Stir (18 page)

There's a little place in Boulder, Colorado, called Dot's Diner. I have never been there, but someone named Kimberly McClain once visited, and was so impressed by their buttermilk biscuits that she wrote to
Bon Appetit
magazine to see if their editors could snag the recipe. They did, and published it in the October 2000 issue. I was a junior in college then, and a recipe that required only a bowl, a spoon, and a baking sheet was right up my alley, since that was more or less all the kitchen equipment I owned. I've tried other biscuit recipes over the years, but I always come back to Dot's.

3 cups (375 grams) all-purpose flour

2 tablespoons granulated sugar

4 teaspoons baking powder

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon fine sea salt

¾ cup (1½ sticks; 170 grams) cold unsalted butter, cut into ½-inch cubes

1 cup cold buttermilk

Heat the oven to 425 degrees and line a baking sheet with parchment paper.

In a large bowl, whisk together all the dry ingredients (everything but the butter and the buttermilk). Drop the cubes of butter into the bowl and rub them into the flour mixture with your fingertips until the texture resembles a coarse meal.

Make a well in the center of the mixture, and fill it with the buttermilk. Stir just enough to form a wet dough. Don't worry if you end up with a bit of flour at the bottom of the bowl. Better to leave it than to overmix. Drop a packed ¼ cup of dough per biscuit onto the prepared baking sheet, leaving a couple of inches between each biscuit. Bake for about 15 minutes, until golden brown on top.

Makes 12 biscuits.

A
round the time I started Sweet Amandine, I read
How to Cook a Wolf
, by M. F. K. Fisher. She wrote it in 1942, when war demanded rationing, and rationing demanded that economy become the home cook's highest value.

With the war in full swing, the wolf at the door was hunger, the literal hunger that people faced on a rationed existence, but also the hunger for peace, for simple pleasures, and the authority to determine the nature of one's own appetite and feed it accordingly.

Government agencies encouraged the public to think scientifically about how they might cobble together their recommended vitamins and nutrients each day. M. F. K. Fisher urged her readers to take a different approach, rooted in the belief that eating well and eating affordably are not mutually exclusive. The key, she believed, was approaching the stove with all the powers of one's mind and one's heart. When war rages, it is the only practical thing to do.

And so,
How to Cook a Wolf
is a book about cooking with courage and faith. It's about granting oneself permission to feast, really feast, on whatever scraps you have before you, despite the wolf nearby—in fact, because of him.

I found myself nodding as I read. From my own experiences with a wolf of a different kind, I knew that she was onto something. To trust in your own aliveness, in your own ability to sustain and be sustained—there are times when there is no greater act of defiance.

There is a line from the second chapter of the book that I kept coming back to: “It is all a question of weeding out what you yourself like best to do, so that you can live most agreeably in a world full of an increasing number of disagreeable surprises.” That, I was learning, is what it's all about. My entire life, I had asked myself, “What would you do if you could do anything?” It was an attempt to step back from the path I was on, to locate paths not taken—not yet anyway—and figure out what I wanted most of all.

But “anything” means anything, and possibility is noisy. I would come up with five, ten, fifteen competing answers, struggle to choose just one, and do my best to go after it, full speed ahead. When I got sick, the question of whether I should do one thing or some other thing fell away.

Recovery is an incremental process: a first meal at the table, a first tying on of shoes, a first walk around the block. Next steps are small, obvious, prescribed for a while. Then, one bright day, there is a moment when you can decide. Suddenly, what's next is up to you. Your mind is quiet, your body is willing, and you know with stunning clarity what you want most of all to get back. “What would you do if you could do anything?” wasn't it at all. Instead, I should have been asking myself something else all along: “What would you do if you could do nothing?” That, for me, for a lot of us, I imagine, was the real question.

 • • • 

People were reading my blog. They were leaving comments, sending e-mails, asking questions about my recipes and sharing their own. We talked about soup and scones; crisp roasted chickpeas; sesame noodles made with oil, soy sauce, and rice vinegar, and no peanut butter, thank you very much. We did not talk about my brain. They didn't ask me about my blind eye, insist that I sit down, or place a hand on my shoulder and tear up. As far as these people knew, I was just fine.

And wasn't I? By early spring, when people would ask how I was doing, I'd tell them I felt great, and mean it. “All better” is probably a stretch when you have a dent in your face the size of a deck of cards, but after feeling so bad for so long, “really much, much better” felt like practically the same thing.

It was all relative. Every few weeks, I was certain I'd arrived. “I feel better!” I'd announce to Eli over breakfast, fully believing that I did. Then a few weeks later, I'd think back to that breakfast and how slowly I'd still moved when clearing my plate. I'd remember the weight in my bones I'd felt by the end of the day, and revise: “
Now
I feel better.” Then a few weeks later: “No,
now
.”

I started preparing for my exams in earnest, and this time, it felt okay. It wasn't too hard. The only difference, I told myself, was that I was reading these texts with a hockey helmet on my head. I developed certain habits at my desk those days beneath the shelves of books nailed to my office wall. I would drum the roof of my helmet, my fingernails clicking against the plastic as I read. Hook a finger over one of the rubber loops that held the chin strap in place.

My first follow-up angiogram happened in March. We drove up to Burlington so I could have the procedure back at Fletcher Allen and I was glad about that. Fletcher Allen was where I had almost died, where I'd had the riskiest, most invasive of my surgeries, experienced the severest pain of my life, and lost half my vision to boot. Yet my memories of the place were fond. Everything had seemed under control at Fletcher Allen. I'd felt so taken care of there, safe.
Ah, the good old days in the neuro-ICU! The complete bed rest lest I bleed to death from inside my brain!

