Stuck in Downward Dog, page 8
“You can start by separating the eggs,” she said, handing me a bowl filled with brown and white eggs. “We need twelve whites.”
It sounded like a make-work project.
“Those are organic eggs I bought at the St. Lawrence Market,” Victoria said. Of course they were. “I hand-picked them, and they’ve been sitting out for an hour. When you’re going to be cooking with them, it’s best to bring them to room temperature first.”
If Victoria hadn’t sounded so full of herself, I might’ve acted impressed. But I didn’t want to give her that satisfaction, so I simply began plucking the brown eggs out of the bowl and setting them on the counter, while Victoria grabbed a shallow frying pan and placed it on the stove.
“So, is it weird for you to be here?” I asked her.
“What do you mean?” She flipped her hair behind her right ear. It was a nervous habit she seemed to have developed with this new haircut. Or maybe it was just a bad cut.
“I mean, being away from George and Stanny and Aidan and Serena.”
“Please don’t call him Stanny. It makes him sound like a geriatric.” I obviously couldn’t even live up to my sister’s exacting standards for nicknames.
“Anyway, of course it’s difficult for me, but sometimes we make sacrifices,” Victoria continued. “You need me, and I’m being a good sister. The kids will be fine. They have Francie. She’s not me, but she’ll do,” Victoria added smugly.
I wondered if Victoria trusted the nanny over her husband when it came to child care.
“George must like having more time to spend alone with them, too,” I prompted as she placed a pat of butter in the pan.
“I’m sure. Hand me the whites.”
I felt like Victoria was dancing around all my personal questions. “What are we making?”
“Frittata. It’s a healthy quiche.”
I thought quiche was already healthy. “Is there cheese involved?”
“No. Hand me the whites,” she said again, “before this butter burns.”
I handed her the bowl of white eggs. She stared at them and then at me. Then she began cracking the eggs open one by one, flipping each half back and forth in her hand like a Slinky until the egg whites fell into a bowl on the stove. She dumped the yolks into a glass measuring cup.
I sat down on one of the kitchen chairs while she rattled on about poaching. Aside from illegal hunting (which wasn’t common in downtown Toronto), the only poaching I knew about had to do with eggs, but judging from the way my sister was whipping the egg whites around in the frying pan, it seemed more like scrambled, not poached, eggs she was making. Then she grabbed the yolks and dumped them into the pan, so apparently, even if I’d gotten the separating task right, it was still a make-work project as I’d suspected.
“Mom said to tell you to teach me to make stew.” I intended it as a joke, but Victoria was taking her chef session quite seriously.
“Stew?” She shook her head. “Surely you know how to make stew. You cut up a bunch of vegetables and beef and throw them in a pot.” She pointed to some vegetables—red and green pepper, tomato, onion and zucchini—and told me to chop them. When I had completed the task (successfully, I might add), she threw them into the pan.
“Now, typically you’d just throw a lid on this and stick it in the oven for an hour, but we’re going to scoop it into mini muffin pans,” she continued.
I wondered if she thought that would give me the incentive to pack the frittata for lunch. Which, of course, it would not.
“Easy, right?”
Not as easy as scrambled eggs with vegetables thrown in, which is exactly what it looked like, and which I already knew how to make.
“Plus, it’s perfect for your guests without teeth,” she said, and laughed at her own joke—if it was supposed to be a joke. My sister may have been talented at many things, but making jokes was not one of them. Maybe she just assumed that my next boyfriend would be so old (or so white trash) that he wouldn’t have teeth. I wasn’t sure, but apparently she was keeping my options open. So was my mother, who at that moment called to ask me what I thought about Charles.
“Charles who?”
“Charles, Auntie Carol’s son. You know, he’s quite handsome and very well established at the law firm in Georgetown. Quite a catch.”
“For who?” Had my mother suddenly gone senile in the past forty-eight hours?
“For you, silly dilly!”
“Charles is my cousin,” I reminded my mother.
