I love to cook for just myself. That’s when I get the real entertainment value out of thinking: what exactly do I have in the house and what exactly out of that do I feel like eating? I have a huge oval platter that I have these solitary meals upon—and the dog always likes them because, with my Vegetarian Husband gone, it’s likely he’s going to end up with a bit of meat at the end of them.
While, as MFK Fisher observes, there are few greater pleasures than dining with One, dining alone has its own satisfactions, its own silences and triumphs and downright wallowings in the first person.
Some things I’ve discovered on these solitary wallowings: I’ll want different things at different times. Some nights I’ll want a lot of carbos—fettuccine alfredo with lots of parsley. Some nights I’ll want lots of vegetables—chard and tomato hash. Some nights I’ll want protein—pan-fried skirt steak with garlic salt, on a piece of pan-fried bread. But it’s never the same two nights running. It’s as if my body’s always calibrating itself, adding something missing here, holding back on something too present there.
I have a blast engaging in this dialogue with my body. I like my body telling me its likes and dislikes. Why should I ignore it when I listen with great interest to the similar words of my friends? In the end, my body is the friend I’m going to depend on the most.
The other night, I had a couple of egg whites left over from dinner the night before. (I’d made a roast chicken/ bacon/tomato club sandwich, and some homemade mayonnaise to go on the bread. The first mayonnaise broke down into an oily mess—it happens sometimes—so I poured it into a measuring cup, cleaned out the mortar, broke another egg yolk in, and added the broken mayonnaise drop by drop, beating all the while. It came out perfectly the second time.) I also had some raw Swiss cheese.
1. I turned the oven on to 400°.
2. Smeared a small skillet with butter.
3. Beat three egg whites until “stiff but not dry” (this means they stand up in peaks, all shiny, in the bowl).
4. Beat the egg yolk till it was thick and lemony colored.
5. Added salt and pepper to the egg yolk.
6. (Meanwhile, I’m heating the pan over low heat.)
7. Chopped a scallion.
8. Grated the cheese.
9. I stirred a spoonful of the whites into the yolk . . . very gently.
10. Then I folded the yolk mixture into the remaining whites . . . also very gently.
When the pan was hot, I poured the egg mixture in, smoothed the top with a spatula, and cooked it over low heat until it was puffy looking and started to smell eggy. Then I sprinkled the cheese and scallion on top and put it in the 400° oven for 4 minutes. Waited for the cheese to melt and the top to look done.
(While this was going on, I boiled a piece of corn.)
When the omelet was done, I put it on top of some chopped greens from the garden, and had the corn on the side. Glass of red wine. Read Diana Kennedy’s My Mexico during.
A very nice evening.
The night after that, as I recall, I dined on popcorn with grated Parmesan and garlic salt. I ate it from a cobalt blue glazed bowl, sitting on the deck with my feet up on the rails, watching the bats in the hot evening air. For a vegetable—I felt I needed one—I drank a glass of spicy tomato juice . . . and then some chocolate and dried apricots after . . . that’s what I felt like . . .
Then there are the nights when I’ve spent the day wrestling with an alienating technology.
There’s nothing like technological alienation to put me off my food. Wrestling with computers, or automobiles, or even just trying to figure out the intricacies of my cell phone. Whenever I have to deal with any of these distasteful tasks . . . and me, I’d rather learn how to churn butter than how to simplify my virtual address book . . . I find I can hardly think about food at all—which means I am as near psychosis as I ever get.
But still, you know, even then, food is my great solace. Not eating it. (Everything tastes like balsa wood when some nice man—no matter how patient—is trying to get you to understand computer code FOR THE FIRST TIME.) I mean thinking about food. Planning it.
Which leads me to another point. Sometimes, in groups of my more rigorously activist friends, when I dreamily bring up the subject of where we’re to get our next meal, there spring up some . . . er . . . mutterings, is the best way I can describe it . . . that food and recipes are hardly important, are they? I mean when the world is in such bad shape, don’t I think it’s kind of messed up of me to think so much about food?
No. I don’t.
That kind of thinking—everyday life is unimportant because I AM GOING TO SAVE THE WORLD—is, while not entirely alien to my thinking, at least something I feel strongly we should fight against. Not fight with it . . . maybe gently give it a fall or two, the same way a cat knocks its kittens around . . . but suggest something to take its place.
That something is that every moment of everyday life is what our world is made of. And if those moments are not good, are not happy, are not kind, are not intrinsically satisfying, nothing in our world is going to be either. [I think this even more now, today.]
