Poor Man's Feast —

It’s been raining nonstop now for the last week, we’re expecting even more rain next week, today is Judgement Day, and I’m alone in the kitchen. While this feels ominous, it also feels sort of right, since everything begins and ends for me in front of my stove; it’s where my life as a writer started, where my life with Susan started, and if D-day were to strike me down where I stood, where I stood would likely be right there, in front of my oven.

I’m supposed to be in Italy right now, but a bunch of physical things conspired to keep me here, including my body’s peculiar response to flying to the other side of the country and back again last week. So, I’m here at home, and that’s fine. But Susan expected me to not be home this weekend, and she promised her 93 year old mother to come for a visit (“and bring the dogs-“), so off she went this morning with Addie and Petey in the backseat of the old Subaru, leaving me alone in the house with the cats. (Subaru, cats, two women. Don’t even say it.)

This isn’t a big deal: I work from home, and so I’m alone here every single day. Every single goddamned day, to be precise. And every single goddamned day, being alone in the house allows me to not stand on culinary ceremony: yesterday, for lunch, I reheated leftover Cacio e Pepe, got it crispy and pancake-like, and topped it with an egg and more black pepper and a few dashes of Sriracha. Not bad. I’d make it again in a second.

But weekend days are very different, somehow, and the possibilities seem more interesting, and, for me, even bizarre, when I’m alone. Like I would never bake a cake by or for myself. I just wouldn’t. I don’t have a sweet tooth, and so the idea of it is just completely lost on me. It feels sort of brazen, and mildly dangerous. But tonight, I’m going to bake Molly Wizenberg’s Winning Hearts & Minds chocolate cake, just because Susan seriously loves her some chocolate cake, and baking one without her in the house on Judgement Day will make me feel like she’s right here, even though she’s an hour away, napping in her teeny childhood bed under that gigantic crucifix, the dogs snoring on the floor next to her. Baking a chocolate cake for someone else seems to me to be an act of hope that tomorrow will be another day (no matter what the wingnuts think).

I have no idea what I will be making for dinner tonight, though; it might be a couple of soft-shell crabs (because Susan can’t stand having them in the house; they remind her of the bugs they actually are). It might be Rebecca Charles’s salt and pepper shrimp — the ones that Amanda Hesser wrote about in Cooking for Mr. Latte, and that Susan also won’t eat because she has major shell/texture issues (see soft shell crabs, above). It might just be a baked potato. I’m not there yet.

But tomorrow, I’ll be driving up to Susan’s mom’s house early in the day so that we can go to Camp’s, a local plant nursery, and also so we can bring home the 1940s television that Susan inherited from her Aunt Millie. We’re planning on putting it in the bedroom, and placing our small flatscreen tv on top of it: a television on a television. I’ve already been thinking about what to make for an early dinner up there with Susan and her mom: fried chicken. It’s something we absolutely never eat but once a year (maybe). It might be Edna Lewis’s recipe, or Nathalie Dupree’s, or Virginia Willis’s, or Scott Peacock’s. We might eat it with smoky collards, or we might not. It might be cooked in shortening, or in the lard that our butcher, Steve, sells. Because if we manage to survive The End of Days, we might as well go whole hog and do the damned thing right.

But tonight, I’ll be here alone in the kitchen, baking a chocolate cake that I might have only the smallest sliver of. And I’ll go to sleep after a weirdly discomfiting meal — whatever it is I decide to make — and plan to get on the road early, with the chicken packed in a glass container, doing the backstroke in its buttermilk brine, ever hopeful.

The last slice at Delancey.

