A Homemade Life

by Molly Wizenberg

  Serve immediately, with additional salt and lots of grated Parmigiano-Reggiano at the table.

  NOTE: You will likely have some pesto left over, but in our house, that’s never much trouble. Just cover its surface with a sheet of plastic wrap to prevent oxidation, and store it in the refrigerator for up to 4 days.

  Yield: 4 servings

  A BIG DEAL

  You’re ready to marry someone, I figure, if you’re willing to go into debt with him. It may not be a terribly romantic way of gauging things, but it’s as good as any. Buying a house or a car or a fancy television is not as quaint as falling asleep in his arms or soaking together in a bathtub filled with bubbles and rose petals, but it’s a serious commitment, a way of promising to continue to love each other—at least for the term of the loan.

  When Brandon and I bought a car together, we’d already been engaged for a year, but in some ways, it felt even more affirming than the white dress waiting in my closet, the wedding bands in their velvety boxes, and the invitations in the mail.

  Not that it was an easy decision. Our old car, or rather, my old car, a used two-door that my father had bought for me when I was sixteen, had suddenly reached the point in its lifespan when its total worth was approximately that of a head of cabbage, but it required about a thousand cabbages’ worth to keep it running. I didn’t want to get rid of it, but we had to. So we parked it on the street out front, called the American Cancer Society, filled out the donation paperwork, and waited for the tow truck to come.

  In the meantime, we contemplated just how badly we really needed a car. Maybe we could live without one. We could save money. We could be ecologically correct. We could be progressive! People in New York and Paris don’t need cars, we told ourselves, and maybe we didn’t either. The Seattle bus system is a little less efficient than the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, but we have friends without cars who make do. We thought we’d give it a try.

  And to tell you the truth, in a small, dark way, I wasn’t sure we were ready to buy a car. We’d never put our names side-by-side on any sort of legally binding document. If we were to call off the wedding, our names would still be there together, legally bound, even if we weren’t. We decided we should take some time to ride the bus, just to make sure.

  This, however, was late May. The flowers were in bloom, and so were the trees, but Seattle, being the Rainy City it is, wasn’t quite on the bandwagon. When it comes to summer, Seattle tends to hang from the tailgate for a while, bumping along, dragging its heels, until finally—sometime around July 4, usually—it decides to climb on board. This particular May, every time we went to leave the house, it started raining. It was in this hostile climate that Brandon and I considered our newly carless situation. For the better part of two weeks, while we dutifully checked bus schedules and stood at our chosen stops, it rained. It rained almost constantly. Every time we stepped out the door, there it was. Drip drop, drip drop.

  One Sunday afternoon in the midst of all this, Olaiya called to invite us to dinner. We had a few hours before we would need to catch the bus, and I was in the mood for baking, so I offered to bring dessert. We had a bag of pistachios sitting on the counter, and I’d been thinking of turning them into a cake. And apricots were coming into season. We had some in a bowl on the table, and they were still a little sour, but with some heat, they would sweeten up nicely. A cake, I decided, would be the perfect place for them. So while the rain beat against the window-panes, I flicked on the oven and got to work.

  I whizzed some pistachios in the food processor until they turned to powder. Then I folded them into the batter, now a pale, speckled shade of green, and grated in some nutmeg for extra warmth. At this point in the season, I would take all the warmth I could get. Then I halved and pitted the apricots, nudged a blob of honey into their upturned wells, and nestled them into the batter. As the cake baked, the apricots sunk slowly, hiding themselves from view. It wasn’t what I had intended—I wanted a cake with a pretty, apricot-dotted top—but it was sort of charming. Anyway, I could hardly blame them. I wanted to burrow into that warm batter, too.

  I pulled the cake out of the oven exactly ten minutes before our bus was due at the nearest stop, two blocks away. Not knowing what else to do, I pulled out a paper grocery bag, pushed a folded-up newspaper all the way to the bottom to reinforce it, and gently, suited up with my oven mitt, set the cake on top of the newspaper. Then I laid a plastic grocery sack loosely across the cake to protect it from splashes, and we grabbed our umbrellas and ran.

