by Cathy Erway
Sprinkle of salt and freshly ground black pepper
Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Place the baguette rounds in a single layer on baking sheets and bake for about 5 minutes, or until lightly toasted. Remove and let cool completely before topping.
Combine all the rest of the ingredients in a bowl (can be made a day ahead). Top each toasted baguette slice with a spoonful of the hearts-of-palm mixture. Serve immediately.
Red-Curry-Glazed Roasted Eggplant
Another great party snack with a bold flavor. These eggplant bites can be served with toothpicks or placed on top of crostini or seeded crackers for a bit of crunch.
(MAKES ABOUT 4 APPETIZER-SIZED SERVINGS)
2 medium shallots, chopped
1 large garlic clove, minced
2 teaspoons grated fresh ginger
2 teaspoons red curry paste
1 teaspoon fish sauce
2 teaspoons sugar
1 teaspoon soy sauce
¼ cup vegetable oil
4 long Asian eggplants, halved lengthwise and chopped into about 2-inch pieces
Combine all the ingredients except the eggplant in a food processor or blender. Transfer to a container with a lid and enough room to fit the eggplant pieces. Toss the eggplant in the sauce until fully coated by covering container and shaking. Let marinate for about 15 minutes before roasting.
Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Spread eggplant pieces across an oiled baking sheet. Bake for about 8 minutes or until crisp on the edges. Remove carefully with a spatula and let cool a few minutes before serving.
Boneless San Bei GiwithGreen Beans
I recommend trying the classic version of this Taiwanese dish, but this bastardization using boneless strips of chicken and the addition of green beans for a complete meal has been a popular and tasty variation that many have found easier to digest.
(SERVES 4)
3 pounds boneless chicken breasts and/or thighs, sliced against the grain to ¼-inch-thick pieces
1 tablespoon cornstarch
⅓ cup soy sauce
⅓ cup plus 2 teaspoons sesame oil
20 cloves of garlic, smashed or coarsely chopped
20 slices of fresh ginger
⅓ cup rice wine
3 tablespoons sugar
1 pound green beans, ends trimmed and snapped in half to roughly 2-3-inch pieces
2 scallions, chopped
2-3 dried whole red chilies (optional)
1 large bunch Thai basil leaves
Rice for serving
Mix chicken pieces in cornstarch and 2 teaspoons of soy sauce in a bowl. Cover and chill to marinate at least 30 minutes, or up to overnight.
In a large nonstick pan, heat sesame oil with the chilies, garlic and ginger until oil just begins to bubble. Add chicken and stir to brown pieces on all sides a little bit. Add rice wine, remaining soy sauce, and sugar. Stir until boiling, then cover. Let simmer on medium-low 8 minutes or slightly longer if using chicken with bones. Add the green beans and basil and stir the pan to evenly distribute them. Cover partially and continue cooking for 5 minutes. Add scallions and toss once more. Serve with white rice.
CHAPTER 4
Chilaquiles and Meringues
COOKING QUIRKS AND CHARACTERISTICS
The way a man cuts his meat reflects his life.
—Chinese proverb
A blotted canvas tarp was heaped in the center of the room. On top of it stood a paint-speckled three-step ladder with a can of white paint and a toolbox at its feet. The rest of the hardwood living room floor was bare, and so was the front of the cupboard in the bathroom. It smelled of fresh paint in the apartment, and I got the feeling that someone had just been inside it a short time ago.
Our new landlord had assured us that the apartment Ben and I were moving into would be ready by November first. About a week before the move-in date, he called me to see if we could move on the fifteenth instead. Actually, we didn’t have a choice—his contractors hadn’t finished the renovation. This sent off a wave of complications involving subletters, tricky math regarding our rent payments, and inconvenient timing—the fifteenth fell in the middle of the week. And now, at eleven o’clock on a Wednesday night, we stood in our new one-bedroom apartment, a van full of our stuff and three friends waiting outside.
A short month and a half ago, Ben and I had made the decision to move in together. Neither of us had really thought about leaving behind our old living situations before; I couldn’t have asked for a better roommate than Erin, and Ben loved his old neighborhood and apartment, which he also shared with just one roommate. But with the way we had been living for the past few months—together, essentially—a dramatic change seemed inevitable. Wary that we were burdening our roommates with a part-time third roommate, and prompted by the fact that our leases were due for renewal at the same time, we began looking for our own place.
Neither Ben nor I had ever lived with a significant other before. It had been somewhat nerve-wracking to think about at first, but once Ben and I started finding apartments that we liked and envisioning the new situation, it all seemed like it was meant to be. I’d started a new job that month, too. Finally I’d no longer be manning the office of a busy executive, taking phone calls and pushing papers around; instead I was working as a copywriter for a clothing company, where I had the chance to flex some creativity. It was a step in the right direction for me, and of course, I was still cooking and blogging away in the meantime. Ben helped me refresh my website with new graphics that he’d designed. There were plenty of changes that fall.
