My Father, The Eater

Today was a fairly uneventful day: a morning spent writing over coffee and fantastic red flannel hash (roasted beets, potatoes, and bacon with poached eggs) at Mia's Cafe in Eastsound, and a hungry but fairly mellow crowd at pizza time. (We sold out early--90 pizzas sold before 7pm, not too shabby.) A few of the gatherings today were definitely centered around dads, whose kids passed them up the last slices of pizza and shared sips of strawberry lemonade. A good way to honor your family on a beautiful sunny Father's Day...

My dad was the first encounter I ever had with a "big eater." At 6 feet 4 inches, and a less-than-portly more-than-lean stature, he could put away any kind of food in front of him, including whatever was left on our plates. (We referred to him as the "human garbage disposal," a term he was fine with so long as it meant he had dibs on the table scraps.) In his early 40s, after being diagnosed with sleep apnea (a condition exasterbated by being overweight), he put in hours every day at the gym, but his real sacrifice came from not getting to eat up the difference post calories-burned. We'd have to remind him that the only way to lose weight was to avoid eating back the calories--and this reminder always came when he was loading up his plate with a second slice of apple pie. As a partner in a law firm, he'd often bill hours working at home after we'd gone to bed, which meant he'd be around to cook us dinner before my mom got home each night from her museum curatorial position. Mom would take on the complicated dishes and events--Thanksgiving was her holiday, from the cornbread and dried fruit-stuffed turkey to the pear and cranberry chutney--and she always played a role in packing our school lunches, resplendent with those totally tradeable items like whole wheat peanut butter sandwiches and "fruit bark."

But for everyday dinners, Dad would often take the lead. He wasn't an elaborate cook--stir-fries of vegetables and chicken breast, served up with buttery rice pilaf, were the norm--but his specialties were stick-to-your-ribs food: when Mom would be home especially late, he'd open up a can of Heinz's vegetarian baked beans, sweet with hints of molasses and mustard, and dump it into a pot on the stove. Meanwhile he'd slice up 4 or 5 links of Hebrew National hot dogs and sear them in a skillet, and roll out a can of Pillsbury buttermilk biscuits. I'd listen as he pulled the tab off the can, releasing the signature pop and hiss of the vacuum-packed dough, and I'd pull each biscuit apart and plop it onto a sheet pan. While the biscuits baked, he'd mix together the hot dogs and beans and fill my bowl with it (my sister, until a very late age, ate nothing but pasta with butter.) I'd pull apart the flaky layers of my biscuit and dip them into the beans, eating until I could wipe the bowl clean with the last remaining biscuit.

Lord knows how much salt, butter, and oil I consumed when my dad cooked, and years of near-childhood-obesity are nothing that nostalgic relish can erase. (Adolescence is always painful, but adolescence with a weight problem is especially bad.) But even as he taught me bad food habits, he also taught me something very valuable: that food--when it's fancy, when it's totally ordinary--is almost always on some level about pleasure. When we still lived in California, we'd often do post-dinner runs for ice cream or frozen yogurt, and the ritual of walking out to the car with your special little paper cup of chocolate chip cookie dough became a sign of a night well-spent. Once we moved to New England in my teenage years, the march to the freezer (kept in our basement, a late-breaking gesture at self-restraint) became just as valuable, even if it was for Fudgesicles instead of actual fudge. He was a guy that relished desserts, and good food, as a communal experience.

He didn't live long enough to see me start to cook in a serious way...he died, quite unexpectedly, when I was almost 20, and it's impossible to cook a really good meal for myself without thinking of how he would've enjoyed it. And more than enjoying my triumphs, he would've delighted, at least a little bit, in my mistakes...

After fighting back the major weight problems I'd experienced as an early adolescent, I started to channel my fascination with food into creation rather than consumption. I began to read through my family's cookbook collection, go on supermarket runs, and pick out recipes that seemed interesting to me. When I was about 16 years old, my sister (then 9) and I decided to plot out a special dinner for our parents. I'd make the main dish (a pasta with roasted red peppers and garlic, and just butter sauce for her), and she'd make a cake for dessert. I set her up with her ingredients--the ever trustworthy Duncan Hines mix, an egg, canola oil, and a whisk--then turned to my task. The recipe asked for "2 cloves garlic, minced"--I knew how to chop garlic nice and small, but the "cloves" amount three me off. Surely they couldn't mean the little pieces of the garlic bulb--otherwise they'd call them "pieces," right? So I took clove to mean the entire bulb, and proceeded to peel and chop two full heads of garlic. This is a lot of garlic, I thought, but if "garlic" is in the recipe name, it must be a major flavor. With my two full handfuls of garlic in the sauce, I threw in my chopped red peppers and other ingredients, and a half hour later, called my parents to the dinner table, which we'd set with candles and cloth napkins to make it extra special.

I tasted the pasta, and the garlicky sauce nearly knocked me flat. Maybe I should add more cheese, to make it less strong, I thought, and dumped in an extra two tablespoons of ricotta to make it creamier. It helped, but not nearly enough to fix the problem. I looked over the recipe to see what I did wrong...

"Jess, let's just sit down and eat," Dad said, taking the full pot of dressed pasta from my hands. 'I'm sure it'll be delicious." He filled his plate, and my mom's, and dug his fork into the sauce, now nearly pink after all my extra ricotta. His eyes immediately started to water. My mom began to cough uncontrollably.

"There's a lot of garlic in this..."

"Well, that's what the recipe told me..."

"Can you show it to me?"

