Man With a Pan (27 page)

After going through pretty intense cooking phases when I was young, I fell away from it, and then I slowly rediscovered cooking in my twenties. Only recently I started to get a lot more into it. I had a number of obsessive hobbies as a kid that I dropped and then tended to pick up again and become very enthusiastic about later in life. I think that at eleven, I probably knew exactly what I was into, and then it took me a couple of decades to rediscover that.

Recipe File

Chicken, Sausage, and Oyster Gumbo

Chicken and sausage gumbo is a pretty standard dish. The addition of oysters is my own preference, undoubtedly influenced by the chicken and oyster gumbo my mother used to make. Hers was very different in style from mine, and fairly atypical in general, very brothy—I don’t think she used a roux at all—but I love the addition of oysters to the standard combination. It adds a lovely complexity. And oysters just generally make most things better.

2 to 3 cups cooked long-grain rice
⅔ cup vegetable oil
1 3- to 4-pound chicken, cut into pieces
½ cup flour
1 pound (or a bit more) andouille sausage, sliced into ½-inch disks
1 large onion, chopped
1 green pepper, chopped
2 to 3 scallions, thinly sliced
2 to 3 tablespoons parsley, minced
2 to 3 cloves garlic, minced
2 quarts chicken stock
⅛ teaspoon cayenne
1 teaspoon dried thyme
2 bay leaves
Salt and pepper to taste
1 pint shucked oysters in their juice
3 tablespoons filé powder (ground sassafras)

Heat the oil in a large pot over high heat. Add the chicken and brown. (Don’t cook through.)

Remove the chicken and set aside. Scrape up any remaining browned bits, then gradually add the flour to make the roux.

The moment the roux is ready (if you dally, the roux will burn), add the sausage, onion, green pepper, scallion, parsley, and garlic.

Continue to cook over low heat for about 10 more minutes, until the vegetables have softened and the onions have turned translucent.

Add the chicken stock, chicken pieces, cayenne, thyme, bay leaves, salt, and pepper and bring to a simmer.

Simmer for about 1 hour, until the chicken is tender.

Let the gumbo cool, then refrigerate overnight.

The next day, skim off any fat.

Remove the chicken; strip the meat, tearing it into coarse chunks; and return it to the pot. Gradually heat the gumbo.

Shortly before serving, add the oysters along with their juice.

Continue to simmer just long enough to cook the oysters through.

Just before serving, add the filé powder.

Ladle the gumbo into individual serving bowls. Add a generous spoonful of rice, and serve. Provide Crystal, Louisiana, Tabasco, or other hot sauce at the table for individual doctoring.

Note: Cooling the gumbo overnight is done primarily to improve the flavor, but also because I typically make gumbo for dinner parties, and when entertaining, I like to do most of the cooking ahead of time so that when the guests arrive, I have time for more important things—like mixing cocktails.

Andouille is a Cajun favorite from rural Louisiana, but one can substitute other smoked sausages.

SEAN WILSEY

Kitchen ABCs: Always Be Cleaning

Sean Wilsey is the author of
Oh the Glory of It All,
a memoir, and the coeditor of the anthology
State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America.

Before becoming a father, I had a credo: if you could not clean as you cooked, then you should stay away from the kitchen. And this conviction has remained into fatherhood as a sort of midlife delusion, or phantom limb, in the face of my total failure to embrace it.

In 2003, while on vacation, I shared a kitchen with a friend who left a trail of vegetable trimmings; uncapped olive oil, soy sauce, and vinegar bottles; dirty bowls; and rejected greens trailed across every surface whenever she made a salad. It was always a great salad, but it made me smug. It ought, I told this friend ungratefully, while eating her salad and looking at the trashed kitchen from which it had come, to be physically impossible to cook and not clean. Cooking and cleaning shouldn’t just be mentioned in tandem but bound together with bonds unsunderable. Sharing a kitchen with her was like flying with a pilot who could get a plane into the air but didn’t know how to land. I believed I knew how to land. I prepared complicated, multicourse meals that hit the table with nothing to be washed but cutlery, glasses, and plates.

