Kitchen Yarns Read online

  I had forgotten about Sausage on Wheels because, I admit, their business venture had embarrassed me. I was twenty-two that year and trying on a new self, a more worldly and sophisticated one. I drank Chablis and wore Gloria Vanderbilt jeans. I dated young lawyers who drove Porsches and took me to dinner at expensive restaurants. I lived on the sixth floor of a soaring high-rise on the waterfront in Boston, just one T stop from Logan airport, where I was based as a TWA flight attendant. How could two parents who drove a truck to a flea market every Sunday to sell sandwiches ever fit into the world I was so carefully trying to create?

  But one summer many years later in Portland, Oregon, I followed a map carefully marked by the hotel concierge to a parking lot where people sold food out of their trucks. I stood, surrounded by trucks selling Wiener schnitzel sandwiches and sushi and Thai noodles and Mongolian beef and sliders and tacos. Truck food was hot. It was hip. The trend was spreading east. On that sunny day in that parking lot, I remembered Sausage on Wheels and the energetic hope and pride with which my parents ran it.

  Sausage on Wheels made money. Not enough for them to quit their real jobs working for the IRS, but enough for them to take trips to Las Vegas, to give both my brother and me down payments for houses. “Even if it didn’t make a dime,” my father told me, “I would still do it. I love it that much.” I smiled tightly while he dreamed of expanding. “Couldn’t you see a Sausage on Wheels downtown?” he said, his eyes gleaming. “All those people on their lunch breaks?” I could imagine it, and the idea made me shudder. What if someone recognized them?

  My parents never did expand. Instead, life got in the way. In June 1982, my brother, Skip, died suddenly. A few days later, we sat, stunned, on the back porch of our house. Sausage on Wheels was parked in the driveway. My father got up and went into the house, returning with the restaurant-sized bowl he used for mixing the meatballs. My mother joined him as he went back to the kitchen. Together, crying, they sliced peppers and onions and rolled hundreds of meatballs. The next day, they drove the truck to the flea market to sell the food they’d made.

  I have a picture, a Polaroid, of my parents smiling out from the truck on its first day in business. The words SAUSAGE ON WHEELS are painted in fat letters on the side. They are happy and proud, holding sandwiches out the window. When I look at that snapshot, I wonder what they would have thought had they been able to see the future: the food trucks parked everywhere in cities across the country. Or perhaps they would be satisfied that in their ordinary way, they taught me something extraordinary. That even in grief, we must take tentative steps back into the world. That even in grief, we must eat. And that when we share that food with others, we are reclaiming those broken bits of our lives, holding them out as if to say, I am still here. Comfort me. As if with each bite, we remember how it is to live.

  GLORIA AND HOOD’S SAUSAGE AND PEPPERS

  My mother no longer remembers how many pounds of peppers and sausages they made every weekend for Sausage on Wheels. She does remember that the sandwiches sold for two dollars each, and they brought home about a thousand dollars a weekend. So that’s five hundred sandwiches. The math is mind-boggling. This recipe is for sausage and peppers, which can be served on a roll, like they used to do, for a grinder or eaten as lunch without bread. They used to add onions—sacks of them, my mother told me when I asked how many—to theirs. I like mine without. But if you do add onions, slice them not too thin and cook them, like the peppers, in the sausage drippings.

  Serves 4

  INGREDIENTS

  3 to 4 tablespoons olive oil

  1 pound sausage, hot or sweet or—my favorite—mixed

  2 red peppers, sliced not too thin

  2 green peppers, sliced not too thin

  Salt and pepper

  Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.

  Pour the olive oil into a frying pan.

  Roll each sausage in the oil to coat, then put them on a sheet pan and bake until browned. Note from Gogo: Don’t prick the sausage; it dries them out!

  Heat the olive oil over medium to medium-high heat and add the sliced peppers and salt and pepper.

  Cook the peppers until they soften, about 10 minutes; do not remove them from the pan.

  When the sausage is browned, add it to the peppers, either sliced into one-inch disks or whole.

