Olive oil pours slowly to thin on a hot pan. Two thick slices of sourdough bathe just on top, a layer of pesto spread generously and a couple of ruby-fresh tomatoes on the first slice. Leftover turkey breast moist enough to wet your fingertips, cold cut. Soft mozzarella stretches over the corners of the crust. Chunky tomato sauce ladled over top and tucked in by the second hunk of sourdough. The first bite forces open your jaws and reminds you to take care of your teeth – thicker crust is a spectacular challenge.
We take for granted the things we put in our mouths. Holed up in our rooms we young people chomp on Captain Crunch and other stale cereals and drink too much coffee. It’s a generation of split focus. We love too much coffee, hate too much sleep. There are just so many other things on our minds.
It’s been years since I last tasted an artichoke. It drowns in the colander for 30 minutes. Dipped in hot butter, the yellowish leaves feel sour on your tongue. Artichokes are an excellent source of magnesium, fiber, and vitamin C. One works very hard to scrape the meager amount of meat from the base. My mother always prefers the heart – I prefer the satisfaction of my hard-working teeth cleaning off the leaves.
My dad had just migrated from Cambridge to Watertown when I was about eight, a nice basement apartment. Shuttled there each Friday night, we began our weekly traditions. On Tuesdays my brother and I would each choose a dish and, upon arrival at week’s end, the ingredients would greet us on the counter top. There were some failures: cream of broccoli soup, more comparable to hot broccoli milk. But sometimes we made roast duck, thick breaded meatballs, chicken broccoli Alfredo over fettuccini, homemade pasta sauce right down to plopping the boiled tomatoes in the ice water. At ten o’clock, instead of being tucked into bed with our teddy bears and our goodnight stories and our lullabies, dad would turn off the Dukes of Stratosphere or Depeche Mode and turn on Iron Chef. There in full color was Chairman Kaga, smiling maniacally as he devoured a bite of raw bell pepper and took his sweet time revealing the secret ingredient to the iron chef and his challenger.
I don’t eat much meat at college. It costs more than I earn and the cafeteria meat makes me feel a great despair for the animals. Their lives were spent to feed us, and all they were given to taste were hormones and chemically treated feed. Vegetarianism has no place in my life, but neither does grade D meat. Is that pretentious? Because it seems good health has become incredibly pretentious.
With winter, so too comes the difficulty to rise with brittle bones and a stiff head – products of seasonal affective disorder. But the morning begins with the coffee maker, of course. No addict can look directly into the eyes of any person or appliance until they at least have the sensual proof of coffee being brewed. So we scrub up, flop the filter into the compost, rinse off our hands and the crust at the bottom of the pot, shy our ears away from the screaming grinder, and revel at the rustle and clink of the grounds settling and the pot slapped in place. Then we sit, we wait, and we watch each tentative drop. Being addicted to coffee is really more about the wait.
Becky Colpitts raises lambs. She lets my friends feed them bottles, and chase them drunkenly through her fields. Then for winter solstice she cooks us stews and sour meatballs and whole shanks and rumps and burgers. She glazes and marinades and watches the oven like a mother giving her child to the world. She leans over the stove and inhales its steam and its aroma. She cares for her lambs up until the moment they enter our bellies, and because they love her, our bellies care for them too.
A few weeks after I turned 18, the warmth of April was just beginning. I spent a long sunny day wandering around Burlington, an escape from the isolation of my own Vermont mountain town. I had an appointment scheduled for half past noon at Yankee Tattoo. All morning had been spent discussing and sketching. The decision finally rested on fried eggs and bacon just about to land on a cast iron skillet, forever cooking on the nape of my neck.
Red quinoa with green onions and carrots and eggs. Salt & pepper. Cabot cheddar grated on top while the pot is still softly cooking. With one bowl I’ve avoided a cheese burger coated in mayonnaise and deep fried potato wedges. (That said: a good patty melt is nearly always irresistible.) Instead, there is a great war in my stomach – the good minerals battling the bad. Textures collide heavenly behind my lips: crunchy carrots and salty cheese and soft fluffy grains. When ready to eat, the quinoa looks like mulberries pummeled in the palm of my hand.
There was the calm temperature, the free feel of the sidewalks, the friendliness of the Schizophrenics, and the dull stillness of an ocean, almost like a warm Boston. Cowgirl Creamery sat just off the San Francisco Bay in Ferry Plaza. Women walked in to smell and taste and flirt with handsome cheese makers. Inside smelled like salt water and warm bread, and of course the heavy melody of cheeses bundled on top of one other; creamy whites and oranges overlapped in a blurry pattern. Brown barrels with rusty nails held the big wheels that the counter couldn’t burden. One of my current boyfriend’s seven siblings worked there, and I was shaking with nerves but determined to meet him. It’s quite easy to spot a Darling, their noses brim over their faces like humble reminders that their entire family is far superior in talent and charisma. There was a brief adjunct introduction between him my mother and me, and then, very swiftly, Simon was throwing cheeses at us to taste. He was incredibly thorough in answering our many questions and explaining every root of the cheeses’ birth: from northern California to France and back to Vermont. I was entirely perplexed by him, learning and tasting and watching Simon run about, but exceedingly apprehensive as to how much all this fancy cheese would cost.
My taste buds lollopped with the creamy combinations. Simon instructed us to head next door and buy bread while he “put together our dinner.” Firmly holding a baguette and a sourdough loaf, my mother lead us back to the creamery where Simon awaited us with a smile and two white paper bags heaping with treats. I exited the ferry building with our loot and a great bamboozled sort of feeling. He’d given us sweet chutney and green olives, mascarpone, brie and feta, two soft cheeses we’d never heard of, and one delightfully stinky and stiff – the kind that hurts your knuckles to slice. Aside from the warm, fresh bread, it had cost us merely a friendly face.
As transitioning adults, my dear mother still fills our stockings. They are the only thing she can afford to fill to the brim with “stuff,” and she beams through the process. Last Christmas, squishing the chapsticks and the thumb lights and candy was a bottle of Chianti. Beside it was a Whole Foods gift certificate for my days back in school. And suffocating on the floor of the cheap fabric was a fresh Clementine. I hugged her for these forgotten essentials and I saved that Chianti as long as I could. The gift certificate I spent right away.
Gruyère, parmesan and cheddar melted delicately into a milky béchamel, simmering and thickening around the wires of a whisk. I always remove it and replace it with a fat wooden spoon before the sauce is finished, so I can sneakily lick off all the cheese in the privacy of my kitchen. The cream is gratefully poured over the pasta in its cold casserole, topped with crispy buttered bread crumbs and a layer of crimson tomato slices then placed in the oven to familiarize. The red juices of the tomato slide down the layers of bread and cheese. It looks beautiful, the enthusiasm of the tomatoes readily seated on their golden divan. In every bite I taste my process – always worth bending over the stove for an hour. My crunched knees relax in a chair and friends stuff their mouths, their satisfaction comforting me. But I chew slowly and carefully and let each flavor sit on my tongue for a while, tasting the moments of their watery eyes and chomping jaws.
