The Tao of Martha: My Year of LIVING

by Jen Lancaster

  The best way to honor her life is to get on with my own.

  She’d want that.

  Mind you, I’m aware that she was a dog and couldn’t grasp the complexities of human emotions like grief. But I can say that whenever I’ve been sad or down in the past ten years, she’d do something to try to pull me out of my funk, like the Naughty Run. If I was in my office, she’d nose through my trash until she found a Starbucks cup and she’d pry off the lid to lick the contents. Then she’d sit there grasping the cup, which would look comically large between her paws, and she’d always remind me of an Olsen twin.

  Her need for physical proximity was her trademark, and I can attest that it’s very hard to stay upset when a sixty-five-pound pit bull tries to climb into your shirt or attempts to hump a cat. Maisy could even time a fart in such a way that it broke the tension; her comedic sensibilities were second to none.

  In many ways, having Hambone is a godsend, but at some point in the past few weeks, she careened into adolescence. Any vestiges left of the advertised “cute, timid puppy” have been replaced with “awkward teenager with a sassy mouth and a penchant for biting her brother in the face.”

  Every day it’s something with this dog. Her power move last week was exploding out of the screen when she thought it was an open door. Her Facebook “likes” include Running Through the Muck on the Edge of the Yard and Then Jumping on the Beds, and the Coalition of Dogs Who Prefer to Whiz Indoors.

  Yesterday she tore open a six-pack of toilet paper while we were out, and for a second I thought it had snowed in three rooms upon our return. I’ve been calling her Osama Bone Laden, because she’s terrorizing all of us.

  Someday Hambone will be my best friend and the love of my life, and I’ll have spent a decade telling her my secrets. Someday I’ll nurse her and hand-feed her every bite and fret over each breath she takes because I love her so much it hurts, and I’ll live to make sure she’s comfortable and content.

  Today is not that day.

  Today, I picked up four mountains of her poop in the living room. And then I took it all out to the trash, and while I was gone she not only crapped in the laundry room, but then stepped in it and Dirty Sanchezed me in her zeal upon my return.

  Maisy would have found Hambone hilarious, which actually gives me comfort.

  But the fact remains that if I’m not occupied with a project, then I ruminate on what I had and not what I have.

  While I was busy cooking Fletch’s birthday dinner, I felt like the old me, the one who isn’t consumed with loss and sings (badly) into her spatula while she’s making sauce. Truly, there is a joy of cooking. (Quick, someone use this as a title for an iconic cookbook!)

  Although I once despised all things meal-preparation-related, I’ve been cooking enthusiastically ever since I wrote My Fair Lazy and upped my previously nonexistent culinary skills by taking classes. But I’ve made very little since July that wasn’t specifically to feed Maisy. Between giving her fluids and trying to coax her into eating and taking her on nightly walks, by the time dinner rolled around, delivery seemed the easiest option.

  I need comfort; ergo I need comfort food. So I believe the best way to live My Year of Martha currently will be to head back to the kitchen. I’m going to cook every single day for the rest of October. I mean, meal making feels the most Stewartesque action, considering she built her empire on a catering business.

  I’ll begin the process by asking Fletch what he might want to eat.

  He doesn’t even hesitate with his answer. “Anything in the slow cooker.” And then he smirks.

  Crock-Pot cookery does not normally lend itself to smirking, except in this circumstance. Back when we lived in the city, I started hosting an annual eighties party. Everyone would don Lycra and leg warmers and Members Only jackets and we’d throw down to new wave music with John Hughes movies on in the background.

  Nothing’s more retro than neon food, so Stacey told me how to make Day-Glo orange Rotel dip, which is comprised of exactly two ingredients, the second being Velveeta. Open the Rotel, cube the cheese, turn on the slow cooker, and voilà! Four hours later, I have the kind of liquid gold that guests will mainline, given the chance.

  Except I had a shitty old slow cooker and ended up burning my Rotel dip. Two ingredients! One step! Ruined! (I ate it anyway, but grudgingly.) So, before our next party, Fletch bought us a new slow cooker. He was in charge, as slow cookers are somehow under my mental auspices with other things-that-I-need-but-won’t-pay-for, along with oil changes and car washes.

