15 Spectacles and a Pince-Nez

I've worn glasses since I lived in Kentucky, some odd 17 years ago.  I remember the exact day I couldn't read the board anymore.  My teacher thought I was lying, thought I was being dramatic, wanting attention.  I squinted until my tiny eyes were slits and I used to wear the same pair of matching sweats to school every day.  I wasn't able to see, to read, I got headaches when I tried.  And when we finally got glasses, we got them from the discount bin at Wal-mart.  Thirteen dollars and I wore them for two years, stretched the dollar and waited until I got headaches again and had to ask for new ones.  My mom thought I was being dramatic, wanting attention.  She misunderstood.

Every year for fifteen years I've gotten a new pair of glasses, trying to rediscover myself and see who I wanted to be.  I stopped wearing glasses and switched to contacts when I started growing facial hair.  I one time had a pair that were NASCAR brand.  I got Raybans before I moved to Italy and then left them at a barista's house that I was seeing for a week or two. Now, I wear glasses more for utility than anything else, when my eyes are tired, when I forgot to buy contact solution.  When I want to appear smart and older and wise.  It shows I've grown up, that I'm not dramatic, not wanting attention.

But the ritual is the same and my day revolved around my eyes.  Tired eyes, weak eyes.  I wake up and lay a hand on the nightstand, spider-crawling my fingers until I reach my frames.  I put them on bleary eyes, scratch my stomach, leg, head and yawn.  I put on an undershirt, thrown off at night because it restricted me, and trip over a dog, stumble to the kitchen.  My eyes adjust to the dark, then to the warm amber glow of the light above the sink.  I measure out the coffee grounds and pour the water, the formula is exact--never changing. It's all robotic, it's all ritual that I have grown to love.  Cherishing in the efforts I've made to make this place my home.  The glasses fog when I turn on the shower, and I sit on the shower floor to stay warm, still waking up.  Eyes all the more blurry.  I put contacts in, get ready.  Put eye drops in when I'm working on a spreadsheet, then come home and take my contacts out.  When I need to be sophisticated, when I need to relax and can sleep without redness.  And with attentive care, I lay them back on the nightstand, open and waiting for me in the morning.

The ritual has always been the same.  The ritual will probably never end.  And like a magpie, I have been collecting bits of who I used to be through my ever-growing glasses collection.  There are glasses that remind me that I used to drink tea, to seem intelligent.  Glasses that are the color of a wallet my mother once had.  Glasses my sister called me a fag in.  Glasses I lost my virginity in.  So many memories.  The ritual has always been the same, but the glasses have all become markers to my life.  I'm different each time I put a new pair on.  And each morning, each bleary morning, I'd like to think I'm a different person, too.

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...

  

Simple Homemade Noodles

It's Italy, 2010.  I stayed up before a midterm to make macaroni with a woman named Claire.  Her daughter was my classmate, her daughter was in a coma.  She flew all the way from Philadelphia to be with her, and said she was starving when she landed.  Everything was closed, so I helped her make mac and cheese.  It seems surreal now, to think the only way I knew to comfort her, a stranger, was to make such an American classic.  By the time we added the cheddar, her daughter could have been hemorrhaging.  But that's the beauty of it--how we ate the pasta out of the pot and she told me about her Christina.  How simple it all was.  How it distracted her, how we reverted to childhood staples and how she told me Christina would live and how lucky it was that the pope was only a mile away.  It was comfort food, and we both savored the moment in our own form of silence. She left one day without saying goodbye.  She lived on the other side of the convent I stayed at, on the nun's side.  Closer to the chapel.  She said it helped her sleep at night.  She dropped off almond cookies before she went, a note that said, "Thank you" and nothing else.  The script was curly, feminine, concise.  Not a single drop of ink was wasted, all of it conserved for future birthday cards for her dear, dear Christina.  I was just a replacement, and I was content in that knowledge.

