Blue Plate Special (44 page)

CHICKEN TAGINE

I invented this recipe by describing it on the fly in the first chapter of my novel
, The Great Man,
in which a seventy-four-year-old woman half seduces a forty-year-old man with food, and then I made it in order to test my imaginative culinary instincts. There is no modest way to say this: the apricots melt into the broth and sweeten it deeply, the olives give it brine, and the almonds and cilantro and lemon bring it to life. And it contains cinnamon; it is, in a word, delicious
.

On low heat, sauté a chopped red onion and 5–6 minced garlic cloves in lots of butter (or ghee) or oil. Add coriander and cumin, about a tablespoon—yes, I said tablespoon, of each (feel free to use already ground; I like using a mortar and pestle, but some people don’t)—a teaspoon of cinnamon, half a lemon’s worth of grated zest, a generous pinch each of saffron and cayenne, a teaspoon of paprika, 2 bay leaves, and a thumb-sized lump of grated fresh ginger. Keep heat low, stir constantly, and make sure nothing burns or sticks; add more ghee or oil if necessary.

When it’s all cooked into a commingled fragrant brown spice puddle, add a red and a yellow pepper, diced; a large carrot or 2 medium carrots, peeled and chopped small; a generous handful of cracked green olives; a handful of dried Turkish apricots, chopped small; one 15–16 ounce can of well-rinsed chickpeas; a cup of Pomì diced tomatoes; and a cup of hearty chicken broth. Bring to a gentle boil, then right down to a simmer, and cover.

Cut up 5 skinless, boneless chicken thighs and 3 breasts, more than 2 pounds of chicken in all, into big bite-size pieces—the kind you have to cut in half to really eat—and grill them in a cast-iron skillet in ghee or oil till they’re brown just on the outside and still raw inside, then add them to the stew and stir everything together and gently simmer it, covered, for 4½ hours. Add more chicken broth as necessary.

Sauté and slightly brown 1 package or 2 cups couscous—or, if you’re gluten intolerant, quinoa—in 2 tablespoons butter, then cook according to the directions on the packet. Serve with harissa or shug, along with bowls of chopped toasted almonds, lemon slices, and chopped fresh cilantro.

ORECCHIETTE WITH BROCCOFLOWER

In the first year of our love affair, when we were delirious and invincible and I could eat anything I wanted, Brendan made this for me with real pasta. Now, four years later, my gluten intolerance is back to normal, and we are no longer delirious or invincible, merely profoundly happy and contented, so he uses gluten-free pasta. Either way, it is a fantastic dish
.

Chop a broccoflower (a neon-green broccoli-cauliflower hybrid with dizzyingly otherworldly conical whorls that looks like a
Star Trek
vegetable and is also known as romanesco) into bite-size pieces. Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil. Add broccoflower and simmer for 5 minutes. Add 1 pound of orecchiette to the broccoflower in the water and follow directions on package for cooking, usually 11 minutes.

Meanwhile, peel 8 cloves of garlic. Chop roughly and sauté in hot olive oil in a large skillet on low heat. Add salt, pepper, and crushed red pepper flakes. Let the garlic just begin to brown—don’t overcook.

Drain the pasta and broccoflower and add to the large skillet and toss with the oil and garlic. Add generous amounts of Parmesan, more salt, black pepper, and crushed red pepper flakes to taste, stir, and cook on low heat for 2 minutes. Serve hot with more cheese and pepper. This simple but luscious meal serves 2 voracious people.

Starting over in midlife is an interesting thing. The past doesn’t go away or even recede behind you; it stays with you. I didn’t know that when I was young. I thought things fell away and disappeared. Now, I know otherwise. I am exactly the same person as I was when I was born, and I always will be. Everything that has ever happened to me—every meal I’ve ever eaten, every person I’ve loved or hated, every book I’ve read or written, every song I’ve heard or sung—is all still with me, magnetically adhering to my cells.

In the fall of 2011, Brendan and I bought a nineteenth-century brick house in the West End of Portland, Maine, and then we moved all our things into it and hired a contractor to renovate it. The farmhouse is just over an hour away; we go back and forth along little country roads in our Subaru with Dingo in the backseat. Our life is settled, quiet, and calm. It turns out that true happiness is a simple thing, as simple as dirt.

