"Two-Prong Wooden Fork" : just for fries and maybe poking your eye out

A walk down Forbidden Drive (origin of its name: you were forbidden to drive there. isn’t that the most prosaic explanation of an exciting name that you’ve ever heard?) led us to two fantastic new places:

Bruno’s Diner.  When the girls at the stables at Fairmount Park’s north end told us we couldn’t use the equestrienne bathrooms but “There’s a diner at the end of the road,” the inconvenience of me having to pee every 10 minutes became a blessing.  Bruno’s is awesome. The big outside front porch must be heavenly in summer, to watch fireflies and swat mosquitoes and wait for the bats to come out in the evening. Still winter, though, on this peaceful sunlit  day, chilly even with surprising warm gusts of snow-and root-scented air coming up from the ground. We found the second, glassed-in front porch perfect for our purposes. The gray wood and jukebox and no-frills rickety chairs made it feel like a been-around-forever shabby beach-side diner.

The waitress seemed like a busy older sister and urged cokes upon us and took good care of the large older  man in a stained sweater and black sneakers who looked like he had seen better days and may have come to Bruno’s on many of them.

The banana split served to the young family nearby stretched absolutely colossal in its glass dish. Matt’s burger was big, my diet coke came in a satisfyingly wide glass with lemon.

And the fries, cut round, were served with special two-prong wooden forks that you used to spear them and pop them in your mouth (the most uni-purpose utensil I have ever seen.) I asked the mustached manager what they were called. He brought us a box of them – “two-prong wooden forks,” the label said. The picture was of the forks spearing a fry. He told us that the factory had actually discontinued them, because Bruno’s was literally the only person buying them, but that he had found another supplier.

When I left, I went to buy a gumball from the penny-a-gumball machine – and when I didn’t have a penny, a gentleman sitting at the counter gave me one. I got pink!

Bruno’s is a must-return. Who will join us for a day-long hike up and down the Wissahickon Gorge – with lunch at Bruno’s? The banana split is on me.

The Great Beech.

The lady stands her ground

The Great Beech is a grand old lady tree, grand enough that people decided they would make a sign with her “name” on it. She does not really give a leaf about signs. She has a silvery smooth bark and many branches the size of tree trunks themselves, so wide that her root system creates a sort of sofa at the base of the trunk. She is a very calm and strong tree, and she welcomes visitors in her branches with lots of nobbly bits to brace feet on and wrap hands around. Many of her nobbles look like breasts and nipples, some look like elbows. In some places, her branches have met and grown together in arcs. She is an arbol to come visit when you feel sad or afraid. I have a feeling that an hour curled up in one of her big branches could heal a lot of ills.

And both of these places are in Philly! Hooray for this crazy mixedup city.

After a day of homebody nibbling, the elegant Msr Nick and I made a date for a poetry reading at L’Etage. When I climbed on my bike, the rain – steady, noisy drops all day – had lightened to a mist. The bike tires barely hissed on the street. Under the streetlights, my body felt light in the bicycle’s motion, sheer and bright, another electric reflection skimming the asphalt. I rode past the vibrating neon cheesesteaks of Pat and Geno’s, the darkened library, empty streets.  Nick was waiting upstairs, whiskey in hand. After an hour and a half of music and intricate words, we skipped out early to get a dessert crepe in Beau Monde’s last 10 minutes of Sunday night.

With little hesitation, we chose chocolate with crispy coconut, to be served with coffee ice cream. The crepe came already divided in two and sprinkled with powdered sugar. The ice cream melted where it hit the hot crepe. Oh, it was cold and bitter and sweet, and the crepe hot and crunchy and milksweet, that back-of-the-tongue cling of good chocolate. The textures and flavors wrapped around my tongue and tingled my teeth. Nick’s conversation about poetry and plans, and the sweetness, richness and perfection of the crepe, carried me home happy tonight.

at the plaza hotel

Cheap pink champagne has never tasted better.