There can be no equivocation here. No saying, oh, I see your point about it being more important to (your activity here—make a living, make a film, build a bomb, invade a country, pursue a lawsuit, whatever) than to pay attention to what’s right in front of you. No. Paying attention to what’s right in front of you is what life is about. No other way.
Three times a day you have an opportunity to meditate on what your body needs and wants, and—if you’re lucky—on what the bodies of your loved ones need and want. It’s a constant pleasure to contemplate this and then to act on it, and then to see the inevitable happiness that descends on the household. Meal preparation is not just a domestic act, but a political act as well. It’s a declaration of the importance of social happiness to the general well being. [Yes!]
Even when you’re by yourself. Maybe even especially then.
So when I was just about run over by a tsunami of technological alienation recently, and just about to give up and go back to my earlier career choice of buggy whip manufacturer, you know what stopped the wave and made me stand right up and stare it in the eye?
That’s right. A chicken liver omelet. With, I must add, a pecan and blue cheese mesclun salad and one really good glass of red wine.
I had a lone chicken liver hiding in the fridge, left over from the chicken I’d roasted to see me through a couple of days of wrestling with the computer. And when I came to the kitchen that night, bleary-eyed, depressed, and strongly considering beginning a Mennonite community of one in my little alpine valley, that chicken liver was the beginnings of a stirring back to life for me. I immediately could smell it cooked with garlic and butter, cream and parsley. So I immediately cooked it with garlic and butter and cream and parsley. Then I made my salad, poured my wine and set the table. And then, setting the chicken liver aside in a bowl, I cleaned out the pan and poured in the beaten eggs for a two-egg omelet. At the right moment I added the liver, sprinkled it with a little more cream, folded the omelet, and rubbed it with a little butter.
Eating that dinner restored me to myself, and told that technological alienation to get lost. For the time being, anyway.
When Alex, also known as the Beloved Vegetarian Husband, is not at home for dinner, I usually sneak in some meat. It’s a deliciously guilty pleasure, my meat eating, and I take my time about it.
The first thing I do is choose the meat. This is always the best and most organic stuff I can find and . . . this is important . . . it’s always the stuff that the market is selling on special because it’s near the due date. I like meat near the due date. I like it a little strong. I like it when it’s more a mysterious brick brown, and not that bright red color. Meaty. And of course I like that it’s a bargain. That always adds a little extra savor.
So last week, there was a lamb chop that perfectly fit that description, a sirloin chop, beautiful, well marbled, thick—marked down to about two dollars. Amazing. I tossed it in my basket, gloating. All the way home I thought about how to cook it. I always like the easiest way, so I knew I’d do something simple. Herbs? I wondered to myself. Thyme? I always have thyme. Rosemary? Well, you really have to feel like having rosemary to appreciate it, so not tonight. Marjoram? I had some in a tomato salad. Oregano?
I stopped there, tasting with my mind’s palate. Fresh oregano. Very nice.
That week, by coincidence, in my quest to get rid of my Teflon pans (I don’t know about you, but when they tell me that Teflon fumes kill parrots, and then say but don’t worry, it won’t hurt humans, all I can think is: exactly how different am I from a parrot, anyway?), I had bought a cast iron griddle pan, the kind with the black iron ridges that leave those yummy looking marks on a piece of fast grilled meat. My father always swears by cast iron pans, and he’s quite right. So when I got home right around dinnertime, there was the pan where I’d left it, seasoning itself serenely on top of the stove.
I looked at it. I looked at my beautiful little chop. I looked at the handful of oregano I’d just plucked from the garden, and at the garlic cloves and olive oil on the counter. I thought: “Aha! Nigel Slater! Aha!”
Meaning all of this looked just like a picture in his cookbook Appetite. So I took the book down and opened it up, and there was the perfect lamb chop sitting there on the page. As I had all the ingredients, I set to.
You know what? Nigel Slater really does tell you how to cook the perfect lamb chop. It was by far the best one I’ve ever eaten (and that includes the terrific chuletas de cordero at Las Eras Restaurant in the south of Spain, too).
This is how:
For each chop (about one inch thick), mash a small garlic clove with salt and pepper and some fresh herbs—thyme or oregano or rosemary or marjoram or even parsley, but FRESH—in a mortar and pestle, or just mince it all up with a knife. Add a glug or two of olive oil to make a paste. Massage this into the chop and let it sit as long or as short as you like.
