The Fire

Thanksgiving; menu with links to recipes appear at the bottom of this post.

On Thanksgiving Day, Luca refused to make the biscuits that were such a huge success the first time around. Compared to past years, we were having a small gathering; my mother-in-law Christine who was visiting us from Cape Cod for the first time in six years, and a family of German/Bolivians; Wolf, Sandra and their two polyglot children who moved here from Berlin last year and are still discovering just how big a deal Thanksgiving is in this country. From the mad scramble to slog through airports across the country in rush-hour crowds to be with family; the obsession with turkey, a bird that leaves most non-Americans scratching their heads; and the almost heroic value we place on eating an obscene amount of food in one sitting, Thanksgiving is more than a little dumbfounding. For my part, I’m in it for the pies.

apple pie

most divine pumpkin/hazelnut pie

With cornbread-sausage stuffing, mashed potatoes and spicy roasted sweet potatoes on the menu, neither we, nor our arteries, actually needed biscuits made with heavy cream and dipped individually in butter. I just thought Luca would enjoy taking part in the creation of the meal. He kept going back and forth. First it was no. Then I reminded him of how delicious they were and how much our guests would enjoy them and he said yes he wanted to make them. But then Grandma turned the TV to the Thanksgiving Day Parade and once again the answer was no.

Until recently, Luca had three living grandparents and no relationship of any substance with any of them. Until he died in February, one grandfather was in a nursing home on Cape Cod and could barely remember the names of his own grown sons. To say that Luca’s other grandfather is estranged is a vast understatement; I have had little contact with my father throughout my life and he has never met Luca or acknowledged him in any way. That leaves Christine, Luca’s only living grandmother whom he visits maybe once a year and usually when his three cousins are there too. The kids have a blast but the chaos makes Grandma jumpy and forces her to turn up the TV volume to deafening levels.

Grandma

Luca has friends whose grandparents pick them up at school and take them for weekend-long sleepovers, and I think I can sense the envy in him when he sees all the love and attention that he is doing without. Or maybe it’s my own envy I am feeling whenever I hear that friends of ours are leaving the kids with the grandparents in order to enjoy a grownup weekend of wine tasting and sleeping late (remember morning sex, anyone?). With no grandparents able or willing to take Luca for a weekend, we take him with us when we go wine tasting, which is not often, and wake to the sounds of droid battles in the next bed.

Jim, Luca and I invent our family as we go, the definition of “family” being by necessity more fluid than it is for people with lots of blood relatives in close proximity. Luca gets as much love as the next kid, even with a fractured and spread out extended family. And yet, he craves loving contact with his grandmother, even if his notion of it is influenced as much by the Bearenstain Bears as by reality.

Having Grandma in our house for a week was an opportunity for Luca to have her all to himself. From the minute she entered the house, he was showing her things he has made, books he likes, even the Cat Piano iPhone app on my phone which she didn’t much like (the meowing made her jumpy).

chorizo and onions

I didn’t expect Luca to last long watching the Thanksgiving Day Parade since for me watching a parade, live or on television, is about as much fun as having hot pokers drilled through my eyeballs. I can’t for the life of me fathom the appeal of watching floats and marching bands move at a glacial pace down the street. When I worked as a waitress on the Upper West Side in New York City, the Wednesday night before Thanksgiving was one of the best nights at the restaurant. The place would be packed and outside, the floats were laid out on the street where people gathered with drinks in hand for a big street party. I figured the parade couldn’t get any better than that.

The only parade that has not left me in tears of boredom is the Carnaval in Sao Paulo. Within hours of arriving from New York and still jet lagged I found myself dressed as a record album, surrounded by three hundred percussionists, dancing in a School of Samba down the avenida. Fueled by terrible cognac and good cafezinho I stayed up for 36 hours straight and then fell down dead in a bed (what bed? I have no idea) for another 14 hours. That was fun.

brussels sprouts with chorizo

While I trimmed the Brussels sprouts, I expected Luca to come out ready to tie on his apron and get to work on the biscuits. Instead, with two ovens at 450 degrees and the heat outside climbing to an absurd 78 degrees (on Thanksgiving! Will I ever get used to Los Angeles?) I kept hearing these little whoops and exclamations of delight from the den. I sautéed chorizo to go with the brussels sprouts. I opened the doors and windows and sautéed the mushrooms for the stuffing. When I went to check on Luca and Grandma he was patiently explaining to her who Dora the Explorer was. And best of all she was listening with interest.

cornbread sausage stuffing

I have always viewed watching television as a solitary and anti-social activity and could never understand the idea of families watching TV together as a form of togetherness. But what do I know, I thought as I put the turkey in the oven. This might prove to be Luca’s happiest memory of his grandmother, the two of them watching the Thanksgiving Day parade with Mickey Mouse, Santa Claus and all.

