A Homemade Life (23 page)

G
etting married is tricky. In case you haven't tried it yourself, let me tell you a little about it.

First, when you get engaged, a few things happen. You agree to marry someone, for starters. Also, your head sort of explodes. Third, you are handed a ticket—rather sneakily, I should note, with no warnings at all—to an amusement park ride known as
THE WEDDING
. If you were to pass it at the fair, you'd know it by the pink flashing lights and the neon sign of two doves in silhouette, kissing. It's at times mildly disorienting, and it can even tend toward terrifying, with tears, beers, pimples, and speeding tickets. But if you stay in your seat until the very end, it turns out to be pretty fun.

When Brandon and I got engaged, we didn't know any of that. We knew only that we wanted to be married in the summertime, and that we wanted our wedding to be a big party. We wanted to gather our families and friends around us somewhere special, where we could spend a weekend in celebration. We also wanted to show off a little. Contrary to what I was saying just a second ago about Seattle and its surroundings (that it rains and rains and rains), it can also be absolutely gorgeous. We wanted to gather in a place with a view, with water and mountains both, somewhere big enough to fit us all but small enough to feel cozy.

We looked here and there, searching for just the right spot, but it wasn't as easy as we had hoped. We were either stuck with a yacht club, or with a public park teeming with barbecues and Frisbees. But then, one fortuitous evening, our friends Ashley and Chris told us about their wedding, which they had held two years earlier in Bellingham, a college town on the coast about ninety miles north of Seattle. (We didn't know them then, so we weren't there.) They held the ceremony in a small, secluded park by the water, they said, and the reception was a short walk away, in the Bellingham Cruise Terminal, where ships leave for Alaska and the nearby islands. It had exposed brick walls and steel beams, a grand staircase in the center of the building, and a fifteen-foot domed window that looked out onto the piers. They'd even found a caterer there, someone who sourced almost everything from local farms, served it in hand-carved wooden bowls, and passed champagne and Rainier cherries in the park before the ceremony. That was the clincher.

Borrowing shamelessly from their blueprint, we began to put the pieces into place. We drove up to Bellingham and blocked rooms at three small hotels. We hired a photographer. I bought a dress. We asked Ashley, a graphic designer, to do our save-the-dates, invitations, and ceremony programs. If she was bothered by the fact that we were essentially stealing her entire wedding, she didn't say a thing. When I came over to proofread the programs, she even gave me strawberries and ice cream.

So in many ways, it was a piece of cake. We were planning the wedding we wanted. We had all the right people to help. We had a few arguments over frivolous things, like honeymoon destinations and the cost of flowers, but we talked our way through them, and figuring out how to do that made us feel even more sure of each other. But still, it was hard. However you look at it, an engagement is a limbo period, a space in between. For someone who has a hard time with change, it's torture. Being engaged is one big, drawn-out transition, a single change that takes months to enact. Sixteen months, in our case.

Don't get me wrong: I loved seeing that ring on my finger. I loved knowing that we were getting married. But what I didn't love was the
way that being engaged held us in a sort of freeze frame and, at the same time, kept us running—breathless, driven, determined—toward one single day, the day that would take us,
ta daa!
, from this state to the next. Getting married is not for pansies. The way I see it, it's a little like Valentine's Day. If you allow it to, it can feel kind of stale and stilted, like a test to show how impossibly romantic you can be. So much rides on the wedding—on what is said, what is worn, the tiniest nuances—but in the end, it's just a single day. Granted, it's a day to celebrate your love for someone in the presence of everyone you care about, but still, it's just one day.

When people would wish us well, they would often say something like, “Oh, I just
know
your wedding day is going to be PERFECT! It's going to be BLISS! It's going to be the BEST day of your life!” Brandon and I would always giggle about that, even though the gesture was very nice. For one thing, there's the word
bliss,
which makes my toes curl. It reminds me of diamond company commercials and bath beads. But even more than that, if the best day of our lives is our wedding day, we thought, what the hell comes afterward? We would have a lot of so-so years to look forward to. We wanted to have a beautiful wedding, but it didn't need to be utter perfection. It needed to celebrate what we bring to each other in the truest way possible, and with some good food and dancing. But it didn't need to be the best day
ever
. In fact, we sincerely hoped that, in the long-term scheme of things, it wouldn't be.

