Bon Appetempt: A Coming-of-Age Story (with Recipes!) (27 page)

In the next couple of months, I start to come to terms with the fact that I cannot
will
this book to happen any more than I can will Mavis to walk when she doesn’t want to, any more than I can will certain recipes to come together flawlessly and effortlessly.

I can work hard. And I can do my best. And sometimes that’s when I’m happiest, when I have a project and I know I’m putting in the necessary time and effort. But that’s just one facet of who I am. There’s another part of me that needs more space to properly thrive, that needs room to spread out—to do things I want to do just because I want to do them, and, if necessary, to look stupid in the process. I need to reserve the right to make a simple meal that doesn’t even require a recipe, one that isn’t for the blog or because Matt requested it, but merely because that’s what I’m hungry for.

A
t the end of November, as usual, Matt and I both have work the days leading up to Thanksgiving as well as the day after, aka Black Friday, aka retail’s biggest day! For the fourth year in a row we won’t be able to travel home for Thanksgiving, which, to be fair, isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

During these past four years, we’ve been able to build our own little Thanksgiving traditions. One of these is simmering mulled wine in the early afternoon and drinking it while we cook. Matt typically takes charge of the gravy and the bird while I handle the side dishes and dessert. The hardest part is finding the time to do the giant grocery trip beforehand.

After work, all I want to do is sit down, spend some time alone, and try to forget about how just a few hours earlier a pair of registrants purchased all of the remaining items on their registry, how they paid with $1,800 cash, how between packing up all of their items, marking them off the registry, and double-counting the $1,800, I somehow forgot to give them their $63 in change, how I then went on my lunch break (it was almost three p.m. at this point, so I firmly blame this giant mistake on low blood sugar), how they came back fifteen minutes later to explain they hadn’t gotten the cash back,
how I wasn’t there to confirm my mistake, how things got a bit heated between them and my assistant manager, how my assistant manager had to remove the cash drawer and count it in the back room to discover that, yes, we were $63 over, at which point, I returned from lunch so that I could first hug my assistant manager, who was trying not to cry as she counted, and then, second, hand the money back to the registrants and apologize for my error.

But this year, two days before Thanksgiving, I come down with the worst case of strep throat of my life. It’s the kind of sore throat that makes you realize what an asshole you’ve been for taking for granted the ability to swallow your own saliva with neither pain nor fear.

When my mom doesn’t answer her landline or cell phone, I track her down at the office and have her confirm my diagnosis. She technically can’t do so without a throat culture, but she kindly calls me in some antibiotics anyway. After calling work to let them know I can’t make it in and picking up my meds at the pharmacy, I tuck myself into bed with my laptop. Last Thanksgiving, we’d watched back-to-back documentaries on different people’s journeys up Mount Everest. Remembering this with great fondness, I begin my Netflix search there, hoping a new documentary might have come out in the past year.

Sadly, there isn’t anything Everest-y I haven’t already seen. This leads me through the entire selection of Netflix’s sports-documentary subgenre, which eventually spits me out onto YouTube, where I find someone has posted the entire two-day broadcast of the 2008 Women’s Gymnastics Olympic Trials competition. I saw it live, but that was four years ago. I’m more than happy to rewatch it now.

To me, the two achievements—summiting Everest and making the US Olympic gymnastics team—share a lot in common. Both rely so much on a person’s drive and work ethic, and yet, simultaneously, so much hinges on specific arbitrary circumstances, like the weather for the climbers and one’s age for the gymnasts.

To set the 2008 gymnastics scene for you, only six girls (all of who must be sixteen or older) can make the Olympic team. You might think that this means the top six finishers at Trials would be the ones named to the team. But only the top two all-around competitors automatically make it. In 2008, they’re Nastia Liukin and Shawn Johnson. (By the way, Johnson, of all of the celebrities I’ve run into here in Los Angeles, is the only one I’ve felt compelled to approach and tell what a fan I am. We were both shopping at a health food store and at five feet six and thirty-one years old, I towered over her both in height and age as I sang her praises and lamented the fact that her knee injury had kept her from trying to make another Olympic team at age twenty in 2012. When I was finished, she timidly said, “Thank you.” I stood there for a moment, waiting for something more but realized that was it, then returned to grocery shopping feeling like a low-level creep.)