The previous weekend Jim and I took Luca to the LA Philharmonic to see Gustavo Dudamel conduct. We sat in the best seats in the house, front row center behind the orchestra and facing Dudamel (although I have heard that the view from behind has its charms). Dudamel, who has been given rock star status in a city full of stars, did not disappoint. He was incredibly fun to watch; gently gliding his hands over the air and then pounding his fist skyward sending his curls flying in perfect time to the kettle drum. Other times, he’d appear to be conducting only with his eyebrows and a glint in his eye, giving an occasional nod to the woodwinds and a sexy come-hither motion to the strings. At one point all of us with a frontal view of Dudamel broke into unintended laughter. And the music was sublime; two Mozart symphonies and one by Alban Berg, a composer of twelve-tone music with a decidedly modern and more challenging sense of the melodic. Surprisingly, Luca was ansty during Mozart’s Prague Symphony and liked the Berg better (his non-living grandmother, my mother, was a student of Arnold Schoenberg and would have been thrilled). Luca also like the Jupiter Symphony but mostly he liked watching Dudamel. On the way home he said he wanted to be a conductor.

Dudamel and his curls

Later he said he liked watching Dudamel because he was funny and “kind of crazy” and he made a lot of faces.

“It’s because he has a fire in his mouth,” Luca said and then he ran out of the room.

I stopped what I was doing. I had no idea that he remembered ever making this comment about wanting a fire in his mouth. This was in reference to the desire for fire and spice in his food, a desire he claims not to have anymore though it seems to come and go with a randomness that is maddening even in a seven year old. He has no idea that I have given this blog this title – he is not much aware of the blog at all in fact – and here he was hitting the meaning right on its metaphorical head.

“What does that mean?” I yelled after Luca.

But I knew what he meant; a fire in the mouth is the heat we get from the things we love whether or not they themselves are fiery to begin with. It is the habanero salsa that brought tears to my eyes in Playa Del Carmen; it is twelve-tone music and the Jupiter symphony and the curls on top of Gustavo Dudamel’s head. It is the plain (always plain, no matter what we do with it) turkey bird eaten after a lazy day watching the Thanksgiving Day Parade with Grandma.

Wolf and Sandra arrived with mashed potatoes, wine and plenty of Prosecco to start. They knew enough to be a little apprehensive about the sheer volume of food they were about to consume. But they took a deep breath and jumped in with a game spirit, partaking not only of the uber-American tradition of overeating, but of the even more American one of sitting around afterwards in front of the television. In a slight deviation, instead of football, we watched Pixar’s “Up,” which Grandma pronounced “sad.” She went to bed after a while and the rest of us finished “Up” and then watched scenes from the Marx Brothers’ “Night at the Opera.” Wolf, Sandra and their kids had never seen it and we had to pause the final opera scene in order to explain what “Take Me Out To The Ballgame” is, another staple of Americana. I had seen this movie countless times as a child (it must have been a regular on the Million Dollar Movie) and it was fun watching it through the eyes of our friends for whom it was all new. It occurred to me that going back to the old traditions – parades, Marx Brothers, grandmothers on Thanksgiving – can be a kind of reinvention, and that reinvention is perhaps the most American tradition of all.

The kids were in hysterics watching Harpo hanging from the stage ropes, making a mess of the opera. Here again were the curls on top of the head, the fierce talent, and the unmistakable fire in the mouth.

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This is what we ate on Thanksgiving with links to recipes where available (asterisks denote especially delicious dishes):

Dry-brined roasted turkey.

Cornbread-sausage stuffing.

Gravy.

*Cranberry/tangerine relish (with and without jalapeno).

*Brussels sprouts with chorizo.

Mashed potatoes.

*Spicy sweet potato wedges.

Apple pie (from Silver Palate and with Trader Joe’s crust).

*Pumpkin/hazelnut pie – a combination of this and the variation at the end of this.

Whipped cream.