I like eating fried fish on Christmas, a tradition my mom still observes. It’s tasty and doesn’t make you want to fall asleep right away, like turkey. (I just capitalized that by accident…those boring Turks!) It’s a meal I look forward to a lot. But this Christmas, Wooten and I were headed for his parents’ house, and the year before, I spent Christmas eating ice cream sandwiches on a lawn chair with my friend Oso, in order to avoid making smalltalk his large, jovial, and very conservative Argentine family.

This year I’d toyed with the thought of making fried fish, but it didn’t seem like there would be time before we left for GA.  When Joe decided to have dinner with us on the 22nd of December, though, and I discovered some  catfish in the back of the freezer, I found myself making Christmas dinner for the very first time. One might even say we whipped it up. Matt got some Canola oil to improve the frying, and I set out the three bowls  – one with egg, one with flour, and one with breadcrumbs – next to one another, just like I’d seen my mom do for 22 years. Coat the fish in egg, lightly in flour, and then breadcrumbs sticking to the yellow, floury layer of the first two.  And then a quick fry of the fish, which started to smell heavenly – salty and greasy and light.

Joe appeared with jug wine and the comforting clomp of boots up the stairs, gifts exchanged, radio shows made fun of, stories swapped, and then fish was on plates, mashed potatoes scooped out, and all devoured in the light of candles on our table and the Philly skyline outside.

Realizing I’d known how to make Christmas fish all along was great. The fact that it was ACTUALLY delicious, and that happy boys were eating seconds, was even better.

ms. kelly, wondrous whipperupper

Several discombobulating experiences had already occurred at the Wootens’. His parents greeted me with giant hugs, as if I had known them a very long time, and a beribboned journal and small welcome note on the guest bed. Then, candy dishes. It was noon, and three fistfuls of Hershey’s Dark Chocolate Nuggets and Dove Premonitions or Sentiments or whatever had already made their way into my tummy because candy dishes winked at me behind lamps and on bureaus. My parents don’t do candy dishes or welcome notes, and my urge to say  “thank you” every three minutes was beginning to embarrass everyone.

And now, this snack cake. How do you just “whip up” a cake? A cake, by my reckoning, is a complex, messy and mysterious object that

gets made over hours and days of saying “maybe we should make a cake…” and then procuring the ingredients and still missing a few of them and then substituting with Chai powder and milk and creating something so inedible that not even your humungous calorie-sucking younger brother will eat it.

Then I thought, Waverly would love this woman. “Whip up” is a phrase one may use to describe their cooking. When Wave writes about her childhood meals with such detailed sensory memory – and sense of recipe  – it’s obvious her mom introduced her into the life of the kitchen early. I imagine Wave chopping celery the way she does now (scary restaurant prep-style), a giant knife in her stubby five-year-old hands. Wave does not hold any misplaced wonder or fear about how food gets made.

My mother might have already pegged her daughter as too spacey to wield a rolling pin; also, she liked her dominion in the kitchen, and I was perfectly happy to be reading instead. So I mostly stayed away from the kitchen, except for omelettes with lots of chopped onions (the eggs had to be beaten in a copper bowl, according to my mom, for better aeration) and sometimes brownies from a box.

Until fifth grade or so, the kitchen was a warm, pleasant cave of bowls, NPR and the smell of melting butter (we must have cooked with a lot of butter, because I remember thinking it was essential to melt a big pat of it in every pan, including the first few times I made bacon). Things clanked, Terry Gross interviewed, butter sizzled, my mom frazzled, and food appeared.

In fourth grade, I learned how to boil water. It was a process that seemed dangerous to the point of foolhardiness, mostly because of the old gas-burning stove and its ticktickticktickticktickFWOOM! If the spark didn’t catch right away, the FWOOM would flash out blue for inches sideways from the bottom of the kettle (and maybe catch a nearby paper towel on fire and then maybe you would have to wave a flaming banner through the air and maybe drop it and stomp on it until crispy black shards littered the floor).

