Takes a fool to lose twice and start all over again

In August of 2008, I flew to Guadalajara to meet my husband, who had gone down a week earlier to hang his work for a group show at the Ex Convento del Carmen. It had been curated by two Mexican artist friends, both of them named Carlos, who had a loft in the building where Jon had his studio. All the artists in the show were from Brooklyn, a South Williamsburg collective the Carloses had dubbed the Leonard Codex. Guadalajarans evidently take art very seriously; hundreds of people, maybe even a thousand, came to the opening. Afterwards, a group of us went out to a Cuban dance hall to eat roast pork with rice and beans and drink mescal and dance. Jon and I sat alone together at a table and leaned our heads against each other, smiling at everyone. “You two are so in love,” said the smart, serious Dutch girlfriend of one of the Carloses. I felt a lurch in my chest.

The next night, Paco, the gallery director, invited a few of us over to his beautiful, strange, dark house, where every wall and surface was crammed full of small paintings and artifacts and his own work, an assemblage of eerie, mechanical, Victorian wind-up toys and boxes. Three guinea pigs and two reeking, semi-savage dogs had the run of the place. Paco played 1950s Mexican cha-cha on his old record player, and we all drank large quantities of tequila and danced. Jon and I sat close together on the couch, and then we danced together, by all appearances a devoted, affectionate couple.

Very late, all of us drunk and starving, we went out to a restaurant one of the Carloses knew would still be open. At his urging, we all ordered the house specialty, pork-skin and pig-feet tostadas. They were borderline-vile if I thought about it, and perfectly edible if I didn’t. My mind went back and forth as I ate them. I awoke at dawn, savagely thirsty, and drank all the bottled water we had in our hotel room.

That morning, Jon and I rented a car and drove to Cuyutlan, a tiny town on the Pacific coast, for two nights. It was the off-season. We were the only guests in the huge, crumbling, formerly super-mod hotel that must have been very swank about forty years earlier. It was like “The Shining” set in Brasilia, a long-gone architect’s modernistic sci-fi dream, rooms built around the inner wall of a huge curving shell, the lobby set within, with internal free-standing rooms, the now-closed bar, restaurant, and dance floor as grand as an MGM movie-musical set, now all falling to pieces, with chunks of concrete breaking off and plaster sconces detaching from walls. We were given the room on the top floor at the very end; we perched up in the furthermost corner in a little box with a tiled balcony that looked out over the black volcanic beach and the ocean. Except for the two of us, all seventy or so rooms were empty.

The main street felt like a movie set, too, waiters standing idle, music playing futilely, a hot ocean wind blowing across empty chairs and tables, ruffling placemats and napkins. Everyone eyed us with hopeful yearning as we strolled up and down the street, studying menus and consulting each other. We finally chose the restaurant directly across from our hotel. As we seated ourselves in the centermost of the empty tables, we could feel a collective sigh around us. Our waitress was a young girl, all merry smiles at having been the lucky winner of our business. She encouraged us to order the fish special, and so, of course, we did. We were served plates of well-fried whole sea fish with heads and tails intact, alongside yellow rice and a limp salad.

Although we had been passionate fellow eaters from our first date all through our fourteen years together, neither of us had much appetite. We didn’t discuss the fact that we both knew that I was leaving the marriage. We didn’t talk about the terrible summer we’d just had, during which Jon had worked night and day in his studio to get his photographs ready for the show, and I had gone very obviously insane with grief, longing, and panic. We sat over our dinners, trying to eat our fish, making quiet, grim jokes about being the only game in town.

After dinner, we crossed the street for a drink, because there seemed to be another customer in the outdoor bar attached to the hotel, a man sitting alone, hunched over his laptop, wearing headphones. He turned out to be the owner and local expat; he was American, and he had married the daughter of the previous owner. He was a chain-smoking, shambolic, entertaining, obsessive music buff who mixed drink after drink for us – Herradura mixed with a weirdly delicious neon-blue soda – while he played us choice, rare old R&B and jazz he’d downloaded into his computer. At about 2 in the morning, we got up to go. He begged us not to leave. There were so many more songs he wanted to play for us.

We crossed the street to our dark, cavernous, vast hotel and climbed the stairs to our room. Its tiled floor was slick with condensation, and the air was stuffy and humid. We opened the window and went to bed. I lay awake for a long time, listening to the wind blowing steadily off the ocean.

Piensa que tal vez manana yo ya estare lejos, muy lejos de aqui

In 2007, my then-husband and I went down to Mexico City for our friend Janice’s show in an art gallery there. We stayed at our usual place, the Hotel Isabel in the historical center, a colonial hotel built around a balustraded staircase and three-story courtyard with a huge skylight. The Isabel has enormous, cheap rooms furnished in basic-sixties drab with floor-to-ceiling casement windows that open onto the loud, heavily trafficked, cobblestoned streets.

