The Art of Eating In

by Cathy Erway

  The next day was a whirlwind of activity, from sipping wines at a handful of vineyards in Napa Valley to tasting every manner of chocolate possible and taking a truffle-making class at the Death by Chocolate festival at COPIA. My mom and I also found time to stop for lunch at the Culinary Institute of America’s Greystone restaurant, in Napa. There, I’d attacked a foamy souffle of cheese that was baked on top of my French onion soup. My mom had ordered a light seafood cioppino, which came with a separate jug of hot broth to pour over the dish.

  At the end of the day, we also enjoyed a long dinner with Mark Douglas and three other guests from the chocolate contest. We’d gone to Julia’s Kitchen at COPIA, named after the culinary heroine. My entree was a very deconstructed bouillabaisse: a thin, tomato-based stew with fresh and barely seasoned seafood and a shower of parsley. I felt like I was becoming better acquainted with this California cuisine, something I knew about only from books and magazines.

  The next morning, after a quick breakfast at our hotel, my mom and I headed for the airport. It had been a brief but packed two days on the West Coast, and I was sure that my chocolate cravings were sated for the next year or so. I also hoped that my restaurant-food cravings wouldn’t come back to haunt me after all those great and guilt-inspiring meals we had. But as I drove us to the airport, thinking ahead about my upcoming week, I couldn’t wait to get into the kitchen and start cooking again. I could almost feel the familiar grip of the spatula in my hand, and the motions of mincing garlic replayed in my mind.

  “You know,” my mom said, leaning back in the passenger seat, “I think it’s a good time for you to be living alone, have your own place. It will be good for you.”

  “Yeah?” I said.

  “Jo-Jo thinks so, too,” she added.

  I was squinting from the sunlight, but something about what my mom just said made my eyes tear up a little, and I didn’t want her to see. I focused on the road ahead, my hands firm on the wheel.

  “I think it will be good for you,” she said again.

  Back in Brooklyn late that night, I walked into my apartment and plopped down my luggage at the door. The living room was still littered with boxes. It was about midnight, and after a long weekend away, I was tired and found myself missing my old home, and barely recognizing my new one.

  When I sat down a few days later, trying to come up with my next “Reason of the Month for not eating out” blog post, I felt a little bit at a loss. I got up and walked around my apartment. There was a large stockpot on the back burner of my stove simmering with a big batch of vegetable stock I was making. It smelled wonderful, the carrots, celery, onion, and turnips slowly seeping their flavors into the hot water with a steady bubble. I went back to my computer and tried to write again.

  I’d had such an overwhelming change of pace eating in restaurants in Morocco and San Francisco—I was lucky to have eaten at some pretty good places throughout, and this didn’t exactly represent the typical restaurant-food experience for most people. But still, I began to question what I was gaining from this not-eating-out experiment that was so great in comparison to perhaps just eating in really great restaurants. Or, what was I taking away from this experiment that was so much better than what I could gain by traveling around and experiencing new foods all the time in different places?

  But that wasn’t the point of it all, was it? I wasn’t ever trying to say all along that not eating out in New York was somehow unequivocally better than eating in restaurants. No, in a perfect world, a good balance of home-cooking passion and a hearty appetite for exciting and new restaurant food would do me just fine. The problem was expense and practicality. By knowing how to cook all the time, I was saving myself a huge bundle. And I’d made it practical for my busy lifestyle.

  I walked around my living room again, stopping to open the stockpot and stare at the vegetables at the bottom. The translucent, loose rings of an onion were flapping in the bubbles like a winged creature trying to take flight. I closed the lid and walked down the short hall to my bedroom. I opened the door—I’m not sure why I ever closed the door in the first place; it’s not like I needed to for privacy—and stared at the messy room for a minute.

  I sat back down on my living room couch and opened my laptop again. The screen flashed on with a slight beep and returned to my half-written blog post. I erased the text and rewrote the title. “Reason for Not Eating Out #19: Because You Can (Almost) Afford to Live Alone.” In it, I estimated the food cost for an average month’s worth of eating solely from grocery-store purchases. I compared that to an average month’s worth of eating a combination of grocery store and restaurant food, in a breakdown that resembled how I used to eat before I began my blogging quest. The difference in spending, month to month, came surprisingly close to the couple of hundred dollars more I was paying in rent than at my old place, with Ben. It didn’t make up the deficit for my own one-bedroom completely, but it made a compelling argument for sacrificing restaurant spending as a way to budget for something else—something more valuable, perhaps. And for New York City, space commands a very high value.

  Ben and I saw very little of each other after the move. After tying up some loose ends regarding the apartment, my mail, and the like, we didn’t really communicate. I guess neither of us felt the need to.

