The Fatted Calf

I think of my visit to Baltimore later this month.  So many fathers are different.  I am afraid to see where I once lived.  I remember eating salad in the kitchen with you there.  Red cabbage, romaine, matchstick carrots, sunflower seeds, lemon juice, feta.  I make saffron rice in our kitchen now, pounding half the saffron in my mortar and pestle.  The rest I leave in its fiery strands, and let it steep in hot water for five minutes.  I add it in modest lugs to brown rice and chop sweet potatoes for the soup.  You come home for lunch and I ask you if it would be more entertaining to watch me cook naked.  I take my flannel shirt off and stand in the only functioning bra I have left, suddenly more aware of popping oil.  You eat leftover oatmeal I made you for breakfast and rush back to work.  We--two people who didn't know each other in June--have food routines, have a fairly regular hour at which we retire.  Some things have not budged, though.  We both love hot sauce and have a futon on the floor and no dresser.  When we first moved here, we let the temperature drop to 8 degrees before we turned the heat on.  At my new job, while stocking blood oranges, my supervisor tells me that the scary times are when the temperature gets so low that Fahrenheit becomes colder than Celsisus.  This is the kind of thing I had never heard of until moving to Wyoming.

I take a job a food co-op to supplement my hours at the coffee kiosk.  I have known for years how to steam milk for a latte and how a cappuccino.  Now I jump back into retail amid the only products that could have made it worth my while.  I clean up around almond butter grinders, drink kombucha on tap, and ring customers up for their bison meat.  The manager is pleased when, on my first day, I can tell him what both xantham gum and chia seeds are.  I used to be vegan, I say, realizing as I speak that it's not really an explanation.

Because it has been a very non-specific kind of cold since we arrived here, the holidays and my hair length are the only real indicators of time's passage.  On Thanksgiving, we hosted a bizarre mash of people at our house--four types of stuffing and perfect gravy.  Erin, Adrian's mother, told us about having to coax an adult at the theater to take her to see Alice's Restaurant when it first came out.  We ate appetizers of sweet potato fries and the dates I learned from Jesse how to make.  She brought them to my going-away potluck in Baltimore--they are stuffed with blue cheese and wrapped in bacon and one walks away with an incontrovertible taste of caramel.  As I left the potluck, I paused, tearing up, and John yelled, Don't act like you ain't gonna see us soon!  It's been six months.  One walks away knowing that it's how hot sweet things can get that's burned them.

Christmas was different; all our friends had left town.  We went to a dinner earlier that week, thrown by one of your co-workers.  It was populated mostly by cigarette-smoking middle-aged women and it had a "Tex-Mex"theme.  We brought tamale pie and listened to the women discuss all of their former incarcerations.  Christmas morning, we told each other about the gifts we'd planned.  I was going to get you a better pillow, since you always weaseled your way by morning onto mine.  You were going to get me a cassette player so I could listen to the tapes my father sent me--of me talking and singing at Christmas when I was two.  Neither of us bought each other anything.  It's like an even poorer-man's Gift of the Magi,  I said.

On New Year's, two of your friends visited and we went out for one of those dinners that is almost fancy, but the tablecloth is paper.  The woman still has one curler left in her hair when she leaves the house.  The salad was spicy and the beer was warm and there were pool tables in the back.  You used a Wal-Mart gift card to pay for whiskey and champagne and we started drinking so early that when the New Year unceremoniously began, we glanced at our phones and all thought it would behoove us to go to sleep.

We were both broke at Valentine's Day, so you brought me an ice cream flavor that I liked and you didn't, and Doritos, which seemed inexplicable to me until you said, I remember you telling me you liked them as a kid.  The next day, pay day, you brought me flowers, in a vase, since I had told you we didn't have one.  A few weeks later, when we had friends over for breakfast who were about to depart back to their respective cities, we used the vase to mix Bloody Marys in, since we didn't have a pitcher, either. 

St. Patrick's Day was uneventful, since it was a Sunday.  We drank Guiness with foam thick as a cake on top of it with friends, and returned home before the sun went down.  I bought a box of Lucky Charms, explaining that growing up, it was the only day of the year I knew for certain that I would be allowed sugar cereal.  Lucky Charms gives me diarrhea without exception, I said.  But I eat them anyway.

Now it's April Fool's Day.  We have had a rash of visitors lately.  We went out with all of them to the only restaurant in Laramie that can truly come highly recommended.  Burgers--topped with a brown sugar coffee rub, cheddar, and bacon.  Or feta and horseradish aioli.  Or half-burger meat, half-Italaian-sausage-meat, flecked with red pepper flakes and topped with basil, mozzarella, and tomato.  Yanara and I ventured to the same bar to pick up pizzas when the group had become too motley to go out to eat.  We returned to the house and beer and friends with pizza topped with olive oil, sausage, rosemary, and leeks.  She laughed more readily than I imagined--while we waited for the pies, I gave her a driving tour of Laramie--though the town is so small that you and I walk our rent over to our landlady's house instead of mailing it.

We both know the quiet we will come home to most days.  It is hard to live here.  I suspect it will be hard to leave here.  Though a native Wyoming friend said that, it's a hard landscape to love, it took no getting used to for me.  Prairie and treelessness and being landlocked are the set of conditions most unlike the environment in which we both grew up, in our various dots along the east coast.  For me this is no deterrent.  For me the land was the first part of this country that invited me.  Before employment or friends had found their way to me, when I was freshly come west, I made peace with what a massive sky does to me.  I have not stopped.  I plead with the expanses surrounding me not to call death too readily to mind, and mostly they oblige.  The incidental resemblance was not the author's intention, and cannot be helped.

I remember the time we read a Greek tragedy out loud at the table.  The voices our voices accommodated.  I ask you if we are asking too little of each other, I crave school but compulsively masturbate instead of requesting a set of my transcripts.  I rest easy, knowing I can get into any low-brow school in the country, and at least hold true to my resolution to read more.  I read about Harlem, I read about Fingerbone, I read every last heart-splitting page of Hugo's revolution and Kerouac's daughter's sex work.  I know it is too easy for love to make one either dumb or fat.  We are not very diligent in avoiding either, but we have the good grace of youth on our side.  I tell you about how my family just locked hands before dinner, lifting them and shouting, AMEN!  I tell you how when I had to say real prayers at daycare I pronounced them phonetically, Blesses-aw-lord.

In less than a month we will be back on the east coast.  I make a note of all the things I want to eat while in Baltimore: A crepe with turkey, cranberry chutney, avocado, and basil.  A lamb burger with cucumber, feta, and tzatziki.  A salad with peanut noodles, scallions, and fried tofu.  A bagel with homemade vegetable cream cheese.  My father's stuffed peppers.  My mother's hot milk cake.  Frozen yogurt with raspberries and shredded coconut and slivered almonds.  Seafood without fear.  You will come to celebrate my birthday, and then we will be apart for four days, which is two more than we've been separate since October.  I will miss you.  I will see my city with and without you.  I will bring you leftovers.

This excerpt was written over a year ago when I was still living in Baltimore.  Now, Adrian and I live 10 blocks from each other in southern Wyoming.  More on that change--and the meals that have gone with it--soon.

Dear Adrian,

This morning I wish so completely we were in Brooklyn, blearily traveling from both ends of town to meet for breakfast at Choice. The mandoline-thin pear slices on top of glazed tarts, the cafe au lait and sweet "country bread," almond croissants, creamy oatmeal with walnuts, chickpea-artichoke salad, silky goat cheese omelets, red bliss potatoes cooked with dill. The impatient cashier, the thick slices of banana bread in brown paper bags. Eating on the cold brown benches outside while the birds hop aimlessly around the general area and hip Brooklyn mamas roll their strollers into the store.

