Eating for Beginners Read online

  "You've been gone awhile, huh?" he said, laughing.

  But apparently I was taking something in, because at home I was utterly relaxed in the kitchen. The night after my first stint at the fish station, I prepared dinner for four without blinking an eye: pasta carbonara, tomato salad with Lucky Dog tomatoes, and arugula salad. (Notice the happy absence of fish.) It had seemed ridiculously easy to cook for a measly four people who were all eating the same thing. Whereas once I would have consulted my recipe seven hundred times and worried about whether the egg yolks were going to cook too quickly when I poured them over the pasta, now I breezed ahead without any conscious thought at all. My knives, which I now sharpened every weekend, cut through the tomatoes with ease instead of sliding around and slicing into my skin as they had in the past.

  Our tiny four-burner stove suddenly seemed profoundly manageable, producing in me a feeling of competence that grew stronger and stronger as the weeks passed. I got so bold I started burning myself at home almost as much as I did at the restaurant. I sizzled my hip on the edge of a pot and barely flinched. I pressed my fingers into smoking-hot pans to push fish down. I bought my own fish spatula and became obsessed with it. So light! So perfectly designed for its purpose! How had I ever lived without one? Because I had become accustomed to talking to David, who was generally no more than a foot from my side while I was on fish lest some mishap should befall me, I could now produce a fairly complicated meal while carrying on a conversation with dinner guests. I knew now that it was all in the prep work, and it seemed absurd that I had once had to banish Noah from the kitchen while I cooked. For every embarrassing night at applewood, I was enjoying a good one at home.

  I didn't dare make any menu suggestions at work, but at the farmers' market on weekends, I was free to buy whatever appealed to me. Often I wished David were with me so I could ask him the kind of inane questions I asked on every shift—"Would this be good? How do I cook this? What can you do with this?"—but since he wasn't, I just started choosing produce and cuts of meat and pieces of fish and seeing what ideas came to me once I got them home.

  Not everything I made was completely wonderful, but all of it was good. There were no disasters. And then, even as I continued to forget everything at the fish station at applewood, I made a string of meals at home that were not only seasonal and recipe-free but delicious. There was pork tenderloin with balsamic glaze served with kale and spaghetti squash. And there was chicken and dumplings, which my grandmother used to make from a recipe that had been lost to the ages and which I had been trying to re-create for years. When the flour on the chicken burned to the bottom of the pot, I had the sense to wash the pot and start over, substituting butter for the chicken fat I had been cooking with. When the dumplings were bobbing at the top of the pot, I took a bite and traveled right back to my grandmother's kitchen table.

  My crowning achievement that week was a pasta with delicata squash, caramelized red onion, pine nuts, and sage. I had recently become addicted to delicata, a small, oblong, pale orange squash that has thin green stripes running its length and tastes a little like sweet potato. To cook it, you split it in half, scoop out the seeds, and roast it in the oven. You can eat the whole thing, including the skin, which gives any dish made with delicata a pleasing chewiness that other squash dishes often lack. Delicata is sturdy enough that Sarah sometimes served it as the vegetarian entrée, cut into angled cylinders and filled with bulgur salad or other grains or vegetables. I'd never heard of delicata before getting to applewood, and now, as with my fish spatula, I couldn't live without it.

  The first time I roasted delicata at home, to make my improvised pasta dish, I was sure it wouldn't come out the same way it did at the restaurant, but it did. Then I caramelized some red onion in a pan with butter and tossed in pine nuts and shredded sage at the last minute. When it was done, I mixed everything from the pan, along with the diced squash, with fresh spaghetti from the Italian specialty store down the street. When I served it, Noah raised his eyebrows at me across the table and said, "I think all those shifts have started to pay off."

  And then the culinary grace began to transfer. At work the day after the delicata pasta, I knew for the first time how to do everything David asked me to do. Perhaps most incredibly, I finally knew where everything was. When someone asked me for a hotel pan or a cutting board or a quart of cream, I handed it over with a "Here you go, Chef." I was still a novice at applewood, but I was sure of my place at last.

