Bon Appetempt: A Coming-of-Age Story (with Recipes!) (20 page)

D
espite our combined inability to get full-time jobs and the ninety-degree average temperature inside our apartment, that summer Matt and I do manage to fry our own chicken, braid our own challah, layer our own pavlova, and fail at our own semifreddo. We get into a system where I do the cooking and Matt takes the photographs with our point-and-shoot digital camera. I also finish a round of revisions on my thesis, teach myself how to screen-print T-shirts in our garage, and sell homemade envelopes on Etsy. At the end of August, when I see a job listing for a part-time sales associate at Heath Ceramics, a high-end ceramic dinnerware and tile company that just opened a beautiful new showroom five minutes away from our apartment, I say to Matt, “Honestly, if I can get this job, my life would be perfect.”

These will of course become famous last words that Matt will hold me to time and time again after I do get the job one week later.

As a new hire, I mostly work on Saturdays and Sundays and stay in the windowless back room packing dinnerware orders. However, the mood at home lifts almost overnight. I have money coming in that isn’t a sporadic payment from an
eBay or Etsy buyer! Plus, on the days I work, Matt greets me at home with dinner already made, which, in my opinion, is enough reason in itself to have a job.

Employment is contagious. Matt changes temp agencies for a third time and within the next month, he finds semi-regular placement with a global public relations firm. It’s tedious work involving a lot of data entry, but it’s a job.

Matt finds himself on the Walmart account, and as I’m now in retail, the holidays take on a whole new meaning: they’re about
work
. By November, my part-time hours have quickly turned into full-time ones and Matt’s full-time hours bleed into overtime.

From the week of Thanksgiving until the day after New Year’s, life becomes a series of transactions, of explaining gift-wrapping options, gift-wrapping, and of assuring customers that I took the price tag off. Traveling to the East Coast to be with our families is impossible, but since we’re house-sitting again, we have extra space and can host my brother, who plans to visit us for a week over Christmas.

And though Matt and I may not have time to take him to the Getty Villa or to Venice’s canals and the nearby shops, we are staying in this beautiful house;
at the very least
, I can host a holiday dinner party.

I have December 20th off and spend the day trying to recreate one of the menus from local chef Suzanne Goin’s cookbook
Sunday Suppers at Lucques
. I peel pearl onions, braise short ribs in red wine and port, and puree potatoes to which I add so much butter I gain a newfound respect for the potato’s absorption abilities. And I do all of this ahead of time. Tomorrow night is the dinner.

And somehow, with help from my brother and Matt, after
a full day of holiday retail work, I come home and begin a different kind of work. I reheat the short ribs—which Suzanne tells me are even better on day two—and potato puree. I slice blood oranges and toss them with almonds, chunks of Parmesan, dates, and arugula. I pour myself a giant glass of wine and I host my first dinner party for eight.

It’s by far my biggest culinary achievement to date.

I then spend the next three days assuring customers I took the price tag off before gift-wrapping their gift.

“You’d like me to double-check? OK, sure. No prob. Let me just unwrap the whole thing and give it a quick check. Yep, it’s off. OK. Now, let me just rewrap this for you. OK, great. Happy holidays!”

On Christmas Day, we eat leftover Chinese for lunch and burnt French onion soup for dinner (I didn’t braise the onions with enough liquid) while watching the sci-fi thriller
District 9
. Happy holidays indeed!

Come the end of January, I’m dying for a break. And with my holiday bonus, I treat myself to a long weekend in Seattle to visit my best friend in the world, Mary Anne, whom I made up with a long time ago. She’s currently a political science PhD candidate at the University of Washington and has always had an appreciation for food.

And so it’s a no-brainer that we are going to make an epic meal together. For the week leading up to my departure, we send each other various ambitious-sounding recipe links. What about paella? Steak au poivre? Mussels and grilled bread with a homemade aioli?

A coworker of mine has recently lent me the cookbook
Living and Eating
by John Pawson and Annie Bell. Pawson is an architect who favors minimalism; Bell is a food writer, and together, they make a case for the idea that the way we cook when we entertain shouldn’t be that different from the way we cook for just ourselves and our family. Simple food done well is their goal. It’s a gorgeous book I feel compelled to use as soon as possible.

Since we’re going to be in Seattle, Mary Anne and I decide our entrée should be seafood-oriented. Over the phone, I pitch her the idea of making Pawson and Bell’s squid ink risotto with scallops followed by a cheese course of Perail with endive. “I’m not sure how to pronounce it,” I say before spelling it out to my French-speaking friend. “It’s P-e-r-a-i-l.”

“Oh, Per-
ay
,” Mary Anne says.

I read Pawson and Bell’s description: “ ‘The inside of this small round sheep’s milk cheese with its delicate scent of meadow flowers has the same milky liquid charm as Vacherin Mont d’Or, but it’s not as grand. Perail is a cheese to enjoy with endive when the company numbers just two or three.’ ”

“I love it. Let’s do it,” she says.

Upon my arrival, we grab cheap Thai food for dinner so that we can focus our energies on the next day’s menu. Mary Anne has been into baking whole heads of garlic drenched in olive oil, so that will be our appetizer. To counter all that richness, I suggest an arugula salad tossed in lemon juice and olive oil, which we’ll have before the risotto and cheese course. Dessert is the only thing we put off deciding on until tomorrow.