I would be remiss if I pretended all I've been eating has been homemade soup and a noon oatmeal breakfast. I have found a greater variety of greasy, bread, meat, and cheese-based foods in my hands recently than I had in some time. It's all about listening to your cravings, and about what's available to you at any given time: I have spent the last four months working at a burger bar that brags a host of exotic meats from which to choose, and I've systematically sampled most of them at half-price. Kangaroo was nothing to write home about, duck was too fatty for a cohesive burger, but wild boar tasted like some kind of naturally-occurring sausage, and was my favorite in spite of the fact that it must be cooked to medium temperatures (I was informed of this when I tried to order it mid-rare). I wondered if it could possibly carry any bacteria that I, (being born a woman and distressed) don't already have.

Lily Eats

The Patron Saint of Us

Clear as the meals are what I wore and the occasions for them. The first was for Noah, the occasion was Noah. I had on the long, brown, pseudo-tribal dress I would later wear to bid farewell to a man I had wanted to love, unable to properly find in my wardrobe a reflection of the peculiar mix I felt of high celebration and mourning. I had made a reservation, and the hostess whisked us almost immediately to a small, square table where the conversation flowed simply as it can only amidst siblings--young and acutely aware of each others' beauty, but free to converse unfettered by the phantom dinner guest of romance, possible even between two good friends who intend only to eat with each other.

They brought bread and sweet butter and we ordered soups—a sweet potato bisque and a hot, plain oyster stew—no potatoes or fanciful seasonings, just leeks and cream and fine, fat oysters. Noah was leaving to begin a new life and this was his goodbye—before flying three thousand miles, a wholly incomprehensible number to anyone, even if they’ve lapped back and forth across the country several times. He was taking with him the tent that was to be his home for the next six months, his pack, heavy bags of grains.

A whole sea bass came to us, stuffed with lemon wedges and sprigs of fresh mint. Noah ate the jaw-meat reverentially, and confessed, with the naïve eagerness I have only experienced from him two or three times in my life, that he had heard it was the best part of the fish. Then, with the gallantry I have experienced from him more than from any other man to date, he insisted I try it. Not out of obligation, but with his signature inborn sense that whatever he found to be the best must belong to me, too. That is how we have always walked around—absorbing things half by ourselves, and half by virtue of the joy we know they will bring to the other.

There was a platter of squash, faro, kale, wild mushrooms. “This will sustain me,” he said, “when I’ve run out of quinoa and am eating bricks of two-thousand-calorie emergency rations.” We both knew what he meant: This will sustain me when I am far from you. This giddiness, the shared secret that we are both still so able to be dazzled by the truly careful parts of life. The well-treated food, the family’s clammy hands reaching to pat each other across the table, handling each other as dearly as any meal. There was dessert, too, and we ate gratefully, but extraneously, like two people receiving a bouquet of flowers in the middle of a botanical garden.

The second was in New York. Adrian had called me to say she had big news, and after explaining that she and Sweeney had gotten engaged, I laughed and said I knew it was either a baby or a marriage. I congratulated her, from perhaps the deepest place I have ever been able to congratulate anyone. I could tell that I meant that their marriage would be a good thing to have in the world. As we spoke, veering into details on the phone, the knick-knacks of where and when, and the characteristically awkward proposal, thousands of old slides snapped through my mind. The fall that I had met Adrian, when we cooked breakfast barefoot together in our college dorm’s hall kitchen—oatmeal with cinnamon, salt, and butter, fried eggs on top. Sliding notes under each others’ doors with passages quoted about modern-day feasts, small proclamations of small love, an appreciation for bounty wherever we could find it in that interminably cement city.

Which was the same autumn I met Sweeney, a man sprawled drunkenly under a tree at eleven AM, full of opinions about a lecture we’d both attended on Gilgamesh. Which was the season when Adrian and Sweeney met, at a bi-weekly salon held at Sweeney’s apartment—they had a freezer full of various meats and I never saw anyone there eating at all. Just reading Proust and dedicating days to Rimbaud and when a shirtless Sweeney walked by, Adrian asked if she could pick at the blackheads on his back.

And they fell in together, as some people are blessed enough to do when they’re able to get in step with a city like New York. I spent eighteen months trying to love Brooklyn, but ultimately felt it was a foreign object of which my body was constantly trying to purge itself. I stayed for as long as I did for Adrian—which I told her at the time, but which I’m not sure she was able to believe. It seems rather a lot to me now, after so many yeas of unalterable friendship in different states—but at the time, I had no way of knowing that my exit from New York wouldn’t also be the end of my intimacy with the girl I loved more than any other I had known. I wanted to talk with her always—about flaxseeds, the process of distilling vinegar, Wallace Stevens, my fear that my housewife longings were un-artful. But she understood: We, as women, wanted a lot to do with writing and cooking and companionship, wanted a household wherever we went, and understood that the maintenance of such a life was not casual.

“He said, I’ve got your present, but I’m going to save it until after dinner,” she told me. Then, laughing, “But we never ate dinner, so at some point it just became, Well, I guess, now.” And of course it was a ring, too big, so she had to wear another on top of it until they could get it resized. I know now that some time had to lapse before I saw her—I had moved back to Baltimore, after all—but it seems to me that as soon as I got her phone call, I was off the bus in New York, climbing into Sweeney’s car for the drive back to their home. He was erratic, rolling cigarettes and sometimes even reading while he steered, and I remember telling him over and over that he should be a cab driver.

I have always been fundamentally unable to forget old lovers while in their presence—even to push the memories very far out of the foreground. So maybe that was it, or maybe it’s simply that being with the two of them has always felt like a kind of love affair to me. Whatever the case, I found my mind dutifully trudging back to their old room, how many different ways I had been their guest over the years, the fine gin-with-lemon-zest Adrian and I drank before crawling across so many borders to the man of her life. We were free to go anywhere. And remembering it, on the heels of their engagement, I felt not at all separate from the prospect of their wedding, but folded warmly in, as ultimately invited as I’ve often been with them.

But always she was the one extending. We always conversed first, she and I, with Sweeney to come later—tolerant of me, even admiring in some ways, but never so forthcoming. So the dinner was not really about him, but for Adrian, about us. Still, we prepared in front of him in their apartment, in a kind of spectacle and inclusion—both of us wearing her dresses, her stockings and shoes, layered under the necessary coats and scarves to travel to Manhattan by train in January. When we left, in a frenzy of embraces and kisses on the cheek, he was drinking juice from its carton and preparing to reheat some fried chicken he had stored in a plastic bag.

Even though I had called in advance to reserve a table, there was a wait when we reached the restaurant. It only lasted a few minutes, and we spent them marveling over the quiet lighting and loud diners, perusing the extensive wine list. When we sat, we ordered a white wine from Argentina, and I was grateful that the waiter poured the first taste into Adrian’s glass instead of mine. I would have been nervous, where she calmly took a sip and nodded her approval. The waiter, a young man who spoke so quietly that we didn’t hear a single thing he explained to us all evening, filled both of our glasses and left.

We glanced around us at what other people were eating—it was one of the only existing upscale raw-food restaurants. Things looked unrecognizable and good, and we were baffled over our menus until we saw a footnote—a prix fixe chef’s tasting menu. Five courses, and no hint as to what they would be. We both excitedly admitted we’d never ordered such a meal before, and I was reminded of all the times we had had such conversations—on the brink of doing something completely new next to each other. And it seemed perfect: To relinquish control and not haggle with ourselves, but give over to an inevitably long evening, able to look at each other and our plates with new eyes.

