Stir (20 page)

The base for clafoutis typically involves only flour, milk, and eggs, but getting it just right can be tricky. You need enough eggs for the custard to set up, but use too many and the flavor is overly eggy and the texture turns gummy as it cools. To solve this problem, I've cut back on the eggs and added baking powder for a bit of lift. The custard comes together best in a blender, but if all you've got is a bowl and a whisk, use them, and get it as smooth as you can.

For the kirsch in this recipe, I like Trimbach. It's pricey, but since I only ever use a teaspoon or so at a time, a single bottle lasts a while. Kirsch works its magic on all manner of stone fruits and berries, by the way. Toss it with peaches before baking them into a pie or with plums destined for crumble to enhance the fruits' flavor. If you prefer, you can swap in amaretto or ½ teaspoon almond extract for the kirsch in this recipe. Clafoutis traditionalists get their hint of almond flavor by leaving the cherries unpitted. I tried that once, but worried so much about my guests' teeth that I've been pitting my cherries ever since.

1 tablespoon softened unsalted butter for greasing the pan

Granulated sugar for dusting the pan

2 cups (400 grams) fresh cherries, pitted

1 cup whole milk

3 tablespoons (38 grams) brown sugar

1 teaspoon baking powder

2 large eggs

1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

1 tablespoon kirsch

¼ teaspoon fine sea salt

⅓ cup (42 grams) all-purpose flour

Confectioners' sugar, for finishing

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.

Grease a 9-inch baking dish, cake pan, or pie plate with the 1 tablespoon butter. (Use the entire tablespoon so that the coating is thick.) Dust the sides and bottom of the dish with granulated sugar and shake out any excess.

Put the cherries into the baking dish and shake into a single layer. Combine the milk, brown sugar, baking powder, eggs, vanilla extract, kirsch, salt, and flour in the jar of a blender, and blend on high speed for 1 minute. Pour the batter over the cherries, and bake for 30 to 35 minutes, until the clafoutis puffs up and turns golden brown, and a tester inserted into the center comes out clean.

Serve at room temperature or chilled, dusted with confectioners' sugar.

Serves 6.

T
here was a package waiting for me when we got back home from Seattle. A Humpty Dumpty doll carved from wood. His clothing was painted on, a red jacket with blue lapels. His legs, hinged at the knees and also red, dangled down from his egg-shaped body. My father had sent him in honor of the surgery that was now just three weeks away. I perched him on my desk as I studied for my last exams. Sometimes I'd absently stroke his head. It felt smooth, solid, strong.

The technical term for the kind of surgery I was having is “cranioplasty.” The word made me think of papier-mâché. How in preschool, we would drag strips of newsprint through a flour and water paste and drape them around inflated balloons that we'd pop once the paste had dried. We'd draw faces on the paper “heads” that remained and stick on yarn for hair.

Cranioplasty has likely been around since ancient times, when surgeons used precious metals and gourds to repair injured skulls. The sixteenth-century physician Fallopius (after whom the fallopian tube is named) described the use of gold plate, and there is a record from 1668 that mentions canine bone. By the twentieth century, surgeons were using human bone from elsewhere in the patient's body to make repairs, and today, a prosthesis made of synthetic material is common. My prosthesis was custom made from a polymer based on the 3-D scans of my skull. The prosthesis was porous, so my own bone from the surrounding skull would grow right into it over time.

The plan, as I understood it: Have the cranioplasty on August third. Stay in the hospital for about a week. Recover at home for a month or so. Hang up my helmet, and get on with my life, looking and feeling as good as new.

The shape and location of the missing piece of my head would make the operation tricky. The hole was part forehead, part temple, part eye socket, part top of my skull. Because of the delicate facial curves and eyebrow positioning to consider, my neurosurgeon recommended that we consult with a craniofacial plastic surgeon and that the two of them perform the operation together.

