Susan Rebecca White's Blog

Last week I had an amazing discussion with my dear friend, Todd Johnson. During that conversation we spoke of how easy it is to become polarized, to see people who are on the opposing side of any given issue as "them"--separate from us and not worthy of compassion. Todd spoke eloquently about how healing work is done in the breaches between opposing sides. It's easy to stand on one side and condemn the other, much harder to climb into the breach and try to engage with an open and compassionate heart. 

Todd really put his money where his mouth is in his response to last week's passage of Amendment One in North Carolina. Here is a copy of the letter he wrote to the Charlotte Observer. Read it, and you will see what a gracious and generous soul Mr. Johnson is:

To the Editor,

I don’t live in North Carolina, but North Carolina is my home. I was born in Raleigh, grew up in Charlotte, and went to college in Chapel Hill. North Carolina is the single place that has formed me more than any other, and it is also the place I visit every day at my desk as a fiction writer. In fact, I am so proud to be a North Carolinian that I’ve often said boastfully that our state would emerge as the leader of the future South in terms of education, culture, business opportunities, and until yesterday, civil rights.

This past September, my partner of fifteen years and I were married near our home in Connecticut, where same-sex marriage is recognized and protected under the law. Following our civil service, performed by a justice of the peace in a nearby village, we celebrated our marriage in our local Episcopal church with the blessing of the Bishop of Connecticut. One of my Chapel Hill fraternity brothers, a priest on loan to us from the Diocese of New York, performed the service. We gathered in a wooden shingled chapel, formerly Mark Twain’s parish, and sought the blessing of God on our union, surrounded by both of our families as well as beloved friends who traveled from several countries to be our witnesses. It was one of the most wonderful days of my life. It was also typical of most weddings I’ve attended. The toilets broke an hour before the ceremony. Someone showed up drunk at the rehearsal. A couple crashed the reception dinner. One wandering guest got burned by a tiki torch. And all "my" Southerners complained about the cold in New England even though it was in the mid-60s. The next day, linens, tables, and chairs came down, tents were struck, trucks loaded, and everyone scattered to their respective airports. Life returned to normal, an almost painfully banal sort of normal. And now, all these months later, it still looks the same. All around us, as in other states were same-sex marriage is legal, parents are raising their children, people are working to pay their bills, teenagers are going on dates, and we all grow older, one day at a time. If marriage between a man and a woman has been threatened or compromised, the evidence is scant. And as for the religious debate over homosexuality in general, I believe we step on a slippery slope whenever a majority claims authority from God, and I need not quote history to prove my point.

Like most family law experts, I’m not clear about what Amendment One does. It is so broadly written that only time will tell. But I am certain about what it doesn’t do. It does not stop North Carolinians like me from living my life in the belief that things will change for the better for all people. It does not mean that a North Carolina teenager like I once was who realizes that he or she is different need live in fear, but may instead look for support among the multitude of voices of justice and compassion that have risen up in every corner of our state over the past weeks, crossing lines of gender, age, race, religion, socioeconomic status, and sexual orientation. And for those in other parts of the country who might wag the finger of shame at our state, Amendment One certainly does not mean that North Carolina has a monopoly on bigotry – ignorance and intolerance do not play geographical favorites. But most of all, it does not mean that those of us who are committed to the equality of all people will be silenced by a political agenda masquerading as a call to morality.

I can already imagine the day when Amendment One will be as obsolete as the individuals who created it. And I know that on that day, though North Carolina may not lead, it will surely heed the call of freedom.

Respectfully, 

Todd Johnson

 

It's Saturday morning, and I'm futzing around in the carriage house where I now live: listening to music, doing a load of laundry, making a pot of chicken soup for the week (new book idea: Chicken Soup for the Weak), thinking about whether or not I should try to edit a chapter of the new novel or critique student stories this afternoon.

I have a hard time balancing teaching and writing. Each satisfy some deep part of me, and I tend to be pretty hardcore kamikaze about both. When I'm finishing a novel (all two that I've finished!), I become obsessive and bleary-eyed, stationing myself in front of my computer twelve hours a day, thinking about the book whenever I'm not actually working on it. (Supposedly James Thurber's wife once approached him at a cocktail party and whispered, "Stop writing!") During the final throws of writing Soft Place, there was one day when I spent seven hours in front of my computer, then put on a black dress and raced to a funeral. (Racing to a funeral. If that doesn't describe the state of our modern, crazy busyness, I don't know what does.) Immediately afterwards I returned home and sat in front of my computer again, incorporating a part of the beautiful eulogy into the text.

