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.

New routines and a cake recipe

I have met a hundred people this week and cannot remember anyone's name.  I gave thirty-eight cents to a homeless man and didn't look him in the eyes.  I think I am coming down with a cold, my body is achy.  I slept for fourteen hours and made biscuits in a skillet my sister got me for Christmas.  I haven't kissed anyone in ten days. This week has been distinctively marked for me.  One night, I had decaf coffee for dinner.  Another, a bowl of white rice.  My body doesn't need sustenance the way it used to.  Instead, I listen to the small taptaptap's of the dog in the apartment next to mine and that is enough for the night.  I have nightmares about bugs crawling in my mouth and on my skin and I take two showers a day, because I do not pay for water at my new place.  I am always thirsty and I cried reading an old poem I wrote to a boy once.  I notice my oven is gas range and I can smell it strongly when I first preheat it.  I am scared of the ice on the roads, of cancer, of losing the last vestiges of my good, good life that I had before I decided to pursue independence.

This week was my first week of my new job as an administrative manager for a hotel down in San Antonio.  Meeting upon meeting, I was told how I can improve the site, how many granola bars we need to order, how to increase revenue and profits for in the next quarter.   I saw the words, the business idioms, but they are hollow.  In the back of my head, i think about how all I want to do is write, bake, sleep.  When I get home, I look at the wilting flowers that stood erect a day before, and I trim them to be used later for decoration somewhere else.  Nothing can be wasted right now, everything preserved, so I don't have a reason to leave the house.  Eggs used for meringues will make a custard with the yolks.  Scrambled eggs, give the embryos to the stray dog that scratches at houses in search of leftovers.  I used old parchment paper as scratch paper, a quick drawing I did of a logo I want for packaging.  I used some lip balm on my cold and dry hands.  It's been raining here, cold at nights.  The space heater next to my bed runs and squeaks all night.  I am just not used to this sort of life yet.

But I have time to think now, to bake and to write.  I find inspiration in those half-dead and cut flowers.  They were beautiful in their youth and I wanted to lay them on a pillow of buttercream.  I put them on a vanilla cake,  poked their stems into the meringue, and served them to my employees in an effort to show I cared.  When I came home, the flowers had wilted, and my record player was still spinning from when I forgot to flip it over that morning.  Noiselessly, it ran and I laid down on my bed, mouthing the words to a song that wasn't playing.  It rained that night and in the morning there was ice, but at least I made something beautiful.  I have time for beauty now.

Vanilla Cake with Italian Meringue Buttercream

For the cake: Use Molly Yeh's Vanilla Cake recipe to make a two layer 8" cake

For the Italian Meringue Icing:

Ingredients:

• 1/2 cup sugar
• 1/8 cup water
• 3 egg whites, room temperature
• 1/2 teaspoon white vinegar
• 1/8 cup sugar
• 1 cup butter, room temperature and cut into tablespoons
• 1 1/2 teaspoon vanilla (alternatively, use any other extracts, floral essences, or zests --or coffee!--that you may want to try.  I just went with the basics here)

Directions:

1. In a mixer (i suggest stand mixer here, but that is not to say a hand mixer would not work), beat eggs with sugar until stiff peaks begin to form and the white triple or quadruple in volume.
2. Add vinegar to stabilize the meringue.  Add the vanilla.
3. Continue to beat.  Set aside while you work on the simple syrup
4. For the simple syrup necessary to cook the egg whites and create the meringue, Place 1/2 cup sugar and water into small saucepan and put on medium-high heat.  Be mindful that it does not start to burn, due to the small surface area of so little sugar and water
5. When the temperature on an instant read thermometer reaches 238 degrees Fahrenheit (or, if it becomes really tacky as it bubbles, or if you do the water drop test), the syrup is ready
6. Turn the mixer back on and slowly drizzle in the syrup, making sure to take your time.  Keep beating the mixture for a few minutes until it has cooled down (if you add the butter too soon after the hot simple syrup, you risk the butter just melting and clotting and your meringue to be oily)
7. Once the mixture is cool enough to touch (you can tell by touching the bowl), start adding the butter one tablespoon at a time.  Have the mixer on and make sure the last tablespoon is full incorporated before adding a new one.  It may start to curdle and separate as you add them, but it will reconstitute once it works into an emulsified state
8. When the last tablespoon of butter goes in, mix to incorporate and you should have a beautiful, not-too-sweet and silky buttercream that is elegant and simplistic.
9. Assembly:  As Molly's cakes cool, put on on the plate, add a layer of buttercream, put other cake on top.  Slather cake in buttercream, decorate, enjoy!