The first recipe to suffer at my hands was chocolate chip cookies, that self-fulfilling prophecy of a recipe on the Tollhouse chocolate chip bag. Unsure about fractions, I misread the cup measures (I thought that 1  3/4 cups meant one unit, being “3/4″ of a cup, of flour). When we held the baking sheet vertically over the trash to scrape off the deflated mess, it dripped off the tin in goopy strings.

My senior year of college was the first year I closely watched someone cook.  Far from a conjuring trick, cooking turned out to be a practical process involving love, fear, experience, epicurious.com and presence of mind.Waverly’s hands worked systematically, with no wasted movement, and little external narration of her experimentations, so if you looked away for more than a minute, her dishes seemed to magically appear. Our roommate Michelle was a whirl of clanking bracelets, big sleeves, cigarette in the air, and at the center of it all, two small nail-polished hands chopping Japanese mushrooms and sprouts and whipping up bowls of noodles that she sucked down with total pleasure. Emily was a meticulous baker and chopper, her movements more languid, taking time to look at the incredibly symmetrical pieces of carrot she produced before they went in the pan.

energy bars for breakfast!

I love all the styles of cooking I’ve watched, from cataclysms of frosting to clean-as-you-go assembly lines. The cooking style that continues to wow me,  though, is cooking without drama, the men and women who “whip things up.” They move from idea to creation so quickly. They don’t stop to mull on perfection, they take missing vanilla in stride, and they do it all with the knowledge that it will be gone soon. They are zen Buddhist monks creating brown-sugar mandalas.

Kelly did make that snack cake, in about fifteen minutes, with her stand-up mixer and a new recipe. She just for fun, just to have around under a big glass dish to snack on. When we came to visit for Christmas, she made chocolate chip cookies within about 20 minutes of walking in the door, and they were delicious: salty, sweet, chocolatey, chewy.  It’s the kind of easy doing and giving that’s adulthood, that makes homes and makes us at home in the world.

Last year when I arrived in California it was after a fall of traveling. My mom had moved into the house about a month before and Claire and I weren’t sure how to make this new place our own. I spent the next 6 months working, studying, and running and somewhere in those 6 months I found a way to make California home. When I stepped off the plane this December, I could feel it. The lightness that catches you under the feet, the elation and freedom that comes from knowing that you are home and some of the unconscious burdens of living and taking care of oneself are going to be lifted.

I think it was about the fourth day I had been back I pulled out my running shoes and went for a run through the neighborhood, a way of reacquainting myself to the streets that I sometimes get confused with Philly streets because they are overlapped in the part of my mind that knows Home. First there is the turn past the house that has lemon and orange trees by the front door. Then there is the long stretch of homes with fences and lines of roses, another turn and I am running past the school. Then a long straightway to the house with an  abundance of lavender and the cat that looks like a leopard which is next to the house of the outrageous hippies who have a dirt yard that with a sign that says “water conservation zone”. Cross the main drag of Mathilda, I am running past the public library and the women in kurtas who take a daily walk from the library to the park. There is another long stretch of road past a fence covered in ivy and then I hit the neighborhood of the fruit trees. Persimmons hang on the bare branches like orange-y Christmas baubles, pomegranates hang low, a dark purple-ly red also on bare branches. Avocados are still green amongst their waxy leaves, the smell of bay and oily citrus follows me until I hit the park. From the loop around the baseball diamond it is a nice stretch along the railroad tracks. Following the tracks I can feel my legs loosen-they know how close I am to home, how fast I can take this last stretch to my door, my house…

