Stuck in Downward Dog, page 14
The intention is to inspire one another to express the truth, free from judgment.
Emily Post insisted that I not try out a new dish at a dinner party, but my question for her was this: if I’d never had a dinner party, never prepared a proper meal and the only menu item I’d made from the Martha cookbook was a headed salmon gone wrong, how was I supposed to use a dish I’d already prepared for a previous party? It seemed incomprehensible and unreasonable, and besides, wasn’t the point of a dinner party to try out new culinary trends? And since the cookbook was a tenth-anniversary collection published in 2000, some of those recipes (I had no doubt the salmon was one of them) could be at least fifteen years old by now.
Since Victoria was going to be no help in this department, I called Mitz to ask her advice.
“CulinaryConnoisseur.com,” she said. “It has all the best recipes from Gourmand and Palate magazines. I’m surprised you don’t know it,” she added, just as I was thinking she was being so helpful.
I wanted to say, I’m surprised you don’t know I’ve never cooked a meal, but I thought better of it.
“You can even type in a theme, and it’ll come up with great recipes. Like Summer, for instance,” Mitz continued, and I had to admit, she was near-psychic. How perfect would it be to get a themed menu for my event, just like that? “And don’t get bogged down if there’s an ingredient you don’t like. They’re very adaptable recipes, so you can just improvise to make them your own.”
I liked the sound of that, especially since Emily Post also advised: “Your imagination is the only limit to the menu, although be aware of your guests’ dietary restrictions.” I hadn’t actually asked any of my guests about their dietary restrictions, but it wasn’t as though I planned to serve Iron Chef–esque dishes like bone marrow or sea urchin. Besides, I felt I was clearly ahead in the etiquette race (not that this was a competition or anything). After all, Olivia had sent out invites to Mitz’s Engagement Enhancement party only three weeks before the event, and I’d yet to receive an RSVP in the mail from any of my dinner guests. Anyway, I knew none of my guests had allergies—I’d eaten meals with all of them, even Amir and Johnnie, on enough occasions to know that. So all that was left were their dislikes. I could take care of those details with a quick e-mail to each of them, which would not only display my sense of compassion but also impeccable etiquette savvy. Clearly I was managing Item Number 7 on the OM list and would have no problem checking off etiquette as a mastered skill.
And so the next afternoon at work, after composing my e-mail to my dinner guests, I clicked over to CulinaryConnoisseur.com and typed “Summer” into the search bar. A summer-themed menu appeared on screen, and the first recipe that came up was Summer Vegetable Frittata. I was torn. I hated eggs, but I knew how to make this dish. Or at least something quite similar, thanks to Victoria, and Emily Post had said you should make a dish that you’d already tested. And Mitz had said that this was the website to use if you wanted to impress. And the recipe had “Summer” right in the title.
I clicked on the frittata recipe. I planned to serve several courses, and this would be just one of the appetizers I would circulate while guests were arriving. That way, if they, like I, didn’t enjoy eggs, they didn’t have to eat it, but they would at least be impressed, and I would be off to a good start with an item I couldn’t mess up.
An hour later (having been distracted by Marjorie, who wanted me to clean up Treatment Room A), I printed off the summer-themed menu:
Summer Vegetable Frittata
Summer Platter of Shellfish with a Trio of Sauces
Grilled Polenta and Summer Thai Salad
Summer Strawberry Gazpacho
Summer Melon with Basil-Mint Granita
Crown Roast with Asiago-Stuffed Summer Squash Blossoms, Shaved Sweet Potato and Toasted Pumpkin Seeds
Vanilla Port Poached Summer Figs with Honey Crème
Then I printed off each recipe.
“What are you printing?” Marjorie yelled from her office.
“Invoices.”
“You’d better send them out today, because the mail doesn’t go out Monday,” she called. “But you know we’re staying open, right?”
“On the holiday?”
“Of course—we’re booked solid,” she said, and I flipped the appointment book to Monday, August 7. She had filled it—writing straight across the line I’d run vertically through the day to indicate a holiday—with appointments. I couldn’t believe it. I had a feeling it was illegal to deny a worker a statutory holiday, but after the fiasco of the consultation forms, I was worried about losing my job and decided I’d better not challenge Marjorie.