I understood the strangeness of it, but I couldn't shake the feeling. Returning to Fletcher Allen felt like traveling back to a time when all that had happened since I'd left—the infection, the craniotomy—hadn't happened at all. I baked Marcella's butter almond cake, sliced it into wedges, and packed it up into two boxes made of thick Italian paper that I'd been saving for something special. One was for Dr. Tranmer. The other was for Dr. Linnell, the neuroradiologist who had performed my first few angiograms and would do this one, too. When I asked a question, he had a habit of saying, “Now, that's actually very interesting,” before starting in on his answer.

“You know,” I said to Eli as we drove up the night before the procedure, “if this hadn't happened, we never would have met these lovely people.”

“You're crazy,” he said and drove on.

 • • • 

They put you in a place somewhere between sleep and consciousness before the angiogram begins. I hadn't quite climbed back into my right mind when Dr. Tranmer came by my recovery room to tell us what they'd seen: The clip was holding steady. The residual aneurysm was gone.

The first part we'd hoped for. Expected, even, with Dr. Tranmer's encouragement. That was the whole reason we were there, I thought, to make sure the clip hadn't budged. The second part I didn't understand.
The residual aneurysm was gone?

“It resolved itself,” Dr. Tranmer explained. “That happens sometimes.”

It does?

Between the pressure in the vessel returning to normal after the placement of the clip, and the healing of the vessel wall beneath it, apparently so. My mind wobbled through the grogginess and nausea to try to grasp what he was saying. I knew it was good news, but his actual words were lost in the postprocedure fog.

On our drive home, Eli repeated what Dr. Tranmer had said: This was an all clear. Once my head was back in one piece, I could do whatever I pleased. Marathons, pregnancies, and the resulting babies expelled from my body in whichever manner I chose. The scheduled years of follow-up scans and monitoring were canceled. I wouldn't need them anymore. Without a family history of aneurysm or any conditions that would predispose me to forming more, I was done. The risk from angiogram was actually higher than the risk that I'd ever have another aneurysm again.

The possibility still existed, of course, but no more than for anyone else on the planet walking around with a brain in her head. In fact, you might say that my position was even better than the rest of the population, since I had at least been scanned and knew for sure that my brain was clean. It all felt so unexpected, so unlikely. I made Eli tell me again and again.

Some combination of jubilation and relief is no doubt the appropriate response in this scenario. I tried to feel it. When I called my parents to tell them the news, I pretended that I did, certain that any moment I actually would. But I couldn't. I didn't know how to believe it.

For seven months now, all signs had pointed to illness. When I brushed my teeth, a bashed-in head stared back at me from the mirror. It looked as though my brain had taken a deep sucking breath in, pulling my temple and half of my forehead inside. My left eye was missing part of its socket. It looked bulgy and off. Without the piece of skull to contour my skin, my eyebrow stretched into an unnatural arch a couple of inches above where it should have been. I looked perpetually intrigued. Or surprised. Or maybe sinister. Definitely not okay.

The cavity inside my skull was no longer sealed. A sensation of pressure in my head came and went. This was a post-op thing, I was told, something to do with tissues healing and the blood flow finding its way back around. No cause for concern. Still, I worried. Hadn't these doctors been wrong before? I'd been granted permission to think of myself as well again—but it wasn't the sort of thing that someone else could grant. I'd berate myself for letting fear take over. I felt crazy.

“It's not as if you live by the sea but constantly have anxiety about being trapped on a mountain,” my cousin Katie reminded me, “or are anxious about polar bear attacks.” She understood that trauma is a real thing and urged me to be kind to myself, and patient. Time, she said, would help quiet the voices in my head.

But what about the voices outside? With my doctors' permission, Eli had mounted my bike on a stationary trainer in our living room and I had started to ride. When I told friends and family, they'd frown. “Just be careful,” they would say, “don't overdo it.” My heart would pound.
Careful of what?
They knew about the all clear. Did they not believe it? And if they, my best people, did not, should I? I'd remind them of what Dr. Tranmer had said after my angiogram. “Just be careful,” they'd repeat, so I'd smile and do my best to console and convince them some more. My real task was to convince myself.

I'd never been a fan of sesame noodles until I ate them at my friend Julia's table. The culprit? Peanut butter. It was a starring ingredient in the recipes I'd tried, and the sticky texture wasn't for me. Julia's noodles skip the peanut butter. They're slippery and light, mildly sweet. Her recipe was one of the first that I posted on my blog, and I still make it all the time. You can dress the noodles up, if you'd like, with chopped peanuts, sliced raw cabbage, grilled chicken, or tofu. My friend Stephanie adds julienned red bell peppers and carrots that she has lightly sautéed in sesame oil. The flavors of this dish don't fully come together until the noodles and sauce have cooled to room temperature, so you'll want to plan for that.

3 tablespoons sesame seeds

3 garlic cloves, minced

4 tablespoons rice vinegar

6 tablespoons soy sauce

2 tablespoons toasted sesame oil

2 tablespoons granulated sugar

1 pound dry angel-hair pasta or spaghetti

4 scallions, thinly sliced on the diagonal

Crushed red pepper

Toast the sesame seeds in a dry skillet on the stovetop, stirring frequently, for about 5 minutes, until the seeds are fragrant and take on a bit of color. Set aside.

Place the garlic, rice vinegar, soy sauce, sesame oil, and sugar into a small saucepan over medium heat and bring to a boil, stirring constantly. Remove from heat and set aside.

Fill a large pot with water and bring to a rolling boil. Add the pasta, and cook until al dente. Drain the pasta, transfer to a large bowl, immediately pour in the sauce, and toss. Let the noodles cool to room temperature. Gently mix in the toasted sesame seeds, the scallions, a pinch or two of crushed red pepper, and whatever else you'd like to add just before serving. Serve at room temperature or chilled.

Serves 4 to 6.