Skygazing

            There is a Website called sun-gazing.com that publishes amazing photographs. My favorite is of a Landrover on a dirt road carrying a group of people who are standing with their binoculars glued to their eyes looking intently to the left. Crouching behind them, to their right on the dirt road, is a magnificent male lion. The caption is “Should I tell them I’m here?”

            Life is often like that. We get so caught up in admiration of the distant that we forget the near at hand.

            A bunch of years ago, Halley’s Comet was visible from Earth. I was dazzled by the possibility of seeing it. After finding the absolute ultimate time to view from my location, Gloucester, Massachusetts, I determined to stalk this near-miracle. My kids invited friends to stay the night. I took the top off of the IH Scout. We set the alarm for 3 am. We staggered to our feet and departed in darkness for the backshore, there to view the comet with a minimum of environmental light.

            Total bust. I mean, nothing. Zero. We waited, looking at the right segment of the sky. The kids were incredibly patient—or maybe they were stunned by lack of sleep. Whatever the case, we waited, and waited, and waited some more.

            Finally the sky began to lighten over the ocean to the east. I handed out the cocoa and muffins I had brought, and we watched the sun rise. It was magnificent, a thing of such glory that if it had been a once-in-76-years appearance the backshore would have been packed solid with enthusiastic crowds.

            Halley's Comet will again be visible from Earth in 2061. I suspect I will not be here to greet it. But the sun rises and sets every day. The miracles that happen every day can touch our lives with magic if we only look.    

Super Duper Cheesecake

This is my birthday cake. It is so much my birthday cake that it is identified in the family cookbook as “Mom’s Super Duper Cheesecake (Sally’s Birthday Cake). I have celebrated my birthday with this cake nearly every year of my life, made by my mother, or by me, or, this year, by my daughter. I am so lucky. And, you are too, because now you can make this cake.

Crust:

1 1/2 c graham cracker crumbs (20 crackers)

1/4 c sugar

1/3 c melted butter

Mix and press into pan. 1 cup for sides, rest for bottom. Let sit while mixing filling.

Filling:

1 lb cream cheese, softened

3 eggs

1/2 c sugar

3/4 t vanilla

Heat oven to 375. Combine with electric mixer until smooth. Pour into prepared pan. Bake for 20 minutes. Remove from oven and let stand somewhere cool for 15 minutes. Raise oven temperature to 475.

Topping:

1 pint sour cream

1/4 c sugar

1 t vanilla

With a spoon, mix these ingredients only until well blended. Pour over filling and spread evenly. Bake at 475 for 10 minutes. Watch carefully. Let stand on rack for 5 hours. Refrigerate at least 8 hours before unmolding.

Clean

            Cleaning the bathroom. There’s something soul shriving about it, isn’t there?

            And, conversely, there’s something really icky about a bathroom that isn’t clean. Maybe it’s an atavistic abhorrence of the danger of microbes. Maybe it’s unremembered but internalized potty-training cheers and jeers. Maybe it’s the undercurrent of unpleasant smells (leading us back to possibilities one and two).

           

            Whatever the reasons for a dislike of less-than-sparkling bathrooms, the dislike is one shared by many. Witness the proliferation of scent sprayers in public bathrooms. Why the owners of, say, a pancake restaurant would think that a chemical imitation of citrus scent will hide the grungy corners is beyond me. And yet, the effort is made a distressing number of times.

            (This reminds me of my intense dislike of scented cat litter, but that’s another story. Or maybe not. Maybe it’s the same story.)

            When I was very young, I longed to feel sanctified and new after Confession. Instead, I always had the nagging suspicion that I had forgotten something and thus, Sister Nicola assured me, condemned my soul to everlasting torment; or I feared that my Good Act of Contrition wasn’t Good enough.

            I acknowledge that going to Confession was never meant to be spiritual Zoloft. But I longed for that ebullient dance of salvation. Then I got my own bathroom and discovered the incredible lightness of cleaning.     