Clearly, this is not the most balanced approach to writing, or to life. But how do you achieve balance with something as all-consuming as writing or teaching? I'm a very good teacher. Each semester on my student evaluations at Emory someone writes "Best class I've ever had." I won a teaching award at one of the private schools where I taught. But teaching is not just about cult of personality. I "earn" my dynamic classes by putting hours into preparing for them. My classes are choreographed. The more prepared I am, the better I know my end of the dance, the looser I can be during the actual class, the more I can change directions depending on what each student brings to the floor. But I don't think I could dance so easily if I didn't know my steps very, very well. And knowing them, preparing, takes a lot of time. I don't really know any way around it. Betsy Lerner argues that writers aren't supposed to be balanced people, and I wonder if the same applies for teachers.

Then again, I know there are times I over prepare, turning into a squirrel wildly gathering acorns when there's already a winter's worth stockpiled away. I should pay attention to when I start to over-prepare. It probably means I should be turning back to the novel. It probably means I'm avoiding writing a difficult or painful scene. You have to create space for your writer self. She's not just going to show up. To borrow from Alice Munro, you have to woo her. (Alice Munro says she writes to woo "distant parts of myself.") 

I love that.  The times when I am alone but least lonely are when I'm writing, and I suppose this speaks to the Munro quote. You the person meet You the author, and the two of You explore life together. It's a communion of sorts, that you then package together and hope people will purchase from their local indie bookstore, Target, B&N, or Amazon... :)

On the subject of being alone: I got divorced a little over a month ago, after having separated from my husband nine months earlier. I was in New York over the summer, when I was first separated. At the time I was very careful not to write about my private life on this blog. It was too raw and fresh, and I wanted to protect my (now ex) husband's privacy, and the privacy of our dissolving marriage. But looking back on all of those blog entries I wrote about cooking in my tiny NYC kitchen, I see them as clues I was planting about that period of my life, the time I mothered myself through the shock of separation, splitting into two selves, really: the hurt girl and the nurturer who could take care of her with grilled cheese sandwiches, tomato soup, homemade desserts. I even had a visual image for the nurturer. I thought of her as an uber-confident 1940's housewife, a polka-dot kerchief wrapped around her curls, the type of woman who could wring the neck of a chicken for that night's dinner, who makes sure there are three vegetables on the dinner plate, centered with a piece of protein. Who wants to know about a boy's background and intentions before she'll let you go out with him. Someone stalwart and kind. 

She is the kind of woman I hope to be growing into, minus the kerchief and the dead chicken. And, I suppose, the retro pre-feminist leanings.

It occurs to me that I am writing about a lot of split selves. Maybe I come up with these separate selves to fight off loneliness, which is such a fundamental part of divorce. And the annoying truth is, if you run too hard from the loneliness, you won't learn the lessons your divorce has to teach you. (And God are there many.) I'm trying to get comfortable with loneliness, to invite it in and let it hang out a while. Serve it a bowl of chicken soup. It's like that country song, "Hello, Heartbreak. I've been expecting you."

One of the lessons of divorce: There's a lot of community among those who have fallen. We're no longer so sure of our past assumptions. We're no longer so quick to dole out advice or judgment. We have--in some way or another--failed, and the failure makes our hearts more tender. And yet you also develop a tougher exterior. You are hurt, and you are vulnerable, and you absolutely cannot allow people to hurt you gratuitously anymore. And so you speak up for yourself more often. You start saying things like, "I absolutely do not have the band width to tolerate this." Most likely, some of your friends and family begin to think of you as a real pain in the ass, but they also respect you more. You begin to understand that it's better to be respected then to have an all-consuming need to be viewed as nice and sweet and lovely at all times.

Honestly, you begin to re-evaluate everything.

Hiya! My New York adventure is over and I'm back in Atlanta, where I'm teaching creative writing at Emory again.  My Emory kids are so smart.  They are going to start turning in their stories soon (first batch up is next week), so in honor of that I wrote out my thoughts around what makes a successful story.  If this sounds like a list of rules, well, don't take it that way.  This is more a list of discoveries: 


10 Things I’ve Learned About Writing:

1) Concrete details are always better than abstractions. 

2) The first draft is the spill draft—focus on an image, or a character, or a setting, and see what you end up putting down on the page.  The second, third, fourth, fifth drafts are where you revise: add details, take away unnecessary words that bog down the prose, organize your thoughts, switch around paragraphs.  In the first draft you “spill” ideas about what you are going to write about.  In the following drafts, you look at those ideas, and then figure out what it is you are really trying to say. Then you arrange and re-arrange the words until they articulate your thoughts in an interesting and compelling way.


3) When writing a story, you—the writer—should be surprised by the ending.  And yet, if the story is successful, the ending will also feel inevitable.  (Flannery O’Connor articulates this idea of the surprising but inevitable ending in her book of essays, Mystery and Manners.)