  He brought home a beautiful cranberry-colored KitchenAid slow cooker in which the entire ceramic part lifted out. We used it a few times in our old house with great success. But then we moved and we lost the cord in the shuffle. I found this out the first time I tried to make Rotel in the new house. (Fortunately the microwave can do the same thing, three hours and fifty-five minutes quicker. Score!)

  Fletch offered to pick up a new one, but if I’m too stingy to buy a new slow cooker in the first place, the last damn thing I want is to fork out the cash to replace one that’s perfectly good.

  I tore this house apart for two years looking for the cord. I knew it was here somewhere, and the minute I gave up and bought another one, then I’d find the original cord. Not happening.

  When Angie was visiting last week, we got onto the subject of slow cookers.

  “…so I’ll send you the recipe—it’s so good!” she told me, recounting a dish she’d made for a faculty party.

  “Can’t, no slow cooker,” I replied.

  “I thought you had a nice one,” she said. “Didn’t we make Rotel dip in it?”

  “Yes, but the cord’s missing. I’ve pawed through every box in this house multiple times, but I can’t find it anywhere, including the garage. And we had great movers. They didn’t even break a single wineglass. Everything we owned arrived here in perfect shape, so I refuse to accept that they’d lose this one tiny, stupid thing.”

  At that point in the conversation, Fletch came into the kitchen for a Diet Coke. He went first to the butler’s pantry, where we store the soda, and then to the glasses across the kitchen, and then to the ice maker. Exhausting! Why not just keep the sodas in the fridge and drink them cold from the can? What Fletch calls “being a nudge” I consider “being a paragon of efficiency.” Although when I pointed this out, he asked, “Are you really burning gray matter in trying to figure out how I can streamline my beverage consumption?” I kind of didn’t have a response to that.

  Angie smiled in greeting to Fletch and then said to me, “Can’t you just order another one online?”

  Exasperated, I replied, “You’d think, but no. After officially having a missing cord for two years, I decided to compromise by buying a replacement cord. I figured it could be expensive, but not as much as replacing the entire unit. But KitchenAid doesn’t make them!” I’m not kidding; I spent days trawling all the online sites for a solution.

  “Replacement cord for what?” he asked, standing at the head of our extra-long dinner table. The old home owners had a tiny table in here, plus a whole seating area with a couch. Mind you, I love a good couch and I’m a huge fan of comfortable seating, but if everyone’s gathered in the kitchen, it’s to eat and drink, not lounge, so we found a table that seats eight normally and ten with the leaves installed. I plan to have this table for the rest of my life, and that gives me a great sense of stability. I feel like that quote from Fight Club, all “no matter what goes wrong, I’ve got that [sofa] table thing figured out.” (Of course, I’m less on board with the movie’s line, “Fuck Martha Stewart. Martha’s polishing brass on the Titanic; it’s all going down, man.” But kudos to our gal for being woven so deeply into the tapestry of pop culture!)

  “The slow cooker. But no one makes one.”

  Fletch pulled out a chair and sat across from us. He sipped his soda and said, “I don’t believe that.”

  “What’s not to believe? I went everywhere online, and I mean
everywhere. I can find you a new drive assembly part for your KitchenAid ice-cream maker, or a rubber foot for your Pro Line coffee grinder, but a cord? No. Replacement cords do not exist for that unit.”

  Fletch folded up a napkin and placed it under his drink. “That can’t be. You must have looked for the wrong thing.”

  Argh.

  “I didn’t look for the wrong thing—I even Googled every iteration of ‘cord,’ ‘plug,’ and ‘power,’ but there’s nothing. Not to go all H.W.’s reelection, but read my lips—no new cords.”

  Fletch pointed to Angie’s Kindle. “Can I see that for a minute?” and then he conducted his own Internet search.

  “Maybe you should look under ‘magical electricity-bringer rope,’” Angie suggested.

  “Ereplacementcords.com is the most comprehensive place to search,” I offered.