For Your Annoyment…

Recipe # 15: cherry tomato pasta

Recently Luca was reading the National Geographic magazine and misread a sign in a photo of a Western landscape. Instead of “for your enjoyment,” he read “for your annoyment.” When he realized his mistake he cracked up laughing and now he gets a big giggle out of saying “for your annoyment” whenever he can fit it into the conversation.

On the day he made the cherry tomato pasta from Fanny at Chez Panisse, Luca was suffering from a low grade, generalized annoyment and didn’t feel like cooking. I was tempted to make light of it by reminding him of his new favorite word, but he was in no mood.

He was constructing something out of Legos (a battle station? a droid planet?) and when I asked him if he wanted to go ahead with the recipe he had picked out, he snapped at me: “I’m doing something!” I assumed that things would only go downhill from here and that we’d be scrapping the idea of Luca making dinner. But then he came into the kitchen and, without a word, started chopping the tomatoes. He toiled away as though he were a child slave owned by a cruel, cherry tomato-eating giant who, instead of allowing Luca to go to school and play with his friends, forced him to chop tomatoes ten hours a day, seven days a week.

It was interesting watching him work through his irritation. Everything bothered him – the height of the counter relative to his step stool, the volume of tomatoes, anything and everything that came out of my mouth – and yet he kept going. The possibility occurred to me that maybe he wasn’t as annoyed as he seemed but was doing a really good imitation of me on the days I don’t feel like cooking but have no choice. I love to cook but there are days when I’d give anything not to be staring into the crisper trying to think of something exciting to do with the cauliflower. Luca, all of 11 recipes into his cooking life, was having a taste of how even a beloved activity can be a drudgery. I kept expecting him to give up on the tomatoes but he didn’t. He also didn’t whine which, due to my inability to tolerate it even in tiny doses, would have put an end to the whole thing. He just forged ahead making it clear from the wordless banging around of the utensils that he was not happy about it. I tried to stay out of his way and watched him, thinking that if he was playacting then how tired we adults must seem to him; tired of cooking, tired of tending to the needs of our families, just plain tired.

With Luca sometimes it’s hard to tell if he’s having an actual experience, or if he’s just a really good actor. When he dresses up as a scientist and does experiments, is it for the science or the make believe? When he cooks, the costume is half of it. Still he likes to eat more than almost anyone I know (a quality that also makes him one of the most fun people I know) so it’s hard to tell if he wants to learn how to cook or if he likes pretending to be a chef, or both. And does it matter anyway? Like most recovering actors, I live in mortal fear of my child following in my footsteps. I look for early signs of dramatic talent as though for a fatal genetic mutation, and wonder about the merits of brainwashing and interventions. Each big roll of Luca’s eyes, each dramatic exclamation and outsized expression of emotion send a jolt of terror straight to my bones.

When he was just under two years old, Luca became obsessed with the violin. We were living in London and had taken him to the WOMAD Festival, a three-day world music extravaganza on the outskirts of the city where among other acts we saw electric blues from Mali, a folk-singer-cellist from Ireland, and a children’s chorus from Tanzania that we were enjoying until we realized that the lyrics were in praise of the mine company that had funded their CD. (“Oh, Golden Pride mining company/We thank you for our social development/Without you we would have no schools, no roads, no hope for the future!”)

Luca’s thunderbolt moment came with Nigel Kennedy and Kroke, a hypnotic and danceable melding of electric classical violin and Polish klezmer music with hints of North African and gypsy rhythms. Luca couldn’t see over the heads of the people in front of us and only caught glimpses of the stage. At one point I looked down at him and he was swaying with his eyes closed and his hands clasped in front of him.

We bought the band’s CD, East Meets West, at the festival, and on the way back home to London, we listened to it in the car, not one or two times, but over and over through traffic on the awful M4 motorway. We crawled past Heathrow Airport and some of the dullest, grayest landscape anywhere in the world, a dreariness from which Luca, rocking in his car seat, was transported. When he pretended to play along with the music on an imaginary violin, Jim and shared a look. Where was this coming from?

For the next eight months we heard Nigel Kennedy and Kroke’s East Meets West at least six times every day. Luca would demand it first thing in the morning (he awoke in those days at five AM), and then several more times before lunch. He listened to it again after napping and before dinner. If we went somewhere in the car, we had to bring the CD with us. As he became more familiar with the intricacies of the music, he began to play air violin in time with every note on the CD, a trick that once moved his Hungarian babysitter to tears. If we were in a bookstore and he happened to spot a photograph of a violin, he would begin to shout and point: “Violin! Violin!”

