Ice Cream in the Wintertime

I've gotten used to microwaving water for tea and never having to tell a single person what I'm thinking.  I slept for fifteen hours yesterday, my body exhausted from the flu, and no one would ever have known if I didn't tell people.  For pity, for a connection to someone else.  I've become this different person, a liminal character between two worlds--the moorish memories of California, the Shangri-La future of central Texas.  If the sun hits me at noon, my fingertips become smoke rings, I float away into my own imagination.  I never have to tell a single person what I'm thinking. Last week, I stopped by a Salvation Army and looked for an ice cream scoop.  I wanted an old one, one that looked rustic and used.  One that survived birthday parties and anniversaries, graduation parties and the Y2K scare.  I found a chipped crock and an Ace of Base CD instead.  I forgot my wallet in the car and felt oddly embarrassed, oddly unsure of myself, self-conscious of my windowshopping.  I went back out to the car and noticed how few parking spots there were for how many customers the store had.  It confused me, how people got there.  I left without buying anything.

The reason I needed the ice cream scoop is because I was determined to make ice cream.  Chantilly Meringuèe, to be exact.  I was given twenty-two eggs from a coworker whose fridge was overflowing with them.  So many delicate egg whites, cracked open on the sides of mixing bowls and countertops.  My fascination with the egg white's transformation was last seen with the Italian Meringue Buttercream, but I wanted to take it one step further.  Because, egg whites, too, are so liminal.  So between-worlds.  Too viscous for liquid, too amorphous for a solid.  The more air you incorporate, the more velveteen and shapely it becomes.

I wanted to see this transformation, I wanted to feel as though my sublimated body could border-cross the way this dessert did.  I wanted to create magic without the unnecessary equipment of an ice cream maker.  I wanted something cold on my tongue, the sharp bite of winter melting in my mouth.  I wanted to feel alive this week, after sleeping for fifteen hours and only speaking when I needed something.  I wanted to feel like a kid again, taking change from my pocket and buying ice cream across the street from my school, at a place called Shaffer's Snack Shack.  I wanted to share this recipe with you.

Giving Thanks.

The theme this year was burlap and wheat.  Tactile, scratchy.  It irritated the skin, the colors were mute.  The vase full of weeds and blooms were foraged on the morning walk.  There were sprigs of rosemary in jars, next to the salt.  For garnish and for earthiness.  For authenticity, for aromatics.  Rosemary steeped in hot water can speed recovery.  I think we can all use a little of that.  The table was beautiful, simple and connected.  It was crowded.  The windless day would sigh a breeze, and the grapevine would rustle slightly.  It was alive.  Every moment was electric in that brick and mortar kitchen.  We ate outside. It's hard to reflect, I get lost in my thoughts.  i'm like Narcissus, lost in that reflection.  Thanksgiving is hard for me, it seems silly sometimes.  I never appreciated my parents; I still don't, fully.  When I was young, my mother would stay in her bathrobe until three, when the turkey was done, and she'd change into jeans and a black sweater.  Every year.  Every year, it was her formalware.  She cooked for seven hours, we'd be done in twenty minutes.  Never appreciated.  No one ever thanked her for her meal.  No one ever told her she was beautiful.  She told me she wore her pearls this Thanksgiving, the ones I got her last year.  The ones I bought in June, waiting, anticipating, happy to make her feel special.  And she did.  I am thankful she wore them, thankful she smiled as she clasp them around her neck, feeling beautiful and not having to cook for three ungrateful children.

I am thankful for my father, who tells me every day he loves me.  I reflect on the Thanksgiving I called him from Italy and told him he needed to send me more money.  He said the banks were closed and I hung up.  I ignored his emailing until I saw my bank account.  I'm thankful he was patient, patient in a way I know I couldn't be.  He loves me more than I realize.  It's jarring when you realize how one-sided that love is.  I'm thankful he's waiting for me to catch up, to appreciate him.  Appreciate the times he took me to school.  Every morning he'd buy me coffee and ask me about my day.  Most mornings, I was too asleep and too annoyed to answer back much.  Now, I want to go to the Legion and drink a beer with him.  Ask him how his life is.  Tell him I'm growing up and I love him, too.

