Life From Scratch

by Melissa Ford

  Life From Scratch

  Melissa Ford

  Bell Bridge Books Memphis, Tennessee

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons (living or dead), events or locations is entirely coincidental.

  Bell Bridge Books

  PO BOX 300921

  Memphis, TN 38130

  ISBN: 978-1-935661-98-6

  Bell Bridge Books is an Imprint of BelleBooks, Inc.

  Copyright © 2010 by Melissa Ford

  Printed and bound in the United States of America.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

  We at BelleBooks enjoy hearing from readers. You can contact us at the address above or at BelleBooks@BelleBooks.com

  Visit our websites – www.BelleBooks.com and www.BellBridgeBooks.com.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

  Cover design: Debra Dixon

  Interior design: Hank Smith

  Cover art: Spoons (manipulated) Chankim | Dreamstime

  Interior spoon graphic: Blueee@Dreamstime

  :Mslf:01:

  Dedication

  Blog 1

  Chapter One

  Peeling the Onion

  Blog 2

  Dedication

  To Grandma Sally,

  my love is your commission

  Blog 1

  June Cleaver beat the crap out of me with her rolling pin.

  In my dream, Martha Stewart, June Cleaver, Bree Van De Kamp, and Marion Cunningham (who they were all affectionately calling “Mrs. C”) were baking a pie together in my kitchen and arguing about the best way to pit cherries. They hadn't really noticed me lounging around by the sink until I pointed out what a waste of time it would be to pit your own cherries when there were perfectly decent ones that you could get in a can when June Cleaver turned with a maniacal gleam in her eye and started beating me on the face and shoulders with her flour-dusted rolling pin.

  Just imagine what she would have done to me if I had suggested frozen pie crust.

  Which brings us to my latest self-improvement project. I fear that you will all cease to believe me, that I’ve become like the girl who cries post-divorce-finding-myself project, but this one is for real lest I become a spinsterish, batty cat-woman without the cats that I’ve been fearing that I’m morphing into all year.

  Unlike that stint with transcendental meditation (it wasn’t my fault I couldn’t concentrate! Could you meditate in a room while smelling the most divine marinara sauce wafting in through the air vents from the restaurant below?) or the time I mused about life as a zumba instructor or considered becoming a femivore and moving to a farm in Upstate New York so I could raise my own chickens, I’m really going to do this for longer than the typical three minutes I’ve dedicated to past life-improvement projects:

  Rachel Goldman is going to learn how to cook.

  This is the point where I publicly admit that I don’t really have a lot of skills in the kitchen. What I really mean is that I don’t have any skills in the kitchen. I can make ramen noodles like a pro, but I’ve never really followed a recipe (which is what happens when you don’t own any cookbooks). I’m more of a jarred sauce kind of girl. I consider toasting the English muffin on par with making my own bread.

  Before the divorce, we ate out almost every night or brought in take-out. If they offered a degree in Carryout Curry, I would have a PhD. Unfortunately, even if I am now only ordering for one, I quickly learned after we separated that while Hunan Chow is affordable on a lawyer-and-graphic designer’s joint salary, it’s prohibitively expensive for a living-off-the-money-I-got-from-my-half-of-the-condo-while-I-find-myself budget.

  So, I am going to learn how to fry an egg without breaking the yolk. And do more than boil noodles. I might even . . . gasp . . . make my own Pad Thai. And this, my friends, is how I’m finally going to find myself during my Year of Me. I can’t believe I frittered away weeks of my life sabbatical on ideas such as becoming a pet sitter (yes, it turns out that you have to like dogs in order to walk dogs.) You live and you learn.

  Okay, enough whining, it’s time to get cooking. I have armed myself with cookbooks from the library, a healthy stock of wine, and my best friend, Arianna, to be my co-taster. Please stick around; I need you guys.

  Chapter One

  Peeling the Onion

  I am waiting at the bar, my soaked umbrella tucked under my seat, at a trendy sushi restaurant in Soho. It’s the sort of place I used to go with my ex-husband, Adam. It’s now, apparently, the place I go for the first-date-of-the-rest-of-my-life.

  My stomach is in knots as I watch the door. I have vague recollections of what Rob Zuckerman looks like because he’s the only man who asked for my number at the end of the local synagogue’s sponsored Schmooze and Booze at a Manhattan bar. In fact, he’s the only man who really talked to me at all that night when I showed up fashionably late thinking that a Schmooze and Booze is like a dinner party—you look a little desperate for company if you’re the first person through the door. Turns out that the early birds catch the strapping doctors and the later birds catch the worms.

  But it’s been that long since I’ve had a first date.

  I sip a glass of wine, trying to keep my hope and anxiety in check. Two years of dating followed by twelve years of marriage and nine months of post-divorce wound licking means that it has been a long time since I’ve had to shave my legs pre-date for maximum smoothness (only up to the knee—I make a conscious decision not to shave any higher until the third date.) A long time since I’ve had to worry about who is going to pay or whether I have lipstick on my teeth or if my life sounds exciting enough.