I’m a born Cancerian — a homebody, a softy, a three-hanky crier at the movies who takes the nastiness of the clerks at the DMV personally, and finds the frosting I get at the hands of certain people in my business remarkably moronic yet somehow my fault; I’m a fan of babies and animals and I’ll cling to favorite books, like Stegner’s Crossing to Safety, as though they were security blankets. I get a little shaky every time I read something about Dillwyn Parrish going out to the hills around the house he shared with Mary Frances, because the pain was too much to bear. (What could she have thought?) I adore traveling but I love to come home; I like to dine out, but would rather be standing at my stove. So when I’m faced with the prospect of busy — really busy — weeks, I want to pull the covers over my head. When I’m faced with months where every weekend is accounted for, where my deadlines have deadlines, and I’m expected at launch/publishing/press parties, I want to weep like an overtired infant. If there’s flying involved, then all bets are off.

Usually.

Last week, I flew out to Seattle to spend a few days with my colleague and pal Molly Wizenberg, to talk about the books we’re both working on. What should have been an easy trip turned into something out of the Donner Party: my plane landed in Chicago over an hour late, my connecting flight to Seattle was gone, there was a severe thunderstorm warning, and there were no more flights to Washington that night. So, I stayed at an airport Comfort Inn, next door to two people who were having a lot more fun then I was. I woke up every hour on the hour, and when the loud banging noises shook me out of bed at two in the morning, I tried to move the dresser in front of the adjoining room door the way they do in the movies, but it was bolted to the trash can, which was nailed to the carpet, which was fraying.

The next morning, I continued on to Seattle and landed feeling disgusting, scruffy, and like I had just been on the Bataan Death March. I wanted to look like those ladies in the back pages of Vogue, caught strolling down the jetway after a long transatlantic flight: Look! There’s Gwyneth in her painted-on jeans and Manolos, carrying her caramel-colored Kelly bag, all wrapped up in a powder blue cashmere shawl, looking fresh as an organic daisy! Look! There’s Elissa, her eyes, wrists, fingers, and ankles swollen to the size of small dirigibles, dressed in her black leggings coated with so much white cat fur she looks like she rolled around on the floor of a hair salon at an assisted living facility!

But Molly, blessed Molly, didn’t flinch when she picked me up; instead, she transported me to the well-known Sitka & Spruce where we sat at the counter and ate very good, very simple food — excellent bread and butter, sheep’s milk feta drizzled with olive oil and dukkah — and I did everything I could to not whimper with exhaustion. By the time we finished, I was tired — so tired, in that hand-shaking, can’t-form-words kind of way that can easily be confused with inebriation. Over the next 48 hours, I never quite recovered from the trip; the conversation was energizing and stimulating and totally remarkable, and the food, uncomplicated, comforting, and stellar: Nettletown’s pan-fried knoepfli with red cabbage? Really? Who even thinks about serving knoepfli as a base for tofu, or a local brat? Effingham Inlet and Blue Pool oysters reeking of the sweet sea, and spot prawns in harissa and oil at The Walrus & the Carpenter? And Brandon Pettit, my young friend, where exactly do you get off putting just the most perfect amount of preserved Meyer Lemon on your wood-fired, perfectly-blistered white pizza at Delancey? Where do you get off torturing me at three a.m., when I wake up hungry on my right coast and your simple Brooklyn pie — grana, mozzarella, and tomato sauce — is now 3,000 miles away? What, exactly, am I supposed to do with that? Nothing. Just close my eyes, and sleep.

So a taxi picked me up at Molly and Brandon’s house at 4:30 on Saturday morning and by six, I was heading back east, dreaming the strange, parch-mouthed dreams that come when you’re propped up, seat-belted, and flying through the air in a metal tube, 40,000 feet above the ground. When I got to my car, hours and hours later, it was dead.

If I didn’t laugh, I would have cried.

When I walked in to my house, Susan was in the kitchen, her back to me, Yotam Ottolenghi’s book sitting on the counter; she had spent the entire day making food that was tender and kind and not too strenuous on the mind or palate — grape leaf, herb, and yogurt pie, burnt eggplant with tahini, and chickpea saute with Greek yogurt. And really, that’s what you want when you’re so weary, so bone-tired, but also so energized that you want to get back to work at your desk immediately but you’re just too catatonic.