There’s a bar downstairs off the entryway, a long dim room with wobbly tables and a TV. We drank our tequila there without sangrita because, instead of mixing tomato juice with spices and fruit juices, they poured a premade mix out of an industrial-sized jug that looked, and tasted, like neon cough syrup. Off the Isabel’s ornate lobby, with its leather brass-studded couches, oil paintings, stained glass, and giant fish tank, was a small restaurant where we went every morning for chilaquiles – that insanely delicious dish of fried tortilla strips simmered in salsa verde with scrambled eggs, pulled chicken, queso blanco, and refried beans.

The gallery showing Janice’s work, La Refaccionaria, was on the ground floor of a 17^th century building in a narrow mews. Janice was showing a series of deliberately ugly-beautiful life-sized latex heads that bristled with knobs, wens, moles with sprouting hair, squinty heavy-lidded eyes, and thick lips, all the things plastic surgeons are paid a lot of money to change or eradicate. She had created an array of these grotesque, disembodied, colorful, funny, strangely gorgeous heads on pedestals. A crowd of people, most of them old friends, since the art world of Mexico City is a tightly-knit community, stood around drinking tequila out of small plastic cups and smoking and yakking.

Afterwards, a group of about fifteen of us took taxis to Covadonga, an old traditional dominos hall in Roma where men in their shirtsleeves sit tersely around small tables and keep score for decades on end, or so it seems. The art world of Mexico City seems to like to descend there after openings, for reasons possibly having to do with the historical clack of dominoes. We ordered plates of Spanish food, their specialty — fabada asturiana, a stew of fava beans and pork; potato, onion, and egg tortilla; and pulpos a la gallega, octopus with paprika, garlic and coarse salt.

The day after the opening, we met Janice in the Zocalo, and the three of us went into the Catedral Metropolitana de la Asunción de María, the biggest cathedral in the Americas. We wandered around the aisles and chapels and naves, gawping at the shadowy vastness of the place, struck through with shafts of light from faraway high-up windows. Near the front, we peered through velvet ropes at the enormous plumb bob hanging straight down from the ceiling, tracing elliptical lines in a layer of sand to show the movement of the stone floor, settling through the years, sinking and shifting with each earthquake and caving-in of the land it’s built on, a former Aztec sacred site.

We left the cathedral and bought plastic sacks of tepache, fermented pineapple juice with a chunk of ice, with straws sticking out of them, from a street vendor. Although we’d been to Mexico City several times before, it was fun being there with Janice. She’s Eastern European Jewish, born and raised in New York City, but she looks very much like a Mexican of Spanish descent – she is tiny, with hazel almond-shaped eyes and long thick wavy black hair and pale, creamy skin. She lived in Mexico City for 7 years, in the 1980s and early 90s, and she speaks Mexican Spanish fluently. Walking with her through the streets of D.F., we felt as if we were in the hands of a native guide.

She led us from the Zocalo over to the famous Bar l’Opera, with its bullet hole in the ceiling, legendarily made by Pancho Villa, galloping through on a horse. While we sat at a small wooden table in the bar area with a couple of rounds of tequila, Janice ordered caracoles en chipotle. The snails were small and garlicky and surprisingly tender. We sucked them out of their curly little shells and watched the afternoon crowd come and go and talk and smoke and drink and eat under the high, gilded, baroque ceiling, all of us reflected in the old beveled mirrors.

Back in New York, about a year later, after Jon and I had split up, Janice and I found ourselves single and lonely at the same time. We cooked for each other or went out for dinner at least once a week. She can’t eat gluten, like me, and, to make things even more complicated, she also can’t eat dairy, so our meals were of necessity limited and proscribed. When we went out together, we felt like special-needs, high-maintenance nudniks, interrogating the waiters, deliberating over menus, sometimes even sending things back, but when we cooked for each other, our meals were relaxed and luxurious-feeling.

I loved going over to her top-floor walk-up apartment in the East Village and sitting at her  wooden table, drinking wine and talking, while she bustled around. She put on Mexican music and set out bowls of freshly roasted pepitas with sea salt, rice crackers with rich goat cheese, pulpo in garlic sauce, and red pepper-spiced green olives. While she cooked, we drank the wine I’d brought, and then we opened another bottle to drink with dinner.

Dinner could have been pescado en achiote, fish baked in banana leaves, or fish and scallop ceviche, or pollo pipian, chicken in pumpkin sauce with green chili. Whatever it was, it was always so perfectly cooked and savory and fresh and interesting that we were temporarily, happily unaware of our irritating dietary restrictions. We dined together like normal people, like people who could eat whatever the hell we wanted.

Fish in Banana Leaves

For 2 people, buy one pound (2 good-sized filets) of very fresh, firm ocean fish, such as red snapper or grouper.

