A Homemade Life (11 page)

I
'd been in Seattle for only 48 hours when I met Rebecca. I was sore from driving for three days to get there from Oklahoma, and I found her name in the phone book when I went looking for a place to take a Pilates class. She owned a studio in the basement of a neighborhood center a couple of blocks from my apartment. It was decorated in a style perhaps best described as “bordello chic”—zebra stripe fabric, red paint, black fringe—and I knew we would be friends when I saw the magnet on her filing cabinet. It was a drawing of a stern-looking man in chef 's whites, saying, “I know exactly what to do with fat-free food. I throw it away.”

I'd come back from Paris to go to graduate school at the University of Washington, and I needed a job. Rebecca seemed to know a lot of people, so I asked if she had any leads, and she hired me on the spot. She gave me a pink feathered pen and the title “Queen of Customer Service,” and with them, I ruled over the front desk. I even had my own business card, emblazoned with my name and royal handle. It wasn't easy—to know Rebecca is to love her, and to fear her a little—but for two years, I typed, filed, ran errands, and managed the studio's schedule book. Even when I left to take a position at a local publishing house, where I worked until I felt brave enough to try to write for a living, I still got to keep my title. And I
was right about our friendship: it remains intact, and it has perks that no job can provide.

One Saturday night a few years ago, Rebecca invited me to her favorite restaurant for a meal of three bottles of wine, chicken liver pâté, and breaded, deep-fried, soft-boiled eggs. Somewhere in the middle of all that, she invited me to a breakfast of Dutch babies with her gay husband, Jimmy. I'd heard about Jimmy's prowess in the kitchen—namely his chocolate cheesecakes, his shortbread waffles, and his “Pink Cookies,” a rich shortbread spread thickly with rosy, cherry-scented frosting—and I knew better than to refuse. Also, I am a lightweight and, when tipsy, will agree to anything remotely edible. Who could refuse a Dutch baby pancake, hot and puffy from the skillet, on a Sunday morning? Not me.

I arrived at Jimmy's apartment at 9:00 a.m. to find a table set for two and a bacon-scented haze hanging over the stove. Jimmy stood by in a starched, white apron, spatula in hand. Rebecca sat at the table with wet hair and her usual morning iced tea, obligatory straw in place.

“I have five thousand straws,” she told me proudly. “All red!”

Rebecca and Jimmy have known each other since the late 1970s, when they lived in the same building in St. Petersburg, Florida. As Rebecca tells it, she knew she had to meet Jimmy when she noticed his apartment window displays from the parking lot. Sometimes they mimicked department store windows, with mannequin parts carefully arranged. Other times they were a little more understated: a Perrier beach towel hung from the ceiling and lit from beneath, sort of art gallery-meets-Saint Tropez. Their first meeting was auspicious, a long story whose details I have worked hard to forget, but whose ending involves Rebecca in a hallway without pants. For many years, Jimmy, Rebecca, and Rebecca's straight husband, John, all lived in the same building in Seattle—Jimmy on the second floor and Rebecca and John on the ninth—and even now that they live in different parts of town, they still spend the bulk of their free time
together. Jimmy is the baker, John is the cook, and Rebecca is the force of nature.

“Moll, you need two husbands,” Rebecca announced, stirring a snowdrift of sugar into her iced tea. “You can't expect one person to be everything for you. You need at least two.
At least.”
I nodded. She had a point. I have thought about it many times since, and I don't know that I entirely agree—so far, one husband is almost more than enough for me—but she did have a very good point. But that morning, the scent of melted butter was rising from the stove, and talk of husbands, singular or plural, had nothing on it.

Atop the stove sat two small cast-iron skillets, each containing a shimmering pool of warm butter. Using a pastry brush, Jimmy coaxed it up the sides of the skillets. Then, working quickly, he poured a thin batter—not unlike that of a regular pancake, but with more eggs and less flour—into the hot fat. He slid the skillets into the oven, shut the door with a casual backhand, and the batter slowly began to rise, like a soufflé possessed, from the foamy pool of butter. The method for making a Dutch baby, I thought, is only marginally less awe inspiring than the method for making a human one.

While the pancakes baked, Jimmy struggled unsuccessfully to keep Rebecca out of the bacon, and I busied myself with copying down the recipe on a scrap of paper by the phone. Halfway down the page, I made a startling discovery. Jimmy had accidentally
doubled
the quantity of butter called for. It was a very fitting accident, given his penchant for boosting the fat in everything: recipes, thighs, you name it. But it meant that Rebecca and I—Jimmy apparently can't bear to eat before 11:00 a.m.—would be eating
half a stick of butter each.

