The Art of Eating In

by Cathy Erway

  The rest of the afternoon’s preparations went fairly smoothly. But when the diners began to stream in at around six or seven o’clock, the kitchen was in full swing and utterly packed. There were a lot of things that needed to be cooked just before serving. We’d planned to make a dessert and had nearly forgotten about it in the midst of preparing the other courses. We had our guests join in and help pipe the ladyfinger batter into neat ovals on a cookie sheet. I found myself stationed at the deep fryer for a while, carefully frying up batches of chickpeas and shaking them in a bowl with cumin, salt, pepper, and a squeeze of lemon once they were cooked. I was sweating in the late-summer, cramped-kitchen heat, and collecting tiny splatters of hot fryer oil as I worked. A guest came up to me and offered to help. I demonstrated a batch for him, showing him how to slowly lower the basket of chickpeas into the oil and lift it out when they were done. A little later I’d be dipping prawns into a black-squid-ink-dyed batter and carefully dropping them into that fryer, too. It was tricky work, since we’d de-headed the prawns to extract the flavorful “juice” from them for another course, a seafood étouffée, and the prawn heads had to be fitted back together with their bodies and carefully dipped into the batter, then lowered into the deep fryer.

  I took a brief rest in the backyard before dinner was served. I put my beer to my forehead. For some reason, every time I cooked at these dinners it ended up being one of the hottest nights of the summer.

  The next morning, I slept in. I’d biked home late the night before in the heat, on a full belly, and was completely exhausted by the time I got home. I was glad to have the day off from the office. I usually worked three days a week, and this week I was off Monday and Tuesday. I put a pot of rolled oats on the stove and stepped into the shower while it simmered over a low flame. After an oatmeal breakfast and writing a blog entry, I packed a towel, some fruit, and a thawed Jamaican veggie patty that I’d made a few weeks before and headed down to the beach.

  Tuesday was another warm, sunny day. But I had a cooking project to take care of. I’d been invited to a “cupcake meet-up” happy hour hosted by the writers of the food blog “Cupcakes Take the Cake.” Earlier that week, I’d made a spur-of-the-moment batch of homemade cookies as a midnight snack. Spooning up the remaining slicks of dough from the mixing bowl while they baked, I’d wondered whether raw cookie dough wouldn’t make a great alternative to cake frosting. I wanted to recapture this binge and make a batch of cupcakes to bring to the event with chocolate-chip cookie dough on top, and no frosting. I’d never seen it done before, but how hard could it be? That afternoon, I beat together a basic vanilla cake batter and filled lined muffin tins with it. While they baked, I made the same chocolate-chip cookie dough I’d made a few nights before, using chunks of dark chocolate from a bar instead of chips. Once the cakes were baked and cooled, I took a spatula and tried smearing some cookie dough on top. The cake crumbled. That wouldn’t work; the dough was much stiffer than frosting. I took a small scoop of cookie dough and formed it into a ball with my hands. I smushed it into a round disc about the size of a chocolate-chip cookie and pressed it on top of the cupcake. Perfect! I carefully packed my finished cupcakes away in a container and stored them in the fridge for the next night.

  I’d signed up for a pig butchering class at the Brooklyn Kitchen that Tuesday night. The popular classes were taught by Tom Mylan, the local butcher and one of the judges from the last Chili Takedown. His butchering classes had become a big hit among curious foodies in Brooklyn, eager to zero in on what was for most a previously unexplored side of cooking: butchering. They tended to sell out fast, and I had grabbed the last seat at this class.

  I arrived at the Brooklyn Kitchen a few minutes late for class. Tom was talking about the heritage Berkshire pig breed to a group of about twelve pupils standing before a large side of the specimen. The next two hours of class were filled with fascinating facts. Aside from learning about the parts of the pig that constituted certain cuts, like the chop or the tenderloin, I was able to grasp how far the art of butchering had dwindled in the last few decades of industrialized agriculture. Nowadays, butchery was generally done with large saws, and shipped to groceries rather than by skilled, in-house butchers. During the class, Tom also explained how he had become a butcher only a few years before. Training under the guidance of Joshua Applestone from Fleisher’s, the upstate New York distributor of small farm meats, Tom had learned to appreciate the differences in free-range and humanely raised animals. This Berkshire hog, for instance, had unique DNA and was not genetically altered, as was 99 percent of the commercial pork available. What’s more, pastured animals raised by conscientious farmers, like that pig in front of us, are granted longer, fuller lives before they are slaughtered, and benefited from a natural, healthy diet. He pointed to a slightly off-hue patch of flesh next to the rib.