Vietnamese Dry Pork Stew

            Following a bout of terrible tummy turmoil—two days with negative food, one day with small amounts of rice and sips of Sleepytime tea—I was in a food quandary. It was time to eat, but what? Nothing appealed. A lackadaisical wander through the cookbook shelves did not arouse any desire. Rather the reverse. Then, a flash of inspiration: Dry Pork Stew from my Vietnamese cookbook, called, appropriately, Vietnamese Cookery.

            A compendium of the delicious and the obscure (one recipe requires “the water of green coconuts, fresh off the tree. There is no substitute.”) Vietnamese Cookery is one of my favorite pieces of food porn. It does not require any effort other than relaxing in a comfy chair and reading. However, page forty-four, the page housing Dry Pork Stew, is stained and worn. Touted by the author as “the safest possible food for one in a delicate condition…eaten happily by anyone else who can get near this dish,” Dry Pork Stew is the foundation of one of my favorite meals.

            Here it is.

Dry Pork Stew

1 lb. fairly lean pork

2 shallots or white part of green onions

Remove any bones, and slice the meat against the grain in thin (1/8-inch) strips about one inch wide and two or three inches long. Slice shallots or green onion in thin rounds. Put all into a small, deep pot. A larger pot will not do for this dish, for it must cook at fairly high heat and yet not burn. The small pot presents less surface for burning.

¼ teaspoon black pepper                                    2 tablespoons fish sauce

1 tablespoon sugar                                                2 tablespoons water

Add the seasoning and water to the pork in the pot, put on high heat and bring to a boil. Stir well, mix, and cook about two minutes. Reduce heat to medium high, and boil for about twenty or thirty minutes, stirring occasionally, until all the liquid is absorbed and the meat begins to turn light brown. Be careful not to burn it.

This is pretty salty (the fish sauce), so serve with lots of rice. Add a salad and you’re done.

I added ginger to the mix to further soothe my tummy. If you cannot bear the idea of fish sauce, I suggest you get over it. But, if you must, soy sauce will do.     

Childhood Idol

          Red, tousled hair, green eyes, freckles, chocolate silk voice with a hint of the East Coast...and cigarettes...and the bedroom: Margaret. My mother’s close friend Margaret was the epitome of sexy elegance. She was always surrounded by the scent of Shalimar—her husband gave her a giant bottle every Christmas—and had a temper to match her hair. But, when she got angry she didn’t shriek, at least not in front of me; she got steely. One could almost see the sparks flying from her gritted teeth.

          Mother of four girls and a boy, she had a basket of hair ribbons and barrettes hanging by a ribbon from a hook on the back of every bathroom door, a practice I copied the moment I had a home of my own. The upstairs sunporch was the girls’ dormitory, a row of beds stretching the length of the room, each with its unique quilt. A glass-fronted cabinet of Madame Alexander dolls resided in the upstairs hallway. The whole house was filled with warmth and style.

          It is my belief that much of my standardized testing success was due to the Wff-n-Proof game given to the children of the family for Christmas one year.

          This is my clearest memory of Margaret: she was driving her two oldest daughters and my sister and I to a school event, and she was wearing a white pleated skirt. Stepping into the driver’s seat of her Mustang convertible (what else?), she lifted her skirt, revealing a peach-colored slip with deep lace edging. She draped the skirt over the back of the bucket seat of her car to preserve the press. I was awestruck.

          When she was given a diagnosis of terminal cancer, she telephoned my mother: “The first thing I thought was, ‘Oh no’; the second was ‘But I have so many books I want to re-read.’”  

          She never knew how I idolized her. Or, maybe she did and graciously accepted her due.

Well-Duh Mind

          Full circle, I was back again in Chicago. I remembered walking those streets in saddle shoes and the all-girls Trinity High School pleated skirt and blazer with cream-colored Wigwam crew socks. My saddle shoes were never quite perfectly cool: too sturdy to get slouchy without falling apart in the short two years I wore them.

