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

by Morris, Amelia

  The next course, the cheese course, is enough to make me want to cry. In my regular, non-nauseated state, I dream of cheese courses, which evoke a different way of life—a less practical, more indulgent, kinder one. So when, on a rectangular piece of slate, from left to right, we’re introduced to a slice of soft Brie-esque cow’s milk cheese with a delicate white rind, a quenelle of house-made orange and fig fruit paste, followed by a red stripe of ground chile, I do my very best to enjoy it. Unfortunately, I can only show my appreciation by taking a photo of it with Matt’s iPhone.

  Our last course is ice-cold chocolate mousse—the kind of chocolate that has all sorts of notes to it. It’s rich but clean-tasting, sweet but bitter, chocolate with a touch of vanilla. (All this I get from my one spoonful.)

  I’ve never experienced a more beautiful meal, and I’ve never been happier to get the check.

  To add insult to injury, that night my insomnia returns, and with it all of the anxieties I’d hoped to leave in Los Angeles—you know the ones, e.g., my career prospects or lack thereof, this book proposal I’m working on, and, of course, my newly ticking biological clock.

  And so, instead of lying there in the dark with negative thought after negative thought just like I would at home, I get out of bed and move to the couch, where I can turn on a light, read, and not resent (quite as much) the way Matt just falls asleep and stays asleep.

  I pick up one of the books from the apartment’s collection. It’s one I remember the owners recommending when they’d given Matt and me the keys, Adam Gopnik’s Paris to the Moon. It’s a memoir that focuses on the five years Gopnik lived in Paris with his wife and young child. And perhaps because the very first sentence mentions rue Saint-Sulpice and I can actually see the top of Saint-Sulpice from the living room windows, I keep reading well into the dead of the night.

  As I recover from my bout with what I can only diagnose as a case of too much French food for my typically Southern Californian/Mediterranean-fed gastric system, Matt comes down with a horrible cold. It’s so bad, I turn to Rick Steves’s guidebook to find out how to say the words cough and fever so that I can explain his symptoms in French to a pharmacist.

  We are supposed to leave that afternoon for a day trip to Reims, where champagne is produced and where you can take tours of the production process and, you know, drink lots of champagne, but Matt is in no shape for travel. Instead, he spends the day sipping miso soup made from a packet and nonironically reading Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. As for me, I walk to our neighborhood café, laptop in hand, and enjoy checking my e-mail and reading the Wikipedia pages on Saint-Sulpice, Josephine Baker, Musée de l’Orangerie, and everything else I’ve wanted to look up for the past ten days. We spend a few days like this—not really touring the city, just living in it.

  Once Matt is feeling better, we make it to Versailles, which we love, though our tour is so crowded with other people we find ourselves rushing a bit through each room and are almost relieved once we realize we’ve seen everything and can go back home. On the train back, we discuss what we should do that night. We still have a few restaurants we want to try.

  “Or we could pick up stuff at the grocery store, I could make huge bowls of pasta, and we could watch the end of Ronin?” Matt says in a way that makes clear that he knows that that’s probably what we shouldn’t do. Because, well, we’re in Paris, and we’re both finally feeling better. We should probably do something we can’t do in Los Angeles, right?

  There’s a paragraph in the beginning of Paris to the Moon I go back to again and again. In it, the author seems to almost warn the reader about what his book is really about, that though yes it’s about Paris and a specific five-year period—from 1995 to 2000—it is really mostly “about life spent at home.”

  “Life is mostly lived by timid bodies at home,” he writes, “and since we see life as deeply in our pleasures as in our pains, we see the differences in lives as deeply there too. The real differences among people shine most brightly in two bedrooms and one building, with a clock ticking, five years to find out how and why. Not just how and why and in what way Paris is different from New York, but how [one] might end up feeling about the idea of difference itself—about the existence of minute variations among people: which ones really matter and which ones really don’t.”