“Not technically. Auntie Carol had Charles before she married your father’s brother. So there’s no blood relation at all. So don’t give me that. I could arrange a little meeting. Or . . . I could send him a little cookie bouquet from a certain secret admirer.” Her voice tinkled.
“That won’t be necessary. I’ve learned to make frittata. I think I can set my standards higher.” Teeth or no teeth, anyone was better for a date than a relative. Besides which, I wasn’t looking to date, given that I hadn’t included it on my OM list as a priority. Of course, neither my mom nor my sister was aware of that fact.
Thankfully, the frittata seemed to throw my mother off track. “Frittata!” The tinkling became more of a fireworks explosion of excitement. “I remember when your sister made that last Easter. It was just perfect for George’s grandfather and Stansmith, who was losing three baby teeth and missing at least another four. All he could eat was ice cream and eggs.”
After a minute of rave reviews of my sister as an all-around fabulous mother, daughter and chef, and an update on my father, who was taking a Build Your Own Website course at the community college so that she could offer “Cookies on the Go” for people “driving on the information superhighway,” I was able to get off the phone.
I decided to try a different tactic with my sister. Perhaps her idea and my idea of what I needed to know how to cook were completely different.
“It’s not that I don’t think the frittata is interesting,” I began, “it’s just that I’d really like to know how to cook items for dinner—”
“You can have frittata any time of day. It’s a lot better to eat at dinner, in fact, than pasta or rice dishes, since they’re just laden with carbs.”
“Eggs for dinner?”
“Excuse me, I didn’t realize that you were so set on pigeon-holing your food. Weren’t you just eating a cookie for breakfast this morning, or was that my imagination?”
Somehow my sister had managed to make me feel like I was twelve again.
“I was going to teach you to poach salmon, too,” she said.
I wasn’t really fond of fish, unless it was in sushi, and even then I tended to get the vegetarian rolls rather than the sashimi. Victoria handed me the mother of all Martha Stewart cookbooks and, since the cover bragged about the 1,200 recipes inside, I decided to be honest with my sister about my general dislike for fish. Surely there were at least a thousand recipes that didn’t contain fish.
Victoria glared at me, told me not to generalize and then conceded that she wasn’t about to waste her time trying to help me learn to cook if I was going to be so ungrateful.
“I thought you’d teach me something I’d actually want to make,” I told her. Surely the best thing was to be honest. “I want to have a dinner party, and I just don’t see myself cooking mini egg muffins or a slab of fish.”
“What do you think poached salmon is?” she snapped.
I wasn’t sure if that was a rhetorical question, because as far as I knew salmon—poached, grilled, baked or otherwise—was fish. And I really didn’t enjoy fish, particularly salmon, given the number of bones and, in this case, the very large head, eyeballs and teeth that were slapped on the counter in front of me. Victoria flipped the cookbook over to the back and pointed to the picture. Smack dab on the back was a photo of what appeared to be the poached salmon.
Well, if it was good enough for the back cover of The Martha Stewart Living Cookbook, it was good enough for a dinner party, I supposed.
Two hours later, I was starting to see why Martha Stewart had ruled her own empire for so long without any competition. Women everywhere were apparently purchasing her recipe books merely as status symbols. Surely there was no way that any woman could know if all her recipes actually worked. If this one cookbook alone had 1,200 recipes, multiplying that by her dozen other cookbooks took you up to 14,400 recipes. Even if someone (someone crazy, obviously) attempted one recipe a night, it could take somewhere in the vicinity of thirty-nine years to test all her recipes. And I was already twenty-eight years behind.
Perhaps Whole Poached Salmon 101 was easy, but in my book, easy was not defined by a recipe that took three columns and ten steps to explain in font so tiny it gave me eye strain. Each step contained nearly one hundred words and included things such as Court Bouillon, for which there was an entirely different recipe on a separate page, and fennel fronds for garnish.