It all seemed quite simple. The plastic surgeon examined me—that he seemed unimpressed by my deformity was a source of relief—and he agreed to do the surgery. The only thing we'd have to do, he told us, was to shift the date of the operation a few days up, or push it a few days back, to fit with his OR schedule. That afternoon, I spoke with the neurosurgeon's secretary, who said she would look into making the change. She sent me an e-mail a few days later: “All good to go for 8/3.” The plastic surgeon would be able to make that date after all, she said.

My family arrived the weekend before the surgery. I wanted to feed them, so on Friday afternoon I walked the neighborhood alone to gather provisions, a few canvas bags looped over my shoulder, helmet on my head. At Hi-Rise Bread Company I picked up a flute, their version of a
pain a l'ancienne
made with a blend of white and whole wheat flours. Its crust is crisper than a traditional baguette; its flavor full. From there I walked along Huron Avenue, down the hill to Formaggio Kitchen. The cheesemongers sliced samples from plastic-wrapped rounds and offered them, still on the knife, for me to taste. Without precise enough depth perception to peel them from the blade, I stretched out my hand as casually as I could and let the mongers flip the portions onto my palm. Something creamy, something hard, something in between. Three chubby wedges wrapped in paper and sealed. I chose a bottle of white wine from the shelf beside the cheese counter. Olives. Slippery anchovies lifted from a bath of vinegar and oil. Then back up the hill and down another, through the square to the farmers' market, for peaches, cucumbers, and tomatoes at their height, swollen, seamy pouches of flesh, seeds, and juice.

I made Eli's aunt Leslie's gazpacho for dinner that night with its hallmark tarragon and cumin, flavors I'd never think to pair but which did each other right. With the spoils of the afternoon laid out on our red table, people served themselves, then sat wherever, anchovies, olives, cheese, and bread piled into their now-empty gazpacho bowls. Amy, my dad, and my brother, Caleb, were there, and my aunt and uncle, and Eli, of course. The next day, my mom and grandfather would arrive, and the day after that Eli's parents. Then it would be Monday, Humpty Dumpty Day.

Sunday evening I made a quiet salad of couscous and tiny green lentils that glistened like caviar as I rinsed them in the sink. I folded in what was left of some arugula from the fridge and the rest of the tomatoes, applied olive oil, lemon, salt, and pepper, and put out the bowl with a stack of plates for anyone who came by. Beside the salad, I placed a wooden board with thick slabs of banana bread lopped in half to make them easy to eat with your hands. I'd baked two loaves from the blackening bananas on the counter, one for Sunday and one for my family to have the next day while the surgeons put me back in one piece.

In my kitchen, banana bread is a food of departure. Before a few days or weeks away, I tend to view the perishable contents of my refrigerator and pantry as an edible checklist. It feels good, clever, baking bananas into bread, blending berries into smoothies, chopping greens into omelets, making delicious what would otherwise go to waste. Cooking is, on the one hand, an act of resistance to the coming departure. (I should be packing.) But as I empty out my fridge and sop up the last of what my kitchen has to offer, it is also an acknowledgment that soon, I'll be out the door.

Cooking before leaving home for someplace new means clinging to what's familiar before nothing is. It also means getting to eat something good, which is wise before a trip, in any case. There was no way of knowing how long I'd be away this time.
The doctors said one week,
I reminded myself, as I scored Xs into the bottoms of a few overripe peaches, lowered them into a pot of boiling water, plunged them in ice water, and slipped off their skins. But I was afraid it would be much longer. I quartered the peeled peaches, slid them into a Ziploc bag, and stashed them in the freezer. “I'll be back,” the gesture said, “and I'll be hungry.”

I adapted this banana bread from the Classic Banana Bundt Cake that appears in Dorie Greenspan's book
Baking: From My Home to Yours.
I halved the recipe to make just enough batter to fit a loaf pan, and swapped in some whole wheat flour to deepen the flavor. Instead of creaming the butter with an electric mixer, I melt it and fold everything together by hand for an especially tender, muffinlike crumb.

Ideally, the bananas for this recipe should be ripe past the point where you'd want to eat them straight from the peel. You're looking for plenty of dark brown spots—if your bananas are almost entirely black, even better—and some squishiness when you hold them in your hand.

