What to Eat When You’re Catatonic

 

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

Usually.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kind food is what you want, preferably made by someone who loves you.

Assuming you can’t get your hands on Brandon Pettit’s pizza.

 

Tagged as: Brandon Pettit, Delancey, Molly Wizenberg, Nettletown, pizza, Sitka & Spruce, The Walrus & The Carpenter