I handed him the cookbook, and his eyes scanned down the page. (Leave it to a lawyer to look for the loophole.) "Hmmm...you put in two cloves of garlic?"

"Yeah, two BIG cloves."

"Can you show me the size?"

I pulled a "clove" out of the garlic jar that lived on our windowsill, and brought it over to him. He started to laugh, a huge guffawing laugh somewhere between coughing and barking. "That's a HEAD, sweetie."

"Oh NO," Mom said, and started to laugh as well. I stood there, tearing up with humiliation and wounded pride as they looked at their vampire-proof pasta. Needles to say, we had cake for dinner.

It's taken me until my late twenties to start a true chef's education, but I'd like to think that my first kitchen experiments were born out of my dad's availability as a taste-tester. I could've given him botulism, or a horrible stomachache, but he gave me a taste for trying things out, for making mistakes, for continuing to seek out new and delightful flavors.

When I moved into my current apartment in Morningside Heights, the first dish I made was a pot of hot dogs and beans. Dad would've been proud, and hungry.

Tuesday dinner: What it is to Own a Night

At closing staff meal Tuesday, I can say that the red glow in my cheeks is no longer solely due to the wine I've imbibed. (I'm on my second excellent glass, thanks to Chris and his ever-growing sommelier skills.) I can say, even with my sore neck and slightly irritated hands, that I have finally rocked a dinner at the Inn. My breakfast this morning was a heralding of the good day to come--I poached one of my farm fresh eggs and set it atop a salad of fresh tomatoes and croutons (made from the stale bread of the kitchen.) A perfect way to start what turned out to be a surprisingly triumphant day.

Tonight was a full house for the dining room, but also a special celebration in our reception room--a 75th anniversary attended by 50 of the Inn's most loyal and hungry guests. Geddes sets me to work prepping ingredients for the appetizer course, the crab salad specially requested by the birthday girl. I dice cucumber, then tomato, into small chunks. This is the first dish that I've made from beginning to end since I've arrived, and its assembly feels like a real triumph. As I'm laying out the components of the hors d'oeuvres--we're doing the smoked salmon, chicken pate, and cucumber-avocado again, but also a cracker layered with stone-ground mustard, a rolled-up slice of Mangalitsa salami, and a few slivers of pickled ramps--I'm feeling a real level of mastery over what I'm doing. When Geddes tells me to grab some herbs from the garden, I know exactly where to look (though he shows me the proper way to pull it from the plant--only from those branches with multiple offshoots). When he sends me in search of cornichons, mustard, and cucumbers, I know my way around the walk-in cooler. I lay out the platters of appetizers, garnished with springs of flowering catnip, and lay them out for the servers to grab.

I then team up with Geddes in layering each ingredient for the crab salads into metal rounds, so they can be quickly unmolded and plated with little mess. First, a layer of diced avocado, then a layer of tomato, then a layer of cucumber, and finally a layer of shredded crab meat. We transport all of this to the reception hall prep room next door, with a little mobile station set up to finish our plating. It's an ad hoc cold station, but it works for this size dinner.

The waitstaff for the dinner lay out plates all around the room so we can easily move around with each elements--there are molds to remove, piles of salad greens to heap on, two different tomato dressings to pour, and little rounds of cherry tomato and hunks of crab to add for a final garnish. Luke grabs one bucket of dressing, I grab the other, and we make our way around the room.

It's a sweet, tangy salad all the way through to its creamy avocado base, and the presentation is gorgeous...It's one of the first things I've made here from start to finish, and I'm beaming with pride as the servers pick them up and run them out to the waiting guests. Luke takes a final photo before they leave the room.

Then we plate the entrees--Luke and I set up plates, assembly-line style once more, to shuttle starches and vegetables down to Geddes. While he plates the steak, slicing it and fanning it over the mashed potatoes and dressing it with shaved leeks, I slide my spatula under the seared halibut and place it on the bed of black rice. This feels tremendously important--this is the first time I'm handling the major protein ingredients of the dish myself, and as I gently press the piece of fish into the bed of rice, I'm aware just how much attention will be paid to its presentation. It gets a little nest of fennel and citrus salad on top, a dash of buttery sauce and dollops of herbal reduction, and we send it on its way. Even when dishes get backed up and Geddes has to tell the waitstaff to hurry it along, he's hardly losing his cool. There's a zen workmanship in place as we pass the plates down, having just enough time to wipe renegade sauce and herbs from the rims. I'm feeling busy and very much on a deadline, but not remotely stressed out.

And finally, dessert comes around. Annie has whipped up glorious little rhubarb tarts topped with meringue, and we lay them out on plates around the room, ready for a dash of citrusy-herbal emulsion and a scattering of cookie crumbs. Annie hands me the scoop and a bucket of lemon ice cream...I'm put to the test, and the ice cream is melting fast, but I'm whipping it up against the sides of the container into neat, creamy egg-shaped scoops, and we plate about 50 desserts in 5 minutes. Despite having a large dollop of meringue on my shoulder, I'm feeling wildly accomplished.

Things feel like they're starting to fall into place--even if Annie chides me for moving to prepare a few plates too early, it's done with more jest and more knowing humor than last week. As we're wrapping up for the night, Wally hands me a few containers of leftover tomato and cucumber to make something for family meal...a huge honor and challenge all at once. I reach for the grab-bag of compost-rescued produce in the walk-in, and for the Tabasco sauce and red wine vinegar, and whip up a quick batch of gazpacho. The waitstaff and chefs ladle it onto their plates and devour it--even after feeding 50+ people tonight, the greatest validation is seeing my fellow kitchen mates eating my food with gusto.