  Have you ever tried to carry a freshly baked, still-steaming cake in a paper bag under a too-small umbrella in a rainstorm? Also, have you ever sat in front of a drunk on the bus and watched him fondle your fiancé’s chin-length hair? And have you ever held a still-hot cake on your lap, now without its (soaked, torn, discarded) paper bag, anticipating that at any second, you might need to leap from your seat to avoid being fondled yourself? I have. That’s all I want to say about that.

  We did make it to Olaiya’s, I’m pleased to report, and with the cake still intact. Despite all that it had suffered, it was exactly what I hoped it would be. The apricots had stopped their descent somewhere near the equator of the cake, and when we cut in, they revealed themselves like buried treasure. We ate half of the cake that night and left the rest with Olaiya when we headed out to catch the bus. One cake-related transportation fiasco was enough, we figured. Better not to risk another.

  Instead, we huddled together in a corner of the humid bus all the way home. Then we filled the bathtub and soaked until our feet were warm again. The next morning, we took the bus downtown and bought a car.

  PISTACHIO CAKE WITH HONEYED APRICOTS

  before you assemble this cake, be sure to taste one or two of the apricots. If they’re on the tart side, you might consider doubling the amount of honey.

  I like to serve this cake on its own, unadorned, but if you want to dress it up, you could dust it with powdered sugar. You could also serve it with a dollop of loosely whipped cream. For a fancier, more festive treatment, you could even try making it into a layer cake. Double the recipe, omitting the apricots and honey, and sandwich the layers with strawberry or raspberry jam that you’ve pressed through a sieve to remove the seeds. Coat the whole thing in whipped cream or any other frosting you like.

  ¾ cup shelled raw pistachios

  1 cup unbleached all-purpose flour

  2 teaspoons baking powder

  ¼ teaspoon freshly ground nutmeg

  ¼ teaspoon salt

  ½ cup whole milk

  ¼ teaspoon pure vanilla extract

  1 stick (4 ounces) unsalted butter, at room temperature

  1 cup sugar

  3 large eggs

  5 ripe apricots, halved and pitted

  1 tablespoon honey

  Set an oven rack to the middle position, and preheat the oven to 350°F. Butter a 9-inch round pan, and line the bottom with a round of parchment paper. Butter the paper; then dust the pan lightly with flour.

  In the bowl of a food processor, pulse the pistachios until very finely ground. Take off the lid every now and then and rub a pinch of the ground nuts between your fingers: if they feel too coarse, keep going, but if they feel fine, like sand, they’re ready. Add the flour, baking powder, nutmeg, and salt, and pulse once or twice to mix.

  In a measuring cup, combine the milk and vanilla.

  In a large bowl, beat the butter and sugar until pale and fluffy. Add the eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition. Add the flour mixture in three batches, alternating with the milk, mixing at low speed to just combine. Do not overmix. If any streaks of flour remain, use a rubber spatula to fold them in. Pour the batter into the cake pan, and shake the pan a bit to ensure that the batter is evenly spread.

  Arrange the apricots cut side up on a cutting board or countertop. Using the tip of your finger, smear a blob of honey into the center of each, dividing it evenly among the ten halves. Gently arrange them cut side
up on top of the batter.

  Slide the cake into the oven, and bake until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean, 35 to 40 minutes. The apricots will have sunk into the batter, but don’t worry: they will reveal themselves in each slice. Cool the cake in the pan on a rack for 10 minutes, then run a thin knife around its edge and release the sides of the pan. Continue to cool the cake until you are ready to serve it.

  Serve warm or at room temperature.

  Yield: 8 servings

  FREEZE FRAME

  Getting married is tricky. In case you haven’t tried it yourself, let me tell you a little about it.

  First, when you get engaged, a few things happen. You agree to marry someone, for starters. Also, your head sort of explodes. Third, you are handed a ticket—rather sneakily, I should note, with no warnings at all—to an amusement park ride known as THE WEDDING. If you were to pass it at the fair, you’d know it by the pink flashing lights and the neon sign of two doves in silhouette, kissing. It’s at times mildly disorienting, and it can even tend toward terrifying, with tears, beers, pimples, and speeding tickets. But if you stay in your seat until the very end, it turns out to be pretty fun.