The fact that my mother who died ten years before Luca was born had been a Juilliard-trained violinist added a supernatural spin to the whole thing. If you believed such things were possible you might think that her spirit were somehow coming back to pay us a visit. (That Luca and my mother share a birthday might send a further shiver down your spine.)  For about a year after my mother’s death, I had frequent dreams of spotting her on the street somewhere as she was getting on a bus or driving by in a car, always leaving me again. In the dreams, just like in life, she was supposed to be dead, and yet here she was getting on the bus and waving to me. Maybe this violin obsession of Luca’s was another little wave from my mother from the Great Beyond. After all, he had seen hundreds of instruments that weekend at WOMAD, and much more kid-friendly and eye-catching performances than Nigel Kennedy’s. So why the violin?

And yet, Jim and I often wondered whether it wasn’t really the violin that had captured Luca’s heart and soul. Maybe what he loved more than the music was pretending to play it. Maybe (oh, dread!) he was an actor in the making and all of this was just an elaborate form of mimicry like pretending to be a doctor after a visit to the pediatrician’s office. It’s amazing how much of mystery your own child can be. He is seven and I cannot for the life of me imagine the man he will one day become.

So as Luca sliced each cherry tomato in half, here I was again wondering if he was doing a dead-on imitation of an adult fed up with cooking, or if he was honestly sick of cutting the cherry tomatoes in half.

Since he had done most of these tasks before – chopping parsley, cutting tomatoes – we didn’t have to say much to each other. This suited Luca just fine. Small talk was out. There was only chopping.

He put the tomatoes into a bowl and then poured in the olive oil, or more accurately, he dumped it in. Then he added a little vinegar and the chopped parsley, added salt and pepper and stirred it all together. He slammed the spoon on the counter and said, “Is that all?” When I said it was, he sighed deeply and stomped off to his Lego planet.

Luca’s obsession with the violin lasted for over a year. When he turned three he begged us for violin lessons. We thought he was too young but we finally relented and then Luca spent a few months learning the unpleasant reality that, with anything worthwhile and difficult, you have to start at the bottom and work your way to expertise. Like cooking, good results often come only after a certain amount of tedium. “Different sound!” Luca had exclaimed in dismay the first time he held an actual violin under his chin. He expected the sound to come out just like Nigel Kennedy. When the frustration became too much he took a break from the violin and then later switched to piano which offered a fresh start and less demanding technique (or at least a bench to sit on).

Two years ago when my brother Niles was dying of cancer he gave Luca an old violin of my mother’s that had been in his basement for years. The violin was covered in bright green fuzz. It seemed impossible for something to have grown so moldy. I only didn’t chuck it because it was a gift from my brother and I knew he wouldn’t be around much longer.

Without much hope for its recovery, we had the violin restored and were surprised to learn that it is a somewhat special instrument; a concert stage-worthy, pre-War, handmade violin from Germany. We have no idea if Luca will ever play it, if his love for the violin will one day be reawakened. Maybe he will stick with the piano or take up the drum kit. Maybe he will forgo music altogether and never cut another tomato in half. Maybe someday he will say the dreaded words, “Mom? Dad? I’ve decided to give acting a shot.” There is no knowing. There is only cooking and eating and reading good stories and hopefully, through the intermittent tedium of daily practice, getting good at a few things. In the meantime, the violin, free of its green fuzz, waits in a corner.

Bread and Religion

Recipes #12,13 and 14, pizza dough, pizza with tomato and mozzarella and white and whole wheat bread.

Pizza dough made by Luca

Last Sunday I had a little bread baking party with a couple of moms and their two boys who are good friends of Luca’s from school. The last time I tried baking bread was in college when I was preparing to play Saint Joan and was giving The Method a shot by baking bread and washing my sheets by hand. Washing the sheets almost broke my back and it must be that I forever associated the bread baking with it because I have always thought of it as exceedingly difficult and not really worth the trouble. I learned on Sunday how wrong I have been all these years. All you need to bake bread besides time is some good company.

Of course it helped to have an experienced baker in the kitchen. I have never actually eaten a full meal at Amy’s house, but it’s impossible to go to her house, even for five minutes, without her offering you a million different things that she just happens to have in the fridge and that she whipped up the day before. Some of these offerings (she calls them “snacks”) have included homemade blintzes; various soups such as bean, cabbage, vegetable and chicken soup with homemade matzoh balls; strudel; lasagne; and challah bread. A snack in my house is a banana or some chips out of a bag. I have seen people leave Amy’s house laden with Tupperware containers full of roasted meats, coffee cake and cabbage rolls.