But now, I am not content at all.  I am not content in this house with more square footage.  Not content to be making the money I make.  Not content in being lonely, or the fear of being lonely.  And in those efforts to feel normal, I make comfort food myself. I made a food to challenge myself, to know I could do it.  To thank the smaller gods, to have just one triumph in this haystack of a million failures.  Every cook has a dish they don't think they could make, couldn't muster the technique to create the magical. For some, it might be a soufflé.  My mother never thought she'd make caramel until she had to work after the recession in that "hell hole" town of ours.  For me, it was pasta.  It was a dish done right.  We had eggs and flour in that convent kitchen, but we both just knew how to boil water and add some cheese.  And if I could go back, I'd show that stranger how much I cared by making her a dish like this.  Simple, quiet in its own way, tender and soft like a scrawled "thank you."  Comfort food.

Simple Homemade Noodles

Ingredients:

• 3 cups all-purpose flour
• 6 whole eggs
• 1 teaspoon salt

Directions

1. In a bowl, measure and pour flour.  Use a wooden spoon and create a well in center
2. Crack eggs into well and stir with wooden spoon until starting to become crumbly
3. Turn out onto a floured working surface and, with floured hands, knead for several minutes until dough is a pale yellow, springy and firm.
4. Cut dough into 6 equal parts and flour work surface again, as well as rolling pin and dough
5. Roll equal section of cut dough as thin as possible, working from the center outwards.  When dough is at desired thickness and cannot extend any further, dust lightly with flour
6. Roll dough back into itself like a pinwheel, creating a tight chiffonade or cigar-shape
7. Cut off small strips of dough, place cut pieces onto a floured baking sheet
8. When complete, bring water to a boil and salt
9. Add pasta dough to boiling water and let boil for 2 minutes or until tender and just beyond al dente
10. Drain and serve with preferred sauce

(Of course, you can use a pasta maker.  Of course you can use these noodles for other things.  But it's so therapeutic and rewarding to know you made it by hand.  To know you have the luxury to create and learn and grow as a chef in every way you can think.  Be that person, and take it slow.  Make it by hand, eat it simple.  You won't regret how comforting it can be.)

 

Pestare.

Sometimes when you want to be alone, you have to find solitude in the crowd.  To watch the crows lined like gargoyles on the stoplight lit green, waiting for the cars to come, to swoop down and steal the children.  Watching the young crippled girl sing her lovely song, but no one leaves a dollar in the outstretched woven basket.  The vendors remind you of your nine-to-five, their chapped hands and grey-wrinkled eyes remind you of winter, of your mom, of home.  Each vendor has an antidote, each more conscious of buzzwords like "sustainability" than the last.  I find myself smelling small baskets of grape tomatoes, setting them down and promising to be back.  Going to the nearest ATM and paying a $3.25 surcharge to go back and buy those tomatoes.  Asking if they're heirloom, not knowing what that means exactly.  I find myself emboldened by the knowledge of a meal to come, the way it creeps into my mind like nerve-friction.  How I can sense something creative, and each greengrocer and fishmonger in Little Italy lays out the totems of inspiration.  I brush against a vendor selling caramel sauce, ask someone about culinary school.  He says he's against it, but I don't believe him for a second.  That night, I google Le Cordon Bleu tuition.  I help a seller sharpen a knife and say I'm partial to Japanese knives (I'm not).

I lied to everyone, said I'd come back before I left for eggs and ox and hummus.  I didn't.  I pretended.  It was free to pretend until I knew what I was looking for.  And I found it in the plastic bin like the kind my mother keeps Christmas ornaments in, hidden in the corner of a ruddy, earthen woman's stand.  She spoke no English.  I asked her how much the zanahorias were.  Two dollars.   I smiled and picked the most exotic of the root vegetables.  The ones that were twisted, mangled sensually.  The kinds that had curves and humps, small Venuses of Willendorfs in the crisper bin in the fridge.  Purple, orange, and tan, the color of spider veins.  The color of the earths.

I picked up bread, cheese.  Green beans and sea salt.  I picked it up and carried it home in a brown paper bag.  I felt legitimized by my purchases and want to keep my promise to the farmer, that I'll come back in April when he'll have quail eggs for me.  But, until then, I'll keep making this verdant green pesto, and I'll welcome Spring with open arms.