  When Brandon and I got engaged, we didn’t know any of that. We knew only that we wanted to be married in the summertime, and that we wanted our wedding to be a big party. We wanted to gather our families and friends around us somewhere special, where we could spend a weekend in celebration. We also wanted to show off a little. Contrary to what I was saying just a second ago about Seattle and its surroundings (that it rains and rains and rains), it can also be absolutely gorgeous. We wanted to gather in a place with a view, with water and mountains both, somewhere big enough to fit us all but small enough to feel cozy.

  We looked here and there, searching for just the right spot, but it wasn’t as easy as we had hoped. We were either stuck with a yacht club, or with a public park teeming with barbecues and Frisbees. But then, one fortuitous evening, our friends Ashley and Chris told us about their wedding, which they had held two years earlier in Bellingham, a college town on the coast about ninety miles north of Seattle. (We didn’t know them then, so we weren’t there.) They held the ceremony in a small, secluded park by the water, they said, and the reception was a short walk away, in the Bellingham Cruise Terminal, where ships leave for Alaska and the nearby islands. It had exposed brick walls and steel beams, a grand staircase in the center of the building, and a fifteen-foot domed window that looked out onto the piers. They’d even found a caterer there, someone who sourced almost everything from local farms, served it in hand-carved wooden bowls, and passed champagne and Rainier cherries in the park before the ceremony. That was the clincher.

  Borrowing shamelessly from their blueprint, we began to put the pieces into place. We drove up to Bellingham and blocked rooms at three small hotels. We hired a photographer. I bought a dress. We asked Ashley, a graphic designer, to do our save-the-dates, invitations, and ceremony programs. If she was bothered by the fact that we were essentially stealing her entire wedding, she didn’t say a thing. When I came over to proofread the programs, she even gave me strawberries and ice cream.

  So in many ways, it was a piece of cake. We were planning the wedding we wanted. We had all the right people to help. We had a few arguments over frivolous things, like honeymoon destinations and the cost of flowers, but we talked our way through them, and figuring out how to do that made us feel even more sure of each other. But still, it was hard. However you look at it, an engagement is a limbo period, a space in between. For someone who has a hard time with change, it’s torture. Being engaged is one big, drawn-out transition, a single change that takes months to enact. Sixteen months, in our case.

  Don’t get me wrong: I loved seeing that ring on my finger. I loved knowing that we were getting married. But what I didn’t love was the way that being engaged held us in a sort of freeze frame and, at the same time, kept us running—breathless, driven, determined—toward one single day, the day that would take us, ta daa!, from this state to the next. Getting married is not for pansies. The way I see it, it’s a little like Valentine’s Day. If you allow it to, it can feel kind of stale and stilted, like a test to show how impossibly romantic you can be. So much rides on the wedding—on what is said, what is worn, the tiniest nuances—but in the end, it’s just a single day. Granted, it’s a day to celebrate your love for someone in the presence of everyone you care about, but still, it’s just one day.

  When people would wish us well, they would often say something like, “Oh, I just know your wedding day is going to be PERFECT! It’s going to be BLISS! It’s going to be the BEST day of your life!” Brandon and I would always giggle about that, even though the gesture was very nice. For one thing, there’s the word bliss, which makes my toes curl. It reminds me of diamond company commercials and bath beads. But even more than that, if the best day of our lives is our wedding day, we thought, what the hell comes afterward? We would have a lot of so-so years to look forward to. We wanted to have a beautiful wedding, but it didn’t need to be utter perfection. It needed to celebrate what we bring to each other in the truest way possible, and with some good food and dancing. But it didn’t need to be the best day ever. In fact, we sincerely hoped that, in the long-term scheme of things, it wouldn’t be.

  Sometimes, when the planning would get the best of us, or when I would start crying about hotel rooms or table linens, Brandon would look at me and say, “This is BLISS!” and then everything would feel much better.