Peel a head of garlic. Blend the cloves in the blender with enough olive oil, about ¼ cup, to make a thick paste.

Rub this olive oil/garlic mixture into the fish on both sides and then cover the fish with dried leaves of the Mexican herb hoja santa (available at Mexican specialty stores).

Wrap each filet in a banana leaf and tie into a packet with cooking twine. Bake the packets on a cookie sheet in a preheated 350 degree oven until done, about 20 minutes.

Serve with basmati rice with roasted corn, and kale cooked in olive oil with garlic.

For dessert, serve chocolate or coconut goat’s milk ice cream and glasses of a light dessert wine like vin santo.

Yo soy como el chile verde, picante pero sabroso

Tacos are some of the most festively social foods I know of. My friend Janice likes to take groups of friends on a culinary field trip to Roosevelt Avenue in Queens to dine al fresco, as they say, at the taco trucks at 74^th Street, which she has always claimed have the best tacos in New York City. She lived in Mexico City for many years and is a true traditional Mexican cook, so I take her word in all such matters. (She also makes amazing tacos, most notably squid.)

Those Queens taco trucks rival the best taco stands I’ve been to in Mexico City and Guadalajara. The greasy, spicy chorizo tacos from the stand just outside the Cantina Tlaquepaque in D.F.’s Colonia Centro are addictive, but if you want variety, you can get just about anything else in a pair of warm tortillas, including eye, tongue, cochinita pibil, and carna asada, which sizzle in batches on a hot oily metal drum and are scooped into double tortillas and handed to you on a paper plate. You can stand at a little counter on the sidewalk, just like at the taco trucks, helping yourself to the pickled jalapenos, radishes, crema, cilantro, and chopped onion, or you can take your food into the cantina, sit at a table, order glasses of tequila with sangrita, and listen to the jukebox play loud Mexican pop while everyone in the place sings along.

The other afternoon here in Portland, Maine in the middle of this weirdly warm, weirdly sunny winter, I was grocery shopping in Hannaford’s with Brendan, roaming around with a cart and no particular list or plan, as usual. Magpie-like, I found myself reaching for glossy dark-green jalapenos, an orangey-gold mango, plush-red tomatoes, spring-green cilantro, neon limes, and a pepper that was the lurid, unreal red of cherry candy. It dawned on me that I was planning to make shrimp tacos with mango-avocado salsa.

At home, I diced 2 tomatoes, a red onion, 3 jalapenos, 4 garlic cloves, a ripe mango, a ripe avocado, and a red pepper, then added some salt and black pepper and an entire bunch of minced cilantro. I squeezed 2 juicy limes over it all and stirred and let it sit. Then, after consulting Janice, who recommended garlic and red pepper flakes, I minced a whole head of garlic and put it into a glass bowl with lots of fresh lime juice, lots of red pepper flakes, and another entire bunch of minced cilantro. While a pound of large raw peeled shrimp marinated in this, I simmered two well-rinsed cans of black beans with garlic, jalapeno, red onion, and chopped tomatoes, cumin, bay leaves, oregano, and paprika, and just enough vegetable broth to bind it all. Then I ran the shrimp under the broiler until they were pink and cooked through. We scooped them into warm corn tortillas with chopped iceberg lettuce and the mango salsa and devoured them with a side of black beans.

Last night, to use up the leftover tortillas, salsa, and beans, and inspired by my friend Rosie’s recipe, I bought a pound of fresh local haddock, 2 big filets, and marinated them in the adobo sauce from a can of chipotles and then dredged them in cornmeal. I panfried them till they were just cooked through. Rosie likes to flash-pickle jalapenos and radishes and whizz more adobo in the blender with crema for a sauce, but even without these accoutrements, the tacos were fantastic. We ate every scrap of everything on blue plastic plates in the still-unfinished house, sitting on mismatched old chairs at a small table by the fireplace in the box-filled living room. We drank red wine out of some small blue-patterned mugs I bought years ago in the covered market in Mexico City.

Taco-Stand Chicken Tacos

This is one of my few bona-fide published recipes. It appeared in a collection of various writers’ favorite recipes called Table of Contents. It’s adapted from a recipe I found online; I made it for a guy who was coming over to interview me about my novel, Trouble, which takes place partially in Mexico City, so I figured I should serve a Mexican lunch. He came in, saw the table set with plates and wine and napkins, glanced at the pot of stewing chicken, and announced that he had done some online research and had learned that I like to cook for my interviewers. “I think it’s a gimmick,” he said, “and I’m not impressed.” I laughed, said nothing, and served him these tacos. After hoovering up five or six of them with all the trimmings, he took it back in no uncertain terms.