Sometimes, when the planning would get the best of us, or when I would start crying about hotel rooms or table linens, Brandon would look at me and say, “This is BLISS!” and then everything would feel much better.

To tell you the truth, I don't think a wedding, no matter how nice, could have anything on any number of other, more ordinary days. Like the day after our engagement party in Oklahoma, the day that Brandon spent sitting on the floor of my mother's kitchen, wrestling contentedly with a rusty bolt in my father's old espresso machine. He spent hours sitting there, watching us come and go, rigging and wrenching and wielding a can of WD-40. When he finally pried the bolt loose, the ma
chine shuddered to life with a squeal and a roar, a sound none of us had heard since my father died. Brandon worked the knobs with a sort of sweet, fearful reverence, and my mother fawned over her cappuccino for hours.

Or like that one Saturday in July, a couple of months after Brandon moved to Seattle and a year before our wedding. We left home in the morning and drove north to Bellingham to meet with the caterer. We had a bag of spicy peanuts in the console, and I was wearing a new pair of flats. We stopped at Goodwill near Mount Vernon and bought a yellow Pyrex dish that I love, and then we ate spaghetti with pesto at a place called D'Anna's. Our canopy bed at the Best Western was nearly four feet off the ground, and it had a set of wooden steps that leaned up against it. The next morning, when I tried to climb down, I banged my hip on the bedside table and got a bruise the size of a baseball. After I stopped whimpering, we laughed about it for a long time. Then, after breakfast, we went out for ice cream. We ordered two scoops, one of which I can't remember and the other being vanilla with black pepper, and then we sat on the curb outside, eating them from a frilly glass dish, the kind they use at old-fashioned soda fountains. I think of that day a lot.

If we could have a wedding like that, we would be all right. More than any amount of bliss, that would be us.

VANILLA–BLACK PEPPER ICE CREAM

i
t may sound like a strange union of flavors, but vanilla and black pepper make a stunning ice cream. When you take a bite, what you get first is the vanilla, but as you swallow, a mild wave of peppery heat washes over your tongue. After we tasted it at Mallard Ice Cream in Bellingham, we knew we had to replicate it at home. We first tried steeping whole peppercorns in the hot milk base, but the flavor was too soft and floral. Ultimately, we wound up adding the pepper at the very end, once the custard was cool, so that it retained its raw, familiar bite. It would be delicious with a rich chocolate cake or brownie, or sandwiched between two chocolate shortbread cookies.

Oh, and if you accidentally boil or curdle your custard, here is a trick I learned from pastry chef David Lebovitz: you can usually rescue it by whizzing it, while it's still warm, in the blender. But remember not to fill your blender jar more than one-third full; hot liquids expand.

 

1 cup whole milk

2 cups heavy cream

¾ cup granulated sugar

Pinch of salt

6 large egg yolks

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1½ teaspoons finely ground black pepper, or more to taste

 

In a heavy medium saucepan, combine the milk, 1 cup of the cream, sugar, and salt. Warm over medium heat, stirring occasionally, until hot and steaming; it should be just barely too hot to touch. Do not boil.

Meanwhile, pour the remaining 1 cup cream into a large bowl. Set a mesh strainer across the top. In a medium bowl, whisk the egg yolks. Then prepare your ice bath: take out a large bowl—larger than the one you put the cream in—and fill it about a third full with ice cubes. Add about 1 cup cold water, so that the ice cubes float. (In a pinch, ice packs or bags of frozen peas work in place of the ice. You'll have to discard the peas afterward, or use them immediately.)

When the milk mixture is hot, remove it from the heat. Let it sit for about 30 seconds, then gradually, slowly, pour about half of it into the yolks, whisking constantly. Pour the warmed egg mixture back into the saucepan with the rest of the milk mixture. Cook over medium-low heat, stirring and scraping the bottom of the pan slowly and constantly with a heatproof spatula, until the custard thickens slightly, just enough to very lightly coat the spatula. If you draw a line up the spatula with the tip of your finger, the custard on either side of the line shouldn't run back together. On my stove, this takes 5 to 6 minutes.