In such situations, however, I find it best to skip lightly over the details. When Jimmy pulled the Dutch babies from the oven, they were tinged with gold and gorgeously rumpled, like omelets with bed hair. Rebecca and I had no trouble putting away an entire baby each. Doused
with lemon juice and dusted with powdered sugar, they were miraculously light, their eggy richness countered smartly by the citrus. I scooped up every last clump of lemon-soaked sugar and scraped my plate until it shined. Rebecca downed hers in record time and then returned to the bacon.

“One thing at a time, for maximum enjoyment!” she said cheerily. She always has the best advice.

DUTCH BABY PANCAKES WITH LEMON AND SUGAR

t
his recipe is based on the one Jimmy uses, only with a more moderate amount of butter. He likes to make his in two 6-inch cast-iron skillets, but I make mine in a single, deep 8-inch skillet. (A 9-or 10-inch would also work.) If you don't have a cast-iron skillet of the appropriate size, you can also use a metal or Pyrex cake pan or a pie plate.

FOR THE PANCAKES

2 tablespoons (1 ounce) unsalted butter

4 large eggs

½ cup unbleached all-purpose flour

½ cup half-and-half

¼ teaspoon salt

FOR THE TOPPING

Freshly squeezed lemon juice

Powdered sugar, sifted

 

Preheat the oven to 425°F.

Put the butter in an 8-inch cast-iron skillet and place over low heat. Alternatively, put the butter in a similarly sized cake pan or pie plate, and place it in the preheated oven for a few minutes. As the butter melts, use a pastry brush to coax it up the sides of the skillet.

Meanwhile, in a blender, mix together the eggs, flour, half-and-half, and salt until well blended.

Pour the egg mixture into the warmed skillet. Slide into the oven, and bake for 18 to 25 minutes. The mixture will rise and puff around the edges, like a bowl-shaped soufflé. The Dutch baby is ready when the center looks set and the edges are nicely risen and golden brown.

Remove from the oven. Drizzle—or splash, really; abundance is good here—with lemon juice and sprinkle generously with powdered sugar. Serve immediately.

 

Yield: 2 servings

JIMMY'S PINK COOKIES

j
immy makes these cookies for Rebecca on Valentine's Day. She occasionally saves one for me, and though I am usually a chocolate chip kind of person, I have fallen hard for the pink cookie. It's rich and sweet and excessive in every way. The cookie itself is crisp and crumbly like a proper shortbread, but the frosting is pure Americana: soft and smooth, tangy with cream cheese, and scented very, very,
very
lightly with cherry—just enough, as Jimmy says, “to make it taste pink.”

A note about the frosting: don't be alarmed by the amount this recipe makes. You will want it all, or most of it, at least. These cookies are meant to be frosted very generously. Without a nice, thick layer, they aren't nearly as good.

FOR THE COOKIES

3 sticks (12 ounces) unsalted butter, at room temperature

1 cup powdered sugar, sifted

3 cups all-purpose flour

½ teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

FOR THE FROSTING

8 ounces cream cheese, at room temperature

6 tablespoons (3 ounces) unsalted butter, at room temperature

3 cups powdered sugar, sifted

1 ¼ teaspoons kirsch, or more to taste, or a capful of cherry extract

Red food coloring

 

To make the cookies, combine the butter and powdered sugar in the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, and beat, first on low speed, and then slowly increasing to medium, until light and fluffy.

In a medium bowl, combine the flour and salt, and whisk well. With the mixer on low, add the flour mixture to the butter mixture, beating until the flour is just absorbed. Add the vanilla and beat well to incorpo
rate. Lay a sheet of plastic wrap on a large, clean surface, and turn the dough out onto it. Gather the dough into a ball, press it into a thick disk, and wrap it well. Refrigerate for 1 hour.

Preheat the oven to 325°F. Line 2 baking sheets with parchment paper or silicone liners.

On a clean, floured surface, roll the dough out to a thickness of
³
/
₈
inch. (If you don't have a lot of room, cut the disk of dough down the middle, and work with only one half at a time, leaving the second one in the refrigerator until ready for use.) Using a cookie cutter, cut the dough into whatever shapes you would like. I use a 2½-inch round cutter, which, once the cookies have puffed slightly during baking, yields a 2¾-to 3-inch cookie. Jimmy uses a much bigger cutter, often in the shape of a heart.

Place the cookies on the prepared baking sheets, spacing them 1½ inches apart. Bake them one sheet at a time, keeping the second sheet in the refrigerator until the first one is done, for 16 to 20 minutes, or until the cookies are pale golden at the edge. Do not allow them to brown. Transfer the pan to a wire rack, and cool the cookies completely on the pan.

