We hummed along until the day I splurged and bought a steak. Since I only knew the Art of the Casserole, I put that sorry piece of beef in the oven at 350˚F for an hour.
Jim ate every bite.
I did not immediately set my sights on becoming a writer. I studied hard, protested the war in Vietnam, and developed affection for the subject of art history. (Most of the professional foodies I’ve met majored in art history—an interesting coincidence. And art historians themselves are usually wonderful cooks.) While in school, my desire to become a better cook deepened, owing to two sources.
When we were newlyweds, Jim and I lived in a tiny apartment in Menlo Park, right near the offices of Sunset magazine. I bought their cookbooks at the Moffatt Naval Air Station commissary. When I had the time, I worked my way through some of them. Encountering a problem, I would call the Sunset test kitchens. The people who talked to me were unfailingly helpful and encouraging. But I remained timid, and when I was tired, would opt for tuna casserole.
The other, and longest-lasting, reason I came to love cooking was an epiphany that took place during a particularly exhausting exam period that year. Unable to face the prospect of opening yet another can of tuna, I turned on the television and saw Julia Child on PBS. I shook my head as she gave straightforward, simple instructions on making a roux that didn’t taste of flour. That night, I made my first béchamel sauce. She was right. The food was luscious, and I felt energized, not drained.
I bought The French Chef Cookbook, based on the TV show, and soon I was stuffing mushrooms, poaching chicken, and whipping up bavarois à l’orange. Julia Child’s assertion was a revelation: I can teach you to prepare French food. Many women of my generation followed her into the kitchen. To this day, I feel Julia Child’s helpful, guiding presence at the stove.
Once we finished school, the Navy sent Jim off on back-to-back eighteen-month deployments. The first seven years we were married, we moved thirteen times. When Jim finally finished his obligation to the Navy, he landed a job in Colorado. We moved to a small mountain town that bears a marked resemblance to the Aspen Meadow of the Goldy books. Our family grew to include three sons. I did volunteer work at our local church, in our diocese, and for our political party. I tutored in a correctional facility and counseled rape victims. I helped raise funds for various community projects, cared for the kids and the house, cooked up a storm, and in what there was of my spare time, I read. I never forgot Emyl Jenkins’s advice, but I did not yet know how to use it.
The problem with doing scads of volunteer work is that, as with any profession, you can get burned out. When you are a volunteer, the hours are long, appreciation is minimal, and gratitude, if it’s doled out at all, is sparse. And of course you are not being paid. Our three kids had to go to college somehow. Denver, an hour away, offered scant employment opportunities, none of them part-time.
At thirty-two, I still had not tried to become a professional writer, although as a volunteer I had done plenty of writing. I felt directionless, so I took a writing class.
I loved it. I took another class and then another. And I wrote—a lot. Often frustrated, I’d finished and rewritten three novels before Catering to Nobody was accepted for publication.
But where do you get your ideas? is a question writers frequently hear at bookstores and libraries.
What I reply is that a cook goes to the refrigerator to take out ingredients to prepare a meal; a writer goes to the emotional refrigerator to cook up a book. The first ingredient for the Goldy series that got stored in my emotional refrigerator came from my volunteer work. There, I had repeatedly seen a phenomenon that nobody seemed to be talking or writing about in those days: the middle-class—and sometimes wealthy—physically abused spouse. (This was pre-O.J., when nationwide consciousness was suddenly raised.)
I had heard that women stuck in poverty were sometimes beaten up by their husbands or boyfriends. But the abused women I was encountering were my fellow volunteers and committee members. One woman said, “Look at where my husband broke my thumb in three places with a hammer.” He was a social worker. Back then, a woman had to be willing to testify against her husband, and many women simply could not afford to do this.
The laws have since changed, but abused spouses and partners, ex and otherwise, are still not safe. If you need help, please call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233. Trust your intuition regarding threats from a partner. If you doubt your intuition, please read The Gift of Fear by Gavin de Becker.