The waiter, too, was pleased, and in fact, our request seemed to stir up a kind of rallying in the restaurant. From then on, a new member of the staff came to our table each time, detailing the dishes to us in a common inaudible whisper before setting them down. The food was complex, and hard to remember now. A raw butternut squash soup with sage cream, corn tamales, oyster mushrooms prepared somehow reminiscent of actual oysters. A whole tray of different ice creams, displayed like petit-fours. And the wine was easier to drink than any I’d ever had—our cheeks flushing while we rehashed all of the “food dates” we’d had since we met, my quiet assertion that she was the most beautiful woman I’d ever known. What I meant was, there is no one else on this earth I’d rather share a three-hour meal with. No one would catch the light so consistently as you. No one has such love waiting for them at home, and such love sitting across from them at the table.

That was how it had been with her: We were able to laugh always, and always be heartened at my unflinching enamorment of her. It disturbed nothing but sat with us like the prophet Elijah, for whom the door was always open, a plate always left. I wondered at him as our bill was dropped off, then stopped wondering. He’s Sweeney, I thought, as we finished the last of the wine and paid. The good will guest, the absentee saint of this meal. How good to feel we have his blessing, and be able to bless him back.

Lily Eats

Pent House, they call it the Pent House

The household is being reconfigured: A week ago we sat down with the building's super to add up the collective incomes of the roommates who intend to stay for a new lease. "I can't even rent to this group," he said, referring to people who make as little money as we do. But since he knows we'd never missed the rent before, he decided he would do it anyway, sighed at the defense he would have to pitch for us to the absentee landlord. Told me that even though I'm not going to be on the lease, he'll still take my phone number for contact info and "in case I need a date to the prom." Signing on for another year here feels a lot like promising to carry a child to term--all of us feel a little bit like we are putting down collateral on a responsibility we are only half-certain of handling, worrying about money, planning art shows, apprehensively approaching bringing new people into our world.

When I moved in, I was unfamiliar with all but two or three of the seven roommates, and I only had a real, established intimacy with one. He immediately left town for several weeks upon my moving date, and I forced myself out of my room--to talk, to cook soup, to review and respond to invitations to potlucks at people's houses who I didn't know. The summer lasted forever, and then it was simply cold. Not to any particular degree, but just the kind of cold that made it necessary that one find a bed-mate or wear a sweater or fill a hot water bottle before going to sleep. We all drank coffee. We all drank tea. I traveled the short road to being halfway in love and then took the long, empty-bindled hike out, able still to share vanilla cookies and peanut butter with the object of my affection through it all. During the denouement of this affair, I bought a one-way plane ticket to California. Crazed with the idea of seeing my brother, eating the fresh lettuces he and his wife shake free of their garden, distancing myself from the meals I cooked one-handed while the other arm tried to embrace a receding man. I canceled the flight nearly as soon as I'd planned it and suddenly saw my full body back at the stove, toiling towards no one, checking temperatures, going next door to flip a switch when all the appliances revolted and threw off the yoke of their circuit.

Every morning, I wake up to at least an hour's worth of dishes compiled like careless found objects in the sink. I am supposed to mind this, but routine is the initial draw of any kitchen, and I find myself falling into them like a daily prayer. I brew a cup of coffee to drink as it grows cold between shifts of scrubbing. I wipe down four different flat surfaces with a reusable rag, I sweep the kitchen floor and sometimes empty the cat's litterbox, fill his food-dish. I read Diane di Prima's account of farm-life with three men:

"I would get up with Billy and go over to the kichen in the big house, where I would get the coffee going, fry a bunch of home-fries, and make eggs and oatmeal for the men. After they split for work I would slowly get dressed, clean up the house and our shack, weed the garden a little, read, write, walk, listen to Big Bill's short-wave radio. The time passed very quickly, and then it was time to boil the potatoes--each of them ate three potatoes at supper, and you had to boil another two apiece for home-fries the next morning."

Dishes dripping, I hearken back to this and think it sounds, for all its gendered qualities, like the ultimate high life. How I admire what every person in this house brings to the table: Adam's declaration that "I only like food that tastes bad"--an unwillingness to explore any worlds beyond pasta and oranges, tomato sauce and packaged hot chocolate. Brent's restaurant wisdom and appreciation of sharp knives, earned through a series of high-stress kitchen jobs. John and his girlfriend's frequent forays out into the late-night world for cartons of ice cream. Sal's stringent observance of cast-iron rules, concern over the regularity with which he consumes bacon. Amanda's tiny portions and fried lima beans and inexorable sweet tooth. Zach's morning egg sandwich that he offers to double and give one to Amanda, which she always refuses, and which she always then takes a bite of anyway. Dave's cheap cereal that tastes like honey graham crackers in a bowl, his pious observance of protein in the morning, earnest attempts at buying groceries which never stop him from usually eating out.

We've had "family dinners" that found Amanda sweating over her cookbooks, pizza parties, pan-seared scallops, surprise birthdays with two cakes, going away parties with peppercorn-infused vodka. Dinner at an expensive pasta restaurant--complete with wine--when Dave, John, and I felt we couldn't hack it anymore unless someone else brought us food unarguably hot and rich. Mornings brewing coffee in any one of a number of ingenious ways--through filters that are too big for their use and therefore folded, into a percolator which doesn't work and instead serves as a large urn, in a French Press that was the fourth one to shatter in the apartment. Guest visits from a fine-dining sous chef friend who plated each of us a desert comprised of concord grapes, homemade gelato, goat cheese and figs on toast points with a honeyed balsamic vinegar browned-butter sauce.

Prospective roommates keep emerging from the Baltimore woodwork: a filmmaker who none of us knows but whose videos we looked up and which made us certain that, as Danielle proclaimed with absolute authority, "He loves sushi." A fiction writer who I've only seen take beer by way of sustenance. The leader of a dance troupe who doesn't like that we smoke indoors but loves the space, as anyone with an inclination towards large movement would. A photographer with whom I once shared a wall, and who spent a semester in Italy ignoring men to write me letters detailing the juice of market pomegranates. None of us knows who will be here when spring opens its full doors. None of us can predict what we will be eating. I can only suspect that I will be in the usual realm of ritual-dining: For now it's been oatmeal with sunflower seed butter and thin raspberry jam that Val brought back for me from Spain. Pho broth that's been on sale for months at the natural food store with sweet potatoes, green peppers, garlic and ginger, crimini mushrooms, kale, pinto beans. It takes me a week to eat what I cook in one day. Sometimes a lamb burger wrapped in lettuce when I get off work at the bar--pickle slices and manchego and bacon layered lustrously on top of it.

Breakfast is never until at least noon, though I've often been awake since eight or before. First there is coffee, the dishes, the kitchen, at least two cigarettes at the table at the far end of the wide main space. Sometimes almonds or an apple to stay me while I go about my day pretending I have no early appetite, sometimes nothing. Then, as the house begins to wake up, people emerging blearily from the stage curtains that separate their rooms, we find at least two or three of us ready to eat at the same time. The kitchen is suddenly populated with the hunger of late-to-bed, late-to-risers, their truest cravings coming forth with their first light. If it must be bacon. If you must move out. If you don't have any coffee use some of mine.

Lily Eats

The Morning After:

Dear Age,

One thing we know is the slam of bodies, an unassuming basement in an unreasonably large house on Saturday night. No heat except the damp smoldering of a crowd, an unfurnished bathroom, a fire pit seemingly left to tend itself outside. Culls of smokers and music-makers, nostrils being filled with the black dust kicked up by a crowd alternating--depending on the band--between rocking on their neglected heels, and full-on slamming. A duo rapping. A short man with a guitar that he plays with a drumstick and the high, clear voice of an adolescent shepherd calling out to any living creature on the mountain.

