An imprint of Penguin Random House
375 Hudson Street
New York, New York 10014
Copyright © 2015 by Jessica Fechtor
Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.
Some of the recipes and brief portions of this book appeared in different form on the author’s blog, Sweet Amandine.
Portions of chapter 30 were originally published in slightly different form in Tablet Magazine (www.tabletmag.com).
Excerpt from Omeros by Derek Walcott. Copyright © 1990 by Derek Walcott. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.
Photos by Jessica Fechtor
Most Avery books are available at special quantity discounts for bulk purchase for sales promotions, premiums, fund-raising, and educational needs. Special books or book excerpts also can be created to fit specific needs. For details, write [email protected]
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Fechtor, Jessica.
Stir : my broken brain and the meals that brought me home / Jessica Fechtor.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-698-16129-0
1. Fechtor, Jessica—Health. 2. Intracranial aneurysms—Patients—United States—Biography. 3. Intracranial aneurysms—Patients—Rehabilitation—United States. 4. Cooking—Therapeutic use. I. Title.
RC693.F43 2015
616.1'330092—dc23
[B]
2014048572
The recipes contained in this book are to be followed exactly as written. The Publisher is not responsible for your specific health or allergy needs that may require medical supervision. The Publisher is not responsible for any adverse reactions to the recipes contained in this book.
Some names and identifying characteristics have been changed to protect the privacy of the individuals involved.
Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone.
Cover design: Alison Forner
Cover images: (spoon) Laurie Rubin/Getty Images; (chocolate) Momoko Takeda/Getty Images
Version_1
For Mom, Dad, and Amy
And for Eli, of course
Measure the days you have left. Do just that labour
which marries your heart to your right hand: simplify
your life to one emblem, a sail leaving harbour
and a sail coming in. . . .
—DEREK WALCOTT, Omeros
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
Please Buy an Oven Thermometer (Some Thoughts on
Cooking from This Book)
Chapter 1: The Pit
Chapter 2: A Cake
Marcella’s Butter Almond Cake
Chapter 3: Passing Through
Chapter 4: At the Table
Eli’s Oatmeal Cookies
Chapter 5: Patient
Chapter 6: Z-i-t-i
Saucy Baked Ziti
Chapter 7: The Moon Out of the Sky
Pan-Roasted Salmon
Chapter 8: Just in Case
Kale and Pomegranate Salad
Chapter 9: A Home Run
Sweet and Clear Chicken Soup
Chapter 10: The Most Beautiful Things
Sarah’s Cholent with Kugel
Chapter 11: Riptide
Chapter 12: Plotting, Together
Cream of Asparagus Soup
Chapter 13: The Everywhere Light
Crispy Rice and Eggs
Chapter 14: Everything Happens
Chapter 15: Becoming Home
Hi-Rise Almond Macaroons
Chapter 16: The Most We Could Do
Chapter 17: Badass
Roasted Chicken
Chapter 18: A Certain Kind of Best
Whole Wheat Chocolate Chip Cookies
Chapter 19: Medium Dreadful
Chapter 20: Three Mushrooms
Lemony Pasta with Morel Mushrooms and Peas
Chapter 21: Home Is a Verb
Amy’s Potato Salad
Chapter 22: Doing the Math
Louise’s Apple Pie
Chapter 23: They Cooked
Sweet Potato Curry Latkes
Chapter 24: Food Blog
Buttermilk Biscuits
Chapter 25: The All Clear
Julia’s Sesame Noodles
Chapter 26: More Than Enough
Cleveland Cassata Cake
(Strawberry Custard Layer Cake)
Chapter 27: Time-In
Cherry Clafoutis
Chapter 28: Humpty Dumpty Day
Whole Wheat Banana Bread
Chapter 29: Luxury Head
Five-Fold Challah
Chapter 30: Don’t Look
Simplest Tomato Soup
Brown Soda Bread
Chapter 31: A Funny Definition
Janet’s Coconut Cake
Chapter 32: Move Along Now
Baked Apricots with Cardamom Pistachios
Chapter 33: Any Day
Italian Prune Plum Tart
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Prologue
I am on the floor.
My back is flat against the ground, and so are the soles of my feet, and my knees are up and swaying. Someone is holding my head at the temples. “Jessica, it’s Ilana.” She says it the Canadian way, with a flat first a. Lavish, lamb, Atlantic.
My knees are swaying.
I turn my head and vomit into her lap. The hotel gym guy comes with orange Gatorade. He is tall and waxy with a bird face and dark hair that’s more thin than thinning. He wants to know if I’ve had any breakfast. “A banana,” I tell him, and he nods as though he suspected as much. He bends at the waist and wags the bottle over my face for me to take it. I vomit again. Ilana doesn’t flinch.
I’m at a graduate student conference in Stowe, Vermont, a town wedged deep in the valley between the Green Mountains and the Worcester Range. I am twenty-eight years old. Ilana is a colleague. I’ve seen her at these conferences over the last couple of years, and we’ve shared meals, but that’s all. I’m grateful for the pad of her thigh.