O
n St. Valentine’s Day, Brendan and Dingo and I took our walk along the dirt road, then veered off down the path through the woods to the lake. We walked out onto the frozen lake and back toward home. The ice seemed thick enough, but we didn’t know for sure. It made strange whale-groaning sounds far out on the lake and at one point it cracked thickly under Brendan’s
feet. We were a little spooked, but not enough to go sensibly back to shore, so we continued out over an inlet. Dingo, highly intelligent as always, walked far enough away from us, closer to shore, so that if we fell in, he’d be safe. Meanwhile, we humans burbled along like daring eight-year-olds, shoe-skating and light stepping and whooping with suspense. Out there on the flat, frozen surface, we had a dazzling view of the White Mountains just to the north. It was a clear day, and the far-off, snow-covered, looming Mount Washington seemed close enough to walk to.

After about a mile, we made it safely to the dock where we swam in the summertime. Although rationally we knew the danger was minimal, we were giddy from the relief of not falling into the freezing-cold lake. We climbed up through the woods and came home along the road. In the warm house, we shed our coats, out of breath.

I made us buckwheat blini with fine black mild caviar and crème fraîche. We drank
cava
with a dash of orange juice and listened to the most innocuous, elevator-music-like bossa nova in the world, and laughed at ourselves for liking it.

We ate and drank all day long. Brendan shucked fresh Maine oysters, which we ate raw on ice by the fire with shallots in white wine vinegar and a cocktail sauce of lemon juice, ketchup, Worcestershire sauce, Tabasco, and horseradish.

I dismantled two small endives and, on twinned pairs of the crisp, subtly bitter leaves, I slathered sour cream and loaded each with capers, fresh basil, and oil-packed artichoke hearts. We ate the whole plateful with a fresh batch of blini and slabs of two rather spectacular mild cheeses and some seedless purple grapes.

Then I steamed a bunch of slender asparagus spears and served them with a gobsmackingly delicious dipping sauce made of the rest of the white wine vinegar-and-shallots mixed with mayonnaise and Dijon mustard. After this, I steamed
eighteen clams, which we dipped in hot butter and slid down our gullets, one by one.

Later, I melted a bar of very dark chocolate in a double boiler while I cut the stems off some eerily ripe, preternaturally juicy California strawberries. I dipped ten of them in the chocolate and put them into the fridge on wax paper. While they set, we revisited the blini and cheese course.

And then, with small glasses of Rioja, to finish this day of luxurious but simple eating, we ate the chocolate-dipped strawberries.

The next morning, I woke up with a well-fed glow. I thought about my father. His birthday falls on February 15, the day after St. Valentine’s Day. I’ve always found this ironic, or at least worthy of note. There’s the day of love, and then hard on its heels comes the yearly reminder of my father’s charming, upsetting, tantalizing presence in my childhood and then his abrupt, eternal absence from the rest of my life. It’s hard not to draw some sort of intuitive and subterranean connection, every year.

I thought about all of us, his five daughters: Caddie and Thea, me, Susan, and Emily—the people we are, the lives we’ve made for ourselves. I thought about my four brothers-in-law, and Jon, and Brendan. Silently, I wished my father a happy birthday, wherever he was.

Kate Christensen is the author of six previous novels, most recently
The Astral. The Great Man
won the 2008 PEN/Faulkner Award. She has published reviews and essays in numerous publications, most recently
The New York Times Book Review
,
Bookforum
,
O
,
Elle
, and
Gilt Taste
. She writes an occasional drinks column called With a Twist for
The Wall Street Journal
. Her blog can be accessed at:
http://​kate​christensen.​word​press.​com
. She lives in Portland, Maine.

Other titles by Kate Christensen available in eBook format
Fiction:
The Astral
• 978-0-385-53092-7
Trouble
• 978-0-385-53038-5
The Great Man
• 978-0-307-45561-1
The Epicure’s Lament
• 978-0-307-48433-8
Jeremy Thrane
• 978-0-307-80738-0
In the Drink
• 978-0-307-80737-3

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