I Loved, I Lost, I Made Spaghetti Page 16
The benefits to them here were obvious: a home-cooked meal, an extra pair of hands, adult conversation. The benefit for me was time with their baby. Oddly, I find that time with other people’s children thoroughly fulfills my maternal desires. I’m not overly concerned with bearing a child, and the fact is that I most likely never will. Without a stable relationship, I can’t even fathom the idea—to me it’s like worrying about where you’re going to put all that money before you even scratch the lottery ticket (and romance, to me, seems about as precarious as winning the lottery). Children were definitely included in the life I pictured with Ethan, but when I lost Ethan, it wasn’t the prospect of children that I felt was brutally torn from me, it was the prospect of a life with him. If I find another man to love, I may want to have his babies, but I know it’s probably too late. Somehow this scenario doesn’t haunt me. I can’t say how I’ll feel ten years from now, but for the present I consider being spared that regret a tremendous, albeit unexplainable, gift. In the future, should the desire seize me, I’ll consider science or adoption.
My visits to John and Lucinda have become regular monthly events, and no matter how many creative suggestions I come up with for other dishes, they always insist on the meatballs. I don’t mind. I can make them with my eyes closed.
Spaghetti and Meatballs for Cooking Sluts and Those Who Love Them
For meatballs
1 pound chopped beef (I like to use chuck, but Lucinda prefers a leaner cut; either way, they’re delicious)
¾ cup plain bread crumbs
1 clove garlic, minced
¼ cup freshly grated parmigiano
2 eggs
¼ cup milk
1 teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon freshly ground pepper
½ cup chopped Italian parsley
2 tablespoons olive oil, plus 2 more tablespoons reserved for browning
Throw all the above ingredients in a large bowl and blend well with your hands. Shape into balls (you choose the size).
In a large skillet, heat the reserved 2 tablespoons olive oil and sauté the meatballs until they are browned on all sides. Remove to plate lined with two paper towels. Set aside.
Yield: About 20 (1-inch-diameter) meatballs.
For sauce
2 tablespoons olive oil
Big pinch hot red pepper flakes (optional)
1 (28-ounce) can chopped or whole (the better choice) tomatoes from Italy
1 tablespoon tomato paste
¼ cup red wine
2 teaspoons sugar
2 teaspoons salt
1 pound spaghetti
¼ cup packed basil leaves
Freshly grated parmigiano for passing at the table
Heat the olive oil in a large sauté pan over medium heat, then add the pepper flakes (if using), tomatoes (and their juices, breaking them up with your hands, if using whole), and tomato paste. Add wine, sugar, salt, and meatballs. Bring to a simmer, then lower heat to medium-low; cook, stirring often, for 40 minutes.
Cook spaghetti according to the directions for pasta here. Drain and return to pot, then add a few ladlefuls of sauce and a few leaves of basil torn with your hands. Add pasta to individual bowls garnished with 1 to 2 meatballs (depending on the appetites of your friends) and a few torn basil leaves. Pass parmigiano at table.
Serves 4 to 6.
Single-Girl
Suppers
If a tree falls in the woods and no one hears it, does it make a sound? If I make a splendid rigatoni with sausages, broccoli, onions, and butter, and only I taste it, did it exist?
I’ve spent just as much time single as I have as half of a couple, and though I much prefer cooking for two to cooking for one, if one is all I have, I cook for her. It’s not like I only got into this racket to please men, though I do get a thrill out of feeding those unfathomable creatures. Many have found succor on that old green sofa, where sooner or later I’m going to offer them a cookie, but never enough to sign up for a lifetime of three well-made squares cheerfully provided daily. I don’t blame any of them for my situation (well, I sort of do but not fully, at least); my logical mind knows that in every case I got precisely what I was looking for. I’m where I am because of me. I haven’t gotten to the bottom of why that is, but I have a battery of professionals working with me on the case.