For the filling

3 pounds bone-in chicken breasts (3-4 breasts)

2 jalapeño chiles
2 cups finely chopped tomato (fresh or canned)
1/3 cup finely chopped onion
3 tablespoons minced garlic
3 tablespoons chopped cilantro leaves
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon pepper
18 corn tortillas

For the garnish

Sliced avocado

Minced red onion

Chopped cilantro leaves

Green and red salsas

Sour cream

Lime wedges

Pickled jalapeño chiles

Thinly sliced radishes, fresh or pickled

To make the filling:  Place the chicken breasts in a large pot and cover with at least 1½ inches of water.  Bring to a boil and cook, uncovered, for 30-40 minutes. Use a large metal spoon to occasionally skim the scum that rises to the surface. Remove chicken and reserve 1½ cups of chicken broth. When chicken is cool enough to handle, shred the chicken into bite-size pieces, discarding the skin and bones. You should have about 5 cups of shredded chicken.

If you have a gas range, roast the chiles over an open flame until tender and blackened on all sides. If you have an electric range, place the chiles on a broiling tray covered with foil and broil, turning occasionally, until skin is blackened and blistered on all sides. Place chiles in a small bowl, cover tightly with plastic wrap, and let sit for 5 minutes. Remove stems and peel off blackened skin.

Place reserved broth, tomatoes, onion, garlic, cilantro, chiles, salt, and pepper in a blender and puree for 1-3 minutes (depending on the efficiency of your blender.)

Place shredded chicken and puréed sauce in a skillet or saucepan and simmer for 45 minutes on low heat, stirring occasionally.

Preheat oven to 300°F. Warm the tortillas: Place tortillas on two baking sheets (they can overlap slightly) and bake until tortillas are soft and pliable, about 4 minutes.

To assemble the tacos:  Place a few tablespoons of chicken mixture into a warm corn tortilla, and garnish with avocado, red onion, cilantro, green and red salsas, sour cream, lime wedges, pickled jalapeños, and radishes.

Wherever he laid his hat was his home

Today is my father’s 88^th birthday. I haven’t seen him in nearly a quarter of a century, but I always think of him on February 15^th and wonder, for a moment, how he’s doing, how his health is, whether he’s still compos mentis, by which I mean as compos mentis as he ever was, which isn’t very. I’m betting he is, since my family on both sides keeps every one of their marbles till they die — I don’t know of a single relative who’s gone even slightly gaga. My father’s mother died of what was essentially old age, I think, in the 1980s. My father’s father died in the late 1960s in Hawaii, the story goes, when he choked to death on a chicken bone, or maybe it was a fishbone.

Obviously, I don’t have much of a clue about my father or his family. I know that his two sisters, my aunts, are both alive and well in their eighties, and I know I have a lot of cousins somewhere. But, since my father ditched every single person he’s related to decades ago and resolutely went on with his life, free of his mother, two ex-wives, two sisters, and five daughters (so many women; the mere thought of us must have suffocated him), that whole side of my bloodline is shrouded in a strange fog. My half-sister Thea has shed some light on a few things, because she sort of knows our aunts, and she grew up on the same Minnesota lake where her mother and our father grew up – but our paternal relatives are essentially a mystery to her, too.

It’s always interested me that my father’s birthday falls on the day after St. Valentine’s Day, a holiday that’s given me both romantic consternation and romantic contentment. There’s the day of love, and then there’s Ralph’s birthday, hard on its heels, a yearly reminder of my father’s charismatic, scary, diffident presence in the family until I was ten, and then his abrupt, eternal absence from the rest of my life. It’s hard not to draw some sort of connection.

Yesterday at noon or so, Brendan and Dingo and I took a long walk along the road, down the path through the woods to the lake, and then out onto the frozen lake and back toward home. The ice seemed thick enough, but we didn’t know for absolutely sure. It made strange whale-groaning sounds far out on the lake and at one point it cracked thickly under Brendan’s feet. We were a little spooked, but not enough to go sensibly back to shore. We continued out over an inlet. Dingo, highly intelligent as always, walked far enough away from us, closer to shore, so that if we fell in, he’d be safe. We humans burbled along like daring eight-year-olds, shoe-skating and light-stepping and whooping with suspense. Out there on the flat, frozen surface, we had a dazzling view of the White Mountains just to the north. It was a clear day, and the far-off, snow-covered, looming Mt. Washington seemed close enough to walk to.

After about a mile, we made it safely to the dock we usually jump off to swim in the summertime. We climbed up through the woods and came home along the road. In the warm house, we shed our coats, out of breath. I made us buckwheat blini with fine black mild caviar and sour cream. We drank cava with a dash of orange juice and listened to Antonio Carlos Jobim, the most innocuous, elevator-music-like bossa nova in the world; we laughed at ourselves for liking it. Dingo scored a piece of plain blini. Although rationally we knew the danger was minimal, we were giddy from the relief of not falling into the freezing-cold lake.

