Stir

by Jessica Fechtor

  This was a working vacation for us both. I’d photocopied articles and packed up my sticky tabs, highlighters, and a suitcase full of books to prepare for the remaining doctoral exams I planned to take before the surgery. Eli had brought his laptop and, after some climbing at nearby Icicle Creek, would check in with his office each day. We’d hike, study, work; he’d climb; and in the six or seven o’clock hour, Eli would light the grill. He was in charge of the protein and opening a bottle of wine, and I would handle the rest of the meal: bread, salad, and dessert.

  Cooking there was fun. The one pop of color in the house of grays and wood tones was a deep red Viking oven. You had to wedge a tipped chair under the handle to get the oven door to shut all the way. Otherwise, it was ready for business.

  On my first night there, I found Rich’s bread recipe tucked between two cookbooks and got to it. The bread began as a wet dough that developed overnight and into the next afternoon with a long, slow rise. When I dumped the dough onto the counter, it clung to the bowl in strands and strings that I swept free with an oiled spatula. I cranked the oven as high as it would go. Then, after a final rise, I transferred the dough to a cast-iron pot, clapped on the lid, and baked it until the bread was swollen and brown. I was careful but no longer afraid as I shook it from the pot. It crackled as it cooled. Meanwhile, Eli finished the salmon on the grill. I tossed spicy greens with vinaigrette, sawed into the bread, and the crust shattered. We dragged slices through olive oil and salt and pressed squares of cheese into the soft crumb.

  Each night after dinner, I would return to my perch on the window seat to read or write. Eli would build a fire, and we’d fall into bed a little earlier than we typically would at home. Then we’d wake up the next morning and do it all again.

  At first, I studied all day long. The books on my exam lists were ones I’d selected myself and I was interested in what they had to say. Everything was as it should be—or getting close. I was doing it: studying, researching, preparing to teach. I was en route to my former life, just as I had hoped. But the pantry was stocked and the oven called, and where I really wanted to be was in the kitchen. I wanted to be making things, and while the biscuits baked and the pie dough chilled, to get some of it down in words.

  Suddenly, the months I’d spent doing just that felt painfully temporary. Here I was, a few weeks out from my final surgery, the one that would close the door on the illness and injury of the past year. I was almost done at last—and wanting a little bit not to be. It was the strangest thing, this tug of longing for the days that I was still squarely in. The very days that I’d been counting down. There in that house on the water, something was happening. Something so quiet that it was barely perceptible to me. It was more of a stir than a shift, a breeze that swirls through a pile of leaves, holds them in the air for a moment, then sets them back down, the same pile, rearranged.

  The evidence had been mounting. Pastas and tarts and tomatoes heavy with juice, tables full of friends, and writing about it all. This had been no time-out. All those months away from my studies and the life I had known: this had been a time-in.

  So I gave myself over to it in that house by the water, cooking and writing with an urgency I hadn’t felt before. “You’re so happy,” Eli said one night as he cleared the plates. “I think you should pay attention to that.”

  He was right. During those long months, food had called something up in me that needed calling, demanded things of me that my academic work had not. It had inspired me to make something of the everyday life around me, of my home and of my heart, to make something of myself. My kitchen wasn’t the route back to the person I had been. It was the route to who I would become. Life didn’t freeze when I flew off the treadmill that morning and neither did I. There was no going back, and for the first time I realized that I didn’t want to.

  • • •

  A week into our stay, Megan arrived for a visit. We decided to hike Dirty Face all the way to the top, nine miles round-trip with a four-thousand-foot climb. We started early.

  I felt strong, but uneasy. I told myself it was okay if I had to turn back. But as we hiked higher and higher, past the markers of every other morning’s hike—the stream you had to jump across, the waterfall, the fallen tree that Eli called “our bench”—I knew we were going all the way.

  The early trail snakes up along the mountain in tight, tree-lined switchbacks, then opens onto a long-abandoned logging road, wildflowers everywhere in bloom. It then narrows again into a dense forest path that carries you up along the eastern spine. The chin strap of my helmet was soaked with sweat by the time the trees began to thin.