Because cooking and eating well are my raison d’être, I don’t stop when there’s no one else to feed. Even if it’s just me, I make breakfasts of pancakes and sausages or French toast, just as I would if I’d woken up with a man in my bed. The idea of going to the café on the corner for coffee seems insane to me. I’ll make myself a Niçoise salad with olives, capers, red onion, grape tomatoes, parsley, and canned Italian tuna for lunch. At dinner I’ll roast some fish, grill a steak, or invent a pasta from whatever happens to be in the fridge. Those dishes, born out of random couplings dictated by whatever is available, are the ones that make me saddest. They are never to be duplicated; I am the only one who will ever know how delicious they were. I’m conflicted about whether that is good enough, just as I’m conflicted about whether it’s better to be with someone or to be alone.
There are many things I like about being by myself and few people who can provide me with the sort of peace I get buzzing around my apartment, singing along to Belle & Sebastian’s “Funny Little Frog” as it emerges from speakers planted wirelessly in every room of my apartment—including the kitchen, of course—a system I masterminded and installed all on my own.
I manage to be both ashamed and proud of how self- sufficient I am. When I was going to an office every day, I hesitated to admit to colleagues that I couldn’t wait to go straight home after work, roast myself a piece of salmon over a bed of asparagus (450-degree oven, handful of asparagus drizzled with olive oil, a sprinkle of salt, and a grinding of pepper, salmon fillet over it seasoned in same manner, roast for twenty minutes, squeeze a little lemon on top, and chop an herb and stick it on there if you wish, but delicious even without), and sit with it and a glass of cool white wine at my dining room table toute seule. Back then I found this vastly preferable to postwork socializing at a bar. I love drinking, but only when there’s food involved. When I had to go, I was the one showing up with a bag of pretzels.
There are as many pros to being alone as there are cons to being coupled. Sacrifices you must make to be in a couple that you don’t have to make when you are single, and many pleasures to being alone that you forfeit when you are bound to another person. Like being able to watch whatever you want on TV—my current fave is Gossip Girl; I don’t think any man would abide that habit (well, Mitch might, but I won’t give him the chance to find out). When you’re with a man, you have to pretend you like shows like The Wire, which I can’t believe any woman actually likes, though my married friends swear up and down that they truly, truly do (and I’ll take them at their word, but you won’t find me watching it). Or being able to jet off to Cannes with a friend who is going there on business, as I recently did, without having to take anyone else into consideration. Then there’s having the entire bed to spread out in all by yourself.
It’s the sheets that get to me—there is absolutely no way on earth to do a proper job of folding them alone. And that stuff that’s fun to do in them, you really do need to be in a couple to get the most out of that. Meals, of course, are vastly more enjoyable when shared. I can’t marvel about how perfect the rigatoni is to myself, though I sometimes do. Yes, as much as I like my freedom, I am convinced that it’s better to be with someone than not. If nothing else, it makes it that much easier to explain yourself at group functions.
My own dinner parties are full of couples. What choice do I have? When you are my age, the lepers who remain single are few and far between. And as my guests compliment my cooking, which feels great, I also have to hear them wonder aloud how it could be that I’m not married, which feels awful. The person who brings it up is usually a man, a man married to a woman who doesn’t cook. I end up wishin
g I were a fat, terrible cook; that way my life would make sense to me. But my reasoning is faulty. Fat people get married, and women who can’t cook get married to nice men who cook for them. In fact, both of my brothers do most of the cooking for their wives, and they are quite talented. What I like most about cooking for the priests is that they never ask me why I’m not married. I don’t ask them, either, but if I did, they would have canon law to explain their situation. There’s nothing to explain me.