  “See, that might look kind of weird since it’s sort of yellowish, but that’s actually a good sign. It’s because of the beta-carotene, from the grass,” he said.

  At the end of the class, all the students took their turns picking cuts of the pork that Tom had demonstrated on to take home. I’d chosen a hunk of pork shoulder, a piece of loin, and a small strip of spare ribs. I planned to braise the shoulder into a chili for my upcoming Chili Takedown the next week. With about ten pounds of meat in a bag, I had the perplexing dilemma of how I was going to bring it home that night. I’d planned to meet friends at a CD-release party for Matt’s band at a nearby bar in Brooklyn right after class. There was no way I’d be able to carry all that meat on my bike, then put it down at the crowded bar for the duration of the party. I asked Taylor and Harry if they had room in the store’s refrigerator, and they kindly accepted the meat. I’d have to pick it up the next day, though, I was warned—since they were planning on filling the fridge space with a shipment of something or other on Thursday.

  After a late night at Matt’s show, I got up bright and early for work the following morning. I brought my container of chocolate-chip-cookie-dough-topped cupcakes to the office with me, and another frozen veggie patty for lunch. I left the patty on my desk to thaw a little during the morning and, at lunchtime, reheated it in the microwave. By midafternoon, I was craving a snack and headed guiltily toward the office vending machines for a bag of chips. It seemed no matter how healthfully I strived to eat, I’d go through junk-food phases like these from time to time.

  That afternoon, my friend and fellow food blogger Winnie sent me an e-mail, asking if I was attending the Edible Manhattan magazine launch that night. I was a fan of Edible Brooklyn, and the new Manhattan-based food magazine was throwing a launch party at the South Street Seaport. I told her I’d try to swing by, right after the cupcake meet-up.

  The cupcake event turned out to be a lot of fun—I got a chance to chat with Rachel and Nichelle, two of the three bloggers behind “Cupcakes Take the Cake.” I was also duly rewarded for my cupcake innovation. As soon as I revealed what I’d topped my cupcakes with, jaws dropped all around me. Somehow, in this crowd of cupcake enthusiasts, I had done something they’d never seen. The first few people who tried one let out moans of guilty pleasure. My cupcakes were finished off before any other batch at the party. Before leaving, I grabbed a chocolate cupcake for the road. It had been a special request from my friend Chrysanthe, whom I planned to meet up with after the Edible Manhattan launch party. She’d asked me to come along to the opening-night party for a new music venue in Brooklyn called the Bell House. She also loved chocolate cupcakes.

  I’d had a suspicion there would be free food at the Edible Manhattan party, but I had no idea what this would entail. The party was stretched along two or three blocks at the southern tip of Manhattan. Some of the shops had been transformed into venues for various food merchants, like wineries, cheese makers, and fish and oyster specialists, all small businesses hailing from the borough of Manhattan. The party was exceptionally well put-together, and teeming with familiar faces from the foodie world, bloggers, writers, an
d local artisanal food producers. It also had excellent food.

  Throughout all the schmoozing and tasting of various delectables, I was once again faced with the question of what constituted not eating out. Did this count? A bunch of small, local food purveyors gathered for a celebration of food on the South Street Seaport, sharing and boasting of their wares, for free?

  I had no idea anymore. There were too many events like these lately, anyway. I’d walk into a party, or a foodie meet-up, and there’d be samples of catered food, or something else that was borderline restaurant fare. I went to a tasting night at the Grand Central Market, which really is a market in the sense that it sells fresh produce, meats and cheese, and fresh-baked bread, but so much of the food that night was fully prepared hors d’oeuvres. There were just too many loopholes in not eating out. I shook my head as I thought about it.