To make the frosting, combine the cream cheese and butter in the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment and beat on medium speed until smooth. Add the powdered sugar and beat on low speed to fully incorporate, then raise the speed to medium or medium-high and beat until there are no lumps, scraping down the sides of the bowl with a rubber spatula as needed. Add the kirsch and a couple of drops of red food coloring and beat well. The frosting should be a pretty shade of pale pink. Taste, and if you want more cherry flavor, beat in a bit more kirsch. Generously spread onto the fully cooled cookies.

Stored in an airtight container, pink cookies will keep in the refrigerator for up to 3 days—and they're delicious cold—or you can freeze them indefinitely.

 

Yield: 20 to 24 (3-inch) cookies

M
y father had a bad back. He'd had trouble for as long as I could remember, ever since a cross-country skiing accident when I was a baby. He'd been skiing with me on his back in a frame pack, and he'd lost his balance. To keep from falling backward and crushing me, he sat down instead. After that, his back would go out sometimes, every now and then, and for a day or two he would stand crooked, his spine listing to one side. But he was a doctor, and he kept a tackle box full of pills in his bathroom drawer. He took them when he needed them. We all did. We didn't think much of it.

One night—I think it was the fifteenth of September, the day after my twenty-fourth birthday—he was in Toronto for a family bat mitzvah, and he stumbled on the stairs to his cousin's house. He'd been having back pain for a while, but he hadn't told anyone. He was never the type to talk about those sorts of things. But now the pain was so bad that he thought he might have broken something. I had moved to Seattle only a week earlier, and he and my mother called one night to tell me. It might be a broken vertebra, he said, or maybe a spinal infection. Instead, a couple of days later, a bone scan showed that it was cancer. It had started in one of his kidneys but had been growing for a while, creeping into the bones of his spine. He was a radiation oncologist, so he knew what it meant.

“What a kick in the ass,” he said.

My mother told me the plan. He would have his kidney removed, and then he would be at home for a while, recovering, before the chemotherapy began. My brother David would fly in to keep him company while my mother went to work. I imagined the two of them tottering around the house, my father in a flannel nightshirt and David in a T-shirt and sweats. They would watch TV in the den, and at night, David would help him up the stairs.

But the surgery came and went, and he didn't go home. He didn't leave the hospital for five and a half weeks, and when he did, it was on a stretcher. When they opened him up to pull out his kidney, it was the size of a jumbo Kleenex box, the deep, rectangular kind they keep in hospital waiting rooms and therapists' offices. The cancer had spread to the bones of his pelvis, and to his skull, and to the skinny bone that runs along the shin. There were spots on his liver, and in his lungs.

My mother tried to be calm, counseling me to stay in Seattle. But in mid-October, I flew home for a weekend, and four days after, she called, asking me to come back.

 

For a long time, all I could think about was the duffel bag.

When my father checked into the hospital, he took a brown leather duffel bag with him. It was stained the color of melted milk chocolate, a shiny brown that bordered on red. Inside, he had packed everything that he thought he might want: a book of crossword puzzles, a bottle of cologne, his blue cotton bathrobe with the big white polka dots. He was wearing a white dress shirt and a pair of wool pants that he held under his belly with a brown leather belt. When he exchanged his clothes for a hospital gown, he folded them and put them into the bag to wait for the trip back home.

But after the surgery, he never walked, or wore those clothes, again. Bone cancer, his doctor told me, is one of the most painful kinds. It would require patches, pills, and eventually an epidural port, a coiled wire that slipped eerily into a hole in his back. Then there were the
bones themselves, which were slowly ceding ground to the soft tissue of the cancer. About a month after his diagnosis, a CAT scan showed his pelvis almost completely blacked out by tumors. I remember standing by the sink in his hospital room with my mother and the doctor, looking at the scan against a fluorescent light. It was as though a storm cloud had floated across the film and settled under my father's ribs. I gasped when I saw it. My mother covered my mouth, so Burg wouldn't hear.

He couldn't stand because of the pain, but if he had, his bones would have crumbled under the weight. I didn't even know that bones could do that. I was terrified of what it might look like. But he didn't try to stand. He just lay there in the bed, propped at varying degrees of supine. Sometimes he slept, and sometimes he cried. Sometimes he just stared at us. He must have been trying to understand how we got there, to that room at the end of the oncology hall, where we read old issues of
People
to pass the time and warmed soup from the neighbors in a microwave at the nurse's station. The duffel bag sat where he had left it, on the window ledge next to the bed.

Sometimes I would open it up and look inside, overwhelmed by the rush of odors, his smell. He had expected to get up and walk the hospital halls in that robe, and to go home in the clothes he had arrived in. When he left home, he thought he was coming back. When he got out of bed that morning, when he stood in the bathroom, when he combed his hair in the mirror and stooped gingerly to pack his bag, he thought he would be back. He didn't know that he would never see the second floor of his house again, or, for that matter, anything more than a single room downstairs, the room in which we would install his hospital bed, a humidifier, and, for sixteen hours a day, a nurse.