Heat the ridged griddle pan over moderate heat. It’s hot enough when you can put your hand over it by a couple of inches and feel the heat.
Put the chops on the grill pan. Press down on them with a spatula or tongs. Grill for about three minutes. Turn over. Grill till done the way you like it—I like rosy on the inside and grilled brown on the outside, so I grilled my chop four more minutes.
I had already steamed some shredded kale from the garden, so when I took the chop off the griddle, I just added the kale to the pan and sautéed it in the leftover lamb juices. On the plate went the lamb, a line of the kale, and a line of diced tomatoes marinated in balsamic vinegar, chopped marjoram, and a little salt. The tomato juice sloshed deliciously into the kale, but not quite into the lamb that way. Quarter of lemon on the side to squeeze over the whole at will.
Glass of Spanish Tempranillo. Ripe figs for dessert.
One of the most utterly delicious solitary dinners I’ve ever had.
Thank you, Nigel Slater.
This is what I call Gilding the Lily: fettuccine with cream and garlic and butter and Gorgonzola and Parmesan and Romano and parsley and toasted walnuts and . . .
It started out the way it usually does: I was cooking for myself alone, and part of the fun of that is thinking, at the end of the workday, about what I really want to eat. On the evening walk, I thought, well, fettuccine alfredo. I had a quarter pound of pasta, just enough for one, and I had a little cream, and I had some good Parmesan. Also there was a whole lot of parsley about to wilt into insignificance in the vegetable drawer; it would be good to use that up.
But when I got to the stove awhile later, a gust of deep yearning for garlic blew over me. (This happens to me a lot, actually. It’s an ill wind that doesn’t make me think I need more garlic.) And I had some of that pink spring garlic that’s so mild and sweet.
Then when I went to get the Parmesan out, there was some Romano, and a little end of Gorgonzola that was in danger of drying out if it didn’t get used soon.
I took those out. Naturally, the Gorgonzola started me thinking about my favorite salad, which involves it and toasted walnuts. I happened to have some walnut halves around. So I took them out too.
Then this is what I did:
Put the water on to boil.
Mashed five garlic cloves (just use one if you’re not a garlic fanatic, or if the garlic’s winter garlic) in a mortar with some pepper and a tiny bit of salt. (You could just crush the garlic if you don’t have a mortar, and put it in a bowl, by the way.)
Added about ¼ cup cream to the mortar and let it sit.
Toasted the walnuts in a 300° toaster oven for five minutes (these suckers nearly always burn if you’re not careful—watch them the first time, then set a timer ever after).
Chopped the walnuts on the cutting board.
Grated about an ounce each Parmesan and Romano into a bowl.
Crumbled the Gorgonzola end on the cutting board (I had about an ounce).
Chopped the parsley on the cutting board.
By this time, the water was boiling. I put the pasta on to cook—salted the water, then, when it came back to a boil, put a little oil in.
While it was cooking, put the cream/garlic/salt/pepper mixture into a small saucepan. Heated it until the cream thickened. Added a tablespoon of butter. Took it off the heat, added half the Parmesan/Romano and the crumbled Gorgonzola.
When the pasta was done, drained it, put it back in the pan, tossed it with the cream mixture, the parsley, and the toasted walnuts.
Served it with the rest of the grated cheese to sprinkle dreamily on top as I ate.
Read John Thorne while eating and was about as happy as it’s possible to be.
So there I was alone with rain and snow, and slush and more snow. The fire was going, and, I couldn’t help it, gentle readers (my vegan and vegetarian friends please turn discreetly away until after the main course is served), I had to have the world’s best solitary steak dinner.
This was how it went.
Before dinner, by the fire:
One glass of red wine.
One plate of celery sticks with Gorgonzola cheese.
One Lewis Mumford book.
Then, dinner alone at the table:
One rib eye steak cooked so rare it was brown on the outside and just cooked rose red through . . . topped with garlic/pepper/butter and a sprinkle of Maldon salt when it came off the pan . . . all sitting on a big piece of toasted sourdough rubbed with garlic and spread with half an avocado.
One more glass of red wine.
One Julia Child book, especially the section on Tripe (I told you vegetarians to look away, didn’t I?).
Here is how to get the perfect rib eye steak for one:
First, buy a really good rib eye steak. The best are the expensive free range ones, well marbled with fat, particularly the ones that get marked down at the supermarket because they’ve turned a little brown.