  On our last day, I type up a list of my favorite moments from the trip so that I won’t forget them. Our first fancy dinner at L’Epi Dupin, and specifically their carrot ginger soup, makes the list. The dance exhibit at the Pompidou (and our impromptu snack at the museum restaurant where we accidentally ordered an apple tart with ice cream when we thought we were ordering French fries) makes the list. Our evening walk down to the Seine to see the Eiffel Tower lit up makes the list. And, surprisingly or not, our pasta night “with the exciting conclusion of Ronin” makes the list. (For some reason, we found Ronin, which is decidedly not a comedy, to be hilarious.)

  Versailles and all of its gilded furniture doesn’t make the list.

  The expensive macarons we got at the famous patisserie Pierre Hermé don’t make the list.

  Our dinner at Les Papilles doesn’t make the list (though the walk home in the rain does).

  Matt and I may not have done Paris to the max, or the way we maybe thought we were supposed to do it. And back home, we may not have been doing Los Angeles the way we thought we were going to. We certainly weren’t leading lives as outwardly and objectively successful as those of our many friends.

  But if life is “mostly lived by timid bodies at home,” we are mostly doing great. At that part of life, I know we excel. And though this may not be as easy to share at dinner parties with strangers (“What do you do?” “Well, I love cooking dinner for my husband and myself and then eating it while watching House Hunters International.”), I’m realizing that that’s OK.

  In fact, that’s what the whole ballgame is about.

  When we came back home to Los Angeles from Paris, this is exactly what I wanted to eat. Note: This dish may seem like a real pain to make, but once you’ve purchased the kombu and bonito flakes at an Asian grocery or a well-stocked health food store, you’re practically halfway there!

  MY RELATIVELY SIMPLE MISO RAMEN WITH A POACHED EGG

  Makes 2 large portions or 4 more reasonably sized ones

  For the dashi:

  8 cups water

  One 3-inch square kombu (sea kelp)

  ¾ cup bonito flakes

  For the rest of the soup:

  ½ cup yellow miso paste

  1 9.5 ounce packet dried ramen noodles (see Note)

  White vinegar

  2 to 4 eggs (1 for each bowl of soup)

  1 (18-or 19-ounce) block extra-firm tofu, cut into ¼-inch cubes

  Half a bunch of scallions, green tops thinly sliced

  Sriracha sauce

  Toasted sesame oil

  To make the dashi:

  Pour the water into a stockpot. Place the kombu in the cold water. Turn the heat to high and heat until it just begins to boil. Turn off the heat and fish out and discard the kombu. Stir in the bonito flakes and let it steep for 5 minutes. Meanwhile, prepare a large bowl with a fine-mesh strainer on top. After the 5 minutes, strain into the prepared bowl. Pour the strained liquid back into the stockpot.

  The rest of this happens pretty quickly. So you probably want to make sure your tofu is chopped and your scallions are sliced. Ready? OK!

  Bring the strained dashi to a boil.

  For timing purposes, get a saucepan filled with 3 to 4 inches of simmering water in order to poach your eggs.

  Place the miso paste in a small bowl. After the dashi has come to a boil, scoop out 1 cup of it and add it to the bowl with the miso. Whisk until smooth and completely combined. Set aside.

  Dump your dried ramen noodles into the boiling dashi and cook according to the package directions while you poach your eggs.

  To poach the eggs:

  (Truth be told, I overcook my poached eggs all the t
ime by letting the water go from a gentle simmer to a violent simmer. But maybe you’ll have better luck?) Add a tablespoon or two of white vinegar to the simmering water. Crack an egg into a small bowl and kindly coax it into the simmering water. Start timing! 4 minutes at a gentle simmer will give you a poached egg with a runny yolk, which is exactly what you want. You’re probably poaching at least two eggs, so using a slotted spoon, scoop your finished poached egg from the simmering water and place in a bowl of warm water to keep it warm while you poach your next one.

  To finish the soup:

  Once the ramen is cooked, turn off the heat.

  Pour the miso and dashi mixture into the broth with the ramen. Stir until it is incorporated. Stir in the tofu cubes and sliced scallions.

  Divide the soup among bowls, topping each with a poached egg. Serve with sriracha and toasted sesame oil.