Anyway, I didn’t have time to think about how I was missing out on a three-day weekend. I quickly hit Print on the perfect palate cleanser: Summer Melon with Basil-Mint Granita. If anything, I knew that was going to wow my dinner guests. It just didn’t get much more Nigella Lawson than that. I might not have her breasts or her accent, but I would serve a meal that would impress even her.
~
My plan was to hit the St. Lawrence Market on the morning of my party. An indoor market that took up more than a city block, filled with fresh fruit, vegetables, cheese, bread and flowers, it was the perfect place to do my shopping, because everyone knows that if you’re going to be a fabulous chef, then you shop for all your items fresh on the day of the dinner party. And, of course, you let the market atmosphere inspire your menu.
I intended to do just that, so instead of bringing each recipe with me, I’d made a list with the ingredients I needed. In hindsight, I probably should’ve brought the recipes, since I’d forgotten to write the quantity required for each item. I was going to have to guesstimate the amounts that would satiate my seven dinner guests. And now, it also appeared that my list was somewhat vague. The platter of shellfish was open to interpretation since I’d failed to write which types of shellfish were in the recipe—but that would just force me to be inspired. Which was what I was going to have to do with the summer melon, too, as it became clear to me that a fruit called “summer melon” didn’t actually exist, according to the vendor at the first fruit stand I happened upon.
“You could get honeydew or cantaloupe. They’re both quite nice. It’s your personal preference.”
How could I have a personal preference when I hadn’t made the recipe before and didn’t actually know which would taste better? I opted for one of each, thinking that perhaps the title of the recipe was a generalization, meaning a selection of summer melon. And I figured I liked both types of melon, so why not have both together?
I also hadn’t organized my list into fruits, vegetables and meat, so once I left the produce stand, where I bought one honeydew, two cantaloupes, a quart of strawberries and the vegetables for the frittata (which turned out to just be zucchini and Swiss chard leaves), I realized I hadn’t picked up the summer squash blossoms or the sweet potatoes.
But since I didn’t want to fight the crowd to go back to the big veggie stand, I settled for a smaller booth, and the man there told me that summer squash was merely a fancy term for zucchini, and that the blossoms were the flowers on the end of the zucchini. I looked in my bag, and the zucchini I’d just bought didn’t have blossoms, so I was forced to buy another selection of zucchini with blossoms. I got so frazzled that, instead of buying sweet potatoes, I ended up buying plain old baking potatoes.
And then I saw George. Which was weird, because I could’ve sworn Victoria had said she couldn’t bring George to my dinner party because he would be out of town (the reason I was planning for only seven dinner guests). Maybe he was going out of town. But surely, if you were going out of town that afternoon, you wouldn’t be buying a baguette, cheese, a quart of tomatoes and a bag of green beans. Why wouldn’t Victoria be doing the shopping? Wasn’t that the job of a full-time housewife and mother? Or the housekeeper?
I waved, and I was sure George saw me, but he purposely looked away. He also put on his sunglasses, and since we were still inside and his last name was not Michael or Bush, it was sort of weird. Then the moment passed and he got lost in the crowd, so I dismissed the incident.
I needed to focus on the rest of my menu.
I couldn’t even begin to worry about my discovery that there were two types of crown roast, pork and lamb, and I had failed to write down which the recipe called for. I chose the pork because I figured pig was safer than lamb when it came to potential dislikes (a question my guests had all failed miserably to reply to), and besides, the butcher said the roast was already prepared, which was perfect because it was one less thing I had to worry about. All I had to do was put the little crowns on top of the posts (er, bones), before serving, he said. Hosting a dinner party is a cinch, I thought, though I had no intention of telling my guests that I’d bought a prepared roast.
The first fishmonger I found was hawking mussels, oysters and shrimp, and I decided that particular combination would go just fine with my trio of sauces.
“Jumbo black tiger or pink shrimp?” the fishmonger asked me.