4) The best writers are those who are willing to work and re-work on their prose.  It’s really as simple as that.  Sure, some people start off with an extra slice of talent, but talent doesn’t go very far if you aren’t willing to revise, revise, revise. 


5) In order for a story to be successful, you (the writer) need to be interested in the story you are telling.  If it bores you, it’s going to bore the reader.


6) The characters in your story need to have lives that began before they entered onto the pages of your story, and that continue after the story ends.  This is to say that we the reader should feel as if we are peeking into a life that is in motion, rather than feel as if the characters have been brought onto stage only for the purpose of a scene in the book.  We want to feel as if the characters go on living after we turn the page. 


7) Writer Tony Earley says a story must be about “the thing and the other thing.”  This is to say that nothing in fiction is one-dimensional.  For example, dialogue between two people might convey specific information that a reader needs to know, but it can’t only convey that information.  There is a subtext below every text: for a crude example, think of the scene in Annie Hall where Woody Allen and Diane Keaton are talking on her balcony.  They have just met each other, and they are discussing the art of photography, but Allen provides the viewer with subtitles below their conversation, showing us their real thoughts.  “Do I sound stupid?” she thinks.  “God, I’d like to go to bed with her,” he thinks.  Meanwhile, they discuss Diane Arbus.  This is an exaggerated version of “the thing and the other thing,” but the point is: there needs to be something else going on beneath the conversation.


8) Implicate your characters, implicate your reader: This is a terrible thing to have to do, but it gets right to the heart of “cutting the strings” from your fictitious characters and letting them be people, not puppets.  We are fallen creatures, and at least a third of our brain is lizard.  Much as we try to be good, try to do right, our lizard brain often gets the best of us, and we end up hurting other people.  This is the crux of fiction.  We have noble desires, but our lizard brain gets in the way.  You must allow your characters to be flawed, to be self-delusional, to hurt others, and to get hurt.  You cannot protect them from life.


9) Often the thing that has best helped your hero navigate his life will be the thing that brings him to his knees at the end of the story.  He will have to “shed” that old skin and become someone new in order to make it through life.  Think of the alcoholic.  Alcohol has helped her, for years, to deal with her parents’ divorce, to deal with her awkwardness in social situations, to deal with her insecurities about her looks.  But at a certain point, alcohol becomes the problem, not the solution, and it is making her black out, making her have devastating hangovers, making her lose friends, making her endanger herself.  She has to find a new way to cope in the world, after shedding her dependence on alcohol.  What was once a friend—alcohol—is now a foe.  This is true of so many inherent qualities about people.  In fiction, characters must face those parts of themselves that have always helped them navigate their world, but are now getting them stuck and in trouble.  Characters must grow, and usually that is by shedding some skin that no longer fits.


10) A story is an organic thing that grows as you write it.  What I have found is that the best fiction is controlled by the story, not the writer.  You are figuring out what happens to these characters as you write the story.  As best you can, let go of what you think should happen, what you think the ending should be, and discover what your characters’ story is through the process of writing.  A novel takes you from point A to point Z, but you can’t discover the map until you actually start writing. 

I read a wonderful book this week, Coming Up for Air, by Patti Callahan Henry. I know Patti through the Atlanta writing community.  She is one of those lovely, effervescent people full of warmth and laughter.  One of those people whom you want to smile at because she's smiling and looks like she's having fun and you want to join her.  If I were a betting woman (why am I saying "if?"; I love betting) I'd wager that Patti enjoys a shrimp boil, that she slides right up to the newspaper covered table, peels a shrimp, dunks it in cocktail sauce, and washes it down with a beer before settling in to eat her buttered corn on the cob, potatoes and sausage. Which is to say, Patti seems to be a woman who enjoys life.

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(Shrimp boil from earlier this summer.  Patti was not involved.  But I bet she would have loved it.)

Patti is also a woman who has raised three kids.  And before having her kids, she was a nurse.  Meaning, Patti has wisdom.  And has seen hard things.  
All well and good, I can hear you saying, but how's the book?
Why it's excellent.  Thank you for asking.  In it Patti's warmth, wisdom, and engagment with life--the miraculous and the mundane--is on full display.   

Here's the skinny: Coming Up for Air is the story of 48 year old Ellie Calvin.  At the book's start, Ellie's mother Lillian dies suddenly, just as Ellie's only child goes away to college, leaving Ellie alone with her husband, Rusty, a man more interested in his golf game than understanding any part of his wife's interior life. After Lillian's death, Ellie reads her mother's locked away journals, discovering two things: Her mother was passionately in love with someone other than Ellie's dad, and her mother was involved with the civil rights movement in Alabama during the summer of 1961.  Both realizations are shocking to Ellie, who knew her mother only as a Buckhead doyenne, locally famous for her organization and practicality, and not one to feel passion about anything other than following the rules. In fact Lillian, a consummate botanical gardener, discouraged Ellie's own passionate, wildflower nature.  But from reading her mother's journals, Ellie realizes Lillian was not always like that.  At a certain point in her life, Lillian chose safety over love, and then tried to drill that choice into Ellie, an effort that largely succeeded. Until now.