It can be lonely to be alone. But there is nothing that screams “loneliness” louder than takeout. I don’t want my dinner for one brought to me by a man on a bike. I can’t stand waiting around for him to arrive. I’d rather be busy in the kitchen, not sitting around waiting for the doorbell to be rung by a man with whom I have merely a business relationship worrying about how much to tip. No, it is infinitely better to prepare your own food. I believe in a well-stocked pantry and the sense of tranquillity that comes from a well-appointed domestic life, even if it’s only for me, as sad as that may sound.
Those who don’t cook think it’s too much trouble, especially if it’s just for one. If there is anything I want to convince the world of, it is that this is not the case: Cooking is impossibly easy. Food that is prepared simply from a few fresh ingredients is the food I like best. Like this spaghetti with arugula, which involves absolutely no work if you buy baby arugula that is already washed and ready to go. I try to have some in my refrigerator at all times so I can throw together this wonderful pasta at a moment’s notice.
Spaghetti with Arugula and Pine Nuts
(Adapted from Bon Appétit magazine)
2 to 3 ounces spaghetti (depending on how hungry you are)
1 tablespoon olive oil, plus a touch more for taste
2 heaping cups arugula (preferably prewashed baby arugula, for your sake; regular arugula is very dirty, and that’s more work than you want to do right now)
1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice
Freshly ground pepper
Salt
Freshly grated parmigiano, as much as you like
1 tablespoon pine nuts, toasted
Cook the pasta according to the directions here.
When the spaghetti is nearly cooked, heat the olive oil in a medium skillet over low heat, add arugula, and cook until just wilted. When the spaghetti is done, drain and add it to the arugula. Add a touch of olive oil, lemon juice, and some pepper; taste for salt, then remove from heat, add cheese and pine nuts, and serve.
Serves 1.
If you want to double this recipe and make it for a boyfriend, that’s your problem.
I will allow that there could be something in my DNA that makes cooking easy for me when it is not so for other people. Those people, on the other hand, are probably gifted with a gene that makes men want to marry them, or at least ask them out on a second date. In the past few years, even this has proven a feat akin to making a soufflé that never falls. Would I trade with them? Probably.
While I’ve struggled with relationships, cooking has been a fairly consistent source of satisfaction. How to behave with men, I just don’t have a feel for it. It doesn’t come naturally to me the way creating a perfect base for any sauce does. “And then she never heard from him again,” is how I’d jokingly wrap up any report of a promising date, phone conversation, or e-mail exchange. It was my defense, so that when it happened I would be protected by the fact that I expected it. I really didn’t think I would never hear again. But date after date after witty banter and comic repartee, I didn’t. I was astounded by the fact that I did not manage to arouse even the slightest curiosity in the criminal defense attorney, money manager, business magazine writer, book editor, or pickle maker I went out with. (The pickler actually decided he’d had enough of me while the date was still going on. He invited me back to his apartment to make me a salad. We sat on the couch and he fell asleep straight away. No steam and, worse, no salad.)
I renounced my vow of celibacy for nothing. Joel once told me that one can regain her canonical virginity after three years. I didn’t want that; it took me long enough to lose my regular one in the first place.
Then, in classic New York style, I found just the thing to take my mind off all of it: real estate. I had been waiting for a man to swoop in and take me into our new home and life, but he never came and there were things I wanted to do, like cook in a real kitchen and entertain like a grown-up. I couldn’t wait any longer. I had to go it alone, and in order to do that, I needed a better apartment. What did I discover? Real estate affords a girl just as much heartbreak as dating. This I took to be both disturbing and refreshing. It was nice to know there were other things in the world that had the same power over me that men had.
Was it the bridal magazines strewn about the place, whispering, If you buy this apartment, this will happen to you, too? that made me fall so hard for the first apartment I ever looked at? It was a condo on an up-and-coming strip of Brooklyn waterfront. Good move on the owner’s part. But it was more than that. Mainly it was the kitchen with its brand-new de rigueur stainless-steel appliances: the Viking stove, the Sub-Zero refrigerator, the Bosch dishwasher. These things were even more my birthright than the white dresses in those magazines.