  Save the sausage drippings in an empty coffee can for future use (see “Gogo’s Meatballs,” page 30).

  Serve at room temperature or hot, for lunch on its own or in a grinder, with or without onions.

  Dinner for One

  Back in the 1980s, I lived alone in New York City. First in a tiny apartment in a pink building on Sullivan Street, then in an almost as tiny apartment on West Twenty-first Street in Chelsea, and finally in a one-bedroom co-op on the seedy end of Bleecker Street. The neighborhood is called NoHo now, but when I moved there in 1983 it was just a nameless stretch of warehouses, with one bodega, and not much else, around the corner on Broadway. This is why I could finally afford to buy an apartment in a doorman building.

  A U-Haul arrived with my furniture, which had been in storage while I sublet those other apartments. When the movers brought it in, I was surprised by how much I hated all my old things. Living in New York City had changed me in many ways—I’d learned who Sam Shepard was, I walked miles every day, I’d boldly moved into this godforsaken neighborhood, and I’d developed my own taste in clothes and music and, I realized as my blue-flowered couch appeared, in furniture. Everything I owned had been bought to imitate what my friends back in Boston had. By the time the moving truck pulled up to 77 Bleecker Street, I’d abandoned my Ralph Lauren polo shirts and khaki pants for black. Now I had to abandon this ugly furniture.

  That first day in my new apartment, I went to the Grand Union supermarket a few blocks away and bought bags of food: roasts and chops, bacon and eggs, pasta and rice and potatoes and cheese and fresh vegetables and New York apples and a crate of clementines (a fruit I’d never seen until it began to appear at the corner bodega my first fall in Manhattan). I figured that I might have the most embarrassing furniture in all of Manhattan, but at least my refrigerator and cupboards were full.

  When my parents called that night, I explained that I couldn’t talk because I was making dinner.

  “What are you making?” my mother asked.

  “A pork roast, mashed potatoes, asparagus.”

  Always worried about her twenty-six-year-old daughter alone in an unsafe neighborhood in an unsafe city (this was 1983, after all), she said, “Oh good! You’re having company!”

  “No, it’s just me.” My oven dinged, letting me know it was ready for the roast. “Got to go,” I said, and quickly hung up.

  That night, I set the square oak table I’d inherited from an old boyfriend in Boston, poured a glass of chardonnay, and lit candles, beginning my habit of cooking good, full meals for myself almost every night. By the time I got married and had kids, I had shelves of cookbooks and a recipe box with the recipes I’d torn from newspapers and magazines. Chicken paella. Curried chicken with pear chutney. Teriyaki flank steak. Chilaquiles. Beef stew. Turkey in mole. Artichoke soup. The pork roast I made that first night on Bleecker Street. All of it honed in my little galley kitchen.

  I understand now that those elaborate meals cooked and eaten alone were my way of staving off loneliness and keeping sadness at bay. Earlier that summer, when I’d moved into that tiny apartment on Sullivan Street, my brother Skip—five years older and my only sibling—had died suddenly in an accident. My grief-stricken parents had urged me to fulfill my dream of moving to Manhattan and pursuing a life as a writer. “You can’t stay here and take care of us for the rest of your life,” they told me. I loved my new life—the off-off-Broadway plays, the Indian restaurants on East Sixth Street, the readings at Three Lives bookstore, the long aimless walks and all the hours spent browsing at the Strand Book Store. But sometimes my sadness was so big I felt everyone I passed could see it. Once, as I was wal
king home with a new stack of books, a stranger stopped to ask me if I was okay. When I told him I was fine, he said, “I’m sorry. You just look so sad.”

  In my new life a decade later—husband, children, drafty Victorian in Providence, Rhode Island, with a giant 1919 Glenwood stove—I cooked out of joy. I actually thought in those early days of babies and passionate love that I was the happiest person ever. My cooking repertoire got kid-friendly recipes added to it. I made homemade applesauce on that big old stove, and homemade mac and cheese, and “cheesy potatoes,” which were potatoes au gratin from Patricia Wells’s Bistro Cooking. I cooked to nurture my growing family, to hear my husband moan with pleasure at the taste of my ginger salmon, to see my kids reach for seconds and even thirds. I cooked and cooked and cooked, happily.