I'm thankful.  I'm reflecting on this.  I was called ungrateful more than once in my youth, and I don't want to be that same asshole anymore.  I try to say thank you for everything.  It's difficult sometimes.  When you feel so deserving of love, and you still have to stop and realize that someone is willingly letting you have it.  Nothing is for free.  I've given it my all this year.

There were five of us for Thanksgiving, and I cooked for everyone.  I did it out of love, as a challenge to see if I could.  I wrote it all down on paper and used our neighbor's oven as a back-up.  I roasted vegetables and thought about terms like umami and emulsify.  I've grown a lot as a cook, and today I wrote down all the things I could do with pasta.  I've seen a change in me, and I like it.  I'm thankful for that.

And I'm thankful for friends.  I grew up lonely, and it's a human condition I can't shake.  I laughed with friends and called more that evening, we made dinner and I wrote little Thank-You cards, totems of gratitude for sticking around.  Sometimes I can be desperate, I'm always playing aloof and then begging for love.  But we ate around candlelight, drank the red when we ran out of white, and created a small family that night, and I'm thankful for that trust.

Thanksgiving is not the hand-traced turkey holiday of my childhood, it's not that line drawn in the proverbial sand between autumn and "The Holiday Season" where it's more appropriate to have a Christmas tree up.  It's is living, breathing, steeping yourself in that gratitude and calling your parents, saying you love them.  Saying you'll change every year a little bit and love them forever.  Loving everything a little harder next year.  Nothing is for free.  I've given it my all this year.

Here are some pictures of the table and our guests...

  

A Church Potluck Favorite: "Pretzel Salad"

I grew up hungry.  There wasn't a lot of food in the pantry, there wasn't a lot of time for love.  I grew up "working class" and was raised by my siblings, because my parents worked so much. When they got home from the odd jobs they worked, they'd put Spaghetti-o's on the table and tried to get me to drink milk more.  It was my sister who taught me to tie my shoes, frustrated one morning when I didn't want to go to kindergarten, the laces trailing behind me and tears welling in my eyes.  I already felt like a failure at six years old.  She grabbed my laces and taught me with patience, we got on the bus and she held my hand until I calmed down.  A lot has changed between us, and that's the last time we were tender to each other.  A lot has changed, but I still get worked up so easily. I grew up poor.  I grew up poor and I didn't even know it.   I grew up poor and knew no other way.  I grew up poor when my parents worked four jobs and resented them years later for being too tired to listen to my day, my stories, my dreams of being a famous writer and never seeing them again.  I grew up poor and never helped my mom around the house.  When she needed it most.  When she was so exhausted, she'd fall asleep at the dinner table.  When she wasn't herself for so many years, fighting the good fight.  She worked in a freezer once, in a grocery warehouse. My dad took a job once stuffing coupons into newspapers. They did it for us.  They tried to make ends meet, to tie my laces and keep me young.  All of this in Kentucky, where my brother stepped on a nail and he didn't want to tell our parents, in case it cost too much to fix.  I asked him about it while I was in North Carolina in June.  He still has the scar, and I still have the memory of the sacrifices everyone made, and how I was happy to be too young to understand them all.

One thing I was kept young about was food and levels of flavor until I had moved out of rural Pennsylvania and into Pittsburgh (arguably, still rural Pennsylvania).  Until then, I only knew about cake layers, pizza toppings, adding a little more cream to my coffee and calling it something French--I called that cooking.  I didn't know herbs existed in their green state, or that anything you saw at through the smudged bakery glass could be made at home.  I didn't know a lot of things, because my mother fed a family of five on a dollar-store budget.