Store the bread at room temperature, covered tightly with plastic. It will keep for a few days this way, and only improves with time.

Dry ingredients:

1 cup (125 grams) all-purpose flour

½ cup (57 grams) whole wheat flour

1 cup (200 grams) granulated sugar

1 teaspoon baking soda

¼ teaspoon granulated salt

3 ounces (85 grams) semisweet chocolate, chopped into small, irregular pieces (The largest chunks should be about ¼ inch.)

Wet ingredients:

1 large egg

1 stick (113 grams) unsalted butter, melted and cooled slightly

1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

1 cup (235 grams) mashed overripe bananas (You'll need 2–3 medium bananas.)

½ cup (123 grams) plain, whole-milk yogurt

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees, and butter and flour an 8½-by-4½-inch (6-cup) loaf pan.

Whisk together the dry ingredients in a medium-sized bowl. In a large bowl, lightly beat the egg, then add the rest of the wet ingredients and stir well. Dump the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients, and gently fold with a rubber spatula until the flour mixture is just incorporated. Do not overmix.

Pour the batter into the prepared pan, and bake for 50 to 60 minutes, until a tester inserted into the center of the loaf comes out clean. Cool in the pan for 10 to 15 minutes, then carefully turn out the bread onto a rack. Cool completely before slicing.

H
arvard Square was quiet in the 5:00 a.m. hour. The sky was still half sleeping, greenish pink around the edges. Eli and I could hear our shoes against the bricks as we walked. We went down into the T and caught the first Red Line train of the day. It was only three stops to the hospital, but by the time the train climbed aboveground with a view of the Charles River, the sky had ripened into daylight proper. I felt as though I'd been awake for hours.

“Ready, lady?” Eli asked.

This would be my third surgery. Fourth, if you count the decompression of the optic nerve on the heels of the aneurysm clipping. All of those surgeries had been emergencies, urgent, slice-and-saw responses to trauma, injury, and infection. This one was different. Except for the hole in my skull, I was fine. Totally healthy.
Wait, why was I having this surgery, again?
I mean, the helmet was annoying and all, but a mere inconvenience, wasn't it, compared with being cut open?

My mom and dad were already in the waiting room when we got there. I checked in, changed into a couple of johnnies, one with the opening in the back, the other in the front. I knew the drill. Cold snaps against my skin. Hospital bracelet.

I hopped up on a gurney behind a curtain and took off my helmet. Someone had left a thick folder of papers on the table, my medical records, and I flipped through them feeling like a snoop. I jumped when my family pushed back the curtain. “Hi!” I said, too loudly, and slapped the folder shut.

A nurse came by and said it was time to go. I asked to use the bathroom first, gathered up my gowns, and snapped my helmet back on. “Okay, so, um, be right back,” I said brightly. I started toward the hallway, but my dad touched my arm and pulled me in close. “It's okay,” he whispered in my ear, “this is a big deal.”

“I know,” I said, my voice catching.

“I know,” he said back.

Eli came with me to right outside the OR, and the neurosurgeon met us there. “Now, there
is
a possibility that we won't be able to place the prosthesis today.”

“What?”

Apparently there could be trouble pulling apart the tissues. Without my skull to keep them separate, my forehead and the outermost dura surrounding my brain had likely fused. If separating them took too long, they'd have to go back in with the prosthesis another time.

“When you see me in recovery, will you tell me right away if my head is back?”

“Sure,” the doctor said. “But it's likely you won't be with it enough to remember.” I was told before each surgery that I wouldn't remember the recovery room, but I always did.

“Please, just tell me right away,” I said. “Will I see the plastic surgeon before we begin?”

“No, he won't be here until later. His job comes in at the end.”

 • • • 

I awoke in the recovery room with the neurosurgeon standing over me.

“You did fine.”

“Do I have my head back?”

“What's that?”

“My head. Is it back?”

He smiled. “Yes. Yes, it's back.”

“Thank you. Thank you so much.”

I was moved to a room and Eli came in as soon as they let him.

“Jess, your head is back,” he said, first thing, in case I hadn't yet heard. I reached out and squeezed his arms and cupped my hands around his face. I just wanted to touch him.