  This feeling carried over to home, where I became picky about plating and what the garde manger book had called "presenting foods to look their best." I wiped microscopic specks of sauce off plates, and if food looked less perfect on the plate than it did at applewood, it jarred my senses. I was developing, as every good chef does, an ego about my kitchen.

  One day I returned from some errands with a few tubes of mints to put in a little silver box that had been sitting empty on the runner on our dining room table for years. When Noah caught me in the act, he looked almost annoyed.

  "This isn't a restaurant, you know," he said.

  "I know...," I trailed off, trying to give him a fierce look as I scuttled back to the kitchen to check on my latest production.

  Which was fish sticks.

  Jules, who was heading rapidly toward two, was still holding out when it came to meat, fish, cheese, and pasta. I had tried so many different foods on him by this time that I was ready to give up; he wouldn't even go near classic kid foods. When we got together with friends and their children, Noah and I watched miserably while the other kids gobbled down pizza and Jules ran around the table completely uninterested—even though every other parent at the party had assured us that once he saw the others eating he'd join in. On the one hand, I secretly loved it that he was impervious to peer pressure, but on the other, I wanted to scream at him, "It's pizza!"

  To which he probably would have answered, "Mama! Pizza! Mmmm." That was his current comment about anything we put on his plate, spoken just before he refused to try it. His use of "Mmmmm" never ceased to get my hopes up and also never meant he was going to take a bite.

  "Mama. Chicken! Mmmmmm!"

  "Mama! Fish! Mmm."

  "Mama! Pasta! Mmmmm."

  Cashews were his new love. Still in the cocktail-party phase, he had decided to try them when some friends invited us over for drinks and to meet their new baby. After walking around the room naming every food he saw but wouldn't eat—cheese, olives, pita bread—he discovered a bowl of cashews on a side table and consumed them happily. Our friends couldn't believe he was eating cashews at all, much less as his main course. When I mentioned with false nonchalance that they were a good source of protein and confessed that he wouldn't even eat pasta, the new mother nursing her sweet little infant looked aghast and I thought, "Just wait."

  When you're cooking for children who won't eat, the law of diminishing returns eventually kicks in. The harder you try to make something that will tempt them, the less likely they are to eat it. Or at least this was the case at our house. Jules did far better with raw vegetables and fruit and the occasional bagel with peanut butter than he did with anything I made for him. Noah and I had both been reduced to thinking more about nutrition than food at dinnertime; as long as he was getting protein, carbs, vitamins, and calcium, we considered our work done.

  One afternoon, in a grocery store near our apartment, I wandered the aisles looking for new things he might eat. Somehow I found myself in the baby food section, and seeing all those little glass jars lined up on the shelves made me deeply nostalgic for his infancy. I remembered with perfect clarity the morning we had first fed him solid food—jarred peas—and how much he had loved it. From then until he was about a year old, he had eaten whatever we offered him as long as it was out of a jar (he never touched a single purée I made myself), even the things he would no longer go near, such as baby food with bits of meat or pasta in it.

  Back then I had looked forward to the days when the messes a
nd dirty clothes and stained bibs would be gone, but now those days of firsts—first peas, first laughs, first bites of crackers, first crawls—seemed almost painfully sweet and so simple. I wouldn't have traded the walking, talking ball of fire I now lived with, and yet something was gone. I had blotted out Jules's early days, no doubt because they were tangled up with memories of my father's illness and death, but now, at last, I felt I could go back. And though I knew the hazy wash of memory was obscuring all the difficult parts of life with a newborn, I was, for the first time, able to see both where I'd come from and where I'd arrived.

  Which was, among other things, to a place of deep schizophrenia about food that had me using my treasured fish spatula to flip fish sticks. We bought a brand made with sustainably caught fish, because if I wasn't going to actually cook for my child, I could at least keep my politics about me. "Don't feel bad about yourself," Laura had told me a few weeks earlier, when I lamented that Jules had eaten a single raw string bean for dinner the night before and confessed that I was so desperate for him to ingest something both warm and containing protein that I was tempted to give him fish sticks. She went on, "Someone needs to write a story about how chefs' kids eat chicken nuggets out of the box." (I happened to know that her kids also ate frozen fish bites made from sustainably caught fish, and that David sometimes made them tacos from a box kit filled with additives, all of which did make me feel better.)