  As the trail disappeared into the flat, broken scrabble rocks of the final ascent, the view unfurled: blue water tossing off sparkling coins of sunlight, rolling green hills, mountain peaks etched into the sky. The bigness was sudden. Eli, Megan, and I wordlessly spread out from one another, each of us scrambling and crunching our way to the summit on our own. We stood for a moment and just looked. Lake Wenatchee and its tributary rivers stretched out before us. The Chiwawa Valley and the snow-capped Cascade Mountains. There was Glacier Peak, where Eli and I had gone backpacking years earlier, where he’d told me about the ring and I’d ducked into my sleeping bag, too happy to say a word. Eli grabbed me, picked me up, and swung me around. All three of us were laughing, teary, calm.

  Then down, down, down we marched, back to the house. Eli and Megan jumped into the lake. I wasn’t allowed to, presurgery, so I went for a shower, found the dough I’d left to proof in the fridge, and shaped it into disks for pizza on the grill. We’d picked up a giant sack of cherries at a roadside stand and I tore into it now, whisked together a batter of milk and eggs, and baked clafoutis. It was my first clafoutis, a category-defying dish that’s a cross between custard, a pancake, and flan. The eggy batter puffed up, then sank back down, and the cherries slumped in their own private craters. We ate outside in bare feet, our plates on our laps, my helmet on the table beside me. “Is it crazy to look at me?” I asked Megan. I waited for her to verify that indeed it was, or worse, but instead she smiled and said, “I just see a happy Jess.” The Pacific Northwest sky was bright well into the nine o’clock hour, and I felt whole in my brokenness for the first time.

  Cherry Clafoutis

  The base for clafoutis typically involves only flour, milk, and eggs, but getting it just right can be tricky. You need enough eggs for the custard to set up, but use too many and the flavor is overly eggy and the texture turns gummy as it cools. To solve this problem, I’ve cut back on the eggs and added baking powder for a bit of lift. The custard comes together best in a blender, but if all you’ve got is a bowl and a whisk, use them, and get it as smooth as you can.

  For the kirsch in this recipe, I like Trimbach. It’s pricey, but since I only ever use a teaspoon or so at a time, a single bottle lasts a while. Kirsch works its magic on all manner of stone fruits and berries, by the way. Toss it with peaches before baking them into a pie or with plums destined for crumble to enhance the fruits’ flavor. If you prefer, you can swap in amaretto or ½ teaspoon almond extract for the kirsch in this recipe. Clafoutis traditionalists get their hint of almond flavor by leaving the cherries unpitted. I tried that once, but worried so much about my guests’ teeth that I’ve been pitting my cherries ever since.

  1 tablespoon softened unsalted butter for greasing the pan

  Granulated sugar for dusting the pan

  2 cups (400 grams) fresh cherries, pitted

  1 cup whole milk

  3 tablespoons (38 grams) brown sugar

  1 teaspoon baking powder

  2 large eggs

  1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

  1 tablespoon kirsch

  ¼ teaspoon fine sea salt

  ⅓ cup (42 grams) all-purpose flour

  Confectioners’ sugar, for finishing

  Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.

 
Grease a 9-inch baking dish, cake pan, or pie plate with the 1 tablespoon butter. (Use the entire tablespoon so that the coating is thick.) Dust the sides and bottom of the dish with granulated sugar and shake out any excess.

  Put the cherries into the baking dish and shake into a single layer. Combine the milk, brown sugar, baking powder, eggs, vanilla extract, kirsch, salt, and flour in the jar of a blender, and blend on high speed for 1 minute. Pour the batter over the cherries, and bake for 30 to 35 minutes, until the clafoutis puffs up and turns golden brown, and a tester inserted into the center comes out clean.

  Serve at room temperature or chilled, dusted with confectioners’ sugar.

  Serves 6.

  CHAPTER 28

  Humpty Dumpty Day

  There was a package waiting for me when we got back home from Seattle. A Humpty Dumpty doll carved from wood. His clothing was painted on, a red jacket with blue lapels. His legs, hinged at the knees and also red, dangled down from his egg-shaped body. My father had sent him in honor of the surgery that was now just three weeks away. I perched him on my desk as I studied for my last exams. Sometimes I’d absently stroke his head. It felt smooth, solid, strong.