We come from Indiana low-country, an often underrepresented class that subsists itself on eggs covered in ketchup, twenty-year grudges, and first marriages that never seem to stick.  It's a place where you can drive for twenty miles and still see the same rain cloud in the distance.  A place where they get fresh water from a water tower, painted light blue and where kids climb to make out and smoke weed.  It's a place with a Dairy Queen and two cemeteries: the Catholic graveyard and the Baptist graveyard.  A place where the elasticity of money means being creative, stocking a deepfreeze in the garage with bulk cuts of meat, and eating more preservatives than maybe a neighboring longitudinal town.  It means knowing what tastes good and sharing it with your family of five, putting a little extra in the brown paper lunches you pack when the school's get too expensive.

It's comfort food without the luxury of Southern heaviness--no buttermilk or animal fats.  Too expensive.  We budgeted with Crisco, Velveeta, and Great Value-brand butter, saving bacon fat in a mason jar by the stove for Sunday morning donuts.  Everything was saved, everything reconfigured instead of throwing it out.  I assume that's how this dessert was made.  Some cream cheese was going beyond the saving point, some pretzels were stale.  A woman no different than my mother--working class and a mother of three--layered and baked whatever she had on hand, set and cooled the product of her labor in the fridge.  She told her friends who told her friends, who went to church and share it at potlucks.  It was made cheaper with Jell-o, made easier with Cool Whip.  It was adapted and streamlined for economy, using barely any heat and barely any ingredients.  And once my mother got the recipe, it became a staple in our house.  "Pretzel Salad" it's called.  It's a working-class answer to the cheesecake, simple and sturdy and tart how you like it.  It sweet enough to balance out all the salt-of-the-earth people I've met throughout my life, reminding me who I really am and where I really come from.

Strawberry and Pretzel Pie (Pretzel Salad)

Ingredients:

For the crust:

• 2 cups finely-crushed pretzels (to the point of coarse meal or flour)
• 1/3 cup firmly-packed brown sugar (light or dark--I preferred the stronger molasses in dark)
• 3/4 cup + 1 tb melted butter

For the cream cheese filling:

• 1 package cream cheese, room temperature
• 1/2 - 3/4 cup sugar (your preference.  More tart means less sugar)
• 1/2 cup Greek yogurt, sour cream, or plain yogurt (up the sugar if using the former two options, so it isn't overwhelming)
• 2 teaspoon vanilla (optional)

Strawberry layer:

• 1 quart strawberries, hulled and smashed
• 1 cup sugar
• 1/2 lemon, zest and juice
• A slurry of 3/4 cup water and 3 TB cornstarch

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 350 and prepare a 9-inch pie plate with butter and parchment paper the bottom (optional)
2. On the stovetop, melt butter gradually and set aside.
3. In a food processor, pulse pretzels and brown sugar together until you get the consistency of corn meal or flour.
4. In a mixing bowl, combine two cups of the dry pretzel mixture with the melted butter.  Stir with a wooden spoon until just combined, then pat wetted pretzel into the prepared pie plate, molding into the plate to form a consistent thickness and even layering around whole pan
5. Bake for 10-12 minutes or until browned
6. Set aside and allow to cool to the touch, about half an hour
7. While crust is cooling, get a large mixing bowl and whip cream cheese and 1 cup sugar together until peaks begin to form.  Soften these peaks by adding your yogurt or cream and blend until the consistency of very stiff meringue, but still easily spreadable.  Add vanilla,  if using.  (This step doesn't take an awful long time, so if your pie crust is still not cool yet, now would be a good time to hull and smash your pint of strawberries, if you aren't following the mise en place philosophy)
8. Use a rubber spatula and mix cream cheese mixture by hand for a couple rotations to ensure all ingredients are mixed properly, then pour over cooled pie crust.  Distribute mixture over crust and transfer to fridge to cool further and solidify filling for about half an hour.
9. While pie is in the fridge, combine strawberries and 1 cup sugar and heat on medium-high to promote maceration.  Stirring every so often, bring to a boil.  Berries will continue to release their juices.
10. Add the zest and juice of half of a lemon, stir.  Bring to a boil.
11. Add cornstarch slurry and reduce heat
12. Simmer until thickened into a jam-like consistency
13. Remove from heat, mixture will continue to thicken as it cools
14. When cool to the touch, pour and spread mixture on top of cream cheese layer of pie.
15. Return to refrigerator and allow to completely set for no less than one hour.
16. Enjoy!