  To tell you the truth, I don’t think a wedding, no matter how nice, could have anything on any number of other, more ordinary days. Like the day after our engagement party in Oklahoma, the day that Brandon spent sitting on the floor of my mother’s kitchen, wrestling contentedly with a rusty bolt in my father’s old espresso machine. He spent hours sitting there, watching us come and go, rigging and wrenching and wielding a can of WD-40. When he finally pried the bolt loose, the machine shuddered to life with a squeal and a roar, a sound none of us had heard since my father died. Brandon worked the knobs with a sort of sweet, fearful reverence, and my mother fawned over her cappuccino for hours.

  Or like that one Saturday in July, a couple of months after Brandon moved to Seattle and a year before our wedding. We left home in the morning and drove north to Bellingham to meet with the caterer. We had a bag of spicy peanuts in the console, and I was wearing a new pair of flats. We stopped at Goodwill near Mount Vernon and bought a yellow Pyrex dish that I love, and then we ate spaghetti with pesto at a place called D’Anna’s. Our canopy bed at the Best Western was nearly four feet off the ground, and it had a set of wooden steps that leaned up against it. The next morning, when I tried to climb down, I banged my hip on the bedside table and got a bruise the size of a baseball. After I stopped whimpering, we laughed about it for a long time. Then, after breakfast, we went out for ice cream. We ordered two scoops, one of which I can’t remember and the other being vanilla with black pepper, and then we sat on the curb outside, eating them from a frilly glass dish, the kind they use at old-fashioned soda fountains. I think of that day a lot.

  If we could have a wedding like that, we would be all right. More than any amount of bliss, that would be us.

  VANILLA–BLACK PEPPER ICE CREAM

  it may sound like a strange union of flavors, but vanilla and black pepper make a stunning ice cream. When you take a bite, what you get first is the vanilla, but as you swallow, a mild wave of peppery heat washes over your tongue. After we tasted it at Mallard Ice Cream in Bellingham, we knew we had to replicate it at home. We first tried steeping whole peppercorns in the hot milk base, but the flavor was too soft and floral. Ultimately, we wound up adding the pepper at the very end, once the custard was cool, so that it retained its raw, familiar bite. It would be delicious with a rich chocolate cake or brownie, or sandwiched between two chocolate shortbread cookies.

  Oh, and if you accidentally boil or curdle your custard, here is a trick I learned fr
om pastry chef David Lebovitz: you can usually rescue it by whizzing it, while it’s still warm, in the blender. But remember not to fill your blender jar more than one-third full; hot liquids expand.

  1 cup whole milk

  2 cups heavy cream

  ¾ cup granulated sugar

  Pinch of salt

  6 large egg yolks

  1 teaspoon vanilla extract

  1½ teaspoons finely ground black pepper, or more to taste

  In a heavy medium saucepan, combine the milk, 1 cup of the cream, sugar, and salt. Warm over medium heat, stirring occasionally, until hot and steaming; it should be just barely too hot to touch. Do not boil.

  Meanwhile, pour the remaining 1 cup cream into a large bowl. Set a mesh strainer across the top. In a medium bowl, whisk the egg yolks. Then prepare your ice bath: take out a large bowl—larger than the one you put the cream in—and fill it about a third full with ice cubes. Add about 1 cup cold water, so that the ice cubes float. (In a pinch, ice packs or bags of frozen peas work in place of the ice. You’ll have to discard the peas afterward, or use them immediately.)

  When the milk mixture is hot, remove it from the heat. Let it sit for about 30 seconds, then gradually, slowly, pour about half of it into the yolks, whisking constantly. Pour the warmed egg mixture back into the saucepan with the rest of the milk mixture. Cook over medium-low heat, stirring and scraping the bottom of the pan slowly and constantly with a heatproof spatula, until the custard thickens slightly, just enough to very lightly coat the spatula. If you draw a line up the spatula with the tip of your finger, the custard on either side of the line shouldn’t run back together. On my stove, this takes 5 to 6 minutes.