I thought kitchen trashing was simply extended postcollegiate naïveté about work and efficiency. I thought it was a
slacker
thing. I thought all of this, deludedly, up to the moment I began writing this essay. But as I wrote, I realized what I somehow had not noticed: that with the arrival of small children has come an insurmountable messiness, with ever more and more to be cleaned.

My wife, Daphne, and I split the work in our house. Because I am a show-off, and because I have amnesia, and because of allergies, I often prepare four different dishes, plus sides, at each and every meal.

Our five-year-old, Owen, grouchy on less than ten hours sleep, can best be restored to himself by pancakes. I make them often (on Sundays with a side of bacon), employing one mixing bowl, one skillet, a whisk, and a measuring cup, plus a knife, fork, and plate. Let’s say this is a Sunday and throw in a second skillet, a pair of tongs, and a plate covered in paper towels for the bacon. Sometimes I get a chance to wash the whisk right after I’ve used it, but not if Owen’s two-year-old sister, Mira, a bigheaded small person in purple polar bear pajamas, is up. The sound of clomping feet precedes her arrival. When she gets to the kitchen, she stops and throws her lilac and gray blanket over her head.

Owen says, “Dad, ghost. At breakfast.”

I say, “Haunted breakfast.”

The ghost nods.

I scoop her up, put her in the seat we have clamped to our counter, and ask, “Do you want an egg?”

“Mnh-hnh.”

Mira, lover of soft-boiled eggs, gets eczema from egg whites, so I try to cook precisely, making the yolk soft and the rest discouragingly (but not unappetizingly) inflexible. Mira’s also allergic to cow’s milk, and drinks goat’s milk, which she likes to have warmed for twenty seconds in a pan. Add to the dirty list one pot, one pan, a slotted spoon, a knife, an egg cup (votive holders work well here), and a spoon.

At this point some dialogue.

Mira: “I want go-go!”

Me: “Sure, you can have some yogurt. How would you ask if you wanted me to give it to you?”

“
CANIHAVESOMEYOGURT
PLEASE
!”

I give her some plain yogurt (goat’s-milk yogurt) and turn around to get some honey, which we buy in half-gallon glass jars that weigh ten pounds each. Mira wants to eat an entire one of these for breakfast. I wrestle a jar down from a cabinet, stick in a spoon, prepare to drizzle.

Mira says, “I can do it!”

“OK,” I say. “You can do it.” I give her the spoon, full of honey. Suddenly it’s in her mouth.

“Mmmm.” She removes it slowly, then reaches for a second dip.

“Wait, don’t
re
dip!” I get another spoon. “Last time, OK?”

She dips and drizzles with total focus, allowing me to secret the honey into an out-of-sight zone on the floor. I then try to get some conversation going so the disappearance goes unnoticed. My strategy: Talk off the top of my head, fast, and with enthusiasm. Circling police helicopters in Lower Manhattan, a background annoyance and source of background anxiety (is something
happening
?) since 9/11, can be helpful.

“Hear that helicopter? Maybe more than one helicopter. A
group
of helicopters. Is there a word for that? A group of birds is called a flock. Unless they’re crows … A group of crows is called a murder.”

Owen: “Murder.”

Mira: “Where’s the honey?”

“There used to be a band in the 1980s, when Daddy was a teenager, called Flock of Seagulls. Flock of Helicopters. Flock of Copters.”

“Where’s the honey?!”

“Do you know they use helicopters to fight fires? Firefighting helicopters haul a big bucket full of water and dump it on the flames.”

“
WHERE’S THE
HONEY
?!?!?”

“Wouldn’t that be cool if we had a remote control helicopter that could carry a bucket full of maple syrup and dump it on your pancakes?”

“WHERE’S THE
HONEY
DADDY
THEHONEY
?!?!?”

“Honey’s gone, sweetheart,” I say in a neutral voice.

“
Not
gone.”

“It’s gone.”

“But I don’t
want
it to be gone!”

“You’ve got a lot there.” I point to her yogurt.

“
Not
a lot.”