  The next morning, I put together a quick lunch to bring to work. Earlier that week, I’d boiled a half dozen or so small baby red potatoes, some of the first newly harvested ones of the season at the markets. In another bag in my fridge, I had some fresh zucchini and summer squash, also from the Greenmarket. I heated some oil on the stove and smashed a clove of garlic. I chopped up two of the squashes—one green, and one small yellow one—with my knife and added the slices to the pan along with the garlic. After seasoning them with salt and pepper and flipping them twice until just a little caramelized, I took the squash out of the pan and put it into a plastic container alongside two of the potatoes. With the addition of roasted beet—I’d roasted a bunch of beets over the weekend, too—I popped the lid on the container and took it to work.

  I liked this easy lunch so much, I brought more or less the same thing with me to work the next day, Friday. By suppertime that night, I decided I was tired of eating potatoes, zucchini, and beets. I found a bag of yellow cornmeal in my pantry and made a quick polenta to go with some vegetables instead. There was a bag of green beans in my crisper that had been hanging out perhaps one too many days, and I sauteed them with some garlic and a sliced half onion also lingering in the fridge. I added a bit of butter and some grated Parmesan to the polenta before topping it with the brownish pan juices from the sauteed green beans and onions. It was a good dinner, if simple. Afterward, I spent a relatively quiet night at a bar with Jordan, Dan, and a handful of other friends. I knew I was in for a crazy day of cooking another supper-club dinner with A Razor, A Shiny Knife starting the following morning.

  The dinner we’d served at Michael’s apartment that Sunday was actually a preparation for a larger, more elaborate supper-club dinner. Michael had teamed up with a local dramatist who went by the name of Jonny Cigar for an event he called “Dinner Theatre.” Theatrical interludes would be performed by the actors in between the six courses of the meal. The idea was to match the presentation of the food with the drama that was being acted before the diners. Therefore, every course would be as elaborately staged and whimsical as the underground theater group’s performance style.

  Sporting a bowler and a three-piece suit, Jonny was a character, and great fun to be around. He and his fellow actors rehearsed while the rest of us prepared the meal all day. Instead of at Michael’s, this dinner was held at the large loft of a friend, and small round tables covered with white tablecloths were placed around the room to create a cocktail-party feel. As usual, guests were encouraged to arrive in the afternoon to participate in the cooking process and watch demonstrations by the chefs.

  I arrived at the loft shortly before noon and spent the next twelve hours cooking, eating, teaching, and serving. The menu, like the performers, was filled with interesting quirks. We used hydrocolloids to turn out distinct textures, like soft blocks of green curry custard to serve underneath the black-squid-ink-battered shrimp dish. Michael was also determined to create perfect cubes of “square sausage” to serve with a Creole-style étouffée. I tasted and nibbled through all the food, by the end scooping up hunks of the braised short ribs with my bare hands. I also ate more than my share of tobacco-laced ladyfingers. We’d revised the dessert from the previous dinner slightly, perfecting the cigarlike shape of the ladyfingers and sandwiching a layer of coffee-flavored buttercream frosting between two of them (a riff on “coffee and cigarettes”). Jonny had walked around the tables filling shot glasses with whiskey for guests to sip with their dessert or to use as a dipping sauce.

  As we were cleaning up, I got a text from Scott, wondering if I wanted to grab a drink. Since we happened to be in the same neighborhood, we decided to meet up for a nightcap at a nearby bar. Scott had recently begun working as a bartender at a newly opened restaurant in Brooklyn and was enjoying a night off. We talked about the restaurant and his new gig, and I made plans to have dinner there during “restaurant week” when Scott was working behind the bar, on Monday.

  “Are you sure you’re okay to ride home?” Scott asked, standing outside the bar after we’d finished our nightcap.

  “Yep! I’m an old pro,” I said as I strapped on my helmet to begin my long ride home to Crown Heights.

  PART II

  “OPPOSITE WEEK”

  On Sunday, I woke with a terrible hangover. But I had a full day’s worth of eating out in New York to begin. There was no time for sleeping in.

  A couple of weeks before, Mark had e-mailed me with a question: “Do you know Grace Piper? She’s a producer/blogger for a food website with cooking videos and interviews called ‘Fearless Cooking.”’