Mary Anne lives with her roommate in a little stand-alone house in a neighborhood in North Seattle, just a short bus ride to her campus at UW. In the morning, we sip coffee while scrolling through
Saveur
’s website debating desserts.
We eventually decide on a pretty-looking chocolate tart and begin making our shopping list. At which point, I realize that I didn’t bring my copy of
Living and Eating
, and as their recipe for squid ink risotto with scallops is nowhere to be found online, we must tweak the menu ever so slightly to a recipe that is online. Spicy squid ink risotto it is.

If you’ve never spent the day with your best friend gathering ingredients for a giant two-person feast from various different markets, sans car, you really should try it.

We begin by taking a bus to Pike Place, the market made famous to me by the season of
The Real World
set in Seattle, in which a cast member (who we later find out has been having a secret relationship with one of the producers of the show!) works at one of its seafood stalls. We find arugula, endive, lemons, garlic, fresh bread, and of course, squid, though before we pay for the latter, the fish guys coerce Mary Anne into trying to catch a large whole fish, which they toss to her from the other side of the counter. (This is something they do there, which I also remember seeing in the credits of
The Real World
.) Mary Anne does
not
catch it, and we do not feel good about the way it falls on the dirty floor of the outdoor market and then is picked up (presumably to be sold).

We still need Arborio rice, vegetable stock, heavy cream, and chocolate, but we’re most concerned about finding the squid ink, Perail, and the “digestive” crackers for the crust of our tart—all three of which Pike Place doesn’t have. There’s a cheese shop across the street, so we start there. No Perail. But Mary Anne knows of a gourmet specialty shop within walking distance. So, we walk.

Though it’s the end of January, the weather is mild, almost as warm as it is in Los Angeles. The last time I was in this city
was right after Dad had been given full custody of my brother and me, and we (my dad, Dolly, Bill, Margaret, Paul, and I) went on our first and last family vacation, taking a train from Pennsylvania to Colorado (because, remember, Dad doesn’t fly), where we rented an RV, then drove to Seattle for the wrestling portion of the Goodwill Games. I was nine. So, in a sense, it’s my first time in the city. And this is my favorite way to be a tourist: doing something I might do if I lived here.

The specialty shop has squid ink but neither Perail nor digestives. We decide to substitute with crème de Bourgogne, which Mare sells to me as “like Brie but creamier and richer.”

We figure Whole Foods will have the rest of what we need. But as a postgraduate student on a budget, Mary Anne isn’t very familiar with the location of the high-priced grocery store. We take the wrong bus and get lost. It reminds us of college, but instead of finding ourselves in the section of Baltimore where
The Wire
was shot on the way to get my nose pierced, we’re in a very clean and safe-looking section of downtown Seattle trying to find an upscale grocery store.

By the time we do find it, it’s close to two in the afternoon. Still no digestives, but we’re OK with that. We grab some graham crackers instead and head home to start cooking.

Perhaps because the ingredient-gathering turned into a five-bus journey and in comparison, actually cooking them feels like less of a struggle, or perhaps because what we thought was an ultra-ambitious dinner menu wasn’t exactly—like when the weather report says it’s eighty-six degrees outside, but that’s followed by a “feels like seventy-eight”—or perhaps because when you have a free afternoon with nothing to do but cook and you can share the many tasks with your best friend while
drinking chilled glasses of white wine, the meal seems to come together almost effortlessly.

By six o’clock, we are eating baguette slices topped with roasted-to-the-point-of-melting, olive-oil-infused garlic cloves. Not too much longer after that, we serve ourselves inky risotto that smells faintly of the ocean alongside spicy arugula dressed in the award-winning combination of lemon juice and olive oil. We switch to red wine and sit down to the decadent crème de Bourgogne and endive, and then retreat from the kitchen and the table altogether for a few hours, slipping out to meet some of Mary Anne’s friends for drinks and dancing.

By the time we return home, it’s late, Mary Anne’s roommate is asleep, and we’re hungry for chocolate tart. We tiptoe into the kitchen, pull our chilled tart from the refrigerator, and then oh-so quietly, cut two triangles for ourselves.

And this is how we finish our meal, standing at the counter in the dimly lit kitchen, whispering and nodding in approval at what we’ve accomplished.

The entire premise of the blog was based on comparing two finished versions with the expectation being that my version would always be worse. And in terms of aesthetics and the photography, this was objectively accurate. My version did
look
worse.

But back at home in Los Angeles, when I begin to write up the post about the dinner Mary Anne and I had made together, I know something has changed. I no longer resent the beautiful if not extremely unrealistic images of finished recipes found in gourmet food magazines and cookbooks.
Because these images are what got me in the kitchen; these images are what inspired me to start cooking, and now, a year later, I am grateful to them. A year later, cooking is no longer a novelty hobby. I must admit I enjoy it. I enjoy the whole process—from grocery shopping to eating the results, and even, on some days, in the repetitive nature of washing the dishes at the end of the night.

In his colossal
French Laundry
cookbook, which I once found adversarial, Thomas Keller writes: “These recipes then, although exact documents of the way food is prepared at the French Laundry, are only guidelines. You’re not going to be able to duplicate the dish that I made. You may create something that in composition resembles what I made, but more important—and this is my greatest hope—you’re going to create something that you have deep respect and feelings and passions for. And you know what? It’s going to be more satisfying than anything I could ever make for you.”