Or maybe we've forgotten. Have grown accustomed to our music on a stage, our parents out of the picture, surprised to find that upstairs the 11 o'clock news is playing and the homeowner is more than willing to give you a much-needed glass of water. And if the night ends abruptly with the ugly vibe of a man yelling in presumed agony at his ex-girlfriend while she tries to play her guitar, help rush him out the door, get him into the car, tell him there's a beast in all of us. It's all the more reason to come home and sit in solidarity watching Seinfeld quietly in a group. It is much like surviving a collapse in the mines.

So try this: Waking with a head like a lighthouse trying to burst through a seemingly unending fog, thoroughly permeated with the smell of campfire, the recollection of songs you feel grateful to have heard, the late-night goodbye to someone who rewrote the course of your evening by grabbing your hand when their friends were leaving and so they had to walk away from you. Whose palm is this? you thought, that it can still inspire such heat in me?

To all those ends and more, mince one clove of garlic. Tear the last of the kale into bite-sized pieces and rinse them in the sink while your roommate tells you the only thing that will make him feel better about doing dishes with a hangover is "if I start to hear the sizzle of breakfast." Finely cube a sweet potato, which at least one man you trust gave to his son as a cure for madness, in hopes that what grows in the ground will keep the eater close to it. Let the garlic and sweet potatoes cook in the pan in too much olive oil, salt, pepper, curry powder, before adding the kale and letting the whole thing wilt under an all-purpose lid for a few moments. Fire up the burner next to it, and fry an egg silkily, slowly, before dumping everything in a clay bowl that gives new feeling to anything contained within.

Cover it, if you're like me, in hot sauce, and eat it slowly, over a book that's so familiar that it's less like reading and more like visiting a companion with whom you've kept touch over the years in spite of the sparse conversation between you. Don't rush your stomach or evade the spiciness of the food or worry about squandering your day. It will be waiting for you when you've cleared the last of the plates suspended above your head.

Lily Eats

What I've Been Eating

Kale sauteed with sesame oil and red pepper flakes, toast with olive taupenade and avocado, dal from a can when it’s last minute and I’ve been reading about Indian cooking all day in a novel. I am hungry for what the main character eats as he grieves for his father. Pad See Ew from a restaurant that—from the outside—looks too dark to be true. Shepherd’s pie with lentils instead of lamb, cooked in the long afternoon before a show in our apartment. I mashed the potatoes with a whisk and said, “You know, this is fitting, because wherever I’ve lived, I’ve made this for my favorite people.” I didn’t realize it until I said it but it’s true, it’s a total tribe food. One of the members of a band set to play that night quietly came up to me and told me it was a relief to eat something grounding, because they’d been on tour and one of the most disconcerting aspects was “eating garbage.” All my life I think this will be one of my favorite sights: people waking on futons and coming in from the cold and eating all at different times, standing around, something hot.

Polenta with butternut squash, fig compote, and caramelized onions with my father, talking about family or architecture or the divine coincidence that always seems to color his life. Lamb stew with him near the Inner Harbor, in a restaurant whose windows he once repaired. He got a Guinness which reminded me of Adrian referencing “the milkshake of beers,” which in turn, reminded me of the afternoon she, Sweeney, Lyndel and I split steaks and talked about what it means to be able to write a sentence. Drunk well before dark, practically able to watch the grass grow at Pratt, that spring was so lush.

Sal and I made “magic bars” one afternoon, modeled after the ones at a cafe down the street, layering coconut, smashed graham crackers, chocolate chips and evaporated milk. Talking about variations. Talking about food with unattractive names: Dump cake. Garbage soup. Later, I re-read parts of Dinners and Nightmares and cringed for the thousandth time at the name “menstrual pudding” applied to a tomato-potato dish. I ordered two raw oysters at the dark wooden bar where Dave tends bar and had my feelings about them confirmed—It’s not the taste of oysters I like, necessarily, with which I’m actually always somewhat repulsed. Rather, they give me a dizzy, elevated feeling in my stomach and my head. It’s like taking a big mouthful of the sea and falling in love at the same time and trying to hold it all in.

side note: What I Ate Where is now on tumblr! You can follow us at whatiatewhere.tumblr.com

Lily Eats

The year that I walked in on my love with another woman and I didn't want to taste a bit of turkey. In my hysterics I started to cook egg-in-a-hole, one for each of my friends, and I didn't stop until I could be calm again. They played Twister and watched a movie about Sparta while I cooked in Morgan's big, wooden kitchen, the kind perfect for wearing socks. The year that I left Baltimore and came back and made twiced-baked potatoes for everyone in Sam's living room, took Polaroids of pretty girls with a glass of whiskey in one hand and a glass of wine in the other. The years I got motion sickness just from seeing my family. It was supposed to be a potluck, so Ben cut up tiny cross-sections of a Snickers bar, impaling each one on a toothpick. Allie was already a vegetarian but brought homemade pigs-in-a-blanket. The year that I got bronchitis and stayed vegan and stayed home and didn't want to celebrate anyone's holiday. I invited my father over and I pulled my bed out to the living room because I couldn't stand staying in my own space any longer. "I just wonder what people did before antibiotics," I told him, trying to justify several months of relying on herbal remedies and eschewing conventional medicine. "They died a lot," he said, and within the week I'd gone to a doctor, gotten a prescription, and cleared up the lungs that had been wet for two months. Still I felt I had proven something to myself, perhaps just by virtue of being alive at the end of it.

Lily Eats

How To Eat Partly

"One of the saving graces of the less-monied people of the world has always been, theoretically, that they were forced to eat more unadulterated, less dishonest food than the rich-bitches."
--M.F.K. Fisher, How To Cook A Wolf

That is to say, what people have when they don't have money is friends, and what Adrian once referred to as "the tricks." That an onion can be baked and eaten alone, as a grit-restoring main course. That food assumes a kind of comrade's magic and lasts longer when shared. That you can subsist on certain things that would make anyone else feel malnourished and inhuman, and that you don't need nearly so much of those things other people require just to make it through the day.

For you it is nearly always a case of remembering that what you love (and have always loved) is real peasant food. The same lentil soup that's been on the stove your entire life, with whatever almost-rancid booze you happen to have thrown in for the last five minutes of cooking. The rice and beans with one onion split in half and cooked two drastically different ways. So that half of them are still as spicy as if they were raw, and the other half are nearly candy. Egg-in-a-hole, or egg-in-a-basket, the real pleasure of which is fried bread. You can smell the olive oil in your hair as you walk in the metered November wind to class. Spaghetti squash with hot peppers and the last tomatoes of the season. Vegetable stock with egg-drops and pasta, chickpeas and kale.

There are always more tricks. Visit your friend while he's tending bar on the night that you decide it's got to be red meat or starvation--he can't give you a free meal but he'll keep you in wine while you wait, and you'll be so bolstered that you'll decide it's worth the cost. Know when it has to be red meat, or has to be a raw oyster, or has to be a bowl of broccoli. Know when you can accept substitutes and when you must have what you're craving, or else your blood will stage a mutiny against you. Visit your friend at the farmer's market, and accept the excess produce her employers weigh her down with weekly: Brussel sprouts and apples and kale and fresh sage.

If you buy your roommate a pack of cigarettes one night, have him pay you back in veggie burgers. Your survival lies, as it always has, with the people around you. Remember that wine can be a fine meal if you want to feed your nerves instead of your stomach. Remember that it feels good to be full and good to be hungry. Know when you've exhausted something seemingly virtuous, like oatmeal, and allow yourself as many eggs as you need in its stead. Remember that to cook when it's cold out is as warm as you can be.

