Alone in the Kitchen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Tagged as: Amanda Hesser, Fried chicken, Nathalie Dupree, Scott Peacock, Virginia Willis