  One cold night a couple of weeks after moving, I went out for drinks with Jordan and a few other friends. We’d gone to a nearby bar and had a good time. Once it had gotten late, we all took off in our separate directions. As I biked my short ride home, I thought about how I was going to put on a record and cook up a hot bowl of noodles with a splash of hot chili sauce in the soup once I got home. I wouldn’t have a sleeping boyfriend to be sorry about waking up in the next room. I also wouldn’t have a boyfriend who just wanted to buy a big bag of chips and sit in front of the squawking TV whenever we came home from a night out like this. Still, I felt a little alone in the world as I rode home, and also, freezing cold.

  I no longer thought about Ben specifically these days so much as I felt a lack of some other entity, a confidant, someone to help pull along the weight of every day. This new sense of independence was compounded by the fact that I had no roommates. I had never before entertained this option in all the time I’d been in New York-mostly because I didn’t think I could afford it. Even back when I was living with Erin, which seemed so long ago but was only a little over a year, sharing tight corners and trying to squeeze in personal peace and quiet now and then just seemed the natural course of living in the city. But here I was, in my apartment all to myself. And here, too, I would be cooking for one.

  I remembered what my mom had said in the car when we were driving to the airport in California, and how confident she had been about my new living situation. This was a far cry from the mother who had told me almost four years ago, when I first moved to the city, that roommates were, if nothing else, watch keepers of one’s life. They would be the ones to call if you got locked out; they were the key contact if anything should happen to you. Now she was saying something else. It had never occurred to me before that I might be doing myself a favor by living alone, or that I could have been depriving myself of some room for personal growth otherwise, much like I had stuffed all my old sketchbooks, musical instruments, and reams of writing tablets into a box at the tippy top of my packed closet, out of reach. Maybe I really would be better off, more productive, by not being around others all the time. I think that’s what she and Jo-Jo meant when she said it would be good for me.

  At the bar that night, instead of being stimulated by the prospect of meeting someone, I found myself thinking about how lame most of the city’s male population was. It was sad, really, the way the drunkards had all sat around in big groups, staring down all-too-aware-of-this females and knocking back beers until they were loud and giggly. Maybe this wasn’t so bad or unusual; maybe I was just seeing guys in a dull light right then and it would take a real diamond in the rough to change my point of view.

&
nbsp; I rode past another bar on my way home and glanced at a crowd of smokers hanging out by the entrance. There were three scruffy dudes shivering in the cold in sweaters, corduroy jackets, and ripped jeans. I summed them up pretty quickly and suddenly felt gripped with a conviction: Whoever I was going to date next-whenever that would be—would have nothing to do with these types of overeducated, overly taste-conscious, regular losers and persnickety coffee-shop jerks. The type who fetishized some sort of hardscrabble New York lifestyle, barely making rent on tip wages while their parents back in some other state probably had enough money to buffer them, or at least buy them a winter coat.

  Well, it turned out I was wrong.

  Roasted Green Pepper and Tomato Dip (Taktouka Salad)

  This dish was taught at the La Maison Arabe cooking class in Marrakesh, Morocco. It can be served warm, room temperature, or cold, and it can be eaten with bread as a dip or simply alone as a side.

  (SERVES 2-3)

  2 large green bell peppers

  2 tablespoons olive oil

  2 garlic cloves, minced

  1 heaping teaspoon paprika

  1 teaspoon salt

  ½ teaspoon black pepper

  3 large ripe tomatoes, cored, peeled, and finely chopped

  Holding each bell pepper with tongs, blacken all sides of its surface over an open flame from a gas oven. Alternately, the peppers can be placed on a sheet and broiled on each side, or baked at 500 degrees, until their skin has crisped and blackened. Place peppers into individual plastic bags and close tightly to prevent any air from getting in. Let sit for 10 minutes. Remove peppers from bags and carefully peel away the skin with a dull knife (it should be soggy by now and slip off easily). Core the peppers and slice them into very fine, long slivers.

  In a saucepan, heat the olive oil with garlic. Add the spices and tomatoes and cook about 5-6 minutes, stirring occasionally, until tomatoes have broken down and reduced to a thick sauce. Add the slivered peppers and stir for another 2-3 minutes. Serve immediately.

  Minty Moroccan Couscous Salad with Mint and Ghee

  With vegetables, protein, and grains, this salad makes a great summer meal and travels well to potlucks and parties. The classic North African ingredients—oliues, almonds, and raisins—add a warm complement to the fresh tomatoes, but the mint clarified butter (ghee) is the real secret to the dish’s tastiness.

  (SERVES 4-6)

  2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil

  ½ large red onion, finely chopped

  2 cloves garlic, minced

  1 teaspoon each coriander and cumin seeds, toasted and crushed in a spice grinder (or use ground powders)

  2 teaspoons turmeric

  1 teaspoon paprika

  1-2 teaspoons salt

  ½ teaspoon black pepper

  2 cups uncooked couscous

  1 cup vegetable stock or water

  2 cups grape tomatoes, halved

  ½ cup raisins

  ½ cup roasted almonds, roughly chopped

  1 cup pitted black Greek olives, roughly chopped

  1½ cups chickpeas, soaked and fully cooked, or if canned, rinsed and drained

  Juice and zest of 1 lemon

  1 stick butter

  4-5 tablespoons fresh mint leaves, finely chopped

  In a large, heavy pot, heat the olive oil. Add about one-third of the chopped onions, the garlic, all the spices, and the salt and pepper, and stir over medium-low heat for 4-5 minutes, until the onions are soft. Add the couscous and stir to coat evenly. In a separate pan, bring the vegetable stock or water to a boil. Pour over the couscous, stir thoroughly, and cover the pot. Let sit for 5 minutes.