  Note: I use a brand of ramen called Hakubaku that’s sold at my grocery store, but if you can’t find ramen, you can substitute dried spaghetti. I’ve done it before, and though I’m sure it’s hugely frowned upon by the ramen community, it still makes for a delicious noodle.

  Chapter 30

  Be Careful When Hammering Your Life into Shape

  I’d gone to Whole Foods planning to pick up ingredients for linguine and clams, but as I stand there shivering in the produce department on an unseasonably cold, gray day by Los Angeles standards, I decide that what I’d really like is Manhattan clam chowder, something I’ve never made before.

  Though it’s 2012, I still don’t have a smartphone; I can’t Google a recipe. But what I do have is a husband at work with access to the Internet. I call Matt and ask him to please find a Manhattan clam chowder recipe online and read off the ingredients to me. He kindly agrees but with the proviso that he’s at work and is not available for a million follow-up questions. (He knows me too well.)

  I buy the majority of what he tells me to: littleneck clams (as the smaller ones, manilas, aren’t available), bacon, celery, onion, white wine, a can of tomatoes. I skip the chorizo and instead grab some halibut. Why? Because I’m feeling confident. I’m making soup. And soups, I’ve discovered in the short history of my cooking life, are hard to mess up. Why halibut specifically? Because it seems like a nice, if not familiar-sounding, fish that will hold up in a soup.

  I go about my day off as I normally do, and then, at five o’clock, I pour myself a glass of white wine, turn on some music, and begin making my inaugural chowder. The recipe doesn’t mention anything about potatoes, but I have some on hand and, well, who doesn’t like potatoes in their clam chowder? I put them in a pot of water and bring them to a simmer, waiting until they’re just fork-tender. I drain them and allow them to cool for a bit while I get the bacon ready to fry.

  As I’m frying the bacon, I remember this amazing bacon potato hash I once made. Impulsively, I slice the potatoes with their skin still somewhat attached and toss them in the bacon fat.

  Unfortunately, while my heart is in the right place (a starchy vegetable cooked in animal fat), within a few minutes, it seems that I may have overloaded the pan with potatoes, because the flesh doesn’t seem to be crisping up the way I’d like. Plus, the skin has come off some of the potatoes and adhered itself to the pan. And worst of all, I realize that since I’m going to throw these potatoes in the soup, it doesn’t matter if they crisp up because it’s not like they’re going to stay crisp while suspended in broth.

  The recipe tells me to remove the cooked bacon from the pan and to use the bacon fat to cook some minced garlic, to which I’m supposed to add white wine and water in order to steam open the clams. But the potato skin is so stuck to the pan that I end up using a slotted spoon to remove the bacon to one plate and the potatoes to another before I pour the leftover grease into another pan entirely.

  In the fresh pan, I sauté the garlic in the bacon fat and add the white wine, water, and finally the batch of littleneck clams. Once the clams have steamed open, I pull them out one by one and place them into a bowl. As for the liquid, I’m supposed to strain this off into another bowl. At this point, there is the smallest bit of counter space left to work on, and as I’m straining the hot liquid, I pour too slowly and lose at least a cup to the side of the pan, the counter, and—bonus!—the floor. Next, I avoid that section of the floor as I remove the clam meat from the shells, chop them up, and reserve them in another bowl.

  I take a time-out to clean up, during which Matt comes home from work.

  “Wow, it smells great!”

  “Don’t come in here!”

  “Why?”

  “What time is it?”

  “Uhm, about six-thirty.”

  “Six-thirty!”

  I resentfully move on to a new pan—this time an enameled cast-iron stockpot—and melt some butter and add the onion and celery. (This is where I would have added the chorizo I didn’t buy.) I cook the onion until it’s translucent, then add a bit of flour. Next up is the clam broth, which I must bring to a simmer. Then, in goes my large can of tomatoes, sugar, pepper flakes, and thyme. Here, I’m supposed to cover and cook at a low simmer until the broth is flavorful, about twenty to thirty minutes, adding the reserved bacon and clams at the very end, but then I remember I have that stupid halibut in the refrigerator that I haven’t done anything with yet.