Then there were the items not even listed until you got to the instructions, such as cheesecloth (apparently anyone using a Martha Stewart cookbook would possess such an item, which Victoria had helpfully brought along) and a poaching rack (in this case, she said, we would just be using cookie sheets instead). In terms of the instructions, step 4, for example, instructed me to slide a wooden spoon through the handle of the poaching rack, lift out the rack and elevate it by propping spoons on the edges of the poacher, then maneuver one of the spoons to angle the poacher so that the head of the fish was higher than the tail. Finally, I had to insert a thermometer into the wide part of the back of the fish where the fin used to be. Right.
The phone rang just as we were completing step 7, which included preparing an ice-water bath—really just a bunch of ice cubes with water in a bowl, Victoria explained. I longed for my own bath.
It was George, who skipped the pleasantries and asked for Victoria.
I handed her the cordless phone. She took it and told me to continue with step 8, since this was the crucial part and we couldn’t let the salmon stay too warm. Unfortunately, step 8 instructed me to examine the head and tail and, if both looked presentable, to leave them on for decoration.
They were still attached, and I did not want to leave them on for decoration. Pumpernickel rubbed against my leg and looked up at the fish.
The next step explained how to remove the unwanted body parts, by snipping the tail with kitchen scissors and pulling off the head with my hands. Then I was supposed to flip the fish over, peel off the skin with a paring knife, again flip the fish onto a serving platter, remove the rest of the skin and scrape off any brown fat. Disgusting.
I could hear Victoria’s hushed, angry voice coming from my bedroom, and I tried to convince myself that I didn’t want to listen, though of course I really wanted to. So I flipped the fish off the rack into the cheesecloth and carried it over to the kitchen table, where I could overhear better. Unfortunately, Pumpernickel chose that same moment to move into the exact spot where my right foot was headed. I stepped on his tail, and he yowled and spun around, causing me to stumble. Instinctively, I reached for a chair to steady myself and let go of the fish. The next thing I knew, it had landed on the linoleum, and Pumpernickel, who had possibly planned the whole thing, scurried over to delve into the landlocked salmon.
Holy mackerel. I quickly assessed the situation. I could salvage the fish and pretend nothing had happened; trash it and explain the situation to Victoria; or leave it for Pumpernickel, which would still involve ‘fessing up to my sister.
“What’s going on out there?” Victoria called. I scooped the fish off the floor (the bones would make Pumpernickel sick anyway) and slapped it onto a tray on the table.
“Nothing,” I mumbled.
I wondered if I’d learned enough to cross Item Number 3—become a fabulous chef with my own unique dossier of recipes—off my list.
chapter four
MOKSHA: TO SET FREE.
This liberation of alt bonds is achieved through realization of the self.
Mok—the moksha yoga studio—was located on the Danforth in the Carrot Common, a hangout for environmentalist, herbalist, homeopathic and naturopathic types. It was my destination on Saturday afternoon after bidding a fond farewell to Victoria (although she promised she’d be back by Sunday night), as she put a Tupperware lid with a handle over a mini-muffin pan of frittata, turning it into a sort of flat suitcase. She was bringing the tray to Stansmith’s Scouts meeting, since it was her turn to bring a healthy snack, proving that she actually had an ulterior motive for “teaching” me how to make the egg dish two days earlier. I wondered if the salmon had had a destination too before it ended up on the floor, but I’d never know. She did tell me that she had baked flaxseed-spelt muffins with pumpkin seeds and made fresh-squeezed prune juice that morning, and left them in the fridge for me. In comparison, the frittata actually looked delicious.
The studio’s mandate, posted on the street-level entrance, involved a commitment to ethical, compassionate and environmentally conscious living, which seemed to work well with the surrounding stores—a natural supplements store to the left and a raw-materials clothing store to the right. The studio was up a flight of stairs on the second story, and when I entered, an unpleasant rush of tea tree oil hit me. The smell of tea tree oil made me uneasy. People don’t use tea tree oil unless they’re confident about their lifestyle, which means they recycle and compost and buy brown rice (never white) and eat whole-grain bread, not twelve-grain, because they know that’s just a gimmick, and they would certainly never fall prey to a French baguette. Ever. Simply put, that wasn’t me.