Black tiger sounded decadent. Plus, they cost an extra dollar a pound, so I went with those.
“Don’t forget to shell the shrimp first, split the oyster shells open and serve them on ice, and the mussels should open when you cook them,” the fishmonger said, looking at me doubtfully.
“Right,” I assured him confidently, nodding. Surely my recipes explained those details.
The final thing, which I couldn’t seem to find, was polenta. After asking at three different stands, since I wasn’t sure whether it was a cheese, a fruit or a vegetable that would go in my summer salad, a lady who was pressing the ends of a cantaloupe (something I hadn’t done when I bought mine) said to me, “Most people make polenta. You could buy it pre-made, but I’m not sure if you’ll find it here.”
Sure enough, when I got home, I realized that I hadn’t printed out the recipe for polenta, which must have been another recipe on its own. I called Mitz, who was in a florist’s shop, on her cell phone.
“Do you think tapas are going to be totally out of style by the time I get married?” she asked. Who knew one trip to the market could make me exude culinary expertise over the phone?
Of course, I had no idea tapas were even trendy right now. Maybe I’d have to serve the frittata in the mini-muffin pans after all. I didn’t want to let on my ignorance to Mitz, so I just answered her question with a question. “Have you noticed a lot of restaurants doing tapas instead of mains?”
“See? I knew it. It’s going to be just like Thai,” she sighed.
Thai was out? Maybe I’d have to eliminate the Thai influences from my Thai salad.
“Do you have a recipe for polenta?” I asked her, since it was time to get down to business.
“Polenta? It’s just cornmeal mush. You mix cornmeal, water, olive oil and maybe a dash of salt. Easy.”
Easy for who? Still, I was glad I’d called her.
Except, of course, polenta wasn’t the only recipe I was missing. The trio of sauces for my platter wasn’t actually on the recipe I’d printed out. For that I needed to print out three other recipes: one for the Saffron Mayonnaise, one for Roasted Grape Tomato Relish and one for Lemongrass Glaze, which all in all sounded much more complicated than appetizing.
I wondered if regular mayo, sun-dried tomato salad dressing and some lemon wedges would do the trick. They’d have to. I didn’t have a computer at home, and at that moment I had more important culinary concerns to deal with.
Also, I realized now that the Summer Platter of Shellfish recipe had suggested scallops, king crab legs and clams to match the trio of sauces—not mussels, oysters and black tiger shrimp, as I’d purchased. But I was fine with my seafood selection and my ability to be inspired by the freshness of the market. I wasn’t worried. The fishmonger had told me that the oysters just needed to be opened and placed on ice, the black tiger shrimp needed to be shelled, and the mussel shells had to open on their own once I cooked them. Since I had a recipe for clams, I’d just follow it to cook the mussels.
The real trouble with cooking was that nothing was what it seemed. Who knew that summer melon didn’t exist and that summer squash was really zucchini and that I couldn’t just buy polenta? I was thinking about this as I unwrapped the crown roast to warm it up, since the butcher had said it was prepared and all I’d have to do was add the crowns. But that was apparently not what he had meant. At all.
Of course, I didn’t figure this out until less than half an hour before my dinner guests were set to arrive. Because that’s when I was unwrapping the roast. Which is when I realized that the lovely roast was raw. Raw. With blood oozing out.
When the butcher had told me it was prepared and turned away to wrap it, I thought he meant he was getting me a prepared—cooked—roast from the back. Not wrapping up the raw one.
All I could do was hope for the best, so I slipped the paper crowns on the bones just as the phone rang. “Can I bring anything?” Victoria asked. “Actually, yes.” I cradled the phone between my ear and my shoulder and shoved the roast in the oven. “I can’t find the mini-muffin pans,” I told her. “Do you have them at your place? Can you bring them with you?”
“I—I’ve already left.”
Great, I thought. “Well, can you go back and get them?”
But Victoria said it wasn’t convenient for her to go back, and I wondered why she’d called, or offered to bring anything, in the first place. It was probably just a case of etiquette, which, really, was a bunch of bullshit if you asked me.