  Maybe keeping these truths in mind made me just the tiniest bit more relaxed than usual when, on the evening Noah chided me about the mints, I prepared a plate of fish sticks, carrots and hummus, and almonds for Jules. I set his plate on the table, along with plates of carrots and hummus for me and for Noah. We all sat down.

  "Mama!" said Jules. "Fishies! Mmm!"

  "Yeah!" I said. "How about one for Mama, one for Jules?"

  "Or one for Papa, one for Jules?" echoed Noah. Suffice it to say that when we'd met, eleven years earlier, neither of us had imagined having this conversation even once, much less every day for over a week.

  Jules picked up a carrot and munched it thoughtfully. Then he picked up a fish stick and, even though it was rectangular, made it "swim" along the edge of his placemat. It's great when your child starts to develop an imagination, except when he uses it as a stall tactic.

  "Swimming!" he said cheerfully, putting it back on his plate and taking another carrot.

  Noah and I eyed each other nervously. We had been eating Jules's untouched fish sticks all week, and I didn't think I could manage one more bite.

  But then, after taking a slug of his milk, Jules turned to me and offered me a fish stick with the bright invitation, "Mama and Jules eat fish?" Sensing something unfamiliar in his tone, I took a bite as fast as I could.

  And then he did.

  And then he took another bite, and another, and over the next fifteen minutes, during which I had to leave the table at one point because I felt I might cry with relief, he ate two entire fish sticks, the rest of his carrots, and a huge pile of almonds. That I had had to eat dozens of fish sticks myself in the previous weeks seemed a small price to pay for this moment.

  "Suddenly I understand," said Noah, as Jules got down from his chair, "why parents take such pleasure in seeing their children eat. It's so elemental." He looked a little weepy, too.

  The next day, talking to my sister on the phone, I admitted that perhaps I was overreacting to this not very unusual development. After all, most people's children had tried fish sticks and even real food as soon as they could chew.

  "I feel like he just graduated from college or something," I confessed, slightly embarrassed.

  "Well," she observed sagely, "it's kind of the same thing when you're almost two."

  My triumph was short-lived, naturally. The next night Jules ate nothing but almonds and one carrot. The night after that, nothing at all, and the next one, a banana. Still, progress had been made, and I went about my life with new confidence. Several days later, I got him to eat fish sticks again by giving him a fork, something he'd never been interested in before. As he stabbed his fish with it and said "Press!" I looked out the dining room windows and noticed that the trees in the park across the street were starting to lose their leaves.

  I watched the light fail over the thinning leaves and a calm came over me. My son was eating fish. If he had mastered it at home, maybe I could do so at work.

  Lobster à l'Américaine à la Steve and Melanie

  3 1½-pound live lobsters

  3 tablespoons olive oil

  1 medium carrot, finely diced

  1 medium onion, finely diced

  salt and pepper to taste

  3 tablespoons minced shallots

  1 clove mashed garlic

  ⅓ cup cognac

  1 pound whole, peeled canned tomatoes, chopped, without the juice

  2 tablespoons tomato paste

  1 cup fish stock

  1½ cups dry white wine or white vermouth

  2 tablespoons chopped parsley

  1 tablespoon chopped tarragon

  6 tablespoons softened butter

  2 cups long-grain white rice (basmati will work, too)

  1. Have a stiff drink.

  2. Open your, or someone's, copy of MtAoFC to [>].

  3. Drink some more when you see the length of the recipe.

  4. Prep all the vegetables and herbs as above, then take your lobsters out of the refrigerator and observe them silently, preferably with a friend, long enough to arouse the suspicions of anyone in the next room.