Sit in traffic for one hour waiting to eat falafel with your mother in your childhood house. Curl up in her bed and watch Home For The Holidays. She'll laugh uncomfortably when you tell her that Robert Downey, Jr. listed black tar heroin as the main contributor to his relaxation while making the film. You accidentally remind her that you weren't speaking to one another at Christmastime last year. We all have ways of ringing in the holiday season. After you eat, you ask her to teach you how to blow-dry your hair. Mainly because you are twenty-two and don't know how, and worry that if your car breaks down on the way home your hair will freeze. It's supposed to get below thirty degrees tonight, she helps you dry it and you get frustrated with how little it seems like you. You tell her you feel like an entrant in a pageant. Once, in New York, Robby saw you wearing make-up and said, "You look fine. Just like any other woman running for President."

Everything is honest about this food. The falafel is cold and your mother hates hot sauce and the kale shrinks so much in the soup that you think you should have added twice as much. The smell of the oil stays with you all through a lecture on The Taming of The Shrew, like a man's cologne does after a hug. You think that after all, staying alive is nothing more than taming one seeming beast after another. Your mother shrugs when you say you hate your manicured hair, and sends you off with two pans of brownies for your roommates, as though she knows which battles are the ones worth fighting. When to give into your peasant mind, and mind your essentials.

Lily Eats

What Adrian and I Ate Where

French crullers on the Brooklyn Bridge. We had taken my brother to Chinatown to catch his bus back to Baltimore and I was on the brink of something-missing-something so we decided to walk back to Pratt instead of taking the train. We talked about the writing program and our bi-coastal families with all the familiar roles--robbery, congenial fathers, drug addiction we could always understand but never possess. Apple cider donuts while we looked over hydroponic lettuces and dyed wool in the Union Square farmer's market. Gin martinis with lemon zest while Sweeney slept in the next room. A lobster roll in Red Hook, Brooklyn, not Red Hook, New York, with a view of the Statue of Liberty the tour buses never get. Onions baked in foil with goat cheese.

One summer she and Robert were in Oregon on a farm when Noah was living in his tent near Eugene, so I flew out and we all slept in the farm house for a week. When Noah had to leave again to go back to work, I started to cry and Adrian and I walked to get ice cream cones. That night we watched Twin Peaks and I was afraid to go to sleep, with all of open Oregon outside of the window. Green-bean casserole in New York when Sam and I were breaking up. Avocado smashed on melba toast with cumin while she read my tarot cards. Oatmeal with fried eggs on top in the Pratt dorm kitchens. Oh, I am the king of hot cereal! her boss, Rhadames, had told her when she asked for a good oats recipe working one afternoon at the natural-foods store. Once I moved back to Baltimore, I would write to her whenever I had a new oatmeal recipe or a new flame--try this with pumpkin, Adrian I think I'm in love again, try it with blackstrap molasses if you're feeling down, salt the oats but add blueberries to cook just a little at the end.

The night she put a hot pan of chicken straight into a wet sink from the oven and the glass shattered and so we had beer for dinner instead. We were arguing with Sweeney about Africa and Walter Benjamin and writing that lasts. Americanos at the Cafe Pick-Me-Up on the first night I felt I was starting to understand New York. We had already stayed at one coffee shop until it closed that night, we were in St. Mark's and had no intention yet of getting home. Vegan carrot cake our professor drunkenly insisted on buying for us at an end-of-term reading. Frittatas and baked apples and creole-seasoned chickpeas at potlucks in all kinds of cities.

A five-course raw-foods meal in New York when she got engaged--we both got dressed up in her clothes in front of her fiancee, who stayed home to eat fried chicken and drink juice out of the carton. The kind of meal that makes you say things you didn't even know you thought, things that you thought all along. You're the most beautiful woman in the world was one that came out just as I meant it, raw butternut squash soup with sage cream, a white wine from somewhere in Argentina. Our ultimate food date on the heels of her setting an ultimate kind of date with Sweeney: pink cheeks with the wine and the January weather and above all feeling fancy in a way not many people can, and no one can very often. A meal that clocked in at three hours but felt like it'd been incubating for four years.

Or meals that never counted as meals: Almond biscotti eaten on a hill in Fort Greene park while we wondered what in our lives could possibly stay together, and what was coming apart at its darling seams. Leftover salmon cakes. Bodega coffee that Adrian swore the clerk flavored perfectly, when what she really meant was very milky and very sweet. Cannoli that we made with my father in his old kitchen listening to Judy Collins, eaten later in the back of a bus back to New York. With Genoa salami, fontinella, olives cured in oil till they wrinkle, focaccia with dried tomatoes and rosemary baked into its face. We ate while the east coast (which could have been the world) was rushing by.

Lily Eats

"Drink!" he cried out. "Drink, eat!" And he roared with joy.*

To live with seven people after living alone--You must remember how people eat together, that people eat together. Maybe it's this instinct that's been driving me to cook pot after pot of soup on the hottest days. Soup feeds people. Lentils monastery style--with carrots, diced tomatoes and onions, a splash of cheap red wine which Sal, Amanda and I drank the remainder of. Amanda emptied out her "food bag," and we ate a plate of hors d'oeuvre: cheese, tomatoes, green grapes, apple slices. The soup was eaten as people filtered in, in spite of the heat. Then vegetable soup in cumin-seasoned stock. Chili with cinnamon and coriander in addition to all the usual spices, chili that in spite of its ornate bite, takes only a half an hour to make, from start to finish. Egg-drop soup in "no-chicken" stock which Dave swore was standard-issue Campbell's--kale, pink beans, parmesan.

I keep trying to offer food to Adam but I've yet to make anything that doesn't have beans in it, which he says he just can't eat. Onions, too. He said, It's terrible, they're things that everyone cooks with, peels clementines, Brent nodded along and said, I know what you mean, that's how I feel about fruit. I squinted, looking for some food I don't like and the only thing I could come up with is raw onions. It's not just the taste, which reminds me of a body growing sickly in the sun. They give me a headache when I eat them, and no one believed me except (I think it was) Chelsea, who said, Certain foods do that to me. Milk, does.

Val brought her canvas bags of produce and we went to Justin's house and cooked bean soup with kale in home-jarred chicken stock. She let a ham hock fall off the bone in the center of it, I added a lot of oregano. We listened to the A-side of a Fats Domino record and were both too afraid we'd break Justin's fancy turntable if we tried to flip the record. So we waited for him to do it and the soup was delicious and it was too hot for any of us to eat so we drank gin instead.

Breakfast as always with Dave. In six or seven years of dating-cum-friendship, walks in the park, fine dining in our cheap clothes, free drinks, free rides, and now being roommates, we have always eaten breakfast. I've caught his obsession with eggs in the morning, though "morning" is a term that means something different to the two of us. Eggs, though, are a way of reclaiming power, I want to feel like I woke up running. Things have been good but hard; I want a lot of energy reserves and then I want to use them all. "Every time I've ever been really heartbroken," I told Val, "I've started running. It's happened three times." I remember Noah saying something about tiring oneself out as a method of self-preservation. Your weary body keeps your head intact.

As soon as the first cold night of any year nestles itself between two hot days, I get sick. This time, I eat pad thai and drink coconut-tofu soup, fishing out huge chunks of broccoli with my fingers. My father insists that I cannot eat at home, he wants to buy me dinner since I just started classes today. I joke that it's my tenth year of college, and he says, "That doesn't matter," and can't help but tell the man at the Thai carry-out that it's his daughter's first day of school. We sit in the park by the Washington Monument and I think about how Donna's restaurant burned down and once I got hot chocolate there and watched them light the monument at Christmas and I tell my father that it's everyone's responsibility, their own heartbreak. "To hell with that," he says. "I'll break his legs." We walk back slowly, he gives me half a bottle of wine, I go home and don't drink it but instead make twig tea and fall asleep while it's still mostly too hot to drink. I reheat it on the stove at three AM and Dave walks into the kitchen, offers me some whiskey in much the same way my father offered to break a man's legs. I remember reading Stacie's "Cures for Love," and think, cures for a cold are not so different. Think, everyone has their remedies, everyone is fixed somehow, thank god for cold nights and for colds. They give people a chance to care for each other, pause, say, I really hope you aren't getting sick, would you like some, get some sleep.