We ate and drank all day long. Brendan shucked eighteen very fresh raw Maine oysters, which we ate on ice by the fire with shallots in white wine vinegar and a sauce of lemon juice, ketchup, Worcestershire sauce, Tabasco, and horseradish.

I dismantled 2 small endives and, on twinned pairs of the crisp, subtly bitter leaves, I slathered sour cream and loaded each with capers, fresh basil, and oil-packed artichoke hearts. We ate the whole plateful with a fresh batch of blini with slabs of two rather spectacular mild cheeses and some seedless purple grapes.

Then I steamed a bunch of slender asparagus spears and served them with a fantastic dipping sauce made of the rest of the white wine vinegar-and-shallots mixed with mayonnaise and Dijon mustard. After this, I steamed eighteen clams, which we dipped in hot butter.

Later, I melted a bar of very dark chocolate in a double boiler while I cut the stems off some eerily ripe, preternaturally juicy California strawberries. I dipped ten of them in the chocolate and put them into the fridge on waxed paper. While they set, we revisited the blini and cheese course.

And then, with small glasses of Marques de Caceres, to finish this day of insanely luxurious, happy eating, we ate the chocolate-dipped strawberries.

I woke up this morning with a well-fed glow, aware that it was my father’s birthday. I thought about all four of my brothers-in-law, my sisters’ husbands, all of them strong-minded, intelligent, interesting, caring, handsome men – just like my ex-husband, just like Brendan. Good for us, all five of his daughters. And happy birthday, Ralph.

Is your figure less than Greek?

I associate St. Valentine’s Day with food so profoundly that I keep accidentally calling it Thanksgiving. This wasn’t always the case. As a kid, I loved making Valentines with red construction paper and paper lace. The most elaborate one I made was always, of course, for my mother, the person who inspired my greatest passion until the age of somewhere between ten and eleven. She was guaranteed to love me back a thousandfold. I didn’t know the meaning of the word “heartache” back then.

Then we started using the pre-printed cardboard Valentines with catchy messages, glitter, and cute cartoon drawings. I loved the classroom exchange of cards in little paper envelopes; everyone had to give one to everyone else, so there were no hurt feelings. I was thrilled and bewitched by the one I got from my fifth-grade crush, Tommy Bello – he gave me the special card that came in every box of prefab Valentines, the one that actually said, “I like you” – a prepubescent declaration of love. (After that, we “went out,” an arrangement achieved entirely through intermediaries. We never spoke a word to each other, but everyone in our class knew we were in love.)

Those were simple days. Then came puberty, high school, romantic awkwardness, and the end of the magic of St. Valentine’s Day for me. I never had a proper boyfriend in high school. What I had were painful, unrequited crushes on both sides. I couldn’t talk to boys I liked, because I was too shy, and I couldn’t deal with boys who liked me, because I couldn’t take them seriously. My adolescence was, like many people’s, hormonal agony. St. Valentine’s Day came around every year and just made it all feel worse. And then my twenties brought a series of tortured, protracted so-called relationships; did we even celebrate St. Valentine’s Day, me and any of those guys? I don’t know, maybe, but if we did, I don’t remember.

I got married in my thirties and stayed married till my mid-forties. Like many couples, my husband and I had our St. Valentine’s Day traditions, those cozy, unquestioned romantic rituals that remove all doubt and anxiety from the holiday and cause single people to call married couples “smug.” In any case, we celebrated it every year with a memorable meal at a restaurant where we didn’t usually go. That was the beginning of my association of the day with food — not the gluttonous, stupefying turkey and mashed potatoes and sides of that other food-related holiday, but light, buoying, sensual delicacies, raw oysters being the most obvious of these.

Then my marriage ended, as some marriages do. When the next St. Valentine’s Day came, I had no one to celebrate it with. I reflected instead on the deeply unsettling weirdness of a day that fetishizes romantic love and therefore makes brutally clear, for many people, the lack of it. To return to the Thanksgiving analogy, people who can’t afford turkeys don’t rejoice and give thanks as the entire country tucks into gargantuan roasted stuffed birds. They feel even hungrier. But luckily, there are charities and churches that make a point of serving a Thanksgiving meal to poor people, as many of them as possible, so they don’t feel their lack so starkly. Where are the St. Valentine’s Day charities, the ones who provide the uncoupled with temporary holiday love? They don’t exist, of course. Romantic love is a slippery, inexact commodity. And it’s not just single people who feel it. I know from experience that people in relationships and marriages can be just as lonely.

It’s a hell of a day, a bitch of a day, and we should probably abolish it for everyone over the age of eleven.

