A Homemade Life (13 page)

Bake the pie for 30 minutes at 425°F. Then reduce the temperature to 375°F and continue to bake until the top is a deep shade of gold, about 10 minutes. If you're using a clear Pyrex pie plate, lift the pie and look underneath to check the color of the bottom and sides: you want them to be golden, too. If the pie seems to be browning too quickly, tent it with aluminum foil.

Transfer to a wire rack to cool completely. Serve at room temperature, with lightly sweetened whipped cream.

 

NOTE:
Barbara tells me that she has occasionally thrown in a handful of dried cranberries as well, in addition to the dried fruits listed here. If you have some lying around, you might consider that.

 

Yield: 8 to 12 servings

RUM CREAM PIE WITH GRAHAM CRACKER CRUST

Adapted from David and Pam Fleischaker

y
ou can use a store-bought graham cracker crust, but the flavor of a homemade one is much better.

FOR THE CRUST

9 graham crackers, broken coarsely into pieces

2 tablespoons granulated sugar

5 tablespoons (2½ ounces) unsalted butter, melted and kept warm

FOR THE FILLING

¼ cup cold water

1 ¼ teaspoons (about half of a ¼-ounce packet) unflavored gelatin

1 cup heavy cream

3 large egg yolks

½ cup granulated sugar

2 tablespoons rum, preferably dark

Bittersweet chocolate, shaved or finely chopped

Pistachios, finely chopped

 

Preheat the oven to 325°F.

To make the crust, process the graham crackers in a food processor until they are very fine, about 30 seconds. Add the sugar and pulse to combine. With the processor running, add the melted butter in a thin stream. Process until the mixture looks like wet sand. Scrape it into a 9-or 9½-inch pie plate and press it along the bottom and up the sides, forming an even crust. (It can be tricky to make the sides smooth and square off the top edge, but here's a method that helps: rest your thumb along the lip of the pie plate to form a ledge, and then use a small ramekin to press the crumb mixture up the side, pinching it at the top between your thumb and the ramekin.) Bake the crust until it is fragrant and just beginning to brown, 15 minutes. Transfer to a wire rack and cool completely before filling.

To make the filling, pour the cold water into a small, microwavable bowl. Sprinkle the gelatin over the water. Set aside to soften for a few minutes; it will get thick and spongy. Meanwhile, pour the cream into the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the whisk attachment (or any large bowl, if you plan to use electric beaters), and set aside. In a separate medium bowl, whisk the egg yolks until they lighten to pale yellow. Add the sugar and whisk well; it will be thick. Microwave the gelatin on high power for about 20 seconds, until liquefied, then pour it gradually into the egg mixture, whisking briskly. Working quickly, whip the cream to soft peaks. (It's important not to dally here, or else the gelatin will start to set, and you don't want that yet.) Gently stir the whipped cream into the egg mixture, taking care to blend them thoroughly. Add the rum, stirring gently to incorporate. Chill the filling until it starts to set: it's ready when it holds a delicate mound when nudged with a spoon.

Scrape the filling into the prepared crust. Chill until firm, 4 to 6 hours. Just before serving, sprinkle the top of the pie with a light dusting of chocolate and pistachios.

 

Yield: 8 servings

M
y ex-boyfriend Lucas liked a band called Dirty Three. I was always fond of that name, especially for a kind of melancholic, unshaven trio, which is what they are, but they had an album title that was even better. It was called
Whatever You Love, You Are.
Isn't that perfect? That album title is probably a good part of why we got together—he told me about it on our first date—but I figure it's as valid a reason as any. I mean, think about it: whatever you love, you are. I want to believe in that.

I think about it a lot when I remember those weeks after my father died. More than anyone else I know, he was what he loved. He went after his life with both hands. He swallowed it in gulps, right up to the second they took the plate away. He never apologized, not even when I wanted him to—not for being stubborn, not for the silent treatment, not for leaving us behind. He did what he did, and he was what he was. For his memorial service, he wanted an Episcopal priest, a Catholic priest, and a rabbi. It was so weird and perfect. It wasn't so much that he really believed in any religion, I don't think, but more because he loved little bits of all of them. He
was
a little bit of all of them.