  I wasn’t even sure if I was ready for this, but my best-friend, Arianna, gave me no choice once my life-improvement cooking project started trucking along. I called her to tell her that I had made my own pancakes, and she dropped a Freudian hint that it might be a good time to work on getting myself a man-cake. Arianna is chronically single-by-choice, insisting that she is the dating type and not the marrying type. But I, she has decided, am the marrying type who needs to move away from calling myself post-divorce and start thinking of myself as pre-marriage.

  I don’t really have a good reason for not going on a first date up until this point. The fact is that when you’ve been with one man for all of your twenties and half of your thirties, it is difficult to switch gears and start thinking about a different person’s body or the smell of their aftershave or whether they like the toilet paper roll facing the wall or facing away. Which, of course, is getting ten miles ahead of myself since it’s only a first date. But still.

  It takes Rob Zuckerman a few seconds to notice me at the bar when he pauses at the hostess stand, rain dripping off his expensive Burberry coat. I could do worse, I decide optimistically, for my first-date-of-the-rest-of-my-life. Rob still has a full head of brown hair, an anomaly in the over-thirty-five-and-unmarried crowd. He is tall and athletically built. He has good taste in clothing and even better taste in restaurants.

  And to be fair, he could do worse than me. At thirty-four, I’m still carded at liquor stores, which I like to think means that I still look young and vibrant. I’m wearing my brown hair longer these days, almost to my shoulders, and my stomach is still mostly flat despite my newfound love of butter. I might not be the most striking woman in the room, but I tan well in the summer.

  “Rachel!” he exclaims, finally noticing me. He comes over to my seat and
we do a self-conscious dance where I don’t know whether to continue sitting or stand, and he doesn’t know whether to give me kiss on the cheek or shake my hand. We compromise with an awkward half-hug with him standing and me sitting so that my head presses into his Burberry coat belt.

  I collect my drink, and we follow the hostess to a seat near the window. The rain is coming down harder now, splattering the glass so it’s impossible to see anything more than taxi headlights and glowing storefront signs. I play with the corner of my menu cover. With Adam, we skipped talking until we had both had a chance to glance through the options, but Rob doesn’t even crack the cover before launching into a series of get-to-know-you questions, the sort I had been rehearsing answers to inside my mind all afternoon while I worked out my nervous energy by learning how to julienne carrots.

  “So, Rachel,” he begins, “it was so loud at the bar the other night, I missed hearing if you were actually from New York.”

  “I’m not,” I answer, “I’m from New Jersey. But I sort of knew that I wanted to end up here after graduate school.”

  “Oh, where did you go to graduate school?”

  “Yale,” I say, hoping that this doesn’t sound pretentious. “School of art for graphic design.”

  “That’s sort of cool. So you’re like an artist?”

  “Like an artist,” I repeat.

  “I’m from here. My family still lives off Riverside Drive.”

  I try not to let my scorching case of real estate envy flare up. Nine months in a one-room apartment will do that to you.

  “So how did you end up in New York?”

  This was the question I was sort of dreading. I mean, I could lie and make it about my parents—both incredibly successful and respected lawyers—living in northern New Jersey and say they wanted me to be close to home like my siblings. My sister, Sarah, is a brain surgeon, married and living in Brooklyn with her husband, Richard, and daughter, Penelope. My brother, who could be seen by outsiders as the black sheep of the family because he never holds down a job longer than a few months, has taken his multitude of talents over the bridge as well and lives close to Park Slope. But honestly, my first impulse would have been to move as far away as possible. It’s hard to be surrounded by that much greatness. It makes you allergic to failure. Sans epi-pen.

  The reality is that I ended up in New York due to my ex-husband and his job. And maybe getting this fact out in the open is the best way to deal with the big “D.” I wish he was staring down at the sashimi menu rather than inquisitively studying my face and cleavage.

  “My ex-husband. He got a job here so we moved here after Connecticut.”

  “So you’ve been married before? Wow … divorce … how did that happen?”

  I’m not really itching to share my whole marriage saga with the first-date-of-the-rest-of-my-life, especially not the part where I talk about how he was so in love with his career that he essentially was having an affair with his blackberry. My ex-husband, Adam, trying to make partner, spent more time at the office than he did at home, choosing contracts over contact; the job over me. Over time, it became clear that we had differing views on money, despite what he led me to believe before we walked down the aisle. I wanted to be comfortable. Adam, who came from a wealthy New York family, worked to not only keep up with the Joneses, but to pass them in owning all the good electronic toys and going on the most exclusive vacations. You could say that we had a lack of shared goals.

  I glance at the laminated picture of sushi standing upright on the table, teaching customers the visual difference between the toro and maguro tuna rolls.

  “Oh, you know,” I shrug, “50% of the population gets it wrong the first time.”

  “Huh … 50%. I didn’t realize the number was that high.”

  “I think it’s over 50%, actually,” I say. “But luckily seventh marriages go the distance about 90% of the time.”