When we went to see the one-bedroom that we eventually rented, we immediately loved its old-fashioned details and the historic block of mansions the building was situated on. We also loved the neighborhood, Fort Greene, Brooklyn. It had a farmers’ market, a beautiful park, and a diverse community, yet the influx of trendy restaurants that were beginning to dot its main street told of its recent gentrification. We began imagining how we’d decorate our place, and collecting household odds and ends while checking off a list of items that we’d now have two of so we could discern which was better. But as we stood there, stunned at the scene when we opened the apartment door as tenants for the first time, our elation hit the floor.
After many harried trips up and down the block with our friends helping, we managed to move all our stuff into the center of the living room, and called it a night. The next morning, I discovered a new problem with the apartment. When I called the gas company to register for service, the rep was confused. There was no record of our particular unit in the building in their files. But it had been occupied for the past twenty-five years, by the same tenant right until we moved in. How could this be, we asked?
It turned out the previous tenant had had the gas turned off for some twenty years. Before it had been renovated, the kitchen hadn’t even had a working stove. We’d seen how spare and decrepit the old kitchen in the apartment had been on our first walk-through of the space, before the contractors gutted it and installed new appliances. Unless he was remarkably handy with a microwave, it was pretty clear that the previous tenant had never really cooked at home. So there I was on my first day in the new place, flicking the round knobs of the stove fruitlessly.
“Maybe you should give yourself a break. Let’s order a pizza or something,” Ben suggested.
We were unpacking. The tarp and tools that were on the floor the night before had been removed mysteriously sometime during the day, while we were at work. Here and there little tasks had been hastily finished off, like the addition of the mirror on the bathroom cupboard. We had a huge chore on our hands between unloading our stuff and arranging the place, and I had to admit, the takeout option sounded pretty tempting. But I shot Ben an annoyed glare instead. He shrugged and went back to ripping boxes open.
I’d picked up a package of frozen gyoza dumplings and edamame beans from a Korean grocery on my way to the subway after work. Heating them up had been my idea of a quickie, shortcut meal. N
ow they sat stiffly on the counter, impossibly frozen through. We didn’t own a microwave—neither Erin nor I could find much reason to get one at our old place, and the microwave at Ben’s old apartment had belonged to his roommate. I looked at the polished, never-before-used stove. How was I going to cook these things? I’d never felt so eerily out of my element before. How did humans accomplish anything without fire?
I watched Ben unloading a cardboard box of kitchen tools. He lifted one of my towel-wrapped knives out of a box, then pulled out my shoddy plastic coffeemaker. Then it hit me: the rice cooker. It had a steaming tray inside, and it ran purely on electricity
After that first night of steamed dumplings and edamame, we had to wait an excruciating week and a half before the gas company could properly install a connection to our unit. I survived the week by eating a lot of salad, bread, cold cheeses, fruits, and cured meats. I’d bring sandwiches or chopped salads to work. But every now and then, I had a hankering for something hot.
One of my favorite comfort foods growing up, and also one of the first foods I can remember eating, was a bowl of foamy steamed eggs. Its custardlike texture and bubbly, yellow froth that clung to the sides of the bowl it was cooked in was unlike anything else in the world. It was essentially half eggs, half water, gently seasoned with salt and white pepper, and every spoonful of egg came with a hot slurp of water. My mom said it was a common Chinese baby food, since it was so soft. Because I had only the steamer to cook with that week, I remembered the comfort food and began steaming scrambled eggs, sometimes with bits of chopped vegetables and cold cuts like ham scrambled in. I made steamed omelettes, deliciously soupy and hot—perfect for the early fall.
I shared some of my first batch with Ben. He decided he preferred traditional scrambled eggs cooked on a pan but ate it anyway. When we were living apart, I never imposed my eating-in-only diet on Ben, and I didn’t plan to now that we were living together. But it was clear now that whenever I was cooking at home, there would always be another mouth to feed. And that mouth had a different palate from mine.
My life changed profoundly when I bought an ice-cream maker that fall. Beforehand, Ben and I would walk down to the corner convenience store for snacks at night. Usually, it was ice cream. We’d lean over the slide-top freezer chest, arguing over what flavor to choose from the many pint-sized cartons of Häagen-Dazs and Ben and Jerry’s, and how much fat it should have, to the amusement of our neighbor, a Korean couple who owned the small store. Then we’d compromise—sort of—and bring home our icy treat. These pints cost $4.25 each. Now, thanks to the $50 ice-cream maker, I was making vanilla-bean-speckled premium ice cream with a splash of Bourbon, coffee ice cream, green tea and honey ice cream, or fresh peach or mango frozen yogurt by the quart. After I’d learned how to make an ice-cream base, the sky was the limit. We always had at least two quart containers of homemade ice cream in the freezer after that purchase.
I also bought a food processor, which I used a lot at first to make chickpea hummus. Finding that chickpeas didn’t need to be the only type of bean dip in the world, I began creating other spreads, dips, sauces, and pestos using the food processor. With these tools, I had lots of treats in storage at any given time, either in the freezer or in the refrigerator. Thawing a bit of pesto or fresh tomato sauce to mix with pasta, I found, made for an easy route to dinner, as did slathering some hummus on bread with veggies for lunch.