From the stories I’d heard, I created Goldy’s ex-husband, the Jerk. From my own experience raising our three sons, Arch and Julian were born. The characters are composites. But I had plenty of material. A typical Arch story might come from the true story of going clothes-shopping with one of our adolescent sons. (I always seemed to embarrass our sons.)
“Mom,” our son said, this time in a low voice, “when we go into this store, do not call my name. Do not show me any clothes. Do not point out any girls you think are cute. In fact, pretend that you don’t know me.”
Some readers have commented that Arch speaks to his mother in a disrespectful manner. When they were growing up, these readers say, that kind of language and behavior would not have been tolerated. Well, that was when they were growing up. And by the way, all of our sons were viewed by their teachers and peers as being exceptionally well-mannered. So there.
The character of Tom comes, of course, from being married to a hardworking but easygoing spouse. Numerous women have asked me, “Where do I meet someone like Tom?” I was lucky.
The character of Julian, Goldy’s helper, arose from when one of our sons was going through a particularly challenging period. When Dying for Chocolate was published in 1992, Julian was introduced as a rebellious teen who was a scholarship student at a local prep school. To relieve his frustration, he swam. Because my agent is a vegetarian who had requested more vegetarian recipes, Julian became a vegetarian who loved to cook.
The evolution of the character of Marla, Goldy’s wealthy best friend, is harder to pinpoint. Sometimes it’s better not to try to figure out where characters originate. This is especially true when a bejeweled woman in a designer outfit sashays into a scene you’re writing, drops her Louis Vuitton bag on the kitchen table, and announces, “I’m the Jerk’s other ex-wife.”
This cookbook contains almost all of the recipes from the seventeen books in the Goldy series. (Only a very few have been omitted.) Most of them came from playing around with dishes I’d tasted in restaurants. Others are family favorites: Dad’s Bread (see here), for example, is in The Whole Enchilada. There are also recipes that came from friends we knew in one of the many places where Jim was stationed, and that I copied down on three-by-five cards, only to make numerous changes to them over the ensuing decades. These recipes then became dishes the family decided they couldn’t live without.
Others, finally, were happy accidents. I relate a story in Dying for Chocolate that came from a neighbor’s visit. I was making Julia Child’s gâteau de crêpes à la Florentine, while my friend and I chatted. The recipe calls for two fillings between the crêpes: one mushroom, one spinach. The neighbor and I somehow got to talking too long. I mixed up the proportions and ended up with much more of the spinach filling than the mushroom. Since my neighbor was still sitting at the kitchen table and it was getting on to dinnertime, I thinned out the extra spinach filling with chicken broth, and served the family and my neighbor what became Goldilocks’ Gourmet Spinach Soup. Here is the recipe:
Goldilocks’ Gourmet Spinach Soup
—DYING FOR CHOCOLATE—
5 tablespoons unsalted butter
4 ounces fresh button mushrooms, cleaned, dried, trimmed, and diced
1 scallion, chopped
5 tablespoons all-purpose flour
2 cups canned chicken broth, or homemade chicken stock (see here)
2 cups milk, preferably whole
½ teaspoon salt (optional)
F
reshly ground black pepper
Freshly grated nutmeg (optional)
4 ounces cream cheese, at room temperature, cut into cubes
1 cup grated Gruyère cheese
¾ pound fresh spinach, trimmed, washed, cooked, and chopped
In a large saucepan, melt the butter. Add the mushrooms and scallion and slowly sauté until tender. Add the flour and stir just until the flour is cooked, a couple of minutes. Whisk in first the chicken broth and then the milk, stirring until thickened. Add the salt (if using), pepper to taste, nutmeg to taste (if using), cream cheese, and Gruyère, stirring until melted. Then stir in the spinach. Taste and correct the seasoning. Heat and stir very gently. Serve hot.
Makes 4 to 6 servings
The neighbor adored it and wrote down the recipe. And our three sons actually loved a soup that involves fresh spinach.