  Of course, such joy doesn’t always last. It can’t, can it? From where I am now, years later, I see all the missteps I made: being too trusting, wanting to believe in a fairy-tale marriage that I slowly learned was anything but that. Still, those discoveries and heartbreaks came later, years after we moved to a house built in 1792 with an oddly shaped kitchen. The Glenwood stove went unused; after hauling it across town, we discovered that our new house didn’t have a gas hookup. I found myself having to cook on an electric stove for the first time, and dreaming of a kitchen renovation that never happened. Looking back, I can see that even then my husband and I were drifting apart. Many nights I was cooking for just the kids and me, my husband making excuses for not coming home, Grace standing on a stool to help stir sauces and Sam carefully following a recipe beside me.

  When Grace died suddenly in 2002, from a virulent form of strep, for the first time in two decades I stopped cooking altogether and let friends and neighbors feed my family and me. It was months before I returned to my kitchen, trying to remember how to make something as simple as spaghetti. Once, I had cooked out of loneliness. Once, out of joy. Now I was cooking to keep from losing my mind from grief. I began making more and more complicated recipes, driving to ethnic markets for ingredients. Dinner took hours, sometimes even days, to make. I marinated and rolled and simmered and kneaded. I cooked to save my life.

  One day I looked up and life had changed yet again. Our son Sam was all grown up, out of college and living in Brooklyn, often calling me for some recipe he wanted to try. Our daughter Annabelle was in middle school. And, despite my desperate attempts to hold on, to stay a family, to fix it, our marriage was in tatters. There wasn’t a recipe in any of those stained and dog-eared cookbooks that could rescue it. At almost sixty, I found myself once again standing in an empty apartment, waiting for a moving truck.

  This time, when my pale blue sofa and crazy patterned chairs arrived, I smiled. My art, carefully chosen from trips to Cuba and Colombia and Argentina or bought from artist friends, reminded me how far I’d traveled since that apartment on Bleecker Street. It took days to unpack all my boxes, a lifetime of belongings waiting to go into cupboards and closets, onto new shelves and tabletops. Annabelle went on a road trip with her dad that week while I set up our new home.

  Alone for the first time there, looking out at a new landscape of industrial buildings and smokestacks instead of historically restored houses, I reached for my orange Le Creuset baking pan and did the thing that always comforted me: I cooked. I cut slits into a pork roast and stuffed those slits with sliced garlic. I showered the meat with salt and pepper and put it in the oven. I boiled Yukon Gold potatoes until they were tender, then whipped them with milk and butter and salt and pepper. I roasted slender stalks of asparagus, tossed in good olive oil and salt, beside that roast. My new home grew rich with the smells of good food that I cooked to nourish myself. I lit candles and set the table for one with the Fiesta ware I’d collected over a lifetime and one of the napkins I’d bought in Lyon. I poured a glass of cabernet and filled my plate.

  I paused to think about what I had lost, what I had left behind. But what do you say about a marriage that ends? How do you point to those places when it started to crack? That night, I tried to do that. I tried to understand the man I had thought I knew. The man I had loved so hard once. But in my case, I still had more questions than answers. His actions remained a mystery to me, as did why I’d put up with his emotional withdrawal for so long.

  My mother called to be sure I was okay. “I’m great,” I said. “I’m just sitting down to eat.” She laughed. “Did you make yourself a big dinner?” she asked, as she had that day I’d moved into my apartment alone in the city. I told her that in fact I had. After we hung up, I looked around—at my new home, at my dinner, at the city lights now twinkling outside my window. I was cooking for one again. But all these years later, I was cooking not out of sadness or joy or grief. I was cooking out of hope. I was cooking to feed myself, and I was so hungry.