The rest of the team is chosen by the suits, namely USA Gymnastics, which is headed by Márta Károlyi, the National Team Coordinator for USA Gymnastics, who needs to make sure that among those six girls, she has four who are solid on beam, four who are solid on floor, four on bars, and four on vault. In the end, this means that the two teenagers who actually placed fifth and sixth at Trials in the all-around don’t end up making the team, as they simply don’t fit into Márta’s puzzle.

To come so close and
not
make it. Can you imagine?

Once I’ve shaken myself from my gymnastics trance, I realize that if I can somehow get out of bed and to the grocery store, I can accomplish the dreaded Thanksgiving grocery run at two p.m. on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving instead of on Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving, which has to be the busiest food-shopping day of the year. And since my mom said that I should start to feel better within twenty-four hours, maybe by tomorrow, I can even prep a few dishes ahead of time.

In a way, my strep-ridden, sweatpants-and-hooded-sweatshirt-clad trip to Whole Foods is simpler than it would’ve been under healthy circumstances. Had I been healthy, I would have been rushing and distracted. I would have been annoyed by the fight for a parking space and the throngs of humans surrounding the normally unloved russet potato bin. But in my fevered state, I cannot be distracted. It takes all of my energy to just be there, list in hand, shopping.

I drive home and after unloading all of my bags, I’m completely spent. I sleep the rest of the day.

By Thanksgiving Day, however, I am feeling better. Not great, but hungry. Although it’s not my typical kind of hunger; the potential dreaminess of a perfect meal doesn’t entice me. I’m hungry for the day itself, for the ritual of it, for this tradition Matt and I have created over the past four years.

There are no demands on us. And since it’s just Matt and me, we needn’t bother changing out of our pajamas or setting a time dinner needs to be ready by. We eat breakfast, lingering over our coffees. We take Mavis for a neighborhood stroll. Matt watches football, the sounds of which—the whistles from the referees and voices of the commentators I know so
well—are actually comforting. We occasionally check in on the Macy’s Day parade and are surprisingly entertained by the song and dance numbers.

And sometime in the early afternoon, we begin to cook.

Instead of stuffing, I make a savory bread pudding with ham, mushrooms, radicchio, and Gruyère. I take it right up to the final step so that all I will need to do is bake it for about forty-five minutes before dinner. And instead of cranberry sauce, I unmold the cranberry-maple jelly I made last night, which just spent twelve hours in the refrigerator.

As for Matt, he’s in charge of roasting two small chickens with lemon and garlic as well as the Brussels sprouts. But these dishes, like the mashed potatoes and gravy, can’t be made too far in advance.

Thus, the rest of the afternoon is spent on dessert, an apple tart. I mix the tart dough in the food processor, work it into a ball, cover it in plastic wrap, and then put it in the refrigerator so all that butter in the dough can re-solidify.

Meanwhile, I peel, core, and slice two pounds of apples. It takes a long time, but it’s satisfying to see my pile of pale-yellow crescent-shaped apple slices grow and grow. I preheat the oven and flour my work surface. I unwrap the dough from its plastic and roll it into a thin flat circle. I consider whether my circle is fourteen inches in diameter and decide that it’s very close. Then, remembering the beautiful accidental tarte aux pommes we ordered in Paris with its spiraling circle of apple slices, I layer my own slices. My pattern starts out perfectly, but by the end has lost its way. I remind myself that this is a rustic tart; I’m not even baking it in a tart pan. I’m simply folding the edges of the dough over on itself. And once I do, I coat it with melted butter and a sprinkling of sugar.

When it comes out of the oven forty-five minutes later, it’s a sight to behold.

The whole dinner is. From the table, which I’ve set with all of my best linens and dishes (accrued over the years at Heath), to the individual chocolate turkeys I’ve placed at both of our place settings to, of course, the food.