  “Those are good odds for the married-seven-times set. I wonder how polygamy rolls into that statistic. I mean, if your seventh marriage is at the same time as your other six,” he points out.

  “I’m guessing you were never married before?” I ask.

  “Nope, I love a good first date, but I’ve never met the right person.”

  I plaster a smile back on my face and take a deep breath. I wonder if it’s time yet to take a break in the small talk and see what sort of maki constitutes hip in Soho. It has been so long since I’ve eaten in a restaurant. But Rob Zuckerman has more questions and apparently, a non-grumbling stomach.

  “Where do you live in the city? Wait, you’re in the city, right? Not over the bridge or anything,” he jokes.

  “I’m in Murray Hill.”

  “Do you have any roommates?” Rob asks.

  “Actually, it’s a studio. It’s small, but it’s a great neighborhood, all things considered. I mean, I’m lucky I found it. And it’s close to my best friend so I can walk to her place. Where are you?”

  “Gramercy Park,” he tells me.

  My old neighborhood, and still Adam’s neighborhood. My ex-husband bought me out of my share of our condo which was how I was able to take off this year from my old job designing pamphlets for the New York City Library. My intention was to find another job, but that hasn’t happened and savings are dwindling down, it seems more and more likely that I’ll return to making materials to accompany exhibits. I’m lucky I had the year to sit in my sweatpants and try out every self-help suggestion Oprah passed my way.

  “That’s a great neighborhood,” I offer.

  “I’m on the board at my co-op. It is crazy how many people want to move into our building. I feel like my life is one long series of making rejection phone calls. Seriously, there are people applying who have kids. And pets!”

  I smile wanly again, wondering if I would make the cut in his building. Job-less, unmarried me. At least Adam was too busy with work to ever make a baby with me. And I have my allergy to cats going for me.

  “So, Rachel, what do you want to get?” he asks, even though we still haven’t opened the menu.

  I throw open the cover and quickly scan my choices. I am hungry for everything. I want to taste their teriyaki sauce and see how they’ve worked yuzu into a salad dressing and sample their tempura batter. I want to sit up at the sushi bar and chat with the chef about different fillets of raw fish. And I want to be on a date with a guy who wants to hear the chef’s answers too. Still, Rob Zuckerman is nice, and he’s obviously smart and successful, and he has a full head of brown hair (one cannot discount that full head of hair). So I close my menu and ask him to suggest a few things since he has obviously been here before.

  “Why don’t we start with a bowl of edamame and an order of tatsuta-age chicken?”

  “I made that this week,” I exclaim, excited that he’d pick that off the menu since I was eyeing it. “I’m learning how to cook and it’s actually really easy. You just marinate the chicken and then coat it in potato starch before you fry it.” I notice that Rob is staring at me as if I’ve just started reciting the recipe in Japanese. “I can’t believe I’ve ordered it all these years when I could make it at home.”

  “So, you like to cook?” he asks, quickly recovering from my blinding enthusiasm.

  “I love to cook. I just started a few months ago, but it’s amazing what you can pick up from cookbooks and few Food Network shows.”

  “How do you find the time?” Rob asks, motioning to a waitress that we’re ready to order some appetizers. “I eat out most nights or order in. I think the only thing in my refrigerator right now is ketchup and a few bottles of water.”

  I try not to judge since that was my life as well only a year ago. While I miss my dog-earred copy of Zagats and hunting out new restaurants, I am intensely proud of my variations on a stir-fry and the salsa I make from scratch. I blame my lack of cooking knowledge on my mother who unhelpfully taught me that “real women don’t scramble eggs.”

  Women, such as my mother, who bring in a
comfortable six-figure salary with their husband might not need to scramble their own eggs, but cooking for myself became a necessity when I studied my credit card bills closely. My year-long vacation from life was going to be cut awfully short unless I quickly learned how to make my own marinara. There were only so many packages of ramen noodles a divorcee could eat.

  Rob tells the waitress our appetizer order and I slip in a request for a green tea. We both watch her walk back towards the kitchen, and I pound my brain for a topic of conversation. I had come up with so many good ideas back in my apartment. I wish I could have written them on my hand.

  “Actually, I don’t even know what you do. You’re an artist?” Rob asks.

  “Not exactly,” I admit. If he didn’t run screaming from the admission that I was a divorcee, perhaps he’d be equally as gracious about the fact that I’m currently job-less. “I used to work as a graphic designer for the New York Public Library, and I’ll probably return to that job, but I was taking the year to find myself. That sounds very self-helpy.”

  “It actually sounds sort of nice. Like an extended vacation,” Rob admits.

  I nod my head, feeling a bit more confident. I write in my blog every night which sort of makes me a writer, right? Saying you’re a writer is a very New York thing to say—sort of like how anyone living in Los Angeles can get away with calling themselves an actress, and no one calls their bluff. So I tell Rob that I’m also a writer and sure enough, he just gives a small smile and says, “Have I read anything you’ve written?”