  He tooled around on the Internet while Angie told me about her summer teaching in China. Angie had such an adventure there, yet she returned home with a profound appreciation for advancements in American plumbing. She says every time she flushes, she’s all, “USA! USA! USA!”

  He closed her Kindle with a frustrated snap.

  “Honey,” I said gently, “this doesn’t need to be an I-was-right kind of thing. Rather, these cords simply don’t exist.”

  I was right, though.

  I just didn’t need to say it.

  “Where is the slow cooker now?” he asked, rising from his spot.

  “Butler’s pantry, right side, bottom shelf.”

  Before Angie could describe what Walmart’s like in China, Fletch marched back in the room carrying the Crock-Pot.

  The Smug arrived two seconds before him.

  “What’s with the smirk? Was the cord inside the removable ceramic part?” Angie asked.

  I had to roll my eyes. “Oh, like I didn’t check there ten million times?”

  In one deft move, Fletch flipped the Crock-Pot on its side to display the bottom…where the cord was neatly wrapped around the prongs.

  Damn it.

  Angie barked with laughter while Fletch explained, “The more you talked about the cord, the more the day I bought it came back to me. I remembered my thought process as I weighed my options. There were nicer units, but I said to myself, ‘Jen will likely lose a cord in the chaos that is our drawers. I should get the model with the attached cord to prevent this from being a problem. I’ll buy this one.’”

  “Then why didn’t you tell me it was attached during the two years I looked for it?” I was delighted to have my slow cooker back, but aggravated at all the time I wasted. Am I not a paragon of efficiency, after all?

  “She never asked?” Angie offered.

  “She never asked,” he confirmed.

  Point?

  I’ve found a project to occupy my time and my mind: slow cooking for the win.

  And I shall call this month CROCKTOBER.

  “What’s for Crocktober dinner tonight?” Fletch asks.

  “Pulled pork with a side of red cabbage.”

  He nods appreciatively and rubs his beard. “Mmm. How long till it’s ready?”

  “We’ll eat at six thirty.”

  “Great!” As he retreats from the kitchen, he turns back to say, “The house smells like McDonald’s right now, and I mean that in the best possible sense.”

  I nod in agreement. He’s dead-on with that assessment. The air is fragrant and heavy with the scent of warmed meat, even though I’m braising pork and not frying beef. I bet the similar aroma stems from the ketchup in the recipe. There’s something inexorably linked about McDonald’s and the smell of ketchup.

  I’m excited about serving this particular dinner. Pulled pork is one of those dishes I never had any idea how to make. I routinely buy it premade by the pound at various grocery stores, and I’m always disappointed because it tastes so much better when homemade. Had I any clue how simple pulled pork was to fix at home, I’d have started years ago! The only difficult bit was making sure I started dinner eight hours before we wanted to eat.

  With the advent of Crock-Pot meals, my organizational skills have been put to the test. As I was a competent home cook before, it could be six p.m. and I’d have no idea what to serve, yet I could always whip something together before Bill O’Reilly came on at seven p.m. (Don’t judge; I find his bloviating highly entertaining.)

  But now I plan not only the morning of the dinner, but often days before, so I can shop and stock all the needed ingredients. I feel so…domestic. In terms of the Martha Stewart Experience, Crocktober has been among my favorite parts. Our roles in this house are fairly nontraditional in that I’m the primary breadwinner, and Fletch is more likely to take care of the day-to-day business of our household. He runs the laundry and washes the dishes and scoops litter boxes. He’s the one who schedules vet appointments and picks up prescriptions and drops off dry cleaning while I’m at work. (Generally working involves my sitting at my desk in yoga pants without benefit of a shower, but still.)

  But in living my life like Martha, I’ve taken back the mantle of domestic responsibility. Through diligent time management and a growing sense of organization, I’ve been able to better balance both household and professional tasks. I’m always at my best when I’m busy, so instead of feeling overwhelmed, I feel accomplished.

  With my stepping back into the picture, Fletch has had time to start a small telecom consulting business. He’s still in the early stages of establishing a client base, but he’s deriving a great deal of pleasure from building something on his own. Plus, his being in an excellent state of mind is absolutely improving my own.