  The technical term for the kind of surgery I was having is “cranioplasty.” The word made me think of papier-mâché. How in preschool, we would drag strips of newsprint through a flour and water paste and drape them around inflated balloons that we’d pop once the paste had dried. We’d draw faces on the paper “heads” that remained and stick on yarn for hair.

  Cranioplasty has likely been around since ancient times, when surgeons used precious metals and gourds to repair injured skulls. The sixteenth-century physician Fallopius (after whom the fallopian tube is named) described the use of gold plate, and there is a record from 1668 that mentions canine bone. By the twentieth century, surgeons were using human bone from elsewhere in the patient’s body to make repairs, and today, a prosthesis made of synthetic material is common. My prosthesis was custom made from a polymer based on the 3-D scans of my skull. The prosthesis was porous, so my own bone from the surrounding skull would grow right into it over time.

  The plan, as I understood it: Have the cranioplasty on August third. Stay in the hospital for about a week. Recover at home for a month or so. Hang up my helmet, and get on with my life, looking and feeling as good as new.

  The shape and location of the missing piece of my head would make the operation tricky. The hole was part forehead, part temple, part eye socket, part top of my skull. Because of the delicate facial curves and eyebrow positioning to consider, my neurosurgeon recommended that we consult with a craniofacial plastic surgeon and that the two of them perform the operation together.

  It all seemed quite simple. The plastic surgeon examined me—that he seemed unimpressed by my deformity was a source of relief—and he agreed to do the surgery. The only thing we’d have to do, he told us, was to shift the date of the operation a few days up, or push it a few days back, to fit with his OR schedule. That afternoon, I spoke with the neurosurgeon’s secretary, who said she would look into making the change. She sent me an e-mail a few days later: “All good to go for 8/3.” The plastic surgeon would be able to make that date after all, she said.

  My family arrived the weekend before the surgery. I wanted to feed them, so on Friday afternoon I walked the neighborhood alone to gather provisions, a few canvas bags looped over my shoulder, helmet on my head. At Hi-Rise Bread Company I picked up a flute, their version of a pain a l’ancienne made with a blend of white and whole wheat flours. Its crust is crisper than a traditional baguette; its flavor full. From there I walked along Huron Avenue, down the hill to Formaggio Kitchen. The cheesemongers sliced samples from plastic-wrapped rounds and offered them, still on the knife, for me to taste. Without precise enough depth perception to peel them from the blade, I stretched out my hand as casually as I could and let the mongers flip the portions onto my palm. Something creamy, something hard, something in between. Three chubby wedges wrapped in paper and sealed. I chose a bottle of white wine from the shelf beside the cheese counter. Olives. Slippery anchovies lifted from a bath of vinegar and oil. Then back up the hill and down another, through the square to the farmers’ market, for peaches, cucumbers, and tomatoes at their height, swollen, seamy pouches of flesh, seeds, and juice.

  I made Eli’s aunt Leslie’s gazpacho for dinner that night with its hallmark tarragon and cumin, flavors I’d never think to pair but which did each other right. With the spoils of the afternoon laid out on our red table, people served themselves, then sat wherever, anchovies, olives, cheese, and bread piled into their now-empty gazpacho bowls. Amy, my dad, and my brother, Caleb, were there, and my aunt and uncle, and Eli, of course. The next day, my mom and grandfather would arrive, and the day after that Eli’s parents. Then it would be Monday, Humpty Dumpty Day.

  Sunday evening I made a quiet salad of couscous and tiny green lentils that glistened like caviar as I rinsed them in the sink. I folded in what was left of some arugula from the fridge and the rest of the tomatoes, applied olive oil, lemon, salt, and pepper, and put out the bowl with a stack of plates for anyone who came by. Beside the salad, I placed a wooden board with thick slabs of banana bread lopped in half to make them easy to eat with your hands. I’d baked two loaves from the blackening bananas on the counter, one for Sunday and one for my family to have the next day while the surgeons put me back in one piece.