  Fluff couscous and stir in the rest of the ingredients except for the butter and mint leaves.

  In a small saucepan, slowly melt the butter. Remove from heat, and with a regular spoon skim off all the solid white milk fat that has separated to the top (it’s okay if a tiny bit remains in the pot). Add the chopped mint leaves and let sit for at least 10 minutes. Drizzle the clarified mint butter over the couscous and stir thoroughly. It’s best to let the couscous sit for at least one hourbefore serving, to let the flavors blend. Serve at room temperature.

  CHAPTER 10

  New Lows

  THE SEARCH FOR THE PERFECT DATE MEAL

  The way to a woman’s heart is through the door of an expensive restaurant.

  -Conventional wisdom/Refrigerator magnets/Coffee mugs

  My first few weeks living in my new apartment, I spent most nights cooking boring, repetitive, and humble foods for myself. It was pleasant, if a little lonely. I didn’t have to worry about another person around to disagree with whatever I felt like making. I didn’t have another set of eyes in the apartment to watch me if I was frantically clanging and grabbing things around the kitchen, avoiding the splash of oil and dropping spatulas, or cursing because I forgot to add something to the pot. In fact, I didn’t do much of anything frantically while cooking anymore. Who cared how prompt or good dinner was, when there was only myself to please? It turns out I was my own best personal chef. I’d spend a languid half hour stirring risotto, listening to the radio or records, watching everything going on in the pot. Somehow, everything I cooked in those first few weeks came out seamlessly, too, delicious even if simple.

  On the phone one day, it suddenly occurred to my mother that I couldn’t go to restaurants for dates.

  “How are you going to date?” she exclaimed in between huge, incredulous cackles. “No one is going to be able to take you out!”

  “Whatever,” I said, rolling my eyes. My friends were supercool and creative, I tried to explain to her. And we don’t care about institutions like the nice, civil restaurant date. I think this scared her for a moment even more than the thought of me never dating anyone again.

  The truth was, I knew it was going to be different now, if I should meet someone whom I might want to date. But I hoped that my strange eating disorder wouldn’t be seen as a handicap. Sure, it would be awkward to have to explain the whole blog premise to anyone who just asked me if I wanted to go grab a bite, and it was bound to cause a little hiccup in those precious few moments when a person first asks someone out. But men who were so uncreative as to not know what to do for a date besides go to a restaurant? I decided I had no need for them. Hey, maybe this could be something of a built-in filtering device, this no-restaurant thing.

  I also felt like all of my previous relationships were founded on going to eat in restaurants. This didn’t exactly bring a tear of nostalgia to my eye. In high school, my first boyfriend and I would drive to twenty-four-hour diners throughout New Jersey, which, no matter the town, always had the same Deco exterior and harsh fluorescent lighting. There we’d sit in a booth for hours, sipping coffee and plunking quarters into the jukebox. After he moved away for college, we began going to the big-box, chain restaurants like IHOP, which dotted the highways that then separated us. After a while, it became harder to tell whether we were going to any of these places for the irony or kitsch value as we had been at first.

  In college I dated a vegetarian for a little while, and the idea of an exciting restaurant meal then was limited to a large foldout menu filled with fake-meat dishes at a Buddhist vegetarian restaurant in Chinatown. It wasn’t bad, but personally I’d rather have gone to the better Chinese restaurant down the street and ordered a spicy and savory tofu dish, maybe garnished with traces of meat for flavor, like ma po tofu.

  With Ben, it felt like the first six months of our relationship was a series of checking out one cute, hip new restaurant in Brooklyn after another. This common type of dating wasn’t unenjoyable, of course, and it was definitely a good way of exploring the city. But after a while you might begin to wonder if there was any reason the two of you had decided to spend time together other than to try the next thing on the menu, or the next hot restaurant.

  I was determined to find alternatives to the stale old ritual of going out to eat on dates. Dating while not eating out
in New York was just the challenge I needed to try my hand at next, to make the experiment more complete. Now, who else was up for the challenge?

  Around this time in late February and early March, I also found out that Ben had moved on to another relationship. I discovered this by accident; while clicking around on MySpace one day at the office, I saw that the relationship status on Ben’s profile had gone from “single” to “in a relationship.”

  My hands froze as I stared at the screen, and I felt a nasty surge of nausea rise in my throat. I knew at that moment whom it was with: that coworker of his, who had become so chummy in the last few weeks of our living together. The three of us had even hung out together several times. There was no doubt in my mind that she, who incidentally was ten years my senior, was the person he was now proudly in a relationship with.