  Since we’re not quite so enmeshed in each other’s day, we actually have stuff to discuss at the dinner table now, other than Bill O’Reilly. Which is lovely.

  As Crocktober has progressed, I’ve come to accept exactly what a state my kitchen has been in for the past two years. Again, everything appears neat and clean, but there’s neither rhyme nor reason to any of the cabinets. What it looks like is that we moved in and I immediately had a book due, so I threw the contents of every box into any open cabinet. (That’s because it’s exactly what happened.)

  Before I started any projects in the kitchen, I sat down and brainstormed on kitchen priorities, which were basic, yet painfully lacking. I wanted:

  like items, such as flatware, china, and glasses, grouped in a way that makes sense. I want day-to-day items in one spot, and entertaining items in another. Sounds so simple, and yet…

  a spice rack where I can easily grab what I need without pawing through every herb I ever bought

  a dedicated baking cupboard

  an orderly freezer where chuck roasts don’t come flying out to hobble me

  So, every day, once I set up my Crock-Pot meal, I’ve been working on organization. I started off in the spice cabinet, as Fletch had previously claimed that looking for garlic salt was “like an Easter-egg hunt, without the fun.”

  By using Martha’s advice from her “How to Stock: Home Essentials” checklist on the Web, I quickly culled half of my spices. I gave them the sniff test, and the ones that were no longer fragrant were tossed. (FYI, you do not want to snort cinnamon. Trust.)

  I also evaluated my own purchasing habits and cursed myself for having three kinds of allspice. WTF, allspice? I can’t think of one dish that requires allspice, let alone enough to require three bottles! I did cut myself a break on the four bottles of chili pepper, because that had Fletch’s fingerprints all over it.

  I cross-referenced the spices Martha recommends to keep on hand from Martha Stewart’s Cooking School and restocked accordingly. The only one I didn’t buy was Szechuan peppercorns, figuring I could muddle through with my black, white, red, and pink peppercorns, as well as my favorite Williams-Sonoma smoked pepper. (Which totally makes up for the macaroni sauce debacle.)

  Then I put everything back in alphabetical order.

  Oh, my God.

  Rather, ERHMERGARD!

  Do you h
ave any concept of how much easier life is with alphabetized spices? Everything I need is right there, in the exact same spot, every time I go to grab it. Assembling ingredients for a meal now takes seconds, not minutes.

  Who knew?

  Okay, maybe everyone else in the world already knew this, but I feel like Helen Keller the first time she figured out the word for water. Fletch says this makes him my Annie Sullivan. Oh, really, Annie Sullivan with your spices arranged by country of origin? No.

  After I tackled the spice rack, I felt confident and emboldened and I rearranged all the dinnerware. I finally donated the plain diner-style dishes we received for our wedding, because the stupid lip on them made it impossible to balance a knife on the side. Instead, we’re now officially using the brightly patterned stuff I bought for a dinner party a while back, and Fletch no longer has to sneak off to enjoy their wide-lipped bounty.

  My ultimate plan in here had been to convert the gun cabinet to a baking cabinet, but as Fletch works on it (he insisted), I realize that it’s too pretty to use to store flour. Also, Loki’s bed is right in front of it, and I don’t want to upset him every time I make a pie. (Which has been often—Crocktober has also turned into Sweettober, as I’ve been trying various pie recipes like crazy in order to have my Thanksgiving offerings down pat.)

  So the gun cabinet will be a china cabinet, which means the butler’s pantry will be rededicated for baking.

  But first I have to tackle the Cabinet of Shame.

  The Cabinet of Shame is far worse than the Drawer of Shame, due to both size and necessity. With the drawer, everything’s stashed away to protect stupid cats and dogs from ingesting items that could hurt them. The cabinet? Well, that’s just laziness. This is prime kitchen real estate, located directly across from the stove. But is it filled with cookware or pantry supplies?

  Not even a little bit.

  Among numerous other items, I remove the following:

  my entire collection of Mad Men Barbie dolls, as well as my bonus Iggy Pop action figure