  In fact, I did. I’d met Grace about a year ago to discuss some possible video projects, but we didn’t immediately come up with anything and gradually fell out of touch. The reason Mark asked me this was because he was trying to hunt down a coauthor of a 1985 book called The Brooklyn Cookbook by the name of Lynn Stallworth. The cookbook was all about historically Brooklyn-based food, like the famous blackout cake created by Ebinger’s Bakery, or the pierogis and kielbasas of Greenpoint, Brooklyn’s Polish community. Mark wanted to create a Brooklyn-themed menu at an upcoming Whisk and Ladle dinner and desperately wanted to meet her and invite her to come. He’d seen a photo of Lynn on Grace’s website with a caption and figured they must know each other. Mark connected with Grace, who connected him with Lynn, and he proposed a casual brunch with everyone. He invited me to come along, and that brunch fell on the first day of opposite week.

  Lynn had chosen to meet at a restaurant close to her home in Park Slope, Brooklyn. It was an elegant, New American restaurant called Stone Park Cafe, a popular destination for brunchers, situated along a classy strip of restaurants and shops in the neighborhood. I had never been to the restaurant before my not-eating-out days but had eagerly scoped out its website days before the brunch. Such was my fascination with every place I was to eat at this week.

  I arrived at the restaurant on time, hangover and all, and spotted Mark and Grace standing by the bar. Grace introduced me to her boyfriend, James, and the four of us chatted for a while as we waited for a table. Lynn arrived not too long after I did. With her petite frame and frail, shaky step, I never would have expected the vivacity in her voice as we greeted one another. Lynn was as chipper as any woman could be, her pale eyes glowing as she was introduced to Mark and me.

  “Why don’t they have a table for us yet? Let’s just go ahead!” she suggested.

  Fortunately, we were escorted to a table almost immediately after Lynn arrived. We were seated at a comfortably sized round table and handed menus.

  “I’ll have a Bloody Mary, please. On the rocks,” Lynn told the waiter before he could leave.

  I glanced at the menu. I’d already seen it online a few days before and had eyed the crab cake. But my hangover had changed my appetite from adventurous to simply ravenous. It was too bad there was no menudo on the menu.

  “We always order the same thing,” Grace said, for herself and James. “The Hangtown Fry. Except we get ours with a side salad instead of the potatoes. The waiters all know us here; we come just about every Saturday” She and James smiled.
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  “So Mark, as I was saying a bit before, has a supper club that he runs in his apartment,” Grace said to Lynn. “And there are four or five who do this with you?”

  Mark jumped in to explain Whisk and Ladle to Lynn, adding that they had recently begun a series of dinners that were being shot for an upcoming online show.

  “Oh, why, that’s terrific,” Lynn said. She took the straw out of her Bloody Mary and sipped heartily.

  We chatted for a few minutes about the supper club, alternating with conversation about who in our group liked Bloody Marys and who didn’t. As a non-liker, Mark was persuaded by Lynn to try a sip of one. He still didn’t like it.

  “Actually, I’m not terribly in the mood for one. I think I’d prefer a glass of white wine next,” Lynn said.

  “Are we ready to order?” asked Grace. The waiter had stopped by our table. Grace and James ordered their standard, while Mark and Lynn decided to try the pulled pork hash. I opted for the Stone Park Omelette, with tomatoes, spinach, Swiss cheese, and the house-cured sausage. I planned to eat every piece of the toast that came on the side. While the rest of the table ordered white wines, I declined and ordered a cup of coffee instead, explaining that I’d had a long night. Mark, too, had been up late for a Whisk and Ladle dinner, and in between talking with Lynn and Grace, we shared snippets about our respective feasts from the night before.

  Our meals came to our table after a short wait. I was happy to find that my omelette had been prepared in the classic French fashion—quickly beaten in the pan and rolled into a uniformly textured, pale yellow log. I enjoyed the house-cured breakfast sausage, which was spiced with basic breakfast-sausage seasonings. I was surprised by the tomatoes in the omelet—I was pretty sure they were canned Italian plum, chopped roughly. The intense, bright color and equally strong flavor made them an interesting choice, though not, I deemed, an unpleasant one.