I hung up the phone and shoved the frittata (still in its pan) in the oven. Maybe I could just scoop the frittata into bowls once it came out of the oven?
As I was changing into my Diane von Furstenberg shirt, I realized I’d forgotten to buy flats. I’d also failed to buy black capris (you’d think they’d be a dime a dozen in a twenty-eight-year-old woman’s wardrobe, but the pair I had were faded and too tight, no doubt from too many washes and the occasional dryer mishap). Anyway, it hardly seemed sensible to spend fifty dollars on a pair of capris just to wear with my shirt. My full-length black pants, which I wore to work several times a week, were also so tight nowadays that they felt just like stretch pants, which were neither fashionable nor formal. Besides, my dinner party was meant to be special—and that meant not wearing clothes I wore to the slavery clinic. And jeans didn’t seem fancy enough, which is how I came to pull on my Lululemon capris (at least they were fashionable, if not formal). Then I grabbed a pair of slippers from my closet and checked my reflection in the dresser mirror. Not bad. I’d wanted to pull my hair back in a loose bun (which would keep my hair out of the food while looking chic), but I couldn’t since I needed to conceal the fix-job I’d done on the hole at the back of the shirt. It was a bit bunchy where I’d had to gather the fabric, but as long as I wore my hair down to cover it, I was sure I’d be fine. My hair was a bit greasy since I hadn’t washed it in two days, but I sprinkled a bit of my Cake Beauty Satin Sugar hair powder on my roots and rubbed it in. Then I brushed my hair, smoothed a dab of Dermaglow eye cream on the frizzed-out ends and headed back to the kitchen, stopping to adjust Victoria’s flowery tablecloth, which I’d put on top of the laser-machine-box-turned-coffee-table. Satisfied that the cardboard wasn’t peeking out at the base, I realigned the library-books-turned-coffee-table-books and continued on to the kitchen.
It was time for the polenta. Mitz had said to mix cornmeal with olive oil and water, but I wasn’t really sure how much of each to add. I thought perhaps I’d start to blend them together, sort of like cookie batter, until it seemed like the right consistency. The thing was, the mixture was really quite chunky, and even though I kept adding more and more cornmeal, it just didn’t seem to be creating a lot in the bowl. I finally added the entire box and mixed it with water and oil into a lumpy sort of couscous concoction.
Victoria arrived first, and it seemed to me she could’ve had time to go home, but I was thankful that she showed up just as I was preparing the salad. The salad was a cinch, since nothing needed to be cooked, and I was glad that she was seeing this part of the preparations.
I placed the arugula on each plate, and topped the greens with button mushrooms, mango, zucchini and bamboo shoots. The bamboo shoots were kind of odd looking, so I took the green onions, which I was supposed to chop finely, and instead used them like strings to tie the shoots into bundles, which looked much cuter and was, as Emily Post recommended, much more original. Then I added the polenta to each plate and turned the stove on to heat up the strawberry gazpacho, which I had already pureed. It tasted sweet and summery, and I felt confident that it would be a hit.
Bradford arrived and handed me a bottle of Pinot Noir. “I know, I know. I swore off Pinot for more than a year after that damn movie came out, but I was thinking that a sufficient amount of time has passed that it’s now so uncool it’s cool again,” he said.
I took the bottle of wine. Alcohol was alcohol, Sideways or straight up.
Tobias came through the door, handing me his keys. I took them, admiring his smooth cuticles. They were second only to his smooth elbows, which were the reasons why Tobias was a body double on Color Therapy, a show that helped couples repair their marriages by renovating their homes. It was a concept I found ridiculous. Had the producers never been to an IKEA store, where half of all marriages end? I couldn’t debate this point with Tobias since he wasn’t actually a psychologist; he just doubled for the real one who analyzed the couples’ problems and then recommended paint. Although Tobias’s brush strokes might have ripples (and the actual painters had to repaint the wall between scenes), so did his deltoid muscles, which were exactly what television viewers wanted to see in the background.
He looked at me, then pointed at my shirt. “Diane?”
“At least your boyfriend knows designer when he sees it,” I said to Bradford.