I wish you could have seen that service. We held it at All Souls Episcopal Church in Oklahoma City, and more than five hundred people came. They filled the place like football fans at a bowl game.
They filled the pews from front to back, and then they stood along the walls and in the foyer. My family processed down the aisle, twenty-seven of us in all. I wore my favorite pair of fishnet stockings. My mother wore four-inch heels. We did the best we could. It was a cold, sunny day, very clear, and afterward, when the church bells rang as we filed out the doors, the air almost shook with the sound.

The service was led by an Episcopal bishop named Shannon Mallory, a family friend who my father had, in those last weeks, named his “holy man.” That he even had a holy man is hilarious—a contradiction in terms, really, since I never once saw him go to church or synagogue, and he didn't even believe in global warming, much less Jesus Christ. But Shannon was a former patient, one of the ones my father cured, and over the years, a friendship had grown between the two of them. They'd even traveled to Israel and Jordan together once, when Shannon led a tour. When Burg was sick, Shannon came by every few days, and the two of them would tell dirty jokes while Shannon drank Scotch. At the end of each visit, he would ask my father if he wanted to pray. I'd never seen my father pray before. But he would close his eyes, and then Shannon would lean over the bed, whispering softly, one hand on the crown of my father's head, their noses nearly touching.

I've been to memorial services where no one seemed to want to talk about the person who'd died, where he or she was sort of abstracted, reduced to general descriptors like “caring,” or “kind,” or “beloved.” I wanted to talk about him. I wanted us all to talk about him. I wanted to remember how he laughed, half-gasp and half-gag; how he loved raspberries and osso buco; how he liked to read Gary Larson cartoons and had infinite patience for
A Prairie Home Companion.
I wanted to have him there with us, just for a few minutes.

So Shannon wore his robes and stood at the pulpit, talking and telling stories in his familiar, gentle voice. My siblings and I each stood up and spoke. Shannon's backup singers, as I privately thought of the priest and the rabbi, were okay, too; just right, really. The priest, like Shannon, was a former patient, but he and my father didn't know each other all that well. It was a little strange to have him there, but even that
strangeness seemed fitting. Everything that had happened that fall was strange. The rabbi, for his part, didn't know my father from Adam. He even mispronounced his name during the service, referring to him as “Maurice” instead of “Morris.” But that was okay, too. My father hadn't been much of a Jew for the past fifty years, so it was only appropriate that the rabbi fudge his name.

For my part, I chose a poem called “Yes, But” by James Wright, an American poet who died in 1980 after a short but intense battle with cancer, like Burg. The year before his death, Wright spent nine months traveling in Europe with his wife, waking up early to write poems. I think Burg would have liked to do that, too, if he'd had more time. He'd have eaten his weight in croissants. He would have also liked the fact that Wright's poem allowed me to say “making love” in a church in Bible-belted Oklahoma. I can almost hear him laughing now.

 

When I went back to Seattle, I enrolled in a grieving group at one of the local hospitals. It met every other Saturday from ten to noon. I was the youngest person in the group by a good twenty years, and I cried the hardest by far. I had the Kleenex box on lockdown.

The whole time is a blur, to be honest. The only part I remember is the baking. Those Saturday mornings, I would get up early and bake. First it was brownies, and then some kind of cookie. I remember buying strawberries, too, and making tiny fluted tartlets, vanilla bean pastry cream spooned into shells and topped with wedges of strawberry. I even made soup once, a pot of Italian vegetable soup with white beans, and forced my fellow group members to sip it from Dixie cups at ten o'clock in the morning. Someone should have had
me
on lockdown. When I called my mother to tell her, she laughed so hard that she actually hooted like an owl. My eyes were swollen from crying all the time, but I was the Official Grieving Group Food Pusher. I am
so
my father's daughter. Whatever you love, oh yes, you are.