The plot of Coming Up for Air is rich and layered, and I am only giving you a teeny-tiny slice of it, in part because I don't want to include any spoilers, but mostly because I want to talk about the underlying theology of the book.  Because that's what made me unable to put CUFA down until I had read it cover to cover--the theology that Patti Callahan Henry expresses in Ellie's reawakening to spirit and love. It is not a theology of rules and regulations and exclusion, in fact it is the opposite.  It is a theology of risk over safety, of love over rigidity, of choosing spiritual wholeness over a comfortable lifestyle.  It is a theology that says everyone deserves an abundance of love--you, me, even that guy over there picking his nose on the subway.  And occasionally divine abundance shows itself in our earthly life, if we are open to it, if we show up.

When you get to the jubilee scene, you will know exactly what I am talking about.  

I really loved this book.  Was totally immersed in the plot and was moved by the steady wisdom behind it.  I even read it on the subway--and I have the hardest time reading on the subway because I'm always so interested in eavesdropping on my fellow passengers' conversations...but Ellie's story was more captivating. 

I got a big spiritual lift from Patti's book, and then I got a mini spiritual lift by coming home this evening and making myself two kinds of grilled sandwiches. The first was nothing unusual, just a grilled cheese with lots of butter on Pepperidge Farm white bread.  My only embellishment was to rub each side of the bread with a raw glove of garlic, and to use good sharp cheddar cheese as my filling. Then, for dessert, I tried a sandwich based on a Donna Hay recipe.  For it I also used Pepperidge Farm white bread, each piece spread with nutella, and then dotted with raspberries.  When I sandwiched the bread I pressed the two sides together so that the raspberries would flatten a bit.  Then I just fried the whole thing in lots of butter, so that the nutella got all oozy and melty and the raspberries warmed up and got all bursty.  I sat at my little table in my little apartment kitchen and ate the sandwiches, first the cheese, then the chocolate.  It had been a hard day and I needed the comfort.  I was eating the grilled cheese, thinking about the Christian tradition of taking bread and wine as a way to experience the divine.  It made a lot of sense to me--that God would come to us in such a tactile, necessary package as food and drink. I hunched over my plate, concentrated on what was before me, tasted the crisped butter against my tongue.

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(Simple grilled cheese.  But so good.)

Blame it on the fact that I'm writing a novel where the three main characters experience the world through food: I can't stop cooking.  Last night I made butter cookies at 10pm.  Granted, I wanted something sweet but had nothing in the apartment and didn't want to schlep to the market four blocks away, primarily because I'm cheap but also because I was all cozy at home in my jammies. I looked in the fridge, looked in the pantry, looked in Alice Waters' The Art of Simple Food.  Realized I had everything I needed to make a simple little cookie: butter, sugar, vanilla, lemon (juice & zest), milk, salt, flour.  That's it.  Creamed the butter and sugar til it turned the palest yellow, the sort of yellow you want to paint your walls with, then added in the other liquid ingredients plus the salt.  I used fleur de sel, smashed up to fine grains, just because I figured there were so few ingredients in these cookies each component should sing. I folded in the flour in batches, just til it was incorporated, then rolled the dough into three logs and refrigerated them until they were chilled enough to cut into little disks with a knife.  This means you only cook as many cookies as you want at that time--the rest you just leave, in dough form, in the fridge.  This also means I wasn't cooking the cookies til 1am, as the dough wasn't ready til then.  I decided to gild the lily and glaze them with a little lemon icing.  Confectioners sugar, cream, lemon zest and vanilla. That's it. Nice complement to the tang of the cookie.

The cookies are really good.  They are very short, which means you taste the cooked butter throughout.  Gives them an almost granular texture, but not in a gross freezer burnt ice cream kind of a way.  And with all of that lemon zest in the cookie, its taste puckers the tongue while simultaneously delivering the sugar it craves.  Which leaves you desiring more even as you eat them.

For lunch I've been eating an old salad standby: shaved fennel, shaved apple, shaved Parmesan, toasted walnuts and a little dressing.  It makes up for the cookies, I hope.  For dinner tonight I stuck with fennel and apple, but changed the preparation.  I cut a Granny Smith apple into chunks, and cut half a fennel bulb into 1/4 inch rings.  I also cut a chicken apple sausage into disks.  I melted some butter in a saucepan and added the apple chunks to it.  I sauteed the apples til they caramelized a little, adding a little lemon juice so they wouldn't oxidize.  Then I threw in the fennel.  The fennel and apple sucked up all of the butter--fast--and I really didn't want to add more fat to the dish, so I tossed in about 1/4 cup of the Miller Genuine Draft I was enjoying, thinking, hey, Germans always pair beer with sausage, maybe this will work.  I let the fennel and apples absorb the liquid, then added a splash of apple cider vinegar. Worrying I might have made things too tart I also added a teaspoon of honey.  I salted, peppered, then added the sausage.  Cooked it all together til it was all heated through, then did one more round of apple cider vinegar and honey, to add a nice glaze to the whole dish. Finished with a little more butter.