But apparently that’s not going to happen, so instead, maybe we should shift our expectations and associations from love to food. You can’t buy love, you can’t make love appear, and when it does, you can’t always enjoy it. Love comes and goes and waxes and wanes and vanishes and changes color. The vicissitudes of romance, to make things worse, don’t calibrate themselves to surge in the middle of February – on the contrary, at this point in the winter, most of us are at our lowest ebb, and all we really want to do is stay on the couch in our elastic-waist pajamas watching movies and eating comfort food. It’s the middle of freaking winter. Flowers aren’t in season, it’s frankly too cold for champagne, and plunging necklines, spaghetti straps, and short skirts are madness in this weather. It’s a bad day for romance, all around.

If this were a food-related holiday, on the other hand, we could all look forward to it collectively, as an anticipated, warm, easy pleasure. “What are you cooking for St. Valentine’s?” we could ask one another, or, “Want to go out with us for Valentine’s dinner?” This strikes me as a sensible way of circumventing much of the angst and irritation this day inspires.

St. Valentine’s Day is, of course, already associated with food that warms the loins — ridiculously out-of-season, decadent delicacies with aphrodisiacal properties. That’s fine and wonderful, of course, but such a meal can also charge the cells with renewed life and provide fuel to get through the rest of the winter. And a social, communal, shared sensuality can be so much more exciting than a narrow, proscriptive mandate to be happy with only one other person.

Groups of people should dine lavishly and convivially together on St. Valentine’s Day the way they do on Thanksgiving. Single people wouldn’t have to feel as if they were missing out on “coupled bliss.” Unhappy couples could indulge in a day of social bacchanalia. Happy couples could widen their circle, which is always a good thing. Instead of reverting every year to the timeworn offerings between twosomes of lingerie, roses, and chocolates, making many people feel pressured, inadequate, or left out, it strikes me that it would be so much more fun if everyone just gathered around tables to flirt and make toasts and enjoy one another’s company and feast all together on a traditional St. Valentine’s Day dinner: raw oysters, asparagus, artichokes, fresh figs, chocolate-dipped strawberries… and then have a big, old-fashioned orgy. Just kidding, I think.

Buckwheat Blini with Sour Cream and Caviar

Well, all of this is lovely in theory, but Brendan and I happen to be alone in the farmhouse today, so there will be no well-populated Valentine’s party around here. Right now, we’re sitting at the table in warm bathrobes, drinking coffee and listening to Bach piano concertos and looking out at snowy fields and bare mountains. Of course, we plan to cook and eat and drink all day, because this is the other Thanksgiving. We’ll drink toasts to all the people we love, the ones we wish were sitting at the table with us.

To 2/3 cup buckwheat flour and 1/3 cup gluten-free baking flour, add ¼ teaspoon baking soda, 1 tsp sugar, and 1 tsp salt. Stir. Make a well in the middle and add 3/4 cup buttermilk and 2 egg yolks and mix till smooth. Beat 2 egg whites till stiff and fold them in. Stir in 1 T melted butter.

Drop spoonfuls of batter into very hot butter in a skillet to make small, thick, round pancakes. As soon as you drop the dough in, turn the heat down to low and let the pancakes sit until they bubble on top, then turn and cook them till browned. Slather a thick layer of sour cream on top and garnish with plenty of caviar and chopped chives.

I eat antipasto twice just because she is so nice

Just over two weeks ago, I was cutting some fresh ginger root for stir-fried rice noodles with vegetables. I had a good fast hard chop going with the big, sharp chopping knife, vigorous, since ginger is stringy and tough. I was working my way through what’s known in recipe-speak as a “thumb-sized piece” when I hit something else, something the knife didn’t resist at all. It was an immediate transition of my attention. In a lightning-split second, I leapt from daydreamy cooking to animal alertness.

Fingertips are much softer than ginger, it turns out. I took stock of the damage: the knife had gone in sideways, making a nice fat beret-shaped flap of the soft, fleshy pad of the tallest finger on my left hand, missing the bone entirely, cutting up through the top of the nail but stopping short of complete severance. I ran the fingertip under cold water, wadded up some paper towels, compressed them around my finger, and stuck my arm in the air. Brendan brought Bacitracin and Band-Aids, and, when the bleeding seemed to be under control, we swaddled the finger with a good dollop of antibiotic ointment.

There was some speculative discussion about the emergency room, but then Brendan googled the matter and found a clever diagram with dotted lines bisecting a hypothetical digit, showing which fingertip cuts needed stitches and which didn’t. Mine fell just on the side of staying home, which was a relief; the roads were icy, the E.R. is expensive, and we were hungry. So we finished cooking the meal (Brendan did, actually), which tasted even better with the accompanying gruesome jokes about added blood protein and the relative tastiness of human flesh versus more traditional Chinese ingredients, such as, say, cat.