I see my friend Or. We’d planned to run together along the country roads that morning, but a crack of thunder had sent us to the gym instead. He stands over me now in a tank top with a bandana tied low across his forehead. He looks like a pirate and says he’s going to call. The gym guy insists it’s not necessary, but Or calls.
An ambulance is coming.
It’s August and the sky is dark from the storm. I don’t try to get up. I don’t even think to try—it will be years before I realize the oddness of that—and no one offers to help me. Ilana is talking to me, and Or is talking to me, and Or and Ilana are talking to each other about me, and the girl who was on the treadmill next to mine is talking to someone, the gym guy maybe, about “what happened.” I can hear the spit moving around in her mouth as she speaks. She sounds breathless and scared and I want her to be quiet. Someone at the open
ing session the night before had mentioned that he was training as an EMT and they bring him in. He looks me in the eye, expressionless, then steps away.
My knees are swaying.
I’ve had migraines before. The pain feels similar, so I assume that’s what this is. I’ve never fainted, though, and it has never come on so fast. A flash migraine, then. Is that a thing? I can’t decide if I’m supposed to be scared.
Or is asking me whom he should call and I tell him my dad, no, Eli. I give him my husband’s number and watch him dial. My head hurts so badly, and I think that if I can relax my body, get really quiet, I can make it better. Ilana says, “She’s not talking anymore.”
The paramedic arrives. He shines lights and asks if I remember the fall, and I do.
I was running on the treadmill, when I felt a painless click in my head. There was an odd trickling sensation along my skull like a rolling bead of sweat, but on the inside. Then the room went gray and the earth sucked me down. I knew I was about to faint. The red stop button seemed suddenly far away. I swiped at it, but there was no time to step off the machine. Someone says I hit my head on the way down, and I wonder if the belt was still moving when I fell. I can no longer sway my knees; the paramedic’s in the way, so I start rubbing his leg instead.
“I’m sorry,” I say, “I’m rubbing your leg.”
“That’s all right. You keep rubbing.”
He tells me to fold my arms across my chest, that they are going to strap me to a board and carry me to the ambulance. It’s very important, he says, to call out if I need to vomit so that they can flip me over in time. The thought of that, of hanging facedown in the air and vomiting, the thought of being dropped, is at this moment the most terrifying thing in the world.
• • •
I start this story here, on the floor of a conference center gym, because it now seems the most obvious place. But it wasn’t obvious to me then that a start had occurred at all. I thought my fall from the treadmill was a dot on a plotline already under way, the one about the literature student at a conference who fainted, missed the morning’s events, got checked out, and returned, red faced and sheepish, in time for lunch. I didn’t know then that when I slipped from that moving belt, that dot had also slipped and become its own point A.
What a click in my head, and a moving belt, and a headache that knocked me down might have to do with butter, and flour, and eggs at room temp, and hunger, and love, and a kitchen with something to say, I couldn’t have known that day. How a detour could become its own path, I would never have believed.
Please Buy an Oven Thermometer
(Some Thoughts on Cooking from This Book)
So, yes, this is a book about food. It isn’t a cookbook, though there are recipes here. Because to follow the story where it went I had to follow it into my kitchen. The recipes in this book are for foods that connect me to myself and to my people. Foods that reminded me who I was when I felt least like myself. My recipes are, for the most part, simple and straightforward, because that’s the way I like to cook and eat. They’re recipes that show you how to make food that feels special not because it’s fancy, but because it tastes so good. I’m excited to share them with you.
We all have our ways in the kitchen. Before we get started, I want to tell you about some of mine. Think of it as preemptive troubleshooting, reducing the variables so that at your house, things just work. Of course, over time, I hope you’ll make these recipes your own, with whatever tweaks and changes you see fit.
First, let’s talk about measurements. I like to cook and, especially, bake by weight because I find it easier and faster, with more consistent results. A basic digital scale will do the trick; you don’t need any bells or whistles. You can pick one up for around twenty dollars. Most household kitchen scales are not sensitive enough to reliably measure weights under ten grams. Any ingredient that measures under ¼ cup, I’ve listed by volume alone, in teaspoons and tablespoons.
Flour is especially tricky to measure by volume, since even the same cook measuring the same flour with the same cup can get considerable variation from scoop to scoop. It all depends on how tightly you pack your cup. If you don’t have a scale or prefer to measure by volume, here’s how to do it so that your amounts are closest to mine: Stir your jar or sack of flour with a fork to aerate it, spoon the flour into your measuring cup, and, without tapping the measuring cup to settle its contents, sweep the excess flour from the top with the straight back of a knife. The recipes in this book were tested with both weight and volume measurements by a small army of home cooks, cookbook authors, professional bakers, food bloggers, and food magazine editors, so either way, you should be set.