Dear Reader: I did not expect this one-dish slapdash beer-y meal to be so delicious but it was, it was! The apple chunks were tender but not mealy, and the butter/honey/apple vinegar flavor highlighted the apple's own natural sweetness.  The fennel added that great anise-y crunch, and the chicken apple sausage was just very satisfying in an "I don't get enough protein" kind of a way, and also tasted great with the little bit of honey glazing it.  Weird meal, I guess, but I'm gonna fix it again.  And so is one of the characters in my book. 

Starting with late spring's harvest of strawberries and going all the way through corn and tomatoes and blackberries and peaches, summer is about forgoing a temperate climate for the pleasure of letting sweet things grown in the sun roll around on your tongue.  

Last weekend I went to Todd Johnson's house in Connecticut for an intensive writing retreat. We are both working on novels and both in the stage where we need to be writing a bunch of words a day.  That said, one still has to eat.  We stopped at a strawberry field on the way from the train to the house and bought a quart of just picked strawberries.  (Dear Reader, we did not pick the strawberries ourselves, though that was certainly an option.) Strawberries from the field look so different from the cat-head sized ones you buy at the supermarket.  And while the catheads are mostly water and white hull, the ones we got in CT were small, bright red, and saturated with deep, red strawberry-ness. The juice tastes like honey, only clear and thirst-quenching rather than viscous and syrupy.

But enough of that.  You know what a freshly picked, ripe strawberry tastes like (an argument for the existence of God.) And speaking of the Divine, we also picked up a pint of heavy whipping cream, not ultra pasteurized.  Took it home, got to work writing, and then met 3 hours later for dinner.  From the city I had brought some of my spinach / artichoke dip.  We poured it into a casserole dish, sprinkled the top with Parmesan cheese, heated it then ran it under the broiler.  We ate this with toasted French bread.  And then we skipped past any thoughts of a main course and went straight for dessert.  Strawberry shortcake.  I had made a simple biscuit dough using cream instead of buttermilk, and butter instead of shortening or lard.  Plus I added 2 T. of sugar to the dough.  Todd didn't have a biscuit cutter so we punched them out with the top of a drinking glass, brushed the tops with melted butter and a little sugar, and put them in a hot, hot oven.  Meanwhile I whipped the cream with vanilla and sugar.  I had already hulled the strawberries, cut them in half, and added a little sugar to them just to get them good and juicy. We got some mint from the garden, and had our assembly line all set up.  As soon as the biscuits came out of the oven, we split them in half, put four halves in each of our bowls, poured strawberries and juice all over the hot biscuits, piled softly whipped cream on top of that, poured on more strawberries and juice, and then sprinkled it all with some mint leaves cut in a chiffonade.  

Dear Reader, it was good.  And the next day I wrote a scene in which my characters ate strawberry shortcake...

What is it about southerners and canned tuna? Growing up I ate a tuna fish salad sandwich at least once a week, that or pimento cheese or peanut butter and banana. I don't remember ever contemplating the taste of tuna itself. Tuna wasn't a singular object, it was a collection of ingredients enrobed in mayonnaise.  In fact the point of all of those ingredients was to disguise the actual fishy taste of the tuna.  My mom used the chunk light stuff (packed in water) and mixed it with mayo, chopped boiled egg, diced sweet pickles and diced apple.  The apple and sweet pickles were both chopped so fine you couldn't really recognize them by sight--just taste. It was a sweet tuna salad, and the most dominant ingredient was the apple, which my mom said made the tuna taste like chicken.

A couple of years back I bought what has become one of my favorite cookbooks, The Mensch Chef, by Mitchell Davis.  Davis teaches you how to make all of the classic Ashkenazi Jewish staples, from stuffed cabbage to potato latkes to brisket to tuna fish salad.  His tuna recipe has become my favorite of the mayonnaise based varities.  He insists you use albacore tuna--not the chunk light stuff--and he suggests you use tuna packed in oil.  To that he adds mayonnaise, chopped celery, the juice of a lemon, a chopped dill pickle, 1/4 of a chopped onion, a chopped hard-boiled egg, fresh parsley and salt and pepper.  The lemon really makes a difference, brightening the salad in a sunny sort of way.