Less than 3 weeks later, things are pretty well back to normal except for a gash in my fingernail and a swollen tenderness on the freshly-healed fingerpad. My mishap was far tamer than the famously awesome injuries restaurant chefs seem to undergo on a nightly basis. If the harrowing accounts of war-zone-like, flaming, minuscule-hellhole kitchens are to be believed, and I don’t see why they’re not, those macho, badass pros in toques have so much scar tissue on their hands from hot grease burns, they can pull a molten pan from a flaming salamander without a mitt and not feel it. They’ve all cut various fingers off at the knuckle, splashed boiling soup into their own eyes, caught their hair on fire, punctured themselves on meathooks, and gouged holes in their own chests with oyster shuckers. Maybe I exaggerate, but not, as far as I can tell, by much. Professional cooking is not for the weak.

As one of the weak, I have to confess that this unexpected injury of mine, paltry and humdrum though it may have been, served as a useful wake-up call.  Since almost cutting my fingertip off, I have cooked with the animal alertness I was shocked into when it happened. Here in this sweet, cozy farmhouse kitchen with its huge butcher block cutting surface, handy old knives, excellent pot collection, and simple but effective propane stove, I’ve been approaching cooking lately with a newfound respect and caution and vigilance. These qualities aren’t prominently featured in my character, to put it mildly; I tend to be slapdash and devil-may-care and impatient in all things. But these days, I chop and grate and slice with my ears pricked for predators, stepping softly, sniffing the air.

Pasta alla Norma

This is a southern Italian dish, one of the most ubiquitous in Sicily. It was named after Bellini’s insanely popular 19^th century opera, Norma. It works with any kind of pasta, but the best one to use is rigatoni, says Brendan, who taught himself to make it after a trip to Sicily, when he became addicted to it.

Last night, he cheffed up a batch. It was rich and hearty and impossible to eat slowly; the warm, cheesy, eggplant sauce-coated noodles slide down the gullet and immediately demand  to be followed by more. We devoured big bowlfuls while we watched the weird, hypersensationalized spectacle of the Grammys, sitting by the fired-up Jotul woodstove, almost too hot in bare feet and short sleeves even though outside it was below zero.

Chop up three Italian eggplants, the smaller ones, into rough 1-inch squares. Fry them in olive oil with salt, pepper, and crushed red pepper until they’re soft, 10-15 minutes. Put them aside in a covered bowl.

Heat salted, oiled water for pasta.

To the same pan the eggplant was fried in, add a little more oil, and in it, sauté a small finely-chopped onion and 2-3 finely diced garlic cloves until soft. Add a box of Pomi strained tomatoes and cook, bubbling, until the sauce is thick and savory, about 15 minutes. Add the eggplant and stir and simmer on low heat. Add salt and pepper if necessary.

The pasta water should be boiling by now, so throw in a pound of rigatoni and cook according to directions, generally 12 minutes. (We use a very good gluten-free variety called Pasta D’oro, made by Sam Mills.)

Roughly chop a large handful of fresh basil. Roughly grate 3/4 cup of ricotta salata cheese – it’s a soft, salty peasanty cheese that’s completely different from regular ricotta – a southern Italian cousin of sweet ricotta. (Watch your fingers on the grater.)

Strain the pasta well and dump it into a large serving bowl. Stir in the tomato-eggplant sauce, the chopped basil, and most of the ricotta salata. Serve with the rest of the cheese with a good Nero d’Avola. It’s a meal in itself, but if you want to finish it with a crisp salad, no one would blame you.

Mes parents ils sont presque tous morts

I can’t stop thinking about New Orleans. Last fall, Brendan and I went down to Louisiana to meet my half-sister Thea and her husband Pop, a singing cowboy, at the Blackpot Festival in Lafayette. Beforehand, we spent three days in New Orleans. We stayed at the Maison de Macarty, a fantastically restored mansion on Burgundy Street in the Bywater. We had the front top room with a four-poster bed and shuttered French doors that opened out to a huge veranda.

The ghost in our room was an old horndog who spied on us from the ceiling fan above the bed, making it chug slowly to let us know he was watching, which made me laugh out loud. He toyed with my Internet connection – not Brendan’s, that worked perfectly the whole time. Mine sparked in and out, mostly out, according to his otherworldly whims.

When we told this to Will Poole, the proprietor, over breakfast, he looked amused and chilled, both at once. “He always does that,” he said. “He loves to play with electronics.” He showed us a photograph he’d taken of a blur of strange light in the mirror of the wardrobe in our room. “That’s him. He’s the former owner. I think he liked our renovation so much, he stayed on. He’s a happy ghost.”

Breakfasts at Maison de Macarty were uniformly spectacular. Feeling, as I always do, like a high-strung neurotic, I had requested gluten-free food. They delivered. During our stay there, we got eggs baked into rings of soppresata on spinach; custardy, savory cornmeal mini-quiches; and a densely packed frittata, all of which we gobbled up, along with the beautiful fruit salads alongside, despite the fact that we were eating lavishly all over town, all day long.