            The best saddle shoes—as defined by the coolest chick of all cool chicks, Reggie Belmundo—were so worn that the cracks in the white leather were clearly limned in black and gray, much the way tarnish in the pattern lines adds to the value of antique sterling. And, the leather in truly cool shoes had lost nearly all integrity. Softened by almost four years of five-day-a-week wear, the shoes molded to the uber-cool Trinitarian’s feet like moccasins.

            I had transferred in for junior and senior years, so my shoes were able to acquire only a sophomoric glaze, the bare beginning of the degradation necessary for the wearer to achieve true hipster status.

            Reggie…She had very black, very curly hair, hair that had a life of its own, like a benign aspect of Medusa’s snakes. She sat across from me in the honors English circle, one leg tucked under the other, lifting the perfect oval of her knee so her foot dangled, pointing, flexing, and rotating for fifty minutes’ discussion of Don Quixote.

            Reggie brought on my first experience of well-duh mind. Well-duh mind, like monkey mind, is a state of being. Here is an example of well-duh mind:

            Senior year, the school play was Our Hearts Were Young and Gay. Reggie and I were the final call-backs for the role of the feisty, mischievous sister. It was perfectly clear to me that any sane person given a choice between me and Reggie Belmundo would choose Reggie. When the cast list was posted and I was the Paris hotel maid and Reggie was the lively Galbraith sister, Reggie accepted her leading role with the equanimity of a queen stepping into her court. Friends commiserated, and I experienced my first manifestation of well-duh mind. I mean, really…Reggie Belmundo in all her Italian hummingbird glory and me: cute, dimpled and sweet, true…but, really.

            Well, duh, what director would choose me over Reggie?

            After several decades I returned to Chicago, and as my marriage ended I once again faced the reality that I was not the chosen one. And then I had the ultimate well-duh experience. I learned Reggie’s secret.

            No one should choose or reject any of us. We choose ourselves. We are our own coolest chicks.

            Well, duh.

Puff Pastry Life

Puff pastry.

            Even the words are effervescent in a Dom Perignon, I-taste-stars kind of way. If Katherine Hepburn were the product of an oven, she’d be puff pastry: at once aristocratic and sensuous, golden exterior simultaneously crusty and delicate, shattering into glorious shards of deliciousness to reveal a superlatively soft interior. Puff pastry. Cue violin crescendo.

            Buying the frozen product is, while not unpleasant, not glamorous either. Dedicating a whole day to the production of puff pastry is the ultimate in self-indulgence. Landscape-sized quantities of butter are frozen, powdered with the softest flour and pummeled into submission, a process that more closely resembles a really bad love affair than baking.

            When making puff pastry, make a double batch and use a fabulous recipe (I use Julia Childs’).  It really is a lot of effort and besides, while for some folks cheesy macaroni or fabulous chicken soup is the ultimate in comfort food, the knowledge that homemade puff pastry is held in frosty stasis in the freezer will be a glowing ember in your mind.

            Freeze the completed dough in creamy individual portions; you can always move more than one from the freezer to the fridge to thaw, and the ability to move just one bestows the freedom to use one for any reason or no reason but pure pleasure.

            Pop a glorious top on creamed chicken and vegetables for the chicken pot pie of the gods; surround a square of chocolate; marry it to a sliver of silken brie and some tangy fruit; or, simply bake as a croissant.

                        When making puff pastry, the key to perfection is to start with frozen butter and to never, ever let it be less than cold until the actual baking.

            (Some people insist on cold flour and cold bowl. I myself find that a little twee.)

            The idea is to infuse the flour with tiny bits of frozen butter. When the pastry is baked, the butter melts into the flour, leaving tiny caverns of delight that surround fragrant air. The air inflates in the heat, and the pastry bakes around it, leaving myriad bubbles of buttery magic.

            The scent of baked puff pastry lingers long after the process is complete. Here resides, it proclaims, a baker.

            Puff pastry (even the Pepperidge Farm kind) is, I think, an invention of the gods. Enjoy!

Beginning

Life is, isn't it? Delicious, I mean. And so, we play together in the magical, mystical, mouthwatering music of being. We'll cook a little, muse a little, giggle a lot and dance often, yes? Gotta love it.