  5. When those people wander into the kitchen to see what's going on, make one of them kill the lobsters.

  6. Put your child to bed and follow the rest of the recipe as written by Julia.

  7. Serve the lobster and resulting sauce arranged on a ring of rice, decorated with herbs. Vow that you will never make it again.

  Serves 4.

  Pasta with Delicata Squash, Sage, and Pine Nuts

  2 small or 1 large delicata squash (about 2 pounds)

  1 medium red onion

  2 tablespoons butter

  ½ cup pine nuts

  ½ cup sage leaves, shredded or minced

  1 pound spaghetti (though you can use another shape of pasta like penne or rigatoni or fusilli)

  1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

  2. Wash the squash well (you'll be eating the skin), split it or them in half lengthwise, and scoop out the seeds.

  3. Place the halves face down on a baking sheet and roast in the oven for 20 minutes.

  4. While the squash is roasting, mince the red onion and heat a big pot of salted water to a boil for the pasta.

  5. In a frying pan, melt the butter over medium heat, then add the onion and turn the heat down to low so that the onion cooks very slowly and caramelizes.

  6. Add the pine nuts to the onion and cook, still over low heat, until they're lightly browned. Then add the sage, cook for about a minute, and turn off the heat.

  7. Remove the squash from the oven and take it off the pan to cool.

  8. By this time the pasta water should be boiling. Add the spaghetti.

  9. Turn the heat back on, very low, under the onion/pine nut/sage mixture to warm it up a bit. Cut the cooled squash into rough cubes.

  10. Drain the pasta and combine it with the squash and the onion mixture in a big bowl. Serve with grated parmesan cheese.

  Serves 2 as main dish with leftovers.

  9. Night Shift

  "OOH, YOU'LL LIKE Joe Angello," David had said to me with a mysterious smile more than once since I'd started in the kitchen.

  If Laura was around, she'd chime in. "Yeah," she'd say, "he's a character."

  They both talked about Joe a lot, always very fondly, and always with a chuckle. For some reason, I had formed an idea of him as a jolly, prosperous, perhaps slightly overweight man of about sixty who loved local and organic produce so much he had founded a company to make sure it got to people who wanted it. I pictured him like Oz, behind the curt
ain, secretly pulling the levers and pushing the buttons that first collected produce and then distributed it to all his customers.

  I had no idea, of course, what "distribute it" actually meant. I just knew that somehow boxes of produce, like the ones I had filled at Lucky Dog, made it from the fields to Brooklyn in the white Angello's truck that pulled up outside the restaurant every Thursday. I also knew that without someone like the mythic Joe, the farmers would spend a lot more time selling their product and a lot less time growing it. They'd be at greenmarket tables all the time instead of in their fields, and they'd have no way to expand the market for their food beyond the places where they could drive conveniently. As Richard Giles said to me at one point, "Without Joe, we would be a very different farm. Without the system to efficiently move food, even the short distance from here to New York City, we have no hope of competing with West Coast food. If we're only feeding our own family and the families in our village, then we're living in a very narrow world." Then, further burnishing the legend that had formed in my mind, he added, "And Joe is a rare man."

  At last I had to see for myself. Who was this one-man empire with values and character to spare? On a Wednesday morning in October, I took the train up to Hudson, New York (seated, naturally, in front of a woman with a baby of about ten months who was telling someone on her cell phone, "He eats whatever we eat, just cut up into small pieces." I maturely refrained from turning around and making a face at her). An Angello's employee met the train and drove me (in a pale green Prius hybrid) along a series of deserted roads, past a battered white inn with a sign saying "Bar open 4pm. John Deere tractor 4 Sale," to a small white house at the side of Columbia County Route 8 surrounded by greenery and more empty roads. This was the Angello's office. Behind it was a refrigeration building where the produce and other products the firm distributes—organic yogurts, grass-fed meat, sauerkraut, chocolate, to name a few—were stored between their arrival from their various sources and their departure for their destinations. The company's three trucks were out on the road going as far north as Vermont, one hundred and twenty miles away, picking up the fresh food they'd deliver to stores and restaurants the next day.