“Uh … we don’t have an endless amount?”

“You’re trying to trick me, Daddy.” I am proud of her for noticing. “We have a lot.”

Owen chimes in. “She’s right, Dad, we have a lot of honey.” He cranes over. “She doesn’t have too much.”

Mira: “Thank you, Owen.”

Owen: “You’re welcome, Mira.”

This is all time that I have spent not cleaning.

Owen continues: “Dad, that was an interesting idea about a remote-control helicopter that could pour maple syrup on our pancakes. Maybe we could get a little jar, fill it with maple syrup, and tape it to the bottom of a remote-control helicopter. Tape it. Really, we could do that, Dad.”

“Yes. We could. Though I was thinking you’d maybe use wire and screws and make a sort of harness. What do you think, Mira?”

“Can I have the honey,
please
?”

As a parent I cannot resist a “please.” If one of my children were to say, May I have some weapons-grade Pu-239, please? I would seriously consider the request. I put Mira’s honey back on the counter and we go through another three spoons.

More cleaning time spent not cleaning. Mira and I get sticky and Mira asks for a wet washcloth (without saying “please”).

Owen asks, “What’s a harness?”

“A series of straps and buckles designed to hold people or things safely when they’re hanging in the air.”

Owen: “Harness.”

Pause.

“Would you use a harness to hang from a mountain?”

“Yes. Or a bridge, or any other tall thing. Like a building.”

Mira mixes a lot of the honey into her yogurt, hair, pj’s. I try some spot cleaning with a sponge and do a bad job. The purple polar bears are fleece, highly esteemed, and bedtime does not go easy without them. We do have another pair in the same material, but white, and covered in black lapdogs. Whenever Mira sees this backup pair, she emphatically declares, “
No
Scotties!”

I peel her an apple, then wash some blueberries and give them to Owen in a bowl, racking up two more spoons, a plate, a bowl, and a peeler. Plus cups for milk or juice and/or water for each child (if they don’t want
tea
). There’s so much stuff on the counter that I’m running out of space. I am out of my depth.

New vocabulary words taught while not cleaning any of this up:
murder, harness.

Number of things needing to be washed up midway through breakfast: thirty-one.

In the fall of 2001, long before I became a parent, the air in our neighborhood smelled like melted plastic, and people in New York didn’t know how to behave. I felt very good (sometimes smug) about my cooking and cleaning skills. So Daphne and I started inviting friends and acquaintances over for regular Sunday night dinners that were part improvised comfort and family for people who had neither and, as I look back on it, part culinary grandstanding.

I made a series of dishes that I now almost never make, because our kids don’t like them (Owen: “That’s just not my taste, Dad”; Mira: clamps both hands over her mouth): seafood risotto with peas (and homemade stock); gnocchi Bolognese with pork, beef, and San Marzano tomatoes from Di Palo’s Fine Foods down the street; porcini mushroom tagliatelle (fresh from Raffetto’s around the corner); spaghetti with white wine and clams. Standing in the same spot from which I now issue pancakes and honey-distracting blather, I would have long conversations with friends in the immaculately ABC’d kitchen. Everything was flavorful, everything was comforting and grounding and under control, and the next morning I would wake up and never even think about pancakes (which I’ve never liked that much, especially since developing a gluten allergy).

I like poached eggs. My father used to make them for me after he left my mother, and now I make them for Daphne and myself. I can use the same water for poaching that I use for Mira’s soft boiling, but only if I poach first. I never poach first, because poaching first in the egg water requires Mira to have patience and me to have toasted my frozen gluten-free bread in advance (when the eggs come out, they go straight on the bread). I never do this, because our toaster requires a double toast, once on the dark setting and once on the medium, to get the gluten-free bread defrosted and toasty. And even if the toast were ready, I can’t poach an egg after soft-boiling because we buy eggs from a sloppy Chinese farmer who feeds her chickens organic greens and never washes away what is technically called guano but looks a lot like shit. The eggs cost ten dollars a dozen at the Union Square green-market. Last time I bought some, a woman behind me said, “Must be
gold
eggs at that price.”