ED FRETWELL SOUP

w
hen my father was sick, Ed Fretwell, Barbara's husband, brought us a pot of this soup. It was full of Swiss chard and carrots and plump beans, hearty and reassuring, one of the best soups I'd ever had. When the first batch was gone, we called to ask for more, and Ed delivered it the next day. He and Barbara had first tasted it, he told me, on a trip to Italy in the late 1990s, when it was served to them at a winery as a light lunch. They were so smitten that they asked for the recipe. It is best described as an Italian vegetable soup, but I call it Ed Fretwell Soup. Ed died a couple of years ago, and it feels good to remember him this way.

For the white beans, I highly recommend Rancho Gordo (www.ranchogordo.com), a California company specializing in heirloom bean varieties. I know it seems fussy to order beans by mail, but it's worth it. Their marrow beans (nothing to do with bone marrow; don't worry) are especially wonderful in this soup.

And a word about broth: I find that most commercial vegetable broths have a strange, too-strong flavor. So far, there is only one that I like: the “No-Chicken Broth” made by Imagine. But whatever you choose, be sure to taste it before you use it. If you don't like the flavor, make your own, or use water.

Last, note that this recipe makes a
lot
of soup. If you don't have a large soup pot—say, 8 quarts or even 12 quarts—I suggest halving the recipe.

 

1 pound dried white beans, such as cannellini or marrow beans

2 large cloves garlic, peeled and smashed under the side of a knife

3 fresh sage leaves

Water

4 tablespoons olive oil

2 medium yellow onions, finely chopped

4 stalks celery, finely chopped

8 medium carrots, sliced into thin rounds

2 medium zucchini, trimmed, halved lengthwise, and sliced into ¼-inch-thick half-moons

4 cups vegetable or chicken broth

¾ pound Swiss chard (about 1 small bunch), stalks discarded and leaves coarsely chopped

¾ pound green cabbage (about ½ of a medium head), trimmed and coarsely chopped

One 28-ounce can whole peeled tomatoes, drained and chopped

1 tablespoon salt

Best-quality olive oil, for serving

Finely grated Parmigiano-Reggiano, for serving (optional)

 

Put the beans in a medium bowl, and cover them with cool water by at least 1 inch. Set aside at room temperature, uncovered, for 6 hours or overnight.

Drain the beans, and put them in a Dutch oven or other (approximately 5-quart) pot. Add the garlic, sage leaves, and 10 cups cold water. The beans should be covered with water by at least 1 inch. Place the pot over high heat, and bring it to a boil. Boil for 5 minutes, then reduce to a simmer and cook, uncovered, stirring occasionally, for about 1 hour. Skim away any brownish foam that rises to the surface.

While the beans cook, start the rest of the soup. In a large (8-quart or more) soup pot, warm the olive oil over medium heat. Add the onions, celery, and carrots and cook, stirring frequently, for 10 to 15 minutes. Add the zucchini and broth, increase the heat to medium-high, and bring to a simmer. Then add the Swiss chard, cabbage, and tomatoes, cover the pot, and simmer gently, adjusting the heat as necessary, for 1 hour. At first, it will seem as though there is far too little liquid for
all the vegetables in the pot, but don't worry: the vegetables will give off a good amount of water as they cook, and it'll even out in the end.

After 1 hour, add the cooked beans and their cooking water, discarding the sage leaves. Add the salt and stir well. Simmer for another 30 minutes to 1 hour, stirring frequently, until the beans and vegetables are very tender and the broth has taken on a creamy pale orange hue. Taste, and add salt as needed.

Serve with a hearty glug of good olive oil over the top of each bowl and a dusting of Parmigiano-Reggiano, if you like.

 

NOTE:
Refrigerated, this soup will keep for up to a week, and it gets better with each passing day. It also freezes nicely.