  I bring the broth to a simmer and add the halibut, which I’ve chopped into bite-size pieces. This seems to work, as the halibut is clearly cooking, only it has brought the level of the liquid to within an inch of the top of the pot. If I want to add the potatoes and clams to this, I’m definitely going to have to transfer the soup to a bigger stockpot.

  As I do so, the red broth leaves its splattery mark. I’d love to add the emptied pot to the sink, but alas there’s no room. Finally, I add the potatoes and chopped clams to the newer, larger pot, and, with a sense of great defeat, announce that dinner is ready.

  Oh, but there’s one stipulation. “I work tomorrow,” I tell Matt, “and since this was such a nightmare to make, this needs to last us for two meals.”

  Five months later, at the beginning of September, I send my agent the latest draft of my book proposal. I’m proud of myself, not for having done the work but because I feel like I haven’t rushed the process, that I’ve applied her notes, revised it from top to bottom, given it room to breathe, and then revised it one more time.

  What has perhaps helped me be patient is that Matt and I have had a great summer. I’ve gotten a job teaching a writing class one day a week through a private Los Angeles writing school, which allows me to change my schedule at Heath so that I only have to be there three days a week. And because of the videos we’ve made together for Bon Appétempt, Matt has not only stumbled into freelance work as a shooter/director, but his job at the PR firm has evolved such that he is now shooting and directing web spots for his agency’s major clients. In other words, he is getting to do the work he’s always wanted to do. But the most exciting change of all is that in June, we bought a small house in Echo Park, a windy, hilly neighborhood in east Los Angeles, and almost immediately followed it up with the acquisition of a small dog we named Mavis.

  So that by September, the life I’ve always wanted seems to be coming into focus. By September, I begin to think that maybe that brand of T-shirts Matt’s dad sports on occasion is right: Life is good.

  But when my agent gets back to me via phone, it becomes clear that we’re not even remotely close to being on the same page—no pun intended, as a pun would imply an air of lightheartedness, and by the end of our hour-long conversation, I’m the opposite of lighthearted. I’m both defeated and worked up. I’m also in a T-shirt, shorts, and sneakers, as right before she called, I was about to leave for a hike with Mavis.

  But now it’s almost eleven o’clock. It’s hot and the sun is high in the sky. Mavis, who is still very much a puppy, doesn’t hike well in the heat. But she’s pawing at my legs, seemingly asking to go with me, so against my better judgment, I grab her and head
for Griffith Park anyway.

  Why do I want to write this book? The answer to which I’m supposed to think about rings in my head as I walk.

  Why do I want to write this book?

  I know what I’m supposed to say. I should quote Annie Dillard or Rilke about how if I’m really a writer, then that’s just what writers do. We write! And if the recognition comes, the recognition comes.

  But what I want to say—No, what I want to shout is: I’ll tell you why I want to write this book! Because I want to have a book—out there in the world and not just on my computer.

  Because, at the end of the day, I’m still struggling to drink my own Kool-Aid. Because, though I tell myself differently, part of me still believes that my job as a shop girl does define me. Because part of me believes, despite what Anne Lamott tells me, that publishing this book will bring me happiness, or at the very least, a certain level of respect and/or recognition from those people who have made me feel small, who have made me feel undeserving and dispensable: from the customers at the store to my coworkers and bosses (present and past) to my dad and stepmom. Specifically, I want my dad to hear the news and think: Hmmm… maybe I underestimated Amy. Hmmm… maybe I should’ve paid a little more attention to her when she was a kid. Likewise, I want my stepmom to be worried: Oh, shit. She’s writing a memoir? Maybe I picked the wrong eleven-year-old girl to have told that she wouldn’t amount to anything.

  Sometimes I find myself envying Mavis because she seems the very opposite of tortured. She plays. She eats. She searches for morsels of food on the kitchen floor. And on walks, if it’s too hot outside, she finds herself a shady patch and sits down, sometimes only five minutes in. When she does this, I usually respond by jumping up and down, trying to get her going again. “C’mon, Mavis! Let’s go! Weeee! This is fun!” And sometimes it works.