Carrot Greens Pesto

Ingredients:

• 1 clove garlic
• 1/4 cup almonds (dry toasted in skillet for five minutes)
• 2 cup carrot greens
• Scant 3/4 light olive oil
• 1/4 cup freshly-grated parmesan

Directions:

1. Put almonds in a skillet and toast over medium heat for about five minutes until begin to brown and become fragrant
2. In a food processor, process almonds and garlic until finely ground
3. Add greens and pulse for two minutes, or until a paste forms
4. Add parmesan, pulse until incorporated
5. While the motor is running, slowly pour oil into feeding tube and continue to run until full incorporated
6. Store in container for at least two hours for flavors to incorporate, use as you would basil-based pesto

Fall Galette - Persimmons and Rosemary

The word rustic is used a lot, and authenticity is faltering.  I think it would be disingenuous to call this a "rustic pie" in my black-and-white tiled, sun-dappled kitchen in California.  Rustic, to me, means the antique shop in my Pennsylvania town that takes up half a block.  The one that had a bakery and sold clam chowder out of season.  The one that caught fire and the landlord fed the first responders pizza and Coke when they were done.  This is a place where price tags are handwritten, negotiable.  A place where there is no kitsch in the idea of the "country craft".   Rustic is authentic, in my part of the country.  I'm on rented land in California, this isn't mine at all.  So, for authenticity's sake, I'll call this by its French name.  A galette. This galette is fresh, light, crisp around the edges. It is sturdy and autumnal in ingredients and gesture.  Let it be a reason to celebrate, let it be a reason to go to the farmer's market and buy 20 bruised and shiny persimmons for $3.  Let it be fall, even in the 80 degree noontime heat.  Let it be fall, because it's those last few moments of the autumn harvest that always seem to count the most, the kinds you try to remember and collect like lightning bugs in that old Mason jar of sentimentality.

Rosemary and Persimmons Galette 

Ingredients:

For the pie crust:

• 1 cup flour
• 3 TB packed brown sugar
• 1/2 TB finely chopped rosemary (more if desired)
• 1/4 teaspoon salt (I used a little more smoked salt for some depth to the mineral)
• 1 stick cold, unsalted butter, cut into cubes
• 2 TB ice water
• 1 egg, beaten (for egg wash)

For the filling:

• 4 small or 2 large persimmons
• 2 TB packed brown sugar
• 1/4 cup ground almonds
• 1/4 cup quick oats
• Zest of one clementine, or 1 TB orange zest
• 1 TB lemon zest
• Pinch of sea salt
• 1 TB clover honey
• 1 teaspoon orange blossom water
• 1 teaspoon vanilla

Directions:

1. For the dough: In a food processor, pulse flour, brown sugar, salt, and rosemary together until mixed (5-6 pulses)
2. Add butter, pulse until dry mixture resembles coarse meal with pea-sized bits of butter throughout
3. While processor is running, pour in ice water into feeding tube
4. Keep motor running until a ball just forms, turn dough out onto a lightly flours board
5. Wrap and refrigerate for 45 mins to an hour
6. While dough is resting, preheat oven to 450 degrees and prepare a baking sheet with parchment paper.
7. To start on the filling: Simply combine all ingredients for persimmons filling into a mixing bowl, gently stir them together with a wooden spoon, and allow to rest and macerate while dough is in the refrigerator
8. When dough is ready, place directly on parchment paper and use a floured rolling pin to roll into a circle, about 1/3 inch thick
9. Spoon filling mixture into center of circle and spread evenly, leaving about a 1-inch margin
10. Fold edges inward and over one another to keep center in.  Seal edges and brush with egg wash add a little finishing salt on the edges for some flavor
11. Bake for 20 minutes or until crust is golden and filling is bubbling
12. Allow to cool.  Serve plain, with vanilla ice cream and peppercorns, or with cream cheese mousse (below)

Cream Cheese Mousse

Ingredients:

• Package of 8 oz cream cheese
• 2 TB softened butter
• 1/2 cup confectioner's sugar
• 1/2 cup heavy whipping cream
• 1 TS orange zest
• 1/2 TS cinnamon
• 1/2 TS allspice
• 1/2 TS nutmeg
• Pinch of salt

Directions:

1. Cream butter, cheese, and sugar together in a large mixing bowl, set aside
2. Whip the cream until peaks form, mix into the cream cheese mixture, first by stirring in a small amount with a rubber spatula and then combining in halves
3. Add all remaining spices
4. Refrigerate for half an hour, add as a dollop to galette slices