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...

  

Acoustics.

Fall has come in so acoustically, and it is all around me now.  I can see it most in the morning, when the rest of the world is asleep.  The dogs stretch their long limbs, widen their jaws into yawns.  They don't want to walk on the dew.  They want to sleep on the hand-stitched Navajo blanket in the morning.  The coffee comes in bursts of steam.  I wipe my glasses off with my sleeve.  I stand in my underwear at the new kitchen sink, head dipped over the last of the summer's peach. I tear it with my hands.  I feel most strong when it's quiet.  When the shower is scalding hot.  When the window is down but the heat is on.  When I can wear jeans around the house.  When our two bodies interlace at night, when I see the tan-lines faded.  When the birthmarks start to show.  When my palms and cheeks are red.  When it's late and you can only hear the occasional siren in the deep, deep distance of our new hometown.  And soon a quick inhale and his long, familiar snore drowns everything else out. I let the change happen, because it's been good to me.  I did not trust it at first, the change of adulthood.  I looked back on how many lives I have lived, and how many more I have ahead and realized that, for each, the impetus was a desire for difference.  I am lucky to feel the autumnal metamorphosis this year, because it is usually so stagnant in California.  I am lucky to live in this two-bedroom house. I am lucky to discover all the new things I'm learning to love these last few years.  I am lucky, I am lucky, I am very, very lucky.

This is not what I thought three weeks ago, buried in the bed.  Covered up, hidden from my own insecurities.  Afraid of my failures, not able to see my triumphs.  My father called me and I hung up mid-sentence.  Nolan kissed my hand and asked if I wanted to get ice cream.  I cried until I shuddered.  I was tired of owing any small amount of success to someone else, attributing each failure to my own misunderstanding of life and how it worked.   I did not feel powerful.  I did not wake up early and take a minute, recollect my thoughts, drink black coffee that fogged my lenses.

I locked the door and didn't let anyone in.  I incubated myself for three days.  I reminded myself to be happy, because sometimes you have to, because no one else will.

I turned 23 the next week.

I moved into a new house four days later.

And at each moment I discovered something new.  When the bruises began to turn purple, when I was most tender.  When I limped away, licked my wounds.  I found myself glad for the change.  Glad to be alive, to have my head above the water when it came to my debts.  Glad I recognized what I owed Nolan, happy to let myself be vulnerable so I could tell myself how stupid I was.  Happy to wake up before the sun, because the sun sleeps in late these days, to brew coffee and write a note to Nolan. "There's coffee waiting for you.  Have a good day."  I write it on paper I got in Belgium, a souvenir of who I was, written over as someone new.  I changed, I evolved.

I remind myself that my clothes aren't in trash bags anymore.  I remind myself that I never loved that drug dealer.  I remind myself that my father was right, that I was young and stupid and didn't appreciate a goddamn thing when I was 17.  All of those things are different now. I remind myself that I have lifetimes ahead of me, and that this one is just passing.  I remind myself that when I'm arthritic and can't hold anyone's hand, to be comforted in knowing that I let myself be vulnerable or a day or two.  I remind myself all of these things, because fall isn't a time for dying, it's a time for remembering.  That peacefulness of daybreak is all we have right now, and I couldn't lay in bed once I realized what a mistake I'd made.

I made this fudge to have in the moments when I felt strong, when the ripped up stone fruit couldn't satiate me.  I made it to feel comforted by the pecans, to savor the tang of the buttermilk.  It didn't feel like home, but it felt like nostalgia.