I learned how to pickle in mason jars from my friend Bob, who had recently launched his own pickling business, McClure’s Pickles, with his brother. Soon I had reserves in my fridge of homemade pickled radishes, Brussels sprouts, and any vegetable I could see fit to brine. Other DIY kitchen experiments of mine were less successful. One friend gave me her yogurt cultures after she decided she didn’t have the patience to tend to them daily anymore. After dutifully adding milk and straining the curds from the whey each night for a while, I found that I didn’t have the patience, either. Neither did I particularly enjoy the runny, excessively sour character of homemade yogurt.
My mother came to visit our apartment one day and was awed to find, stacked on top of the kitchen cupboards, the food processor and ice-cream maker. I suppose our extra coffeemaker had added to the scene, because she cried, “You have so many gadgets!”
What a transformation, I thought, that this apartment, once occupied by an old man who for decades never even boiled water on his stove, was now inhabited by a young couple who had kitchen gadgetry on display and a dire need for that kitchen to work properly.
We had an upstairs neighbor who was quite a character. His name was Harvey, and he was the first person I met in the building and the most visible one on a regular basis. Harvey lived alone and worked on his paintings at home during the day. When he wasn’t at work, he was undoubtedly chatting beside someone at a coffee shop down the street, or on another neighbor’s front stoop. He was a thin man, probably in his seventies, with feathery white hair and thick glasses. He had an unpredictable temper, which I’d learned about after a couple of skirmishes between him and our landlord. But the rest of the time, he had an affecting kindness to his voice, like that of a kindergarten teacher. And if you allowed him to, he could keep you talking for hours.
I’d often run into Harvey on the front steps of our building, as he was coming indoors with a pair of weighted-down plastic grocery bags at his sides. I could tell from the frequency of these grocery excursions that Harvey cooked, unlike his friend who had lived in the apartment that Ben and I now occupied. I often wondered what kind of groceries Harvey was carrying. Eggs? Milk? Bread? Things that went bad quickly, or had to be replenished regularly? Maybe he liked shopping for groceries so often just to see what items were marked down that day, a habit of my late paternal grandfather’s, who was legendary for his frugality. At the coffee shop, Harvey would nurse a single cup of coffee for hours, holding court at a table as friends, acquaintances, and new conversation partners came and went. Though they served pastries and sandwiches at the cafe, for all the hours he spent there, I’d never seen Harvey eat a single bite.
“I always see you coming in and out with groceries,” Harvey said to me one night, as we ran into each other at the stoop. I’d smiled and said yes, not knowing what else to say.
Other times we’d linger and talk longer. Harvey once told me, with alternating fury and pride, the story of how he and the five other tenants who’d lived in the building for several decades had triumphed over their landlord’s attempt to raise their rent. The building had been rent-controlled ever since our current landlord’s parents lived in it. This couple had raised their children in the building, and according to Harvey, had “just wanted to have nice neighbors.” That was it. They weren’t greedy But after they passed away, their son, now our landlord, wanted to adjust all the tenants’ rents drastically to bring it up to modern real estate standards. They went to court, and after many months, the tenants won, leaving the two parties bitter. They would be forever bickering about management issues large and small, I’d learn through my months of living there, either from passive-aggressive announcements issued from our landlord or further rants from Harvey. “I’ve been living here for my entire adult life,” Harvey had said once. He’d gone to Pratt, the art school a few blocks away, to study painting. “We were the people who made this neighborhood interesting,” Harvey said.
“Well, I’ve got to get going,” I told Harvey one night, holding up my tote bag filled with groceries to indicate that they needed to get cooked. He smiled and nodded.
“You have a good night, Cathy,” he said, allowing me to pass through the doorway. “Tell Ben I said hello, too.”
Ben and I joked that Harvey was like the king of the block. His presence on stoops and sidewalks, in hallways and at coffee-shop tables, was nearly constant, and confirmed his popularity in the neighborhood. I worried about who would help Harvey cook and buy groceries once he became too old to do it on his own. Once, he’d asked Ben to help him take down some huge ceiling
plants in an apartment belonging to Harvey’s friend down the street, which he was house sitting. I hoped that many friends would be ready to spring to his aid when that time came. For now, though, he was defiant and independent, doing his laundry, cooking his meals, living his life very much his own way within his five-block radius.
Ben and I were invited over for brunch at Sam and Richard’s one Sunday. To repay us for the dinner at my old apartment, they planned to make us one of our favorite foods that morning, chilaquiles. Ben had been going through a lot of restaurant withdrawal lately, and one of his favorite places for brunch was a Mexican restaurant that specialized in chilaquiles con huevos. We’d eaten it there probably more than a dozen times. The brunch entree came in a steaming individual casserole. Underneath two soft poached eggs were crisp corn tortilla strips steeped in a bubbling green tomatillo sauce and connected by stringy, melted cheese.