Enjoy another taste of my memories, because I'm sure they're your memories, too.

Le premier anniversaire de chien.

He's one-year-old today.

He's one and I'm twenty-two, and I'll have this dog all throughout my twenties.  It comforts me to think of commitment and unconditionally loving something that's not my own ego.  A dog is a great companion for people like me, for people who have jaded views on the need for friendships and loves to be needed constantly, incessantly, selflessly.

Nolan and I adopted Murphy when it was probably a dark time for us.  We had just transplanted our humble life of studio-living in ramshackle circumstances, the metallic taste of grudges still fresh on our tongues, and we wanted something to bond us together again. Before it was California, and before we tired of that manifest destiny sort of dream, it was just simple--sex or food in Pittsburgh.  We moved into our current house and I remember the exact moment I came across Murphy's picture.  I was staying for a week in a La Quinta off Harbor Boulevard in Orange County, taking the rest of my law exams for my 1L year.  He was on Craigslist and I was on a comforter that was orange and scratchy.  I got him after my Contracts exam in an Korean community in Los Angeles County.  I gave the owners some extra money for food.  They were poor, Hispanic, and fed Murphy crushed-up, watered-down dog food.

He was inquisitive and cautious since birth.  Energetic at the promise of a walk, a newfound spot to pee, a friend to make, or a kiss from "daddy" or "papa".  It is not a hyperbole to say he has been a blessing and an angel to me.  I was unemployed for six months and he was a reason to still wake up at seven every morning to take him out for his morning ritual (sniff around the mulch, avoid the sprinklers, and squat to pee, his eyes closed in the morning light).  It was a period of bohemian, relaxed self-reflection that involved becoming a caretaker to a child, really.  I considered myself a father and told Murphy my secrets when we were alone.  He's grown into the perfect dog.  Obedient and loving, careful and curious.  He's everything you want in a child, and I brag about him often.

He's the only picture I have in my cubicle at work.  It's when his hair was still shaggy and you see him in all his emotional ranges.

I baked him dog treats and a cake until eleven at night (recipes below).  I wrapped up a sock monkey that we named Pete.  We took him to the park and to lunch, a walk and a nap.  I kissed him a few more times than usual and even wrote him a card.  I sometimes wonder if I do it for myself or for him and how much he recognizes as gestures of love.

Then I wonder, as most children do when they grow up, if my mother ever thought this way about me.  If I ever really appreciated the post-it notes stuck to my car, saying, "Have a good day."  I hope so.

Two-ingredient Dog Treats

Ingredients:

• 2 4-ounce jars of baby food (I used carrot x banana for one combination and turkey dinner x sweet potato for another)
• 2 cups whole-wheat flour (I caution using this much, as I had excess flour.  Start with one and a half cups and add more until it forms a dough)

Directions:

• Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit and prep a baking sheet with parchment paper.
• Mix baby food and flour together in large bowl.
• Once well-incorporated, turn onto lightly-floured surface as it begins to form into a workable dough.
• Roll to desired thickness with rolling pin; or, alternatively, pat to desired thickness (hey, they're dogs--they won't know the difference!)
• Cut into desired shapes.  I happened to have bone and heart shapes to work with.
• Bake in oven for 20-25 minutes, until harden.
• Let cool before serving to your dog.

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Doggy Birthday Cake

Ingredients:

• 1/2 cup whole-wheat flour
• 1 Teaspoon baking powder
• 1/3 cup canola oil
• 1/3 cup apple sauce
• 1 egg
• 2 Tablespoons honey

Directions:

• Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.
• Prep small ramekin for cake.  (Alternatively, this could make two cupcakes.  I, in fact, used these handy baking cups from the Container Store and it was perfect for the festivities and utility.)
• Mix all ingredients together until well-combined.  Batter will be fairly runny but consistent.
• Pour into prepared bakeware.
• Bake 10-12 minutes (or longer.  Mine took 25 minutes) until a toothpick comes out clean.
• Allow to cool.