While we’re on the subject of flour: For all-purpose unbleached white flour, I use the King Arthur brand. It has a higher protein content than other national brands (and a consistent protein content, bag to bag, which I appreciate). Protein content is relevant because more protein means more gluten development, and more water absorption when you combine it with your wet ingredients. That affects texture. King Arthur all-purpose flour contains about 12 percent protein. If you bake the cookies in this book using a brand that contains only, say, 9 percent protein, you can expect a wetter dough that will result in flatter, paler cookies with less chew. A higher-protein all-purpose flour like King Arthur is nice to have around because it also works well in breads. Convenient if you’d rather not purchase an additional sack of bread flour or don’t have any on hand.
I use large eggs and unsalted butter when making the recipes in this book. I bake with fine-grain sea salt. You can use table salt instead, if that’s what you’ve got. A few of the recipes in this book call for Diamond Crystal brand kosher salt. The brand is important because the size of the crystals varies among kosher salt brands. Morton’s, for example, has a finer grain, so a teaspoon will be considerably saltier than a teaspoon of Diamond Crystal. If you swap in fine-grain sea salt or another brand of kosher salt for the Diamond Crystal, you’ll need to use less. Taste as you go and trust your preferences.
A few of the recipes call for canned tomatoes or sauce. My preferred brand is Muir Glen. I always have a can or two of their organic whole peeled tomatoes in the cupboard, the tomatoes that, incidentally, beat out even the celebrated San Marzano tomatoes in a Cook’s Illustrated taste test.
Last but not least, please buy an oven thermometer. Ovens, even shiny new ones, run hot and cold all the time. Some, like mine, overshoot by fifty degrees before settling back down to the temperature on the dial. It’s not only a matter of under- or overbaking. Cakes, cookies, and breads baked at the wrong temperature will have issues with texture, too. It’s the simplest thing, but an oven thermometer can make all the difference in what comes out of your kitchen.
Onward.
CHAPTER 1
The Pit
They say that trauma functions like a merciful eraser, wiping away into dust what the body most needs to forget. That’s not how it worked for me. I remember all of it: the shifting hum of the treadmill as I cranked up the speed; feeling strong and fast until, in an instant, I wasn’t. It was as though someone had tossed a giant lead cape over my shoulders. My knees bent too deeply. My eyelids drooped. “No, no,” I breathed as I went down, my voice a note too high.
I’d never played sports as a kid and only started running after college. I liked the phrase “recreational runner” and thought it might be nice to be one, to “squeeze in a run” during lunch or “take a loop around the park” after work, like the people I knew who said those things. Turned out running was the perfect sport for my bookish, unathletic self. I loved the little goals, the on-your-own-ness of it. There was stuff to keep track of: miles, pace, nutrition. I got to have a notebook. For data!
Running is about putting one foot in front of the other to get where you want to be. It felt similar to my academic work in that way, the incremental progress, the stamina involved, but instead of a
brain swollen with languages and texts, I got fitness. It was simple: By running, I was choosing health. I was certain I had a say.
The hotel room was dark when I woke up that morning. My roommate, Adena, was still sleeping, so I slipped on my running shorts and T-shirt as silently as I could. Or and I had planned to meet in the lobby and knock out six miles before breakfast. At the conference the year before, Or had invited me to join him on a run, but I had said no. He was a “real” runner, a marathoner, over six feet tall and strong. Running with him was way out of my league. But I’d been training all year, adding distance and speed. I’d just completed my first half marathon. With that under my belt, I felt brave enough to join him.
I don’t like to think about what might have happened if there had been no storm that morning and we’d been out on the roads as planned, several miles from the conference center, without cell phones, in rural Vermont. But of course, I sometimes do think about it, and while I don’t believe in fate, I do believe in very good luck and thank my stars for the rain that kept us back.
It had been a while since I’d traded a run outdoors for a treadmill. With the belt pulling itself out from under my feet with every stride, it felt easy. I like to let my thoughts take off on their own when I run, and meet them wherever they land: Emancipation of serfs, 1861, under Alexander the Second. Assassinated, 1881. It was three weeks before my first two doctoral exams, one on Russian history and one on Yiddish language. Twenty days, actually, so less. I’d have to renew that library book again. Or just buy it already.
All my exams would be done by Thanksgiving. I’d start my dissertation. Then, a baby, we hoped. A baby. I loved that Eli and I had come to it together, that wanting to be parents hadn’t been a given for either of us when we married, at twenty-five, but that nearly three years later, we felt ready. I’d been off the pill for two weeks.
Eli and I had spent the summer in New York City. We’d swapped apartments with friends. Theirs was a two-room flat on East Third and Avenue A, two blocks from Katz’s Deli in the heart of the Lower East Side. A few blocks in the other direction was St. Marks Place, home to an all-star plate of grilled haloumi and fried eggs. Due west was the Hudson River, and the path alongside it that goes all the way up the island. On Sunday mornings, I’d wake up early and run long, west to the highway, then north along the water eight, nine, ten miles, whatever my training plan prescribed. Then brunch at Café Mogador for those eggs.
Stir Page 1