After that, for the cooking: mash a clove of garlic in the mortar with some whole pepper, and smoosh some butter in. Refrigerate.
Heat up a cast iron pan to hot. Rub with some beef fat. Turn on the overhead fan. Throw the steak on and sear it on one side. Turn over and salt, then cook till done to your liking. (My particular liking is REALLY REALLY RARE. This is why I just sear one side and cook longer on the other. The side that cooks the longest is the one I turn right side up. This way I don’t overcook the meat, and it still looks all nice and brown. I use this trick with broiled fish, too.)
Take the steak out of the pan, put onto the waiting toast spread with avocado, and scrape the garlic butter on top.
Sprinkle with salt.
Sit at the table, listen to the fire crackle, eat slowly.
Intersperse with sips of red wine.
And then sleep well.
(For my vegan friends, who I know are looking at the above with horror and a sense of betrayal: go shred a Chinese cabbage, mix it with two grated carrots and some shredded red cabbage, if you have it. Toss it all with a dressing that’s one garlic clove mashed with some pepper mixed with soy sauce, red wine vinegar, and sesame oil, in a 1 to 1 to 1 proportion (I use 2 tablespoons of each for this much salad, which will serve 4, or two with leftovers). Add a slug of chile oil. Toss again. If you have any left over, serve for lunch the next day with warm whole wheat tortillas spread with a little hoisin sauce and slivered green onions. Wrap around the salad. Eat. Be happy. The happier and better fed we are, the happier and better fed we’re going to want everybody else to be, too. Or at least, that’s how it should work . . .)
I had the stomach flu for a couple of days, and I practically didn’t feel like myself. Not because I couldn’t eat—though in 48 hours, I only ventured one banana, and even that was a mistake—but because I couldn’t think about eating. Well, I could, but the results were unfortunate and not what I would have hoped. But I did learn something interesting, which is that what’s important to me is not necessarily the eating of the food, the consumption of the STUFF, but, even more, the thinking about it. Not that eating food, God knows, isn’t important enough. But I discovered that turning it over in my mind, enjoying calories I’ll never have to burn, composing meals that aren’t quite right, or are completely right but outside of my power—thinking about it—it turns out that’s really important, too.
In fact, it turns out I spend a lot of time thinking about food.
This has various reasons. It’s not greediness. Not only am I a relatively moderate consumer, even abstemious at times (although I can go to town at a dim sum parlor, and once caused a Chinese waitperson to remark admiringly that I was “a really good eater”), but I just about never snack, and pretty much confine my real eating to two meals a day. It’s not that I’m particularly hungry, though I am, I hope, at the proper times. It’s more that food has a lot of meaning for me and stands in for a lot of other things than just its physical self. It means nourishment, sure. But it also means proper desire. It means communion with loved ones. It means my place in the scheme of things, in the food chain. It means my connection with every other human being who has the same needs and desires as I do. It means an ever-changing evolution in my concept of, literally, taste—of what’s most elegant, what’s most beautiful, what’s best. Food for me is a real life manifestation of the abstract Good.
So when I tinker with my meals, in thought and word and deed, I’m really trying my best to understand the Good. So now I have to think of what I mean by the Good. And I think I mean: the Good is the best way for a human being to live. And I think that there is a best way. I don’t mean that regional and personal rules for how to live might not differ, but underlying all of that is a basic set of principles that all human beings can discover . . . indeed, that I think all human beings are trying to discover. A basic set of values. And these values, I do believe, come from our physical selves. As far as we share physical characteristics, we share those values.
Now this does not mean that human beings do not have a spiritual life. In fact, I think my physical and my spiritual life are twined up together—that they’re dinner companions. I have always had a hard time understanding why they got separated somewhere back in our history. I suppose it was inevitable. But when I read someone who gets hysterical at the thought that we, as humans, might be Body or when I read someone who gets dogmatically censorious about the idea that we might be Spirit (read religious fundamentalist for the first, and secular fundamentalists for the second), I just get puzzled. Surely it’s obvious from personal experience that we are both?
It is, anyway, in my own experience. And food feeds both my physical and my spiritual selves—both those selves enjoy meeting together over a good meal, one that satisfies my inner and outer beings.
Although, when I have the stomach flu, they have to wait a day or two to sit down together. Then the most I can manage is a mug of hot apple juice mixed with water (⅓ water to ⅔ apple juice, heat gently, and sip carefully until your physical nature returns to its regular less fragile state) . . . which is not a bad recipe right there . . .