Immediately pour the custard through the strainer, and stir well to combine it with the cream. Place the bowl carefully in the ice bath. Let cool, stirring occasionally. Then remove the bowl from the ice bath, cover it with plastic wrap, and chill it completely, preferably overnight, before churning.

When you're ready to churn the ice cream, stir in the vanilla and the black pepper. Taste it: Is there enough heat from the pepper? We find that 1½ teaspoons makes a good, balanced flavor, but you can add more, if you like.

Pour the custard into your ice cream maker, and freeze according to the manufacturer's instructions. Transfer the finished ice cream to a container with a lid and put in the freezer to harden for at least 2 hours before serving.

 

Yield: about 1 quart

T
o some people, a pickle is a pickle. I was one of those people until a couple of years ago. The pickle was the silent partner on the sandwich plate. It was a little green sidecar, the dinghy that floats alongside the ship. I usually pushed it out of the way. It was nothing to get excited about.

But then along came Brandon and, with him, a whole universe of things pickled and brined. Brandon craves acidic foods like people stranded in the desert crave water. His private world is filled, I like to imagine, with mirages in the shape of vinegar bottles and citrus fruits. When we met, he owned somewhere between twenty-four and thirty types of vinegar, a fact that he cited during our very first phone call, and with no small amount of pride. Today our collective kitchen has happily adopted most of them, except for the few stragglers that stayed behind with his old housemates in New York. The inventory runs from the simplest white wine vinegar to fancy aged balsamics, specimens made from Cabernet grapes, and others made from cherries, and, in most cases, a few brands and ages of each. Meeting him was like winning the lottery, only instead of a big check, my grand prize was a pantry full of vinegar.

Most of the time he uses them in measured quantities, but occasionally he will sip them from a spoon. For someone with a pretty precise
palate, he takes a heavy hand to the acid on his plate. I need just enough salad dressing to coat the leaves, but one seat over, he's slurping at the jar. You think I'm exaggerating, but I'm not. I have watched him more than once reach for his water glass and get the vinaigrette instead. These were accidents, admittedly, but even as he raised the jar and the scent of vinegar hit his nostrils, he kept tilting it throatward. I watched in horror as the yellowish liquid slid into his mouth. He didn't even flinch.

When he's not consuming salad dressing, it's usually because he's moved onto pickles, another handy way of meeting his vinegar needs. Brandon has always had a thing for pickles, but until a few years ago, it was nothing particularly serious. Then he had what he calls his “pickle awakening.” He was still living in New York at the time, but once when he came to see me in Seattle, I took him to Boat Street Café, one of my favorite restaurants, and he ordered the signature pickle plate. It came to the table looking like a painter's palette in shades of vinegar and salt: a stroke of green asparagus here, a splotch of peppers there, a splash of rosy onions and purplish prunes, spindly young carrots, even cauliflower tinted with turmeric. A heady cloud of vinegar hovered over the plate, and Brandon sniffed at it, looking genuinely moved. The word
pickled
feels too dinky to describe what had happened to those vegetables. Each was infused with a different spice: some sweet, some hot, some almost ticklish when they hit the tongue. These were not someone's soggy jarred spears; they were the kind that gets under your skin. Even I got into the spirit, stealing all of the prunes and most of the peppers.

When Brandon moved to Seattle, he applied for a job at Boat Street. That's where he was working when he met Olaiya and Sam. He even befriended the pickle makers themselves, chef-owners Renee Erickson and Susan Kaplan. With their guidance and a few old cookbooks, Brandon started pickling on his own. Our home kitchen often moonlights now as a small-scale pickling plant. Whenever we have a surplus of a particular fruit or vegetable, he commandeers the stove and cooks up a batch. The smell of hot brine can make you cough at first, but once you
get accustomed, it's kind of intoxicating. On the right man, it makes a lovely cologne.

When Brandon and I started planning our wedding, it was pretty obvious that there would be pickles involved. Our rehearsal dinner was to be a picnic on the grounds of an old homestead, with a red barn and cows nearby, and everyone knows that a picnic is not a picnic, especially not on a farm, without pickles.