PS I first titled this “persmimmons!” for the beautiful persimmons that I took a picture of and wanted to write about, but then off I went on a tangent and ended up writing about running. BUT….what I wanted to write about persimmons is that they are delicious. Right now they are in season in California. Trees are covered in these funny orange, red almost tomato looking fruits. The taste of a persimmon is sweet and fresh, it is somewhere between a carrot, a mango, and maybe one other flavor that I can’t quite name since it am trying to write about taste from memory. The flesh is firm but juicy and I don’t think you can eat the skin, or you could, but I never have….. not sure why now that I think about it. A ripe persimmon smells absolutely luscious and sometimes they are so juicy the skins split. That is ideal. Softer is better, sweetness getting more and more concentrated and skin slipping loose from the skin. But don’t mistake bruised softness for ripe softness, the difference is in the smell. Just like a baked good, you know a fruit is ready when it smells like its taste. I think that persimmons are eaten in some parts of the world to celebrate the New Year-the color and taste of a fruitful year to come. Also, their name…persimmon….. oh I love it. Right. So that is what I wanted to write when I put that picture up. Now you know….

Tuna salad sandwiches were always made after church. On Sunday morning my mom would wrangle us out of bed. My dad would work on one set of tangles while my mom would French braid another. There were scratchy tights to be squeezed into and the nice dresses to be pulled on. We would take the small country roads to the church, the last stretch went past the airport were parachuters sometimes were landing and down a narrow lane lined with trees. Some mornings we would spot hot air balloons. For a while, Claire like to say that angels rode in the balloons. The church was small and made from gray stones that insured that the sanctuary was always cool, winter or summer.  There were tall, tall windows that let the light in and eliminated most of the need to light the sanctuary and old red  velvet, threadbare cushions on the oak pews. When I was younger my mom would doodle on pieces of paper to keep me from getting too bored and fidgeting and when I was old enough to read, I would read through the sermons, leaping up when it was time to sing the hymns. When church was over,  I would head down to the spring that was behind the church and if it was warm enough I would pull off tights or socks and go wading in the creek that sprouted from the spring.

When the tithes had been counted (my dad was the treasurer and my sister and I were sometimes allowed to help him count the money) and the church had been locked up, we would drive home, free our legs from tights, pull on jeans, and tromp down to the narrow kitchen were my dad would be making tuna salad.

We had a set of nesting bowls. They were a made from a cloudy, celery green glass. There was a narrow ridge around the top and I like to think that I remember the largest one being used to make Claire’s first birthday cake, or that there is a picture of the medium sized one in a black and white photo my mom took of my dad and their first cat, but I am not sure if those are memories I have made up for myself or if they actually happened. One thing that I do know for sure is that the smallest one was the one that made it through all the moves and was the one that my dad would use to make tuna salad.

First, you have to take a red onion. Finely dice. Then some celery, also finely diced. Open a can of tuna, the kind that is packed with water. Mix the tuna with the celery and the onion. Add mayonnaise, salt, and pepper. Mix with a fork. In my memories the scent of the tuna is joined with the sound of the tines of a fork scrapping against the glass bowl. My dad would eat his tuna salad sandwiches on toasted English miffins. I probably ate mine on white bread. Not toasted.

Sometimes I forget that I like tuna salad.  I usually remember when I am in a restaurant and see it on the menu. I never make it for myself. The last tuna salad sandwich I had was after a run in Half Moon Bay. We had gone to see the windy, wild ocean and I had taken a run along the cliffs above the water. The sky was heavy with blue-gray clouds and a strong wind ruffled the feathers of the white herons that stood on the shore. By the time I returned, I was ravenous. My mom, sister, and I  headed into the small town and stopped at the coffee shop. There was a tuna melt on the menu, with cheddar and tomato, so I did that annoying thing where I walked up to the counter and ordered not their tuna melt, I’d like your tuna melt but without the cheddar and tomatoes and with the swiss and cucumbers.

The owners of the coffee shop were obliging and the sandwich was delicious. They had kept their tuna salad simple-onions, celery, not too much mayo. No relish or or mustard or capers that some people like to add. All of that is well and good but when I bite into a tuna salad sandwich, I (most of the time) want it to taste like every other tuna salad sandwich I have eaten.