*from M.F.K. Fisher's Serve it Forth.

Lily Eats

A hurricane is always a lady but that doesn't mean we can't be

Dear Adrian,

The real question is not--Should we be hunkering down?--but rather, What does hunkering down mean to us? I like to think that any disaster (personal or global) can be navigated the way M.F.K. Fisher would have dealt with it. Which is to say, grimly but beautifully.

What I have purchased: A bar of Newman's dark chocolate, a can of dal (the same kind sold at the Karrot), two small bottles of water, a larger bottle of wine, organic cotton tampons, banana chips--I agonized over a jar of artichoke hearts and ultimately decided against them not because they were unnecessary, but because I don't have any good bread to eat with them. The man at the liquor store let me charge the wine even though there's usually a minimum limit for credit cards. Everyone is feeling unusual.

I also filled two pitchers with tap water, got some bubble-wrap to stuff below my window where it doesn't-quite-close, boiled six eggs--and called again upon Mary Frances Kennedy for guidance (this time at the stove, where she's probably more comfortable being consulted): Bring eggs and water all to a boil at once, then immediately remove from heat and let the eggs cool completely in the water. Let everything rise and fall together, as everything will do outside whether we are prepared or frightened or arrogant or not. Better to be arrogant then, but cook the eggs anyhow. Hunter S. Thompson said, "Call on God, but row away from the rocks."

Lily Eats

Breakfasts, in memoriam: Starting with school--Cheerios. Cream of wheat intentionally neglected to breed lumps. Blueberry danish till the boys pointed out on the bus they turned my teeth blue. Sour cream donuts. Bacon, egg, and smoked mozzarella sandwiches on crusted Italian bread. Almond croissants with hot chocolate in a wooden booth at the Pratt dining hall--early, too early for anyone else to be awake. Whole-wheat everything bagels with jalapeno cream cheese. Tamales from the woman with no permit who sold them out of a blue cooler on Myrtle Avenue. Pecan swirls six to a plastic tray split with my father. Eggs for the entire summer with Dave. White fish and wild mushrooms and tamari-roasted broccoli tucked back at Sam's parents. Chocolate cake with applesauce and Alix. Noah used to drink green juice in the morning to counteract the previous night's whiskey, I just ate toast. Cinnamon sugar donuts with sheets of crystallized cinnamon from a bakery in Linthicum, by Molly's where the vines took over the house until the neighbors stopped complaining. Her plants were taller than her self. Oatmeal with bananas or pumpkin or blackstrap molasses that fall I read that molasses was good for junkies AND anemics because it bolsters your blood and makes you sturdier. I felt happy, but it was too sweet. Granola, vanilla soymilk, and frozen wild blueberries when we decided we would all quit soon and should eat as much for free as possible. Things Adrian and I cooked together, always barefoot, always two steps to the side of each other, Sherry's raw muesli at the smooth wooden table, giggling, ready to jump on her bike. The time Sweeney and I talked and I didn't disagree with him necessarily and we both put hot sauce over everything. Things I ate because Hunter S. Thompson did and I had no idea how to be sixteen. Lazy-man pancakes the morning after parties in high school, which was basically pancake batter with apples or chocolate chips scrambled in a pan. It was delicious, and it fed all of us, and we had no desires yet to exceed that.

James Joyce Eats

"Mr. Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liver slices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencod's roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.

Kidneys were in his mind as he moved about the kitchen softly, righting her breakfast things on the humpy tray. Gelid light and air were in the kitchen but out of doors gentle summer morning everywhere. Made him feel a bit peckish.

The coals were reddening.

Another slice of bread ad butter: three, four: right. She didn't like her plate full. Right. He turned from the tray, lifted the kettle off he hob and set it sideways on the fire. It sat there, dull and squat, its spout stuck out. Cup of tea soon. Good. Mouth dry. The cat walked stiffly round a leg of the table with tail on high."

Lily Eats

If we needed it

“The novelty has worn off,” she says, trying to tiptoe around the subject because the subject is related to me. She’s cutting up cauliflower for soup and we talk about what makes a person eat more in winter, what makes a woman moan more eating than a man, what constitutes hibernation and what constitutes love.

The novelty wore off for me years ago, I think. What’s left is adoration of something we both saw like staring into the sun. What she thought was clever I thought was a joke and what she thought was lovely is lovely. And will always be, for all of us, for anyone who’s chosen to eat with my brother, which means my family, which means our hands, volatile, like burning potatoes or men, hot in each others’. Circling the meal, lifted to the heavens or the ceiling, depending on which is closing in on us that day, and a chorus of the word “Amen!” rings out among us, because we are hearty people even without God.

I think that no one can love a person without understanding what peril they grew up in, which is another way of saying their family. Whether they ate with their eyes clenched counting in the corner, or never ate for all of the fighting, or ate slowly, thinking of how to tell their mother who it was they loved. Whether they can tell anything about olives from oil to oil, whether their mothers were reluctant bigots in response, whether they ate with one hand while clubbing their father over the head with the other for being so thickly kind as to marry, so wretched. The first winter I starved was over my lover and I didn’t eat but he didn’t sleep and we both emerged that spring, groggy and accidentally nourished. And alone, from trying to give each other what we thought we needed, forgetting that people are well-versed in orchestrating their own survival. Alone from the necessity that glowed above our every meal, the last lightbulb we stripped from his apartment before lying down lastly in its mealy darkness.

If we roamed each other it was like feral animals in a countryside, stealing from fields whenever the moon sat a night out. Thievery is a harvest all its own. Bounty is not what one has, but the knowledge of what one could acquire at a moments’ notice, if they found it was desperately needed. “I could come up with five hundred dollars in a day if I needed to,” my brother bragged to me once. Then, before I could say he was bragging, “Anyone could.”

Lily Eats

Following "How to eat Poorly." What I have and will always have

Taking inventory of my cabinets: Two falafel veggie burgers, two cans of wild salmon, or maybe one of tuna, a tin of baby corn--some coconut milk, some matcha powder, an entire spice cabinet and still no mustard seed, all the ingredients except cooking sherry for the soup my father used to make. I used red wine in Oregon and it was just as well except for indisputably savoring of a substitute. Roommate's stocked seven types of rice and I have wheatberries. There's a struggle to remember what Age told me to eat to ease cramps, except I know she said NO SOY, you're enough of a woman already. Lemon pepper my father bought for me because he uses it on everything in spite of my protests that if I wanted lemon and pepper I'd settle both those issues separately. I want applesauce. Bagels I feel bloated after eating but can't throw out at work night after night. Buckwheat groats I soaked and dried to make the world's blandest cereal which really only means you've got to jazz up the milk. Which is made of almonds--and almond butter, and raw almonds, and roasted, and I remember my babysitter telling me on videotape she wanted me to eat so many teddy-o's I'd turn into one. But I just watched Noah carefully and threw down my spoon when he was finished, figuring what was good enough for him was more than enough for me.

Sherry's vegetable soup and her box of zucchini and tough lettuce and apples that are either good or mealy depending (I'm convinced) on whether or not it's raining. One frozen banana. Teas, all kinds of tea, honeybush, Earl Grey, rooibos, loose and bagged mate, chai, double chai, twig, Mendocino Farmer's Market BLend with whole red clover blossoms, teas with silly names like "Evening in Missoula" when it's really just Chamomile & friends.