 

Yield: 10 to 12 servings

I
remember saying to people, during that year that I lived alone in Paris, that the city felt like my second home. It was a plain enough thing to say, but in retrospect, it seems odd that I should have said it, since I hardly even know where my first home is. I guess it's Oklahoma, technically, but that never seemed quite right. My parents were from the East Coast, and they never really thought of themselves as Oklahomans, so I didn't either. I was raised to know that I would leave, and that, in fact, I was supposed to. It never occurred to me to stay.

I think that's why I'm such a sucker for the Bruce Springsteen album Born to Run. Swap out Springsteen's motorcycle and the backstreets of mid-seventies New Jersey for an airplane and mid-nineties Oklahoma, and you've got me. Mine is not quite so sexy a story—no chrome wheels or wind in my hair—but you get the idea. Six days after my nineteenth birthday, I was gone. I spent the next four years in college in California, with a stint in Paris in the middle. Then, when college was through, there was Paris again. I'm still not sure where home is. It might be Seattle, though I can't be certain. My second home, though, is always the same. Paris.

There's been so much said and written about Paris that it's daunting to hazard a statement of my own. That city just has something. I
can't think of any other place so idealized, so longed for, so sighed over. My Paris isn't always such a sweet one, with kisses à la Doisneau on every street corner, but I like it better that way. It's the place where I've been loneliest, and where I've been happiest. Sometimes I've been both at the same time. It's where my father introduced me to croissants and
pain au chocolat
. It's where I met my first love, and where, six weeks later, when he stopped calling, I sat on a bench at the Champ de Mars and filled an entire Kleenex mini-pack with my snot and tears. It's a place where even crying feels romantic somehow, where heartbreak makes you feel like a part of history. It's who and where, for a long time, I wanted to be.

Whenever I don't know what to do, Paris is where I've gone. I guess it shouldn't have surprised me to find myself there in the summer of 2004. When my father died, everyone told me the same thing:
Don't make any big decisions for the first year and a half. Don't change anything. Just get through it.
Not knowing what else to do, I obeyed. I went back to Seattle. I went back to school. But every time I thought about the years that lay ahead, the dissertation and the defense, my eyes glazed over. I was on track to be a cultural anthropologist, but I hardly knew what for. I didn't want to teach. I wasn't even sure I was interested in anthropology. What I was really interested in, it turned out, was France. So a year and a half after Burg died, I went to Paris.

I had gone to graduate school to study power relations and the body, the way that medicine and other social institutions act on our bodies to mold them into docile “subjects.” Just writing that, just now, I almost nodded off. That's how excited I am, and was, about what I was doing. I'd started down that path because of a philosopher named Michel Foucault, a Frenchman with some very dark, intriguing, and, some might say, sexy ideas about the way societies function. He also happened to have a seemingly bottomless supply of black turtlenecks and a penchant for social deviance. He was fascinating, an object of study in himself. The salient part, though, is that he was French. I think that's why I followed him down the path in the first place. I planned a
dissertation in which I would apply his theories to a study of national health insurance in—you guessed it—France. My three years in graduate school, I now know, amounted to one big excuse to go back to Paris.

So I saved my money, and in the summer of 2004, I went for five weeks. I was ostensibly there to do pilot research, preliminary studies for my dissertation. I would write my master's thesis upon my return, take my general exams, and then, assuming all went well, return to France for more extensive research. These five weeks were to be the foundation for all of it. The timing was perfect: the National Assembly, France's equivalent to our Congress, was in debate over the social security system, one part of which is national health insurance. The first morning I was there, one of the experts I wanted to meet was on television, even, talking about the very issues I wanted to understand. I couldn't have planned it better if I'd tried.

That first week, I worked so hard. I read the papers, collected posters and signs, and conducted interviews. I'd rented the same tiny studio that I lived in two years earlier, and my landlord, who lived next door, was an especially good interview subject. He worked for the government. It was like taking candy from a baby. My research was all but doing itself. It was easy. It was perfect. I was bored stiff.