It's been so hot in New York these past few days that long hours at the stove are out of the question.  And so I've been eating a lot of cold composed salads, including salade Nicoise. Gourmet Garage sells this divine tuna packed in olive oil--Tonnino--that is the best I've ever had. The tuna comes in thick filets.  It is firm and flavorful and yummy all on its own--you could eat it straight out of the jar.  (And sometimes I do.)  It's too good to drown in mayo, which is why it's so good for a salad Nicoise, where all you do is lay it over the lettuce and pour a lemony dressing over it.  But today for lunch I was really craving a sandwich, so I thought I might attempt a sort of Nicoise/tuna salad hybrid.  

Here's what I did: Chopped a few black olives--which acted as the salt for the whole thing--then chopped a tablespoon of parsley.  Put that in a bowl with the wonderful tuna, gave it a few squeezes of lemon, and mixed it with a fork. Next I poured a little bit of olive oil onto two slices of French bread, which I toasted. Meanwhile I tossed some arugula leaves with lemon juice and a tiny bit of salt, and took a couple of slices of roasted red pepper out of the fridge.  (I roast them stovetop and store them in olive oil.)  Not it was just a matter of assembly.  I am on open face sandwich kind of a gal, and this was no exception.  On each piece of toasted baguette I piled on the tuna mixed with olives and parsley, then put a few slices of roasted red pepper on top of that.  I finished with a topping of lemon dressed arugula.  

It was a pretty great sandwich.  A native of Nice, I believe, would have really dug it. Though I doubt I would have liked it as a kid.  I mean, c'mon! Where's the apple? Where's the Duke's?

I feel really lucky that I grew up with a mom who loved to bake.  (And I'm not being reactionary here, telling all ye career girls out there to scuttle back to the kitchen and put on an apron, stat. It would have been equally cool to grow up with a dad who cooked, or two mommies who cooked, or good God the luck!, two daddies who cooked and who cooked the way that most of my gay male friends do, which is to say flawlessly.) But back to my mom, who taught me so much about cooking, baking especially, without me even knowing that sitting on the counter watching her separate eggs, we were engaged in all kinds of teachable moments and shit.  Like how to pack down brown sugar when measuring it, how to scrape the excess baking soda off a tablespoon with the flat edge of a knife, how to slightly underbake cookies knowing they'll finish cooking on the tray, how to make a well with the dry ingredients when making strawberry bread, and then pour the wet ingredients into the well.   

The thing about cooking is this: It is and it is not scientific.  Yes, certain chemical things happen--baking soda makes things rise--but cooking is also about our squishy, sensitive sides:  smell, taste, a "sense" of how something should look, instinct.  The other day I was cooking with a friend.  (Not you, Kasey. I'm speaking of another friend with whom I was boiling potatoes.) We were boiling potatoes. After twenty minutes my friend said, "Okay, my recipe said they should be done by now."  I stuck a knife in one. It didn't pierce easily. In fact it was still quite hard in the middle. It wasn't done.  Which goes to say, when cooking, you have to have all five senses fully engaged.  You have to let your food slap a diamond ring on your finger!

But if you want a cheat sheet, here are the tricks I've learned:

1) When chopping up a clove of garlic, sprinkle the clove with salt.  It makes the knife stick to it while you chop and the whole process just gets done a lot faster.
2) Shrimp cooks fast.  Way faster than you think it will.  Honestly, as soon as it turns pink on both sides it's done, but I always give it one more minute after that just to be safe.
3) When you are cooking meat, steaks especially, let the meat come to room temperature before you put it to the heat. And oh Lord, please don't cook a pork chop til it's white in the middle.  It is really fine for it to be rosy. That "cook it to 180 degrees" b.s. was just propaganda created by people who hate food.
4) A roast chicken will always taste divine if you brine it first.  I use Scott Peacock's method, 1/4 cup of kosher salt for every 4 cups water.  A 4 pound chicken usually takes 1 cup of salt and 16 cups of water.  Make sure the salt is all dissolved before plopping your chicken in, then just let it hang out in the fridge all day. Great fun for house guests to encounter when they happen to open the refrigerator door!
5) After you serve a chicken, snatch everyone's leg bones and such off the plate before you do the dishes.  Use them to make stock.  This is not gross.  You will boil the bones.  The cooties and germs will go away.
6)Err on underbaking cookies. Most people burn their cookies--especially the cookie bottoms.  Take them out a little sooner than necessary, then let them finish cooking on the tray. I'm serious about this.
7)This trick is courtesy of the late, great Edna Lewis, and it works! When you bake a cake, listen for little popping sounds towards the end.  You'll hear them, almost like your cake is a baby blowing bubbles.  As soon as the popping sounds cease, pull the cake out.  It's done.
8) It's a pain in the ass, yes, but do butter AND flour the cake pan.
9) Stick an onion in the freezer for 20 minutes before chopping it.  You won't cry nearly as much.  On that same note, if you are serving raw onion in a salad or a salsa, slice it and put the slices into ice water for 15 minutes.  Takes the sting out.
10) If you are making meatloaf, and you're not sure whether it's seasoned enough (or too much) just pinch off a meatball sized ball and fry it up in the skillet.  It will cook in about five minutes, and then you can taste it for flavor.  
11) Never wash a cast iron skillet with soap.  Rub it with kosher salt if there's excess grease or stuck on bits, then rinse it with hot, hot water.  Dry it completely before putting it up, or else it will rust and be ruint.
12) When making a braise, and you are told to brown the meat first in a skillet, REALLY brown the meat.  Get it golden brown, caramel-y brown.  Brown the hell out of it!
13) Have your pan reallyreallyreally hot before adding to it the meat that you are going to cook.  With the big ol' exception of bacon, which should be started in a cold skillet. A cast iron skillet, to be exact.
14) Please don't ever buy salad dressing.  Just mix it up yourself.  I like to use a tea cup to do my mixing.  Pour in 3 parts oil to one part vinegar.  I often use olive oil and white wine vinegar.  Salt and pepper liberally, and beat furiously with a fork.  That is it.  IF you want to get fancy you can add a pinch of Coleman's mustard powder, or a squeeze of lemon.  If you are putting strawberries or Parm on your salad, use balsamic vinegar.
15) Egg whites whip higher and faster if you let them come to room temperature before beating the hell out of them.
16) If you whip 12 egg whites, then add sugar and such, thus making an angel food cake, take a plastic spatula and run it a circle in the center of the batter once you have poured it into the tube pan.  This will keep there from being big old holes in the cake once cooked.
17) Really fresh eggs are really hard to peel. I've pretty much given up on making deviled eggs from the ones I buy at the farmer's market because they look all pock marked and scarred once I finally get the shells off of them.  When it comes to deviled eggs, an older egg is best.
18) If for some crazy reason you don't own a deviled egg plate, you can just slice off the bottom of your egg, so it will stand up straight on the plate.
19) If you over salt your soup or stew or chili, and you've got some time before you are going to serve it, throw a couple of raw potatoes, cut in half, into the pot.  The potato will soak up the excess salt.
20) If you find yourself without a pepper grinder (which oddly, I have, many times), pour some whole peppercorns into a plastic baggie, and scoot them all to one corner.  Then take the blunt end of a rolling pin (this requires that you have a real rolling pin, and not one of those ersatz things with the handles on the end) and smash the hell out of your peppercorns.  This is an extremely cathartic thing to do when feeling agitated.

And with that, I bid you goodnight.



 

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I love fresh vegetables.  Raw ones especially.  One of my favorite suppers is a spin on Judith Jones' fennel salad: shaved raw fennel (I use a mandoline slicer to get the pieces see-through thin), shaved apple, and shaved radishes topped with little curls of Parmesan and toasted walnuts, dressed with a simple balsamic vinaigrette.  It's crunchy and anise-y and light and a little sweet with nice satisfying chews of warm walnut and salty hits of Parm.  I also make a raw salad with shaved beets, fennel, radish and carrot, served over arugula, also with Parm, though no walnuts and a lemony vinaigrette instead of a Balsamic one.

Come mid summer almost every meal I eat centers on the tomato.  Half the time I just slice a sweet one from the farmer's market, dribble olive oil and a dash of Balsamic on top, scatter on some s&p and basil leaves and dig in.  Sometimes I'll rip some sourdough bread into chunks, season with olive oil and salt, toast til brown, and throw into the tomato salad, letting the crisp toasty bread soak up the tomato juices.  And don't get me started on gazpacho, which I'm a huge sucker for, especially yellow tomato gazpacho, which is sweet and tart and so gorgeous in the bowl.

My point is this: I am not a finicky child-like eater who turns her nose up at healthy things, spinach and such.  In fact, I devour spinach by the bagful, whether raw in a salad or sauteed with garlic and olive oil for a side dish.  

But I don't want to write about healthy delicious food today.  I want to write about my comfort food du jour, a white bread, white sauce, ham and cheese concoction that ze French like to call a Croque Monsieur.  (Add an egg on top and the sandwich becomes a lady, a Croque Madame.)

I've been making a boatload of Croque Monsieur lately. A more apt description might be a belly load, because these things are far from low cal.  The secret to a great Croque Monsieur is bechamel, which is just a white sauce made of cooked flour, butter, hot milk and a little seasoning. The bechamel is the Cyrano de Bergerac of the sandwich.  Most eaters wouldn't even know it's there, but boy does it make the cheese look and behave a whole lot better.  