Familiarity, you can’t beat it.

Red-eye gravy and the best damn peach sauce in the Union

I know a man who can make a mean breakfast. A mean, salty, eggy, kale filled, grits done just right, piles of fried green tomatoes with pancakes and coffee breakfast. One Messr. M. Wooten.

The first time I met Matt I was newly arrived to Mendoza. I had spent the night before on a bus traveling from Buenos Aires to Mendoza. Lilli had met me at the bus station, sitting in a cafe wrapped in her familiar blue hoodie, cup of coffee and some delicious pastry in front of her, nose deep in a book. We sat for a while in the bus station sipping coffee and trying, with limited success, to piece together the tales from our lives since she had left the Larchwood house the March before. We started threads of conversations, got lost down others, tried to tell one story and then had to back track to tell the story right and then another one… and so on. In the midst of this piled up conversation she stopped suddenly and said, I have to to tell you about Matt.

Would you believe it, I had found Lillian Dunn romanced in beautiful Mendoza by an American, a Georgian to be specific, boy? There had been rumbles about this Matt person through emails the weeks before I had arrived in Argentina but sitting there in person and watching beautiful Lilli with her hair longer and more golden, her body more sure of itself (she had taken to swimming), and her normally exuberant energy anchored in a way that was new to me talk about this Matt, I was transfixed. In front of me was a love story in all of its glory–heightened perhaps by the place that the two of them had found themselves but in no way a fantasy. Who, I wondered, could this person be?

Lilli and I walked back through the quiet plaza streets. At the early hour of 8 o’clock most of the citizens had just retired from their night of carousing. As we passed by a pastry shop a group of teenagers shuffled by, the girls carrying their shoes in their hands and leaning on the arms of the boys in the group. I carried my backpack and she carried the canvas bag I had brought with me from Nepal. The plazas were cool in the morning sun, the trees a bright green, the mountains could be seen in the distance, early summer had indeed arrived to this part of the world.

We walked up the stairs of then Matt’s, soon to be Lilli’s, treehouse apartment. The Treehouse is a rooftop apartment. It has a glassed in porch room that looks out over a patio and is just big enough for a small wooden table, a futon, and a gas stove. The kitchen is long and narrow and the bedroom is capped with a skylight. The patio looks out over the tree tops and has enough room for a grill, a wash line, and a hammock. It is a beautiful, beautiful place. Somewhere between a boat and a treehouse really….

I can’t remember if the first time I met Matt was in this Treehouse or if it was later but what I do remember thinking to myself is, This boy is different and I like him. There was also a sense of the familiar, but that could have been because upon first meeting he gave me a big hug, sat down on the couch with me and got into an involved and very intelligent conversation, and then took me to the market where we planned and bought the ingredients for the asado that Lilli and Matt were hosting at their place later that night. How could that not feel somehow familiar?

And then there was Lilli: she sat back, sat at the table watching the two of us, I am not sure what she was thinking but for the first time I had the sense that she was not worried about this person, this relationship, this time. She was genuinely, sincerely, unconcernedly, presently enjoying that moment.

So that was Argentina. The next time I saw Matt is was again a summer’s day but this time it was a summer’s day in Philadelphia. Matt had decided that he would take a year, move to Philadelphia with Lilli, work on building and rebuilding houses, and see what happened.