And though my appetite isn’t fully restored—my plate holds just a sampling of each dish on it—Matt’s exuberance is enough for the two of us. His plate is comically towering with food and un-photogenically completely covered with gravy. He’s holding his fork in one hand and knife in the other when he looks up at me. “Well?”

It’s that moment that only happens before certain meals when we know how hard we’ve worked and how seldom we eat such bounty.

And so we pray. Matt leads off with the Jewish version, the
baruch
. And I finish with the Christian one I grew up with.
Thank you, God, for this food. Bless it for our use. Amen.

And then, at long last, we eat.

Almost exactly three months later, my agent thinks my book proposal is ready to go out to publishers. She sends it to a couple of her contacts on a Friday so that, that Saturday, while it’s
out there
in the hands of the deciders, Matt and I are eating dinner with two of our oldest friends at Taix, one of the oldest restaurants in Los Angeles—opened in 1927 and where some of the servers are over eighty years old. The chicken is always dry, but the pommes frites are fantastic, and so is the semicircular booth the four of us are sitting in. And while scooping
out New England clam chowder from a terrine in the middle of the table, Matt says, “Oh, guys. Amelia’s book proposal is out to publishers.”

“Oh, yeah?” says Neal. “How do you feel? Are you nervous?”

“Well, yeah, I’m nervous,” I say, “but at the same time, I’m—you know—life is going to keep going no matter what happens.” As I say it, I check my theory for holes, for leaks, for cynicism. But no. I seem to actually believe it.

When the proposal does sell less than a week later, I’m both surprised and ecstatic. I hadn’t expected to hear something so quickly. It had taken me over a year to get those forty-plus pages together. I had gone through so many drafts, and then all of a sudden, just like that, that part of the journey was over.

The news is hardly more than a few minutes old when we do what we always do when we have good news. We call Matt’s parents.

Matt’s parents are the kind of people I hope everyone has access to when they have good news to share. They are such positive, effusive people that it’s truly more fun to hear their reaction to any good news than to hear the good news yourself. (I once snapped a vacation photo that caught Matt in midair as he was diving headfirst onto a hotel bed. When Matt’s mom saw it, she responded with an enthusiastic, “Aw, that’s great, Matt!”)

And when we tell them, they don’t disappoint. They cheer so loudly over the phone I feel like some kind of Olympic champion. (OK, fine, I feel like an Olympic
gymnastics
champion.)

When we eventually hang up, we’re still on a high. And
since Matt’s working from home today, we have time to continue to celebrate.

“Let’s call your brother!”

We call my brother.

“Let’s call your mom!”

We call my mom. (She knew it, by the way. “Aw, Sweetie. I knew someday somebody would recognize your talent.”)

“Let’s call your dad!”

“I dunno.”

“What do you mean? C’mon. He’s going to be thrilled.”

“I dunno. Maybe let’s eat some breakfast first.”

In the late afternoon, we pour ourselves some sparkling wine. And after some more prodding from Matt, and despite
knowing
my dad—that he’s the opposite of Matt’s parents, that he’s your classic know-it-all downer—I’m still excited enough that I cave.

“Put it on speaker!” Matt says from across the room.

I do, and when my dad picks up, he sounds genuinely happy to hear from me, “Oh, Amy! I was just thinking about you!”

I feel encouraged. I launch right in. “I have some good news.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah,” I say. “I sold my book proposal.”

“You sold your book proposal? Oh my God. I thought you were going to tell me you finally finished reading the second book of
Game of Thrones
. You haven’t, have you?”

“No.”

“HBO released the trailer for season three. I sent you the link, right? I was hoping you would have finished book three by now. It’s just, look, I applaud HBO for their efforts, but
they cannot—they simply
cannot
—capture everything that happens in the books. Take Daenerys for example. Her storyline is…” And he’s off and running.

Matt is meanwhile frowning and motioning for me to take the phone off speaker. I top my glass with more sparkling wine and head outside, listening to his thoughts on where the show has gone wrong.