Precocious butternut and acorn squash. Ziploc baggies of chopped spinach and diced tomatoes I bought from a farm in Woodbine and froze for the winter. I skipped class to go there after I got so angry I ripped the handle off my car door, and for once Noah was more nervous than me about breaking a rule while I kept telling him it was okay to eat apples as he picked. Standing in piles of rotted mash that smelled like cider and I thought of a book I read as a kid. Emily feeds the rotten apples to the pigs and they've fermented and the pigs get drunk and we picked so many apples I was sure I'd make a pie or apple butter. But we just ate them out of the fridge, all three of us all week and at first it seemed gradual but really it was fast, and they were gone. The fall's been that way, till it got hot for three days and ruined things out on the counter and the fruit flies came back.

Each bag has a cup of tomatoes though, I told Sherry, so now we'll have local tomatoes all winter. The spinach is just as much as I could cram in.

Three garlic bulbs with cloves at various stages of decay. Half a bosc pear in a tupperware with no lid. A knot of ginger with suspiciously clear skin and a drawer full of onions onions carrots, in case the guinea pigs ever find their way to the fridge and must move in there. Everyone must survive anywhere, sometimes.

Since Sherry moved

It's been a lot of mornings of mixed ingredients, and incredulity. Look at what we have doubles of, I say. Nutritional yeast, vital wheat gluten? Who else? A note to tell me to eat the sushi she wrapped in toasted nori and left in tupperware. Makeshift muesli we both eat, pushing our glasses up, with raw oats and hazelnuts and cinnamon and (what we call) milk I make in the blender with almond butter when we're out of raw almonds. A friend drunkenly sleeps in his boots on our living room floor while I spill reconstituted goji berries and buckwheat groats in the kitchen. A mother who can't get going and a father who won't quit. Noah is abruptly living with us, so scarce, barely taking up half a shelf in our hall closet. Eating raw cauliflower for breakfast and bowls of brussel sprouts for dinner. A kind of vegetable-rich squatting, all three of us drinking coffee late into the night and sleeping like shaking or devastated or excited toddlers. We eat like we're anticipating something, all of a sudden three people curled into the table I used alone for so many months. We buy coconut oil with his leftover food stamps and I use it to cook or to keep my face from drying out and think of how Tita uses almond oil on her lips in Like Water for Chocolate. Bismarck and Liliana the guineas hide under their pink igloo when I walk through Sherry's bedroom. A giant bale of hay arrives in the mail, and she says, "Gotta feed the piggums," but it seems to me like the rest of us, they half-eat their food and half-inhabit it.

Adrian Eats

Don't Look a Gift Lunch in the Mouth

The last of the Harrisburg meals varied from poor British Isle fare, like Welsh Rare'bit and baked roots, to Feudal lord-sized lamb burgers from a small farm in Lane County. By that point, we were broke and dinner came down to whatever remained. On the final day of our stay, we were scraping ingredients from the corners of cabinets, half-cans of beans, sprouting potatoes, picking the scanty produce our garden yielded, including raspberries for pancakes, looking for eggs in the hen house and getting brutalized by Stew, the rooster. I woke up one morning and he was a man: innocently, I brought them out a plate of compost, and the minute I pulled back the chicken wire, Stew was lunging at me, talons first. My hair caught on the gate, and I was stuck screaming, switching him with a stick to assert my dominance. By the time Robert came to the back door, I was fleeing across the lawn, trailed by a rooster with murder in his eye. "Kick him," Robert said. "Kick him so he knows who's boss!" So I turned, the rooster at my shin, and kicked him. He fell back on his tail feathers for a moment only to jettison toward me ten-fold -- and now I'd kicked a rooster.

I got back to Brooklyn a week ago, early in the morning, and then slept for three hours. When I got up, it appeared the auto-drip had broken in my absence, so a house guest made some cowboy coffee in a sauce pan. When she poured it into mugs, the grounds floated at the top for a second but she assured me they would sink, and at worst, I'd strain a little through my teeth. We sat on my fire escape, drinking a great, deep, smooth cup of dark Italian coffee, smoking a cigarette, and I couldn't have been happier to be anywhere else. For those first few days, almost all of my friends were gathered in 260 Gates, between three apartments, and returning to Brooklyn is like returning to my wildest dreams only no dreaming. Gab and I met Matthew on the sand in Brighton Beach, where he lives now, and swam, and afterward picked out things from a Russian deli -- they're so good at boiling and stuffing! Beef and carrot dumpling, the bottom of which is soft, white chicken, cabbage rolls -- including tarragon soda, and then had a sheet picnic on the beach. It was July 2nd, but there were four firework displays going on along the bay, one right there on Coney Island.

Then I started working full time, running the little health food store I've worked at since I moved to Brooklyn, just for a week while my boss visited his family in the Dominican Republic. Early one morning, grabbing my coffee next door, I met a spry, sharp elderly Israeli man wearing Nike Dunks, a cowboy hat, and using his iPhone. He asked me if I was from Virginia, said I looked like I came from an intellectual family, that I must have known growing up that I was loved. He asked if he could bring me lunch while I worked. At noon he came in, poised but dragging his leg slightly. He set a warm paper bag on the counter and took out two sandwiches: a garlic bagel full of lamb kabob. "I get this every day," he said. "The bagel from the coffee shop, and the lamb from the Arab place. They make my favorite salad," an item that he also produced from the bag, one for each of us: tabbouleh, tomatoes, onion, green cabbage, purple cabbage, lettuce, parsley, onion, a good pickle. "Whatever you don't get from the tomato," he said, "you get from the onion. The calcium and all of that." At the end, a golden brown filo dough pastry that looked like a delicate ball of fishing wire, filled with dates, honey, and walnuts. He told me about New York real estate, about kibbutz in Israel, about Turkish coffee and his boyhood. He brought me this lunch for four days.

Lily Eats

Hot Flashbacks, early July

Age--It's February 19th--so in less than ten days, Noah will fly to San Francisco to begin his walk. So last night, we ate. In an "industrial-chic" restaurant hidden in an affluent block (just past the overpass, all of a sudden, we're wealthy). Val works there.

We started with a pint-box of different breads. A sesame white loaf, a wheat sliced a 1/2 inch thick with an almost black crust. Good, talking butter. Noah got the oyster stew--sweet oysters, leeks, and cream. No potatoes, no anxious seasoning. I ate one huge oyster from his bowl. And I with my sweet potato soup--with sage butter and cornbread croutons. We ordered our meals and our waiter had to come back and say, I'm so sorry sir, we're out of the scallops. So Noah changed his order, and by way of an apology, our waiter had someone bring us the cherry glen (is that a place, you think?) oven ricotta. A ramekin with an apple-golden raisin-onion compote, flavored with rosemary, and a browned cut of ricotta cheese on top, served with nut crisps.

Mushroom-Leek Mosaic (this is what I mean by "chic"--a meal isn't a meal, it's a mosaic)--a bit of sweet potato puree with brussels leaves, raw clover, faro, kale, garlic, and of course tender, meaty mushrooms. It wasn't MFK-style, because the vegetables weren't treated as vegetables--they were treated better than most people. And Noah's replacement meal. The oven blackened sea bass, it came to us smiling, it was like the Roald Dahl description of the perfect hunks of white fish he ate poached in Norway. Only I thought that wasn't real, thought it was like Turkish delight, and when you find out what it really tastes like, you wish you only read about it. But this. Fingerling potatoes in some tangy white sauce, pea shoots, and olives. The whole fish and his backbone, gutted and stuffed with mint sprigs and lemon wedges. He ate the whole thing, complimented the jaw meat because he'd heard it was supposed to be very good. Ate the crisp skin but left most of the skeleton organized as the day it was born.