Pecan Buttermilk Fudge 

from Bon Appétit

Ingredients

• 1 cup pecans
• 2 cups sugar
• 1 cup buttermilk
• ½ cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, cut into pieces
• 1 tablespoon honey
• ⅛ teaspoon kosher salt
• Flaky sea salt (such as Maldon)

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350°. Line a 9x5” loaf pan with parchment paper, leaving a generous overhang on long sides; set aside.
2. Toast pecans on a rimmed baking sheet, tossing occasionally, until fragrant and slightly darkened in color, 8–10 minutes. Let cool, then coarsely chop.
3. Heat sugar, buttermilk, butter, honey, and kosher salt in a medium saucepan over medium-high heat, stirring occasionally, until butter and sugar are melted, about 3 minutes.
4. Fit saucepan with thermometer, bring mixture to a simmer and cook, stirring occasionally, until thermometer registers 238° (mixture will be pale golden and smell faintly of toffee), 6–8 minutes.
5. Immediately pour mixture into a medium bowl and, using an electric mixer on medium-high speed, beat until cool and thickened (it will be stiff and matte), 5–8 minutes.
6. Fold in pecans. Scrape fudge into prepared pan; smooth top and sprinkle with sea salt.
7. Let sit at least 1 hour before cutting into pieces.

Goodbye to Him

He was gone by Monday evening.  He was determined to die in his own way, and it's been understood by us all that it had to happen.  It's always inevitable, isn't it?  The way seasons come in confused rushes, the way you're never quite nostalgic enough to move back home.  He died on his bed with his family next to him, with his breathing heavy, then soft, then not at all.  He panted and looked my mother right in the eyes, probably apologizing.  Probably wanting her to hold him tight through it all.

My childhood dog died.  His name was Charlie, he passed away of natural causes.  He was fourteen and my family had him since I was nine.  Three months before my brother had cancer, a year before I started middle school, a decade before I left for college.  I thought he was a girl at first, so delicate and beautiful.  He was bought in the rain and was scared of the thunder.  He was special, different than our dog, Humphrey.  He was needy and my sister would dress him up in baby doll clothes.  She painted his nails.  He ate a library book and a hundred dollar bill once.  He had a developmental disorder where we had to baby-talk to him for years and years, so he felt safe and understood we loved him.  He had a scratch under his right eye where it always cried a little.  He was beautiful, strong.  He was afraid of the basement and never went in there.  Not even when there was a storm and the television said to go somewhere safe.  He refused, that stubborn dog.

He one time starved himself to bones when we left him at a kennel, when we went to Florida for a week.  We were charged $200 to fix the fence he broke trying to find us.

He one time starved himself when Humphrey died, too depressed to play ball.

He loved the snow and even when he was arthritic, he still jumped head-first into the first fall of December.

He was special, he was different.  He was delicate like a girl dog.  Beautiful in his own way.  He was blonde, he shed a lot.   He didn't know any tricks.  He was stubborn.  He was perfect the way all dogs are perfect and special the way the small quirks of age make you special.

He was home to me, but he had creaks in him, too.  He stumbled, he fell.  He growled if you touched him when he was sleeping.  He would kiss your hand, then ignore you.  He couldn't walk down steps, so they built him a ramp to go outside.  He couldn't walk up steps, so my parents moved their bedroom into the library on the first floor.  Every morning, my mom would walk him around our fenced-in yard, the whole circumference so Charlie could smell and hear and remember he was still loved.

He died in his sleep, he wanted it to happen.  He panted, then slowly let go.  He lived for fourteen years, and it was greedy to ask for any more.

My mother called me the other day and said she was lost in the mornings, with more free time.  She said she wasn't going to get anymore dogs.  She said they would move the bedroom back upstairs when it didn't hurt so bad.  She said she's waiting for a sign that he's happy now.  I asked her what the sign would be and she said it was too soon to know.  She'll know when she sees it.

I don't think the dreams I've been having are a sign that he's happy.  I keep dreaming he's in pain, that we had to make the choice ourselves.  I dream about being a senior in high school and holding onto Humphrey as we put him down.  I remember crying until I threw up.  And I wonder why I haven't cried this week.  Why Charlie was different.  I'm waiting for a sign now, too.  To know it's okay that I haven't cried yet.  And when that sign comes, I hope this dam inside me breaks.