So . . . the Goldy books began from taking a second look at events in my own life to which I had had a strong emotional reaction. Then I worked (and reworked, it must be said—many times) those experiences into stories. In the chapters that follow, I talk about cooking and writing, and what I discovered about both. Cooking began out of necessity and became fun. My vocation is writing. I am extremely grateful to have had the good fortune to enjoy doing both.
Chapter 1
Appetizers and Soups or How Do I Look?
(AND OTHER STORIES ABOUT FOOD AND APPEARANCE)
I learned about catering in the kitchen of J. William’s, the now unfortunately closed bistro and catering operation owned and operated by John William Schenk. I volunteered to work in his kitchen and with his team for catered events. He agreed, for which I am endlessly thankful. At the outset, I asked John and his wonderful assistant, Karen Johnson Kennedy (that is actually her name), if they had a lot of secret recipes. Karen collapsed in giggles and John, to my surprise, said the cookbooks he used were not the most important aspect of food service. The primary guideline for catering was not “How does the food taste?” but “How does it look?” This is the reason cookbooks with photographs of food are:
1. Expensive to produce
2. More fun to look at than cookbooks with no pictures
(Sorry, this cookbook has no photographs.)
We eat first with our eyes, John would say. Over the years, he always reminded me to take note of a dish’s appearance on the plate or platter. For parties, John would serve a large, shallow rectangular basket so bulging with crudités that it virtually invited one to dive in. A salade composée was just that. The cakes were not only made with butter but elegantly iced with ruffles of buttercream frosting, sometimes held in perfect place by the addition of melted gelatin.
This applies to writing in a number of ways. When I was first published, I found that people who came to bookstore events wanted to have fun. Their desire was to meet the author, get their book signed, maybe eat a cookie, and have a laugh. So far, so good.
Being out promoting a book can generate ideas for other books. The genesis of my fifth book began in Scottsdale, Arizona, in 1992. I was visiting a bookstore to sign Dying for Chocolate. A woman in line looked at my author photograph on the book flap, took a step forward, then glanced at me. She turned her gaze back to the photograph. Then she stared at me. When she arrived at the front of the line, she tapped the picture and said, “This is an extremely flattering photograph.”
I was already working on the third Goldy book, The Cereal Murders, back at home. I also had the broad outline of what would become the fourth, The Last Suppers. So I wasn’t exactly looking for a book idea when I returned to Colorado and raced down to The Denver, an elegant department store that used to be the place to go in the city for fashion and beauty. No, the thought that I looked much less attractive than my photo did that. No question about it: I needed a makeover.
The very nice young woman who patted first one cream, then some concealer, then dabs of other products on my face asked, “What do you do for a living?”
“I write murder mysteries,” said I.
“My, my,” she murmured, “I sure could write a murder mystery about this place.”
“Oh?” I asked. “How’s that?”
And she proceeded to tell me about the tactics used to sell cosmetics. At that time, the top Colorado saleswoman for the leading cosmetics company in the nation was fortyish. She would sell enormous amounts of something called Age-Defying Cream. And this lady would defy her age, all right, by telling women that she used the cream every night, and she was seventy years old. The cream had taken a miraculous thirty years off her face!
Cosmetics sales at that time were—and perhaps still are—largely commission-based. My young resource told me that the cards clients fill out with their contact information are like gold to the saleswomen. And since they are like that precious metal, they were often stolen . . . by other sales associates. Not only that, but if a particularly well-heeled client showed up unexpectedly and asked for say, Jennifer, and Jennifer had just left for lunch, the competitive associate would say, “Jennifer doesn’t work here anymore. Can I help you?”