You start with the best bread you can find.  I think sourdough works particularly well.  Cut a thick slice, remembering that this is an open faced sandwich, so you don't have to worry about getting your mouth around two huge slices of bread.  Lightly mustard the sourdough.  (Yes, it's okay to use mustard as a verb!) I've been using Miele's spicy Dijon, which adds a nice kick. Then layer on a couple of slices of ham. (I just use thin sliced stuff from the deli counter at the grocery store.)  Now comes the secret weapon: Spread about a tablespoon of bechamel onto the ham, and give it a light sprinkling of salt and pepper.  I usually add some chopped parsley at this point too, just because the greenness of the parsley gives the illusion that there is something healthy about all of this. Traditionally you should now top your cream sauce with Gruyere, though I use whatever cheese I have on hand.  Today it was a slice of Monterey Jack with spicy peppers, and grated Parmesan.  Once you cover the top of your sandwich with cheese you can scoop a little more white sauce on top of that, then cover once more with cheese.  But zut alors, that is gilding the lily, and not at all necessary!  Slide the sandwich under the broiler for about 10 minutes until the white sauce is bubbling and the cheese has melted and darkened and your bread and meat are warmed all of the way through.  Serve with cornichons.  I ate a small cup of blueberries with my sandwich, too, because blueberries are a SuperFood and I thought they might counterbalance some of the wrongness of the Croque.

Here is the thing: You don't eat a Croque Monsieur for lunch when everything is going just swimmingly, when you are at the top of your game and you KNOW you'll write 5000 words that day, and they'll be good words, inspired words that will find their way into the novel that you are writing and you're just SO ON FIRE WITH IT THAT YOU'VE GOT TO GET BACK TO IT RIGHT NOW!!  You eat a Croque Monsieur when you've stared at your computer for 2 hours, tinkered with a paragraph, and are now trying to stop yourself from falling asleep at your desk. You eat a Croque Monsieur when your accountant calls to tell you that you're going to owe a little more in taxes than you previously thought. You eat a Croque Monsieur when you feel a sort of generalized sadness about things, though you know the sadness is unwarranted. You know if you were to make a list of all you are grateful for that list would be long.  But you don't feel like making that list.  You feel melancholy.  Which means you feel French.  Which means you should eat a Croque Monsieur.  

You shut down your computer, turn on the broiler, put the sandwich together.  Ten minutes later and you are hunkered over the plate.  With each bite you try to figure out why you like it so much.  You wonder if it was a nursery food for French children, the way grilled cheese was for you.  You think there's something primal about warm bread and gooey, melted things.   You think you are eating too quickly.  You think you had better add an extra fifteen minutes to your workout that night, but then you think, oh screw it.  Food shouldn't always be an intake/outtake calculation. Sometimes its purpose is simply that it is delicious and warm.

I spent the day in the apartment, writing. Which is a more gracious way of saying I did not leave the apartment--not once!--until 5:30 pm when I went to meet a friend at the park so her son could swing.  It's been so hot in New York lately that I expected it to be sweltering outside and so I dressed accordingly.  But there was a lovely breeze, and it could not have been more than 80 degrees. After my friend and I chatted while the baby swung for about 30 minutes (don't babies get dizzy?) I left with the intention of returning home.  Except it was so nice out I kept walking west, to Central Park.  I walked around the footpath at the Jackie Onassis Resevoir. The setting sun reflected pink off the buildings, and I felt so grateful to be in New York.  Except for the fact that I felt like an idiot walking around the reservoir. EVERYONE was running.  I didn't know if I should walk to the right or the left or in the middle or what.  All I knew was that every few seconds a stampede would come pounding behind me, and I would be transported back to high school, where the male track coach used to bark, "LANE! LANE!" when he and the boys came swooshing around the track.  We girls, even if we were running, were expected to get the hell out of their way.

Back home I poured myself a glass of A to Z rose-ay, and ate the rest of the potato salad.  That probably should have sufficed for dinner, but I felt obligated to eat a salad.  Glad I did.  The salad I fixed was good: arugula, pitted bing cherries, toasted walnuts, chunks of Gouda, and balsamic vinaigrette. Granted, the gouda was from a cut up Baby Bella, but it did the trick. Afterwards I watched 1/2 of Manhattan, but got too wierded out by Mariel and Woody's relationship. (She was 17 to his 42.)  The best part of the evening was eating half of a Michel Cluizel chocolate bar.  I like the milk chocolate bars best, though the snob in me wishes I liked the darker varieties. But Cluizel's milk has a 45 percent cocoa content, so it's plenty intense.And there is no way to describe the experience of eating it other than cliche: it melts in the mouth, leaving behind tiny little cocoa nibs.  It's really fabulous. Almost made Mariel and Woody easier to swallow.