I lost three nights of sleep trying to figure out a formula to determine what I should offer. I jumped out of bed hourly and ran to my computer, typing in numbers: square footage, times the number of burners on the stove, divided by the prime rate, minus the balance of my savings account, divided by the number of shelves in the refrigerator. I had no idea how to figure it out, so I came up with some number that was bigger than the one they were asking for and faxed in the paperwork. Then I roasted a chicken and thought about what a better experience that would be in my new kitchen.
Real Estate Roast Chicken
1 (3- to 4-pound) chicken
2 tablespoons soft butter
Salt
Freshly ground pepper
1 lemon
3 garlic cloves, peeled and crushed
Preheat oven to 375 degrees.
Rub the chicken with butter, season generously with salt and pepper, squeeze the juice of the lemon over it, and stuff the cavity with the lemon rinds and garlic. Place on a rack breast side down in a roasting pan; roast for 30 minutes, then turn breast side up, baste with pan juices, and roast for another 20 to 30 minutes, until the breast is golden and the juices that run from a pierced thigh are clear.
Yield: 2 servings.
Getting the call from the listing agent telling me that my bid didn’t cut it felt just like getting dumped. I had rebuilt my life around this apartment, and then one miscalculation, and one phone call, and it was gone.
After that first taste, I got addicted to the hunt. Every Saturday I would scan The New York Times real estate pages and Internet to set my course for Sunday afternoon open houses. For eight months, I never saw a thing to compare with that first place. After eight months, I decided I was never going to find an apartment, so I started fixing up the one I had. I was cruising through my savings buying furniture and cookware while halfheartedly stopping by the occasional open house.
Of course, that “when you give up on it you find it” dictum was going to work for me somewhere. Unfortunately, it happened to be with real estate.
On a Saturday in February, I spotted an apartment that looked pretty nice on the Internet, but big deal, that had happened a million times. Still, I decided to go to the open house that had been scheduled for the following day.
That day coincided with a massive blizzard. I called my brother Nick, who doubled as my real estate coach.
“There can’t possibly be any open houses today.”
“But that’s exactly when you have to go, you’ll have an edge.”
I called the Realtor. Were they still having an open house on Lincoln Place?
Yes, they were.
It continued to snow, hard. I called the Realtor again.
Yes, the open house was still on.
> I trudged the mile and a half from my apartment in a foot of snow. Nick and his wife, Yuki, met me there. The Realtor was taking off her boots when we arrived. We lined ours up beside hers and entered. Immediately I sensed it—something felt right about this place; it wasn’t perfect, but it had everything I wanted. I’d heard this was how you’re supposed to feel about the man you marry, but lacking that, I’d take the apartment. Once inside, I found a nice big central foyer, which connected all the rooms. The art deco bathroom was tiled in black and white with toile de Jouy wallpaper, the large living room had French doors and ample room for dining and lounging, the bedroom had windows that looked onto a pretty courtyard. The pièce de résistance was the kitchen, which, though not enormous, was beautifully done. After a year of looking, those stainless-steel appliances, which I liked so much at first, began to seem soulless once I noticed them in every newly built condo or recently renovated co-op in New York. This kitchen had the top-of-the-line stuff, but here it was interpreted in a traditional style. There were white wooden cabinets with carved details against a backsplash of white tile with an impressed floral molding. The cabinetry continued on the doors of the refrigerator and dishwasher. There were big drawers and sliding shelves to conveniently store cookware, a microwave oven concealed behind a sliding door, a shelf for cookbooks over the sink. The woman who lived here (who was selling it because she was getting married to a German she met on Match.com) had painstakingly restored every inch of that apartment and overseen the kitchen renovation, thinking through every detail. And this single woman would be the one to enjoy it. I told the Realtor I would make an offer. I was pretty sure no one besides me would be showing up today and it would be mine.
“More people may come,” she said. “I got two calls asking about the open house.”