When My Vegetarian Husband goes away, I really get into the Eccentric Dinners for One. I tend to experiment with bits and pieces of the cheaper kinds of meat. Mind, by cheaper I don’t mean the meat from torture animals, at 39 cents a pound, but the kinder cuts that, for whatever reason, nobody else seems to want that day. Those are the ones that get my imagination going. The bargain and the challenge—and also those cuts tend to be the most flavorful. Center cut beef shank for a one-person pot au feu. Duck gizzards and livers for a warm salad. Marrow for spreading on garlic rubbed toast, and layered with cornichons and flaked Maldon salt. Rabbit saddle roasted with a little thyme and olive oil. That kind of thing.
So when I saw a package of “pork riblets” at the Co-op marked “special today” —75 cents for about a third of a pound—I grabbed them and tossed them into the freezer against the next time I’d have a solitary dinner and some time to think about what to do with them.
This is what I did: I chunked some shallots (this could have been onions, but I’d found cheap shallots at one market and loaded up), peeled some whole garlic cloves, chunked a couple of carrots and a stalk of celery or two. Preheated my little toaster oven to 350°. (I don’t like to get the big oven going for such a little pan . . . waste of energy, irritating, that . . .) Tossed the vegetables in a big bowl with the riblets cut up into smaller pieces, along with a very little bit of olive oil (the fat from the ribs was going to be enough lubrication, I reckoned, this was just to get things started), salt, ground pepper, a teaspoon of sweet smoked Spanish paprika, and a little of the Aleppo red pepper a friend had excitingly given me as a New Year’s gift. When everything was nice and coated, I poured it into an earthenware dish and shoved it in the oven. I didn’t need to defrost the riblets. I just cooked them a little extra time to allow for their frozen state.
About forty-five minutes later, the house smelled heavenly. (Of course, you have to really like pork products to be into this version of heaven.) I went and peered at the dish, tossed everything around to coat it all with the rendered juices from the riblets, and turned up the temperature to 400° to brown everything nicely.
Then I poured myself a glass of white wine and spread some mesclun leaves on a plate. (I’ve recently noticed my market calls these leaves “spring mix.” Whatever the name, they’re very handy to have around.) I quartered a lemon and put a wedge next to the leaves. When the ribs and vegetables were nice and browned, I piled them on the lettuce, sat down and had at it.
Gnawing on the bones was the best part, but the rest of it was satisfying, too. Light. I could have chunked potatoes in it as well, and would have if I’d had company. Then I would have used a bigger pan, obviously, and the big oven, and more vegetables, and more ribs—even the thick country style ones would have worked with this. Any variation, as long as it included pork ribs and vegetables, Spanish paprika, and a nice long bake in the oven that gave me time to sit, put up my feet, and think about my day . . .
When you’re by yourself and feeling blue, it always helps to think about, prepare, and eat just exactly what you feel like eating.
In my case the solution is, more often than not, bacon and mushrooms and eggs on avocado, and a whole wheat tortilla.[Still!]
Here’s how:
In a medium sized skillet, I softly fry three strips of bacon (when I’m sad, I want more bacon than usual).
I pour myself a glass of wine and take a sip.
When the bacon’s halfway done, I add to the skillet about seven to ten mushrooms thickly sliced. I turn up the heat and sauté with the bacon till browned and smelling great, and the bacon crisped to my specifications (I like it half floppy and half crisp, but you’ll have your own ideas, of course).
Salt and pepper.
Meanwhile, I wrap a whole wheat tortilla in foil and preheat oven or toaster oven (better) to 350°.
I have another sip of wine.
I give the mushrooms and bacon one last stir, push to one side, carefully slide two eggs onto pan next to them (I hate it when they break) and salt these.
Then I clamp lid down, push to the back of stove off the heat, pop the wrapped tortilla into the oven, and set timer for five minutes.
A little more wine.
I slice an avocado. When the timer goes off, I pull out the tortilla, spread avocado over it. Check eggs to make sure the whites are done and the yolks still liquid. I spread the bacon and mushrooms over the avocado, top with the eggs, pour a top up into my wine glass, carry the whole thing to the table, and eat slowly, while reading a comforting book.
Suddenly, I’m feeling a whole lot better. And I hope, after you cook yourself something you want to eat and sit down and have at it, that you’re feeling good, too.