There was also industrial spying. A fellow from a local facial-care and cosmetics-manufacturing company used to chat up the young women who worked behind the counter. He would take them out for lunch, give them coupons for free facials and lipsticks . . . and interrogate them on the new lines emerging from corporate HQ in New York. What was the packaging on the compacts going to look like? (White compacts were viewed as “old-fashioned,” whereas navy or black compacts were thought to be hip. Since then, silver compacts have become chic, and at some future point white compacts will probably stage a comeback.) The spy would also want to know the names of new products, sales projections, dates and contents of giveaways, and gift-with-purchase events. If an associate became suddenly tight-lipped, the spy would chat with someone else, sometimes offering a higher-paying job to that associate . . . as long as she gave helpful information and was wanting a new gig.
Suddenly, the cosmetics counter looked a lot more interesting. After The Denver closed (the local cosmetics company also closed), I continued my trips to that cosmetics counter, then housed at Lord & Taylor. I had a source who worked there, the daughter of a friend. I called her Deep Neck.
The book became Killer Pancake, a title our youngest son, then in first grade, invented. After my editor said she loved it, our son, delighted, insisted that he also wanted to do the jacket art. He bolted to his room and later proudly handed me a drawing of a giant pancake with an angry face, running on stick legs and holding up a bloody knife with one stick arm, while a man a third the size of the pancake raced away in panic.
The publishing company declined his kind offering.
Now, as to Appetizers and Soups. These days, people usually serve one or the other, because each entails making a separate course that is not supposed to fill people up before dinner. So if you are having people over and are serving wine or drinks, it is a good idea to bring out several types of cheese with crackers if you are serving a soup. Or you can serve an appetizer. Catered events that feature drinks on empty stomachs can quickly descend to disaster. Sometimes hosts began imbibing (and fighting) before John and our catering team ever arrived. There are many reasons catering is challenging, and this is one of them.
Now, as to guacamole: When I began writing the Goldy books, there was no refrigerated guacamole available at the grocery store . . . much less one that you could freeze and then thaw and bring forth at serving time. You used to have to make it from scratch. The recipes that follow often call for making guacamole from scratch, but feel free to substitute the store-bought variety, as it is usually excellent. Still, if you want to make your own, go for it.
Holy Moly Guacamole
—CATERING TO NOBODY—
This is our family’s gold standard guacamole recipe, and is obligatory for the watching of all televised sporting events. It is easy to make ahead, too, as the mayonnaise keeps the avocado from turning brown, and can be mixed in at servi
ng time.
1 large or 2 small avocados
1 tablespoon picante sauce
1½ teaspoons fresh lemon juice
1 teaspoon freshly grated onion
¼ teaspoon salt
¼ cup mayonnaise
Corn chips or tortilla chips, for serving
Peel, pit, and mash the avocado(s). You should have 1 cup. Place the mashed avocado in a nonmetal bowl and mix in the picante sauce, lemon juice, onion, and salt until well blended. Spread the mayonnaise over the top to the edges, cover the bowl, and refrigerate. At serving time, uncover the bowl and thoroughly mix in the mayonnaise. Taste and add more picante sauce if desired. Serve with corn chips or tortilla chips.
Makes 1¼ cups
Nachos Schulz
—THE CEREAL MURDERS—
Tex-Mex food, which you will find throughout this book, is extremely popular in Colorado. This is the version our family enjoys when we watch football games and discuss why the Bronco offense is lined up in the spread, the I, the split, or the shotgun. (If you have a husband and three sons who love football, these are things you need to learn.) This dish is easy to prepare in advance, too. The bean mixture can be made ahead, covered with plastic wrap, and refrigerated; the cheese can be grated; the scallions, tomatoes, and olives chopped. You can make the guacamole while the nachos heat, or you can substitute store-bought guacamole.
Contents of one 15-ounce can chili beans in chili sauce, such as Kuner’s
½ cup plus 1 tablespoon picante sauce
One 15-ounce bag tortilla chips
4 cups grated Cheddar cheese
1 avocado
1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice
1½ cups regular or light sour cream
1 tablespoon freshly grated onion
Goldy's Kitchen Cookbook Page 2