Alarmingly shortly after breakfast one day, we hiked over to the Joint and got heaps of smoked meat so tender it melted on the plate, with perfect coleslaw. We ate our haul at Bacchanal, a sweet, grungy fenced garden near the levee in back of a wine store. We sat at a wrought-iron table under a spreading tree drinking cold Provencal rose and eating barbecue until it was time for a nap and therefore a visit from the Peeping Tom ghost.

We splurged on a dinner one night at the Commander’s Palace in the Garden District. A valet whisked away our econo-crap rent-a-car. We entered under an awning, and it took a team of uniformed waitstaff just to seat us. We got sazeracs to start and then a bottle of white Bordeaux and then, with dessert, tawny port. The place was so perfectly Rat Pack circa 1969, we kept expecting Frank Sinatra to walk in, or at least a low-level mobster in a shiny suit, or at least a crestfallen gambler with a black eye. We gasped over the shrimp and tasso with henican, far and away the highlight of our very expensive, very memorable meal, described evocatively on the menu as “wild Louisiana white shrimp stuffed with spicy Cajun ham, Crystal hot sauce beurre blanc, pickled okra and five pepper jelly.”

By the time we picked Pop and Thea up at the Baton Rouge airport, we were in excellent gustatory condition for the Blackpot. Pop and Thea are expert Cajun dancers, thanks to their friend Millie, who moved north and brought all things Cajun to St. Paul, Minnesota before moving back down to Lafayette. We made our preparations: Pop and Thea taught us to two-step at a barn dance in Eunice the night before the festival, and the next morning, on our way there, we outfitted the car with a cooler, many bottles of wine, some whiskey, bags of ice, potato chips, and plastic cups. We dubbed it the Bar Car, and then we were ready.

The Blackpot is an annual music festival and cookoff at the Acadian Village in Lafayette, a museumlike cluster of restored 19th-century cabins on a bayou. A big stage and bouncy dance floor, with food stands and a bar, are set up behind the village for the bigger bands, with solo performances in the old, light-filled chapel. The cookoff itself takes place in the field.

It all passed in a blur, as these things do. We waltzed and two-stepped until we forgot we didn’t know how. The music was perplexingly wonderful. The musicians, most of them, were young, good-looking as movie stars, shockingly talented — native kids who’d taken to the traditional old ways and revitalized the music – most notably, the Pine Leaf Boys and the Red Stick Ramblers.  We managed to catch three old-timey concerts in the church: Tatiana Hargreaves, Del Rey, and Ginny Hawker & Tracy Schwartz. We all danced from early in the afternoon till very late at night, soberly, then tipsily, then drunkenly, then flat-out euphorically. When waltzes were played, the whole crowd moved in a stately circle together around the dance floor like a slowly turning wheel. During two-steps, all our heads bobbed together, down-down-up. I had a rhythmic accordion in my head at all times, even when one wasn’t playing.

The Blackpot cookoff, whose three judged categories were gravy (gumbo or sauce), jambalaya, and crackling, was on the second and last day of the festival. That morning was full of bustle: tents went up, fires were built under them, boxes of ingredients proliferated on folding tables, and huge cast-iron black pots started smelling like Cajun mirepoix – onion, celery, and bell peppers. We made a tour of the preliminaries, asking every chef what he (they were all men) had going on. The answers were as varied as the smells were consistent: alligator stew, venison chili, turtle gravy…

We quickly ferreted out a controversy: a father-son pair whose cookstands were mere yards apart, a competition within a competition. Rodriguez pere, a chatty, charming, sharp-faced smart-ass who was clearly yearning for his own cooking-channel show and a spotlight on him at all times, told us, “That boy’s good for one thing only, making babies.”  We walked over to get Rodriguez fils’s side of the story, but as soon as he understood what we were after, he melted into the smoke of his cookfire and wouldn’t say another word to us.

Hours later, after the judges had had a whack at it all and made their decisions, the festivalgoers lined up in front of all the cookers’ tables to get their share. Although he hadn’t won or even placed (the Miller family dominated), Rodriguez Sr. attracted the longest line by far. Earlier, Brendan had craftily, falsely intimated that we might be bona-fide food critics. Now, he fast-talked us to the front of the line and scored us plates of jambalaya and gravy. We ate and rejoiced. Rodriguez Sr. shouted over to us, “Best ever, huh?”

When the furor died down, Rodriguez Sr. escorted us over to his son’s table and had us try the turtle stew, which I couldn’t eat. His son stood apart with his baby in his arms, ignoring us, or seeming to. The father watched with a complex expression as Brendan tried it – proprietary, avidly competitive, hopeful. “What can I say?” Brendan told him. “It’s fantastic.”

Unsmiling, with another complex expression, Rodriguez Sr. nodded to himself.