  PORK ROAST WITH GARLIC

  This recipe is so easy that you can see why I made it a lot when I lived alone, as well as after I had kids and was feeding a family. It is best served with mashed potatoes and gravy made from the drippings. Just remove the pork from the pan, and while it’s resting heat the drippings on the stove, right in the same pan. Add about ¼ cup of flour to the drippings and stir it up to make a roux, then slowly pour in milk until it’s smooth and looks like gravy. Add salt and pepper to taste.

  Serves 4 to 6

  INGREDIENTS

  A 2-to 3-pound boneless center-cut pork loin

  Lots of garlic, peeled—enough to fill all the slits you make

  Salt and pepper

  Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F.

  With a sharp knife, cut small slits all over the pork roast.

  Shove a garlic clove deep into each slit.

  Salt and pepper the pork generously.

  Roast in roasting pan for 40 minutes, or until a thermometer inserted in the center registers 145 degrees F.

  Let rest for 15 to 20 minutes, during which you can make your gravy and mashed potatoes (by dumping 4 to 6 quartered cooked potatoes, skin on, into your food processor and whipping them up with a stick of butter, some milk or cream, and salt and pepper).

  Enchiladas

  When you make a pork roast for one person, there will be leftovers. Plenty of leftovers. The next day for lunch, I like to take some thick slices of pork and make either an open-faced sandwich—toasted white bread, pork, leftover gravy, all warmed up—or a regular pork sandwich with mustard. And still I will have more leftovers, which, a couple of days later (so that I have a pork break), I’ll incorporate into enchiladas, which are the best way I know to use up leftover pork, chicken, or beef. I like to use green enchilada sauce for pork and chicken, and red for beef.

  NOHO PORK ENCHILADAS

  INGREDIENTS

  Leftover pork, at least 3 or 4 thick slices

  Corn tortillas

  1 tablespoon canola oil

  1 tablespoon flour

  Green enchilada sauce, preferably Hatch

  1 cup of chicken broth

  2 cups shredded cheese: cheddar, Monterey jack, or a combination; but please don’t use cheese with spices mixed into it

  Diced white onion

  Sour cream

  Chopped cilantro (optional)

  Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.

  Dice the leftover pork into bite-sized pieces.

  Wrap 3 or 4 tortillas at a time in a dampened paper towel and warm for 30 seconds in the microwave to make them soft and pliable. Keep them covered.

  Heat the canola oil and add the flour, stirring to make a roux.

  Add the green enchilada sauce and the chicken broth, stir, and let simmer for one minute. Turn off the heat.

  In the bottom of a roasting dish, spread a thin layer of the sauce.

  Fill the tortillas, one at a time, with about ¼ cup of pork and a big pinch of shredded cheese.

  Roll the tortillas up tight and place them in the pan seam side down.

  When the pan is full, with the enchiladas nestled close together, pour the remaining sauce over the to
p and then sprinkle with about 1 cup of cheese.

  Bake until bubbling, about twenty minutes.

  Add the diced onion and cilantro, if desired.

  Serve with dollops of sour cream.

  NOHO CHICKEN ENCHILADAS

  I used to make chicken enchiladas from a recipe I saw in Glamour magazine. I’ve lost the recipe, but I still remember the secret ingredient—cream cheese!—that made them so good. Here’s my version of that recipe.

  INGREDIENTS

  4 to 5 chopped scallions, with some reserved for serving

  1 small can chopped, roasted chiles

  16 ounces cream cheese, softened

  Corn tortillas

  1 tablespoon canola oil

  1 tablespoon flour

  Green enchilada sauce, preferably Hatch

  1 cup of chicken broth

  Leftover chicken (at least 2 breasts), diced into bite-sized pieces

  2 cups shredded cheese: cheddar, Monterey jack, or a combination; but please don’t use cheese with spices mixed into it

  Sour cream

  Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.

  In a bowl, mix most of the scallions (remembering to save some for serving) and the chiles into the softened cream cheese.