Our caterer offered to provide them, but we decided to do it ourselves. People thought we were out of our minds to want to do it, to take on yet
another
project in the midst of the wedding planning, the project to end all projects. Even my mother, Queen of Crazy Christmas Baking, tried to dissuade us. I'm glad we didn't listen. For all the heart and guts wrapped up in a wedding, planning it is essentially a cerebral exercise. Brining carrots and grapes and onions, on the other hand, is wholly,
heavenly
tangible. It's slow. It's messy. It's slippery and sticky. It made me feel like a real human being, which felt a lot better than being a capital-B Bride.

First on the list were pickled red onions, a regular in our refrigerator. Second in line were carrots doused in hot cider vinegar and scented with garlic and fresh thyme. They were spindly and sweet, as small and delicate as a lady's pinky and just the right height to stand, shoulder to shoulder, in a quart-sized Mason jar. It took all the strength we had not to eat every single one of them before the wedding. We also called into service a recipe from Boat Street for pickled grapes with mustard seeds and cinnamon. I would have never thought to pickle a grape, but they're completely delicious, crunchy, and sweet-tart. Based on a single taste, one of our rehearsal dinner guests offered to bankroll an entire pickling business, should we ever want to start one. So far, we don't plan to, but knowing Brandon, I wouldn't be surprised if we did.

SPICY PICKLED CARROTS WITH GARLIC AND THYME

2 cups apple cider vinegar, plus more for topping jars

2 cups water, plus more for topping jars

¼ cup granulated sugar

6 (5-to 6-inch) sprigs fresh thyme

5 large cloves garlic, thinly sliced

1½ teaspoons black peppercorns, cracked

1½ teaspoons red pepper flakes

Heaping 1½ teaspoons salt

Heaping 2 teaspoons brown mustard seeds

1½ pounds small (finger-sized) carrots, or standard-sized carrots, cut into sticks about ½ inch wide and 3 inches long

 

In a medium saucepan, combine 1½ cups apple cider vinegar, water, sugar, thyme, garlic, black peppercorns, red pepper flakes, salt, and mustard seeds. Bring to a boil over medium-high heat, then reduce to a simmer and cook, stirring occasionally, for 10 minutes. Remove the pan from the heat, and let cool for 5 minutes. Stir in the remaining ½ cup vinegar.

Put the carrots in a large, heatproof bowl, and pour the warm brine over them. Cool to room temperature.

While the carrots cool, wash 2 quart-sized canning jars and their lids in warm, soapy water.

When the carrots and brine are cool, distribute the carrots evenly among the jars, arranging them snugly. (Hands and fingers work best for this; tongs make a mess.) Using a ladle, divide the brine evenly among the jars. The carrots should be covered completely by brine. If they are not, add a mixture of 2 parts vinegar and 1 part water to cover.

Seal firmly and refrigerate for at least 3 days, or, preferably, a week; carrots are dense and take time to absorb the brine.

 

NOTE:
Covered and refrigerated, pickled carrots will, in theory, last indefinitely, but we try to eat them within a month or two.

 

Yield: 2 quarts

PICKLED GRAPES WITH CINNAMON AND BLACK PEPPER

Adapted from Susan Kaplan

t
hese may sound a little strange, but they're a crowd-pleaser. I like them best within the first four days after they're made, but some people like them even more after a week or two. Their pickled flavor gets stronger over time, and their skins will wrinkle slightly.

 

1 pound red or black grapes, preferably seedless

1 cup white wine vinegar

1 cup granulated sugar

1½ teaspoons brown mustard seeds

1 teaspoon whole black peppercorns

1 (2½-inch) cinnamon stick

¼ teaspoon salt

 

Rinse and dry the grapes, and pull them carefully from their stems. Using a small, sharp knife, trim away the “belly button” at the stem end of the grape, exposing a bit of the flesh inside. Put the grapes into a medium bowl and set aside.

In a medium saucepan, combine the remaining ingredients. Bring to a boil over medium-high heat, then pour the mixture over the grapes. Stir to combine. Set aside to cool to room temperature.

While the grapes cool, wash 2 pint-sized canning jars and their lids in warm, soapy water. When the grapes are cool, ladle them into the jars. Chill for at least 8 hours or overnight.

Serve cold.

 

Yield: about 3 cups