After, I ordered a macchiato (Starbucks bastardized the word but you've been to countries that are real. Espresso with a tiny bit of steamed milk and a drop of foam on top, no bigger than a double espresso, and mine came with a heart poured into its dainty face. A dish of coarse amber sugar which of course I didn't use.) Noah got a plain espresso, which was perhaps the best I've had, in that wonderful and rare way where an espresso is unabashed, doesn't mind tasting like espresso and not sharp coffee. If you don't like it...well, you've got very little wild animal, you know? If you can't take the heat, order hot water.

No, I'm just being a prick now.

We ordered the honeyed pear for dessert (whole, stem intact, skin creased with poached sugar) which came on a bed of milk chocolate mousse, bergamot syrup and pine-nut granola. The restaurant was slowing down, and Val (who expedites the kitchen) had time to come and talk, one dish in each hand, a chocolate wafer like a flag sticking out of both. "That's right," she said. "You didn't order ice cream and I wasn't okay with that, because we have the best ice cream in the world." She explained that one was malt ice cream, or, in her words, "improved vanilla," and the other was cocoa sorbet--which Noah and I decided is easily one of the more unique things we've ever eaten. It was dark, so dark you almost couldn't follow it where it was going, icy where it could have been creamy, with an orange flavor that matched the chocolate in strength. It tasted like eating an orange and baker's chocolate in a blizzard.

So a peasants' breakfast then:

Chop some basil and scoop a little butter and throw it into a cup of water with 1/2 cup quinoa. Reduce heat once it's boiling, when it's cooked almost all the way, throw in a 1/2 cup of chickpeas. When quinoa's done, add the juice from 1/4 lemon, 1/4 or so of an avocado chopped, and a teaspoon of capers (who'da thunk? I happened to have them lying around.)

The next morning, Noah told me, "The thought of that meal will sustain me when I've run out of quinoa, and I'm eating bricks of 2300-calorie emergency rations." I gave him The Old Man and the Sea to take on his travels, a copy I actually gave him a few years ago when I used to call him "the marlin," but took it back from him when I decided to release him into the water one time or another. How good to see things floating that we thought would end up on our plates. Smiling, and not stuffed with mint.

Adrian Eats

The Lone Ranger

For almost two months I've been on a farm in rural Oregon. The night before I left Brooklyn, several friends jimmied a Bon Voyage feast, which included removing the top from my kitchen table and placing it on a smaller one in the living room, for more sitting room, cross legged. The meal in full is listed below, but does not include the detail that Lina bicycled home from Morton's Steak House at midnight with Oysters Rockafellar on a bed of rock salt, a slice of carrot cake, and a tall beer with an old man on the front.

Roasted black Brussels sprouts & turnips (broiled to a tender crisp by moi et Lily.)
Mashed potatoes w/ raw red onion and raw garlic (Robby)
Wheat penne w/ stir-fried beets, red peppers, & coconut meat (Matthew)
Sesame rolls w/ broiled tomato & mozzarella (Matthew)
Bits of duck (Jen)
Wine & whiskey

For our first week on the Harrisburg farm, Robert and I had a stove but no burners, so we cooked all of our meals on a grill outside our house. If anyone had been there to witness us, we may have looked trashy, cooking eggs in our underwear, but when a tree falls in the woods, is anyone there to point and laugh? There was also a pipe missing under the sink, so all of our water went into a bucket sitting below, and there was no shower so we washed our hair with an old wok. We bought a heap of Session Black (the cheapest of the good dark beers, and by Hood River's Full Sail) and would drink two or three at the end of the day aruond our smoldering coals. Finally, thanks to Lonnie Sexton, we got elements for the stove, and have cooked a number of reputable feasts out there in grass seed country. Below are some notable meals, which have more or less been repeated to some varying degree, denoted by GRILL or STOVE.

GRILL:

Salmon cakes w/ dill & yellow onion
Homemade guacamole

Salmon cakes on biscuits
Scrambled eggs

Pork burritos
Grilled toast

Spinach & garlic on biscuits
Roasted potatoes & yellow squash scrambled w/ eggs

STOVE:

Roasted potatoes, herbed & olive oiled
Roasted yellow squash
Leeks from the garden

Roasted garlic & olive oil w/ bread
Baked polenta w/ cayenne & cream
Roasted potatoes w/ dill
Sourdough rolls
Tangelos

Salmon cakes w/ green onions
Mango salsa & chips
Spinach salad w/ apples & walnuts, lemon, salt, pepper

White fish w/ toasted bread crumbs & lemon & garlic
Sautéed asparagus
Rogue Valley Mocha Porter

A heap of broccoli & chicken thighs

Homemade biscuits & butter
Jam

Chicken thighs smeared w/ ground mustard, dill, wine, olive oil & vinegar
Roasted potatoes w/ herbs de Provence

Pan o' nachos, w/ refried beans, black beans, onion, garlic, Irish cheddar, salsa
Bok choy salad

　

Hot Flashes

1. Brooklyn

"It's barbaric to put just soy sauce on something," Dave explained. He had driven to Baltimore to make the trip back up to New York with me--everyone was leaving and we begged off of me taking a bus. "I have this idea that I can cook, when really I just put soy sauce and whatever vegetable I have and tofu in a container and stir it all." He said you have to balance the soy sauce with something to make it a decent thing to eat, and that's what he had done, and I can't remember what he used anymore. We leaned back into our seats, at a rest stop somewhere along the turnpike, and agreed about broccoli rabe. His car reminded me of one my father used to drive, and by the time we got to Bed Stuy, we were exhausted but not tired.

2. No Shit Bonnaroo

In Tennessee I ate things I couldn't digest, which is a certain breed of strategy. Lots of peanut butter on lots of bread and Jesse told me to eat with my face to the plate if it was too messy with my hand. "Here," he demonstrated, "I mean, it's not the same as eating with one hand and wiping your ass with the other." Fifteen of us stopped to eat together, still hours from Manchester, and ordered of Canadian bacon and our waitress's name was Susie Q. Dustin leaned in quietly and told Alix and I, "Until we get back to Baltimore--no one's Jewish and no one's gay."

Susie Q. No joke. We all squeezed each others' legs under the table but looked straight from the waist up, and drove through Chattanooga side-swiping the air as it grew hotter.

3. Beyond Eugene

Noah had a third a jar of peanut butter left, so he figured he better not buy anymore. For my first meal in Oregon, we stopped at The Rodeo in Junction City, ate sandwiches made indisputably, almost obscenely, of meat, threw our peanut shells gleefully to the ground. We caught a ride to Harrisburg just by asking someone directions. "Harley like the motorcycle," he introduced himself, talked about the eleven hours he'd been driving alone and the skate park nearby and how they don't even bother with a school field trip to the Shakesepare festival in his hometown, because everyone goes during the summer, anyway. What makes a small town tick.

In the week prior to our visit alone, the only two bars in Harrisburg went out of business. "It says something when the bars shut down," Adrian said ominously. She read my tarot cards on one of the first nights of my visit, and Noah's cards one of the last. His reading was sandwiched between two feasts: Age's dinner was salmon cooked with dill, onions baked with cheese and butter, asparagus to a T, a salad I assembled and a dressing Noah obsessed over. Our breakfast was easy-bake biscuits that I worried would stick together, and Noah manning three burners like a navy captain. Cursing, the bacon too long for the pan, peppers-and-onions done long before the starchy potatoes softened, eggs with cheddar and tomatoes, everything done at roughly the same time . "It's like the rest of my life," Noah said of his tarot. "Either you'll crash and burn into absolute oblivion--or everything will go really well."