To reward myself for such diligent work, I'd spend afternoons visiting chocolate shops or taking long walks through the city, stopping at
boulangeries
here and there to sample the wares. I wrote long e-mails home, detailing my lunches, snacks, and dinners. I sat on a bench in the Luxembourg Gardens and read cookbooks until dark. By the second week of the trip, I knew I was doomed. I'd stopped buying the newspaper. My research notes were crowded with addresses for pastry shops and kitchen supply stores. I wasn't even pretending anymore. I was quitting graduate school.

Paris has a way of getting your priorities straight. For a place that clings vehemently to its history, it certainly helped speed mine along.

 

My friend Elizabeth likes to call it my “Summer of Change.” That sounds a little like the title of a Judy Blume novel, a coming-of-age story with budding breasts and first crushes, but it fits. Liz lived down the hall from me during our freshman year of college. In the summer of 2004, she and our friend Doron, who studied with me in Paris during our junior year, happened to be in Paris at the same time that I was. She was there to go to design school, and he was doing an internship at a law firm, and they were sharing a sixth-floor walk-up on rue des Rosiers. For those who like falafel, you'll recognize the address. Their apartment was only three doors down from the famous L'As du Fallafel, purveyor of some of the finest fried chickpea balls this side of Israel. Even if all you knew was that, you could guess what kind of summer it was.

The first night I was in town, they invited me to dinner. Liz served salmon with caramelized onions and baby potatoes tossed in butter with fresh herbs. We drank until one in the morning. It was only a matter of time before I was baking lemon cakes in their oven and drinking gin and tonics with Liz in the late afternoon while we waited for Doron to get home from work. At night we would sometimes get together for roasted chicken from the butcher shop on rue Oberkampf or a puréed soup with bread and cheese. Liz was having a torrid love affair with the food mill.

Halfway between our apartments was boulevard Richard Lenoir, where each Thursday and Sunday row upon row of covered stands would magically sprout from the pavement, blossoming into the city's largest outdoor market. From the Place de la Bastille to the Bréguet-Sabin Métro station, tables unfurled to offer crates of fruits and vegetables, some still splotched with dirt and smelling appealingly of damp soil. Other booths proffered neatly arranged bottles of olive and nut oils, display cases full of sausages and sauerkraut and pâté, straw mats covered with cheese in various stages of ooze, and troughs mounded with nuts, dried fruits, and olives. Liz and Doron had grown especially fond of one Italian vendor who sold a spectacular soppressata. It was heinously expensive—two dozen slices weighed in at 18 euros—but
oh, was it ever fine. Anyway, as we discovered, the expense could be easily offset by washing it down with cheap champagne. On Bastille Day, we had an indoor picnic that went on all day. We had goose liver pâté, duck pâté with pistachios, a thick slice of Comté, an even thicker wedge of bleu d'Auvergne, baguettes,
tomates confites,
red radishes with salt, champagne, and a DVD of
Six Feet Under,
the first season. One Sunday I made ratatouille, and we ate it on a blanket in the Place des Vosges, with slices of soppressata and Comté from our favorite cheese lady and wine drunk from yogurt jars. I had never before, nor have I since, been so happy to have no idea what I was doing with my life.

 

My mother came to visit during my last week. One night, we dressed up and went to dinner at Le Repaire de Cartouche, one of my favorite restaurants. I had taken my father there in the spring of 2002, at the end of my time working in Paris, when he came for a visit. He was tired during that trip, and he had nerve pain in his feet, but we didn't think much of it. Of course, when he was diagnosed with cancer four months later, we put two and two together: the nerve pain had been from the tumors in his spine. But he was seventy-three that spring, and it didn't seem weird to me that, at that age, he should be tired, even though he never had been before. He loved Le Repaire de Cartouche. He ordered marinated sardines and tuna with an eggplant tapenade, and we both had rhubarb clafouti for dessert. He wrote everything down on that trip, every dish at every meal, every last detail duly noted. Now I know where I get it.