When no one was around to hear me, I would say it aloud to myself.
He thought he was coming home.
This could have been a trip, a vacation, Paris, anywhere. The bathrobe he packed was the one he wore to make stewed prunes and, in the mornings, mugs of cappuccino for himself and my mother. I would hear him go down the creaky stairs, and then the sound of his feet on the wood floor. He would clear his throat, snort a little, and sit down with the newspaper, his knees poking
through the folds of the robe. It smelled like him: a low, musky odor, masculine and pungent. When he packed that duffel bag, he didn't know that he would never wear the robe again. He didn't know that he would never put on his cologne. He didn't know that he would never do another crossword puzzle over Saturday lunch and wash it down with a beer in his favorite glass, the one with the grapevines in relief around the side. He didn't know.

 

For the last four weeks that he was alive, my father lay in a rented hospital bed in a room next to the kitchen. There isn't much a person wants to eat when he is hooked up to an IV drip, or when his legs feel as though they are on fire. The painkillers were strong enough to make him hallucinate—he once went on a duck hunt in his bed, pointing an imaginary gun at the fireplace and shouting
pow! pow!
—but they could barely keep up with the pain. Still, I got out of bed every morning to make his breakfast. There were plenty of people around to do it—my mother, my half-siblings, aunts and uncles, even the nurses—but I wanted to. Some mornings he took a bowl of oatmeal with half-and-half, or Cream of Wheat with fat lumps of butter. But most days, it was eggs. I would scoop the food into his mouth in quiet disbelief, watching his belly, the target of so much nagging, slowly melt away. Sometimes I would think about the last time I hugged him, standing in the driveway in early September, when I left for Seattle, and the way his gut, so distended, had pressed familiarly against mine. I didn't know then that there was a tumor behind it.

One day, he told me about the grotto. I'd come to bring his breakfast, some scrambled eggs with goat cheese and a slice of buttered toast. When he saw me in the doorway, he sighed and pointed dazedly, with one hand, toward the couch.

“Isn't it
beautiful?”
he breathed. We were sitting next to a grotto, he explained, gazing dreamily at the armchair, his voice an excited whisper. “Look at that water. It's so
blue!”

Eyeing the plate in my hands, he asked if the picnic was ready. I
nodded. Between bites, he murmured dazedly. We were in Italy, he said, and we were sitting on a blanket, and the grass around us was green and cool.

“When we finish eating, let's go for a swim in the water,” he said.

I looked down to scoop up the last bite of egg. When I looked up again, he was quiet, staring at his thumbs. I slipped the fork between his lips. As quickly as it had started, it was over. He had left the grotto and come back to bed. He looked away.

I didn't say anything. I didn't want to ruin it. I wiped his mouth, and then I carried the empty plate into the kitchen. But a few days later, when I asked what he wanted for lunch, he looked at me squarely.

“Italian grotto eggs,” he said. Just like that.

Maybe he knew he'd dreamed it, and he wanted me to know. Or maybe he believed that we'd really been to Italy, eating eggs and swimming. Maybe it didn't matter. Somehow his mind was working to bridge the gap between the hospital bed and a hazy, faraway place. It was a grotto in Italy, a sea cave to swim in, somewhere far from that bed in Oklahoma. I guess it was his way of escaping the body that had carried him for seventy-three years and dropped him without warning.

It could have frightened me to see him like that. Sometimes, it did. His body was giving way, literal bone by bone, and so was his mind. But I was grateful for whatever relief he found, and when I wasn't afraid, I just wanted to help him find it.

ITALIAN GROTTO EGGS

1 tablespoon (½ ounce) unsalted butter

5 large eggs

¼ teaspoon salt

1 tablespoon heavy cream

3 tablespoons fresh goat cheese, such as Laura Chenel, coarsely crumbled

Freshly ground black pepper, for serving

 

Melt the butter in a medium nonstick skillet over medium-high heat.

Crack the eggs into a small bowl and beat them lightly with a fork. Add the salt and cream and beat to blend.

When the pan is hot, pour in the eggs and swirl to coat. Reduce the heat to low, and using a heatproof rubber spatula, stir the eggs gently, scraping the spatula along the bottom of the skillet, until they are loosely set in large, pillowy curds. They should be slightly runnier than you want them. Remove the pan from the heat and scatter the goat cheese over the eggs. Give them one more gentle stir to melt and distribute the cheese.

Serve immediately, with additional salt and black pepper to taste and, if you like, slices of buttered toast.

 

Yield: 2 servings