  In my kitchen, banana bread is a food of departure. Before a few days or weeks away, I tend to view the perishable contents of my refrigerator and pantry as an edible checklist. It feels good, clever, baking bananas into bread, blending berries into smoothies, chopping greens into omelets, making delicious what would otherwise go to waste. Cooking is, on the one hand, an act of resistance to the coming departure. (I should be packing.) But as I empty out my fridge and sop up the last of what my kitchen has to offer, it is also an acknowledgment that soon, I’ll be out the door.

  Cooking before leaving home for someplace new means clinging to what’s familiar before nothing is. It also means getting to eat something good, which is wise before a trip, in any case. There was no way of knowing how long I’d be away this time. The doctors said one week, I reminded myself, as I scored Xs into the bottoms of a few overripe peaches, lowered them into a pot of boiling water, plunged them in ice water, and slipped off their skins. But I was afraid it would be much longer. I quartered the peeled peaches, slid them into a Ziploc bag, and stashed them in the freezer. “I’ll be back,” the gesture said, “and I’ll be hungry.”

  Whole Wheat Banana Bread

  I adapted this banana bread from the Classic Banana Bundt Cake that appears in Dorie Greenspan’s book Baking: From My Home to Yours. I halved the recipe to make just enough batter to fit a loaf pan, and swapped in some whole wheat flour to deepen the flavor. Instead of creaming the butter with an electric mixer, I melt it and fold everything together by hand for an especially tender, muffinlike crumb.

  Ideally, the bananas for this recipe should be ripe past the point where you’d want to eat them straight from the peel. You’re looking for plenty of dark brown spots—if your bananas are almost entirely black, even better—and some squishiness when you hold them in your hand.

  Store the bread at room temperature, covered tightly with plastic. It will keep for a few days this way, and only improves with time.

  Dry ingredients:

  1 cup (125 grams) all-purpose flour

  ½ cup (57 grams) whole wheat flour

  1 cup (200 grams) granulated sugar

  1 teaspoon baking soda

  ¼ teaspoon granulated salt

  3 ounces (85 grams) semisweet chocolate, chopped into small, irregular pieces (The largest chunks should be about ¼ inch.)

  Wet ingredients:

  1 large egg

  1 stick (113 grams) unsalted butter, melted and cooled slightly

  1 t
easpoon pure vanilla extract

  1 cup (235 grams) mashed overripe bananas (You’ll need 2–3 medium bananas.)

  ½ cup (123 grams) plain, whole-milk yogurt

  Preheat the oven to 350 degrees, and butter and flour an 8½-by-4½-inch (6-cup) loaf pan.

  Whisk together the dry ingredients in a medium-sized bowl. In a large bowl, lightly beat the egg, then add the rest of the wet ingredients and stir well. Dump the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients, and gently fold with a rubber spatula until the flour mixture is just incorporated. Do not overmix.

  Pour the batter into the prepared pan, and bake for 50 to 60 minutes, until a tester inserted into the center of the loaf comes out clean. Cool in the pan for 10 to 15 minutes, then carefully turn out the bread onto a rack. Cool completely before slicing.

  CHAPTER 29

  Luxury Head

  Harvard Square was quiet in the 5:00 a.m. hour. The sky was still half sleeping, greenish pink around the edges. Eli and I could hear our shoes against the bricks as we walked. We went down into the T and caught the first Red Line train of the day. It was only three stops to the hospital, but by the time the train climbed aboveground with a view of the Charles River, the sky had ripened into daylight proper. I felt as though I’d been awake for hours.

  “Ready, lady?” Eli asked.

  This would be my third surgery. Fourth, if you count the decompression of the optic nerve on the heels of the aneurysm clipping. All of those surgeries had been emergencies, urgent, slice-and-saw responses to trauma, injury, and infection. This one was different. Except for the hole in my skull, I was fine. Totally healthy. Wait, why was I having this surgery, again? I mean, the helmet was annoying and all, but a mere inconvenience, wasn’t it, compared with being cut open?