That night, after dinner, my mother and I walked to the Pont de Sully, one of the bridges that spans the Seine. The wind was blowing from behind us, and we stood quietly for a moment, looking to make sure that no one could see. Then my mother reached into her purse and pulled out a plastic freezer bag, the better part of my father's ashes. She unzipped it and held it over the ledge, and when the wind came up just right, we tipped it and let him float down into the river.

I say that Paris is the place where I've been loneliest, and also where I've been happiest. But what I mean is harder to say. The thing I call loneliness is delicate and lovely, like a blown-out eggshell. It's both empty and hopeful, broken and beautiful. Paris couldn't be anything else for me now, because it's full of my father. That night on the bridge, I could almost see him, waving over the water.

 

The day before I left to return to Seattle, I had lunch with my friend Chris. He's an American and a technology writer, and he moved to Paris a number of years ago with his wife Martine, a Pilates instructor and fellow writer. I met them when I was working in Paris and went looking for a place to take Pilates mat classes. (I don't really meet
everyone
through Pilates; it just seems that way.) They're about the most gorgeous couple you can imagine, lean and beautiful and
très Parisien
in all the right ways, in spite of their American accents. That late-summer day, Chris and I met for a send-off coffee at a café in the Marais. We sat on the terrace with our tiny cups, and I told him that I was going to leave graduate school.

I wanted to do something with food, I said. That was what I kept coming back to, after everything else. At the end of the day, when I was exhausted and fed up and unsure of everything, food was a certainty. It was what I thought about, what I cared about, what I wrote about, what got me out of bed in the morning. (I mean that. I get up for the sole purpose of eating breakfast. I don't know why else you would.) It was so obvious, and so utterly terrifying. In my wildest dreams, the ones also populated by lions and masked men chasing me with live chain-saws, I thought I might want to write for a food magazine. But I had no idea what to do.

“Why don't you start a blog?” he suggested. “It'll give you something to be accountable to, so you can't give up right away. And it'll be a kind of portfolio. You can show it to editors someday.”

I had no real idea what a blog was. Maybe a clue, but only the foggiest. Chris told me how to set it up and assured me that it would be easy.

So I flew home. The next day, I started a blog. I'd sneaked a sachet of my favorite chocolate-dipped orange peels from Paris in my suitcase, and it was sitting on my desk that day. Not having much else in the way of title ideas, I named my blog “Orangette,” after the French name for those orange peels. It was a pretty name, I thought, and since my hair color is a vague shade of orange, sort of auburn-meets-red-meets-brown, it seemed fitting. “Tomme de Savoie” was the only other contender. It's the name of one of my favorite cheeses. I worried, though, that no one would be able to pronounce it, and I wasn't terribly keen on being known as “Tom de Savings,” or “Tummy D. Savoy.” Who knows, maybe I missed the boat on that one. But I don't think so.

DORON'S MEATBALLS WITH PINE NUTS, CILANTRO, AND GOLDEN RAISINS

t
his recipe was, relatively speaking, one of the first I wrote about on my blog. A few months after our summer in Paris, Doron e-mailed to tell me about a dinner he'd made, a meal of Mediterranean-style meatballs with a lemon-and-garlic yogurt sauce.

“It was one of my finer moments,” he wrote. Then he described the recipe.

Doron makes these versatile meatballs with ground turkey, but I've tried them with chicken, too, and they're especially good with lamb. It's hard to go wrong. One pointer, though: if you go with turkey or chicken, use a mixture of breast and thigh meats. Many butchers offer both, and the extra fat in the thigh helps to keep the meatballs moist. I usually use about half breast meat and half thigh.

Also, about bread crumbs: they're easy to buy, but they're just as easy to make. When you have a day-old baguette or other plain bread lying around, trim off and discard the crusts, cut the soft center into coarse cubes, and spin them in a food processor until you have fine crumbs. (Only process a couple of handfuls at a time, though, or the machine tends to over-heat.) Stored in the freezer, they will keep for a couple of months.

FOR THE YOGURT SAUCE

1 cup plain yogurt (not low fat or nonfat)

3 tablespoons lemon juice