“I know.” I laughed. “The doctor told me. How do I look?”

“Like a person with a head,” Eli said. “Looks great, lady.”

We did it,
I thought.
It's over
. I asked for a mirror so that I could see myself before the swelling set in. Yep, I was a person with a head. I swept my eyes over the face staring back at me. My forehead was in place, my eyebrows level. Something was off, though. My left temple. A golf-ball-sized dent was still there. I reached up to touch it and traced my finger along the now-complete eye socket. The edge of the bone felt unnaturally sharp where it dropped off into my hollow temple.

“Eli,” I said, “my temple. Does it look not quite filled in to you?” He tipped my chin up with his fingers and stared at me, his mouth a straight line.

“Maybe. It's hard to tell right now. Could be that the surrounding area is already beginning to swell, and that's why it looks that way.”

“Right,” I said. “Is the plastic surgeon still here? I haven't seen him. I want to thank him.”

Eli looked suddenly tired. “He didn't show up.”

It took me a second before I could speak. “What do you mean?”

No one could say exactly what had happened or where the communication had broken down. A month later, at a follow-up visit, I would ask the secretary about it, and she'd say that she had made a mistake. That was all.

The neurosurgeon pointed out that it was impossible to know what, if anything, might have been different if the plastic surgeon had been there. Temporal wasting is common following craniotomies. Detached from the bone for so many months, the temporalis muscle atrophies. My doctor was right, of course. In an alternate universe where both surgeons were present, maybe something goes terribly wrong and I never make it off the table. But maybe, with the plastic surgeon there, I wake up all the way intact.

 • • • 

My mother stayed with us again for the first week of my recovery. I hung around the house for a few days, mostly because that was what I thought I was supposed to do. The truth was, I felt great. Which is to say, like a healthy person recovering from surgery. I'd never been that before.

I'd been home for four days when my mother and I decided to walk over to the farmers' market on campus. My first real helmet-free outing. I tied a navy blue bandana over my scar and pulled it awkwardly down over the remaining dent in my temple. I felt naked and self-conscious without my helmet, vulnerable, though my brain was better protected now than it had been in almost a year.

We cut through the park on our way to the market, and when we passed a game of ultimate Frisbee, my body switched into high alert. I instinctively moved to the far side of the path to give myself an extra second or two to react should an errant Frisbee glide uncomfortably close. I'd forgotten that I now had a skull to protect me.

We wandered among the stalls piled with tomatoes and zucchini, tiny raspberries, corn. We filled our bags. My mother bought a thyme plant for my kitchen window, a scoop of cherry lambic sorbet for me, and coffee ice cream for herself. We sat down on the steps of a building in Harvard Yard. I'd accepted a teaching fellowship for the semester and would walk into the classroom in three weeks. There was a lot to do before then.

“I want to bake something,” I said.

I hadn't dared to say it out loud, but before leaving for the hospital, I had secretly challenged myself to bake challah my first week home. After my first surgeries, it had taken me months to regain the strength to produce the two braided loaves. If I could be well enough to bake challah this time after only one week, it would be proof that I was well on my way.

I started baking bread when I was in middle school. A friend of my mother's gave me a bread machine, and I used it to make terrible whole wheat bricks from bagged flour mixes. The thing that the manual called the baking pan was actually more of a bucket, a vertically oriented rectangle with a dough hook that snapped into place on the bottom. What came out were not so much loaves but towers that you would have to pry from the “pan,” tearing a hole in the bottom where the dough hook had baked into the bread after the kneading cycle. We ate it warm with butter, and at least butter is nice.

After Eli and I were married, I tried bread baking again, this time doing everything by hand. I baked challah every Friday for Shabbat dinners, and before long I had it down. My hands worked and shaped the dough as if on automatic.

I adjusted my bandana as my mom and I stood up to go, and smoothed the hair on the top of my head. It was warm from the sun.
I have a luxury head,
I thought. At home I had everything I needed: flour, salt, yeast, oil, honey, eggs. That dent was just a battle wound. It was time to get on with it.