I’ve had a very worky weekend–what I call a “serial comma” weekend because it has entailed editing, scheduling, and accounting tasks that just go on and on. Serial comma days are one of the downsides of self-employment. But because all this busy work has kept me home and the weather has been so temperate, I also find myself doing some serious cooking for the first time in months. Yesterday, I actually made meatballs. For a non-Italian* I make really good meatballs, which is a claim that always sounds both boastful and dirty. It’s true, though. I make really good meatballs: flavorful, spicy, light. The secret is the fennel sausage from the old-school pork store down the street. Even permakitten Gracie likes them a lot; I caught her swiping one from the pan. If only my matzo balls were so expertly rendered. (Cue my Jewish grandmother rolling in her grave. Next to lobster bisque, properly made meatballs may be the world’s least Kosher food.) Continue Reading →
Archive | Food Matters
Sex Pots… and Pans
Tonight I ruined my beets. I boiled them for such a long time that by the time I looked up from my book, smoke had filled my apartment. I haven’t been that cotton-headed since I started living by myself twenty years ago but it was an engrossing book (another Octavia Butler) and it has been a terrible summer.
I mention the beets because, in the process of ruining them, I also ruined the pot, which made me panic for an existential minute. I’ve had this pot, a Brazilian stainless-steel 3-quart saucepan, for as long as I’ve lived by myself. I inherited it in a very stupid breakup—or, rather, in the demise of a very stupid relationship, the sort we used to have in the 1990s when we still equated sex with death and so made long-term commitments out of what should have been one-night stands. This man, whom I have called The WASP elsewhere, left me in his West Village studio when he left for graduate school, where he began shacking up with a fellow student before properly ending things with me. When the lease of his NYC apartment ended, he was too terrified to claim the household items he’d left behind. To be fair, by then I’d threatened to mutilate him with most of them.
So I found a sweet and affordable Brooklyn apartment of my own, and soon enough the only traces of him could be found in a set of stainless-steel pots as well as two sky-blue plates. (I ritualistically burned all his plaid flannel shirts.) This established a pattern. Whenever I received kitchenwear from a lover or, worse, their mother, the romance’s death certificate appeared on the wall. Continue Reading →