However, in an attempt to be optimistic, I hoped that I would grow accustomed to the tea tree oil and that it would cleanse my system, remove my toxins and result in a loss of five pounds. Or ten. As Sofi had explained on the phone, moksha was a form of hot yoga, a series of twenty-six poses performed in a sweltering 100-degree-Fahrenheit room, which would loosen my body so that it was more flexible, cause me to sweat out any impurities and prevent me from being hungry afterward.
The dark-skinned woman behind the reception desk was wearing a beige Rawganique organic cotton Zen top (this I knew because the sign behind her head said so), and her coarse black hair was piled in twists on top of her head. She smiled instantly and asked me if I was new. I wondered if it was that obvious that I didn’t belong. Then she stood up, and I saw that her belly was about to burst. I realized that she must be Sofi’s girlfriend, and mother of the baby that was scientifically Bradford’s but spiritually his niece or nephew.
I explained who I was and the situation.
“Oh, great.” Libby said. “Sofi told me you’d be coming in. Why don’t you try the first class for free, see how you like it, and then we can discuss the receptionist position.”
She handed me a clipboard with a form and a pen.
“Did you bring appropriate clothing?” she asked, and I wondered if she meant yoga clothes in general or some sort of organic, all-natural, handmade garment of local design. But I assumed the former and did a mental check.
Mat. Check.
Water. Check.
Shorts. Check.
Shirt. Check.
Shirts were optional for men, which I thought could be quite distracting, but far better than being optional for women.
Bathing suit. Again, optional, and an option I did not exercise given that I was looking to perfect my Fish Pose and not the beached whale position.
Towel. Check.
I was sensing a beach theme, and I was looking forward to it. I couldn’t really imagine any other sport besides swimming that recommended bringing a bathing suit and a towel, and considering that the classes were ninety minutes long, it seemed plausible that there would be some relaxation time—some lazy-hazy-lying-on-my-back-in-savasana-pondering-life time. Surely there was no way we’d actually be expected to physically exert ourselves for the whole ninety minutes. As I signed the waiver, which explicitly stated that the studio wasn’t responsible for any injuries I incurred while doing non-supervised poses, other students began trickling in and I became less worried. Although I might’ve been a size 10, there were definitely size 12s and even 14s, and I wondered why I’d been so intimidated by these authentic studios for so long.
I wasn’t sure that ninety minutes of anything (especially exercise) was within my range of capabilities. I mean, I could barely stay focused on movies for that long without popcorn and jujubes to keep me occupied. I certainly couldn’t file invoices at work for ninety minutes. I couldn’t even clean for ninety minutes. Actually, I couldn’t think of one single activity I could do for ninety minutes, or which I’d even tried to do. I imagined some people would find it simple. Professors, perhaps, who taught two-hour lectures; or truck drivers, who drove for eighteen hours straight; or lawyers, who were in court for much longer than ninety minutes. But not me.
I was determined to attempt the class. After all, it seemed very structured. Moksha was a standard series of twenty-six poses. So I’d know how far along we were and, more importantly, when it was over.
The door to the studio had a sign requesting that yogis unroll their mats before entering and observe total silence once inside. Instead of feeling intimidated, I felt a calming sensation wash away the feeling of anxiousness caused by the tea tree oil. No one would be allowed to talk, which meant I wouldn’t have to worry that I didn’t fit in. I could never tell if people already talking—at a party or fitness class alike—had just met or had been longtime friends, which meant I never knew whether to try to join the conversation (and risk ostracization) or keep to myself (and look like a too-good-for-everyone bitch). I somehow couldn’t seem to assess situations properly.
All this agonizing analysis meant I was forever trying to time things right so that I could sneak in just as the class was starting. This often meant annoying someone as I put my step or mat beside them, making them move over to make space and shifting them, perhaps, from the ideal spot they had picked out when they had arrived early to the class for just that reason.
