It’s ready to go. It’s my head that hesitates, that momentarily imagines the crêpe falling onto the burner and catching fire. But fortunately, my curiosity wins out. My wrist goes for it. The crêpe is tossed and lands perfectly on its other side. I can hardly wait to do it again.
You need a lot of crêpes for a gâteau, about fifteen, and once I’ve reached the end of my batter, I feel a little Pepinesque. I’m not banging the side of the pan with the raw heel of my hand, but it no longer seems like a bad idea.
To put my own very slight twist on the recipe, I’m using apricot jam—as opposed to what appeared to be strawberry in the video—and chopped walnuts. I lay down a crêpe, follow it with a thin layer of jam followed by a spoonful or two of the nuts, and repeat. I pour chocolate sauce over the whole thing, though I heed Julia’s warning not to cover the top entirely so that you can still see the brown speckles of the uppermost pancake, declaring its status as a crêpe cake.
In Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom, the poet and philosopher John O’Donohue writes, “Where things are moving too quickly, nothing can stabilize, gather, or grow.”
He then tells a brief story about a man exploring Africa who is on a deadline to make it to a certain destination by a certain time. The man has hired three or four native Africans to help him make this speedy journey, but after three days of intense traveling, the Africans stop. They will go no farther. The man pleads with them, telling them how important it is that he makes his deadline, but they won’t budge. After continuing to ask them why, he finally gets an answer. One of them says, “We have moved too quickly to reach here; now we need to wait to give our spirits a chance to catch up with us.”
I sometimes worry about what would have happened to Matt and me had things turned out differently, had he become a Hollywood director at age twenty-three like he’d planned. I sometimes worry about what would have happened had I not followed my impulse to make that giant chocolate peppermint cake, if it hadn’t fallen over so spectacularly, if I hadn’t started Bon Appétempt, and for the first couple of years of its life, when I would ask my mom why she refused to read it, if she had responded with something other than an indifferent: “How do you spell it again?”
Because all of these so-called failures allowed us to come up with our own definition of success.
Because all of these so-called failures gave our spirits the chance to catch up with us.
Because all of these so-called failures taught me
that though writers would like readers as much as chefs would like eaters, at the end of the day, if there are none of either to be found, we can continue creating anyway just to feed ourselves.
A STRAWBERRY AND CREAM GTEAU DE CRÊPES COVERED IN CHOCOLATE SAUCE
Inspired by Jacques Pépin, Food & Wine Magazine with Chocolate Sauce Adapted from David Lebovitz
Serves 6 to 8
For the crêpes:
4 large eggs
1½ cups all-purpose flour
1 cup whole milk
¼ teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon sugar
⅔ cup cold water
1 tablespoon cognac or brandy
4 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted and slightly cooled, plus more for the skillet
For the strawberries and cream:
1 pound strawberries (or another berry of your choice), chopped into ¼-inch pieces
⅓ cup sugar
2 cups heavy cream
1 teaspoon vanilla extract (optional)
For the chocolate sauce:
½ cup water
¼ cup sugar
¼ cup light corn syrup
Scant ⅓ cup unsweetened cocoa powder
3 tablespoons finely chopped bittersweet chocolate
To make the crêpes:
In a medium bowl, whisk together the eggs, flour, milk, salt, and sugar until smooth; the batter will be thick. Whisk in the cold water, cognac, and melted butter.
Heat a 9-inch crêpe pan or nonstick skillet over medium-high heat and rub it with a little butter. (The batter is so buttery that you don’t need much.) Add a ladle of the batter to one side of the pan and tilt the skillet to distribute it evenly. (If the batter isn’t moving across the skillet with ease, it may be too thick. In this case, add another tablespoon or two of cold water to it.) Cook the crêpe until the edges curl up and start to brown, about 45 seconds, though for the first one, your pan may not be hot enough, so don’t stress if it takes longer. Flip the crêpe. (As I mentioned, for the first few, I usually do this by pulling up on an edge with a fork and then grabbing hold with my pointer finger and thumb and quickly dragging it across the pan to its other side.) Cook for 30 seconds longer, or until a few brown spots appear on the bottom. Slide the crêpe out onto a plate. Repeat with the remaining batter to make 12 to 14 crêpes total.
Bon Appetempt: A Coming-of-Age Story (with Recipes!) Page 17