Lilli found an apartment in South Philly. It is on a block near a street where there are lights strung up for all parts of the year. Most of the yards boast basil plants and wild patches of overgrown tomatoes. The window in their living room looks out over the city and the street is quiet at night. They have one of the best pizza places in South Philly a block from their door and their downstairs neighbor has a cat and is writing a novel. Lilli decided that this apartment was the one for them when the landlord told her that they could do what fixing up they wanted and she found a domino (the number 4, the number of stability and growing relationships) on the floor. Since they have moved in Matt has painted the bedroom yellow, they have outfitted the house with a rocking chair and comfortable futon and nearly the entire contents of an old Italian lady’s home (she was moving in with her daughter-in-law…). They ripped up the tile and uncovered a hardwood floor. Matt has made counter space and rack to hang the pots and pans on and in the first part of the summer had covered the dinning room table with the seedlings that would get transplanted into his garden. They have rescued pieces of other homes that Matt has worked on and incorporated them into tables, coat racks, bookshelves. Lilli has filled the house with beautiful, sometimes strange objects, and piles and piles of books.

And it is here that sometimes I feel more at home than in my own small apartment on the other side of the city. Especially on Sunday mornings.

professional weekenders

And this is the long way of getting to the breakfasts that Matt knows how to make. I can’t exactly remember what prompted the first breakfast or what it included since there have been many breakfasts since and they tend to blur together. But here are some particularly delicious moments that do stand out, a la Matt:

-Arriving at Matt and Lilli’s door. Lilli answered in blue sweatpants and a sweatshirt and when Joe and I had climbed the three flights of stairs to their apartment, there was Matt, in the doorway, with a cup of coffee in his outstretched hand for us.

-Matt brought back salted ham from home and made red eye gravy (coffee, fat rendered from the ham, combine). That when over grits.

-In the later summer when there was an abundance of green tomatoes, Matt made fried green tomatoes. He used a combination of white flour and cornmeal, salt and pepper, dredged the tomatoes in egg and dipped in the flour and then fried. The tomatoes were crunchy and even a little sweet in their salty fried crusts. Again, more eggs, probably some greens, some grits, some salted ham….

-The last harvest of kale came in a week or two into December and Matt made a frittata with the kale (which was sweet and slightly chewy without being tough and such a bright, deep, green) and onions and that was accompanied by grits and bacon and pancakes.

These are the breakfasts that you eat and that leave you satisfied for the rest of the day. These are the breakfasts that get people up and out of bed and across town (or at least off the futon) and on more than one occasion in the making, the eating, or the cleaning up of these breakfasts I have wanted to propose marriage to this whole mess of people or at least propose commune.

Ingredients:

1 lb of mushrooms (any really, but I used creminis) 

1 small onion

several cloves of garlic

3/4 cup parmesan cheese

1/2 cup cream

1 cup dry marsala                                                                                     

1 jar of artichoke hearts in water

butter, olive oil, bacon fat if you have it

parsley

rosemary

pasta of your choice: I like the little shells or orchetti since they can hold the juices.

One of the reasons that I love cooking with mushrooms is because they are so musty, earthy, even a little meaty. I love the way that the knife slices through them, I love that you don’t wash them, you brush them clean, I love that each mushroom has its own color, flavor, and texture. And when cooked long enough with any type of liquid most mushrooms seem to absorb flavors and then add a richness and depth that is all their own.

For this recipe you simply dice up the mushrooms, onions and garlic. These go in a pan to sautee with a little olive oil. I also added some bacon fat that we had on hand, mostly because I wanted to make sure that it got used and also because I thought that it would add a nice flavor to the dish. You could also add some butter to sweeten the pot. While the mushrooms and onions and garlic were cooking away, I was warming the cream with about a palm-full of rosemary. Shane told me that if you infuse your creams with herbal flavors they become more pronounced in a dish. He’s right. When all of the liquid cooks out of the mushrooms, add the cup of marsala. Cook out the marsala, then add the cream, and then stir in the parmesan. Keep the heat on medium low for this process and add the cheese slowly so it will become incorporated and won’t melt too quickly and stick to the bottom of the pan. Finally add the drained and sliced artichokes. Finish with salt and pepper to taste and a sprinkle of parsley. Serve with your choice of pasta.  You can cook the pasta until it is al dente, seriously al dente, and then add it to the sauce to finish cooking or you can serve the sauce over the pasta.