I was looking forward to the old-fashioned-quilting-bee aspect of our afternoon, three women communing over a shared activity that would result in some homemade deliciousness. Bread is the simplest of foods and is symbolic of many things from friendship to God. But for me, the Italians sum it up best: “Bread is all food, the rest is accompaniment.”

Since there would be three or four different breads rising at various different times that afternoon, I suggested to Luca that, before our friends arrived, he tackle the pizza dough recipe from Fanny at Chez Panisse. That way we would have a nice pizza to bake for everybody later. It took a little coaxing because Luca could think of nothing else but playing with two of his best friends. Amy’s son Micah is a great pal of Luca’s. The first time Micah came to our house we were living in an old beach shack in Venice Beach. As he climbed the rickety steps to the house, Micah said: “It must be a drag to live here.” I adore this kid.

That same day in Venice, Luca and Micah had a conversation about God. They were both six years old and were figuring out their differences while I typed madly on my laptop trying to transcribe it all. Micah’s grandparents, Amy’s parents, are Holocaust survivors who were interned at Auschwitz. Amy is a Reform Jew and says that she “learned at an early age that I had to repopulate the world with Jews.” (She’s not doing badly on that score; she has three sons)

Here is Luca and Micah’s conversation about God:

Luca: Jewish people believe in things that are not true.

Micah: Christian people believe in things that are not true, too.

Luca: I don’t believe in things that are not true.

Micah: What is true?

Luca: The queen is true. She lives in England. God doesn’t exist.

Micah: Yes, he does.

Luca: That’s magic stuff.

Micah: No it’s not. Do you believe in Christ?

Luca: No.

Micah: You are a Christian.

Luca: No I’m not. I’m an American.

Micah: But you’re a Christian. Americans can be Christians and Jewish.

Luca: Let’s play another game.

Micah: God does exist – there has to be a god, the thing that made us. There has to be something that made us.

Luca: No, our dad did. He made the seed.

Micah: He made the seed?

Luca: Yeah. He made the seed. And it went in the egg, and you grew in your mom’s tummy and then you came out. Our dad actually made the seeds.

Micah: How?

Luca: I don’t know but he made the seeds.

Micah: Luca, you don’t get it. You said it was unfair that gods have the power of invisibility. But if god has the power of invisibility, then you just leave him alone.

Luca: OK, then don’t pray to him. If you leave him alone then don’t pray to him.

Micah: Well, if you leave him alone and not pray to him then he’ll get mad at you.

Luca: Jewish have to do that but not Christians.

Micah: Yes they do.

Luca: I don’t.

Micah: You don’t pray?

Luca: No. I don’t go to church. I only go to school and classes.

Micah: You don’t go to church?

Luca: No. I just do whatever I want. I play around. I only go to school and classes and that’s it. I don’t go anywhere.

Micah: You only go to school and that’s it?

Luca: I don’t go to church. I only go to the cemetery.

Micah: I went to a cemetery in Washington, D.C.

Luca:  Me too!

Micah: But there is a cemetery in California.

Luca: But that’s not the one I went to. I went to the one where my uncle is buried. So when I go to visit him when he’s dead, I have to go there.

Micah: You go to visit him when he’s dead?

Luca: Yeah.

Micah: You can’t visit him when he’s dead.

Luca: Yes you can. That’s how all the flowers get there. By people visiting.

Micah: No. People plant seeds.

This discussion held several surprises for me; that the Queen of England is truer than God, for one. But the main surprise was that Luca was such a fierce agnostic. He had been to church once with his cousins and pronounced it “boring,” and “a lot of magic stuff.” But since we had not discussed the subject much I hadn’t realized how strongly he felt. (It was also interesting to learn that the dad makes the babies because he makes the seed, never mind what I remember about months of backache, nausea and exhaustion.)

Luca dissolved the yeast in warm water and a little milk, and right away the whole room smelled like bread. “What is yeast?” Luca asked. I had no good answer except to say that it was what made the bread rise and that it was alive. This must be why I don’t know what yeast is, because any time I have asked the same question, I get a similarly lame answer. (Anyone who actually knows what yeast is, please post a comment.)

Great illustration by Ann Arnold

He added the flour, salt and olive oil and mixed it around until it was too thick to stir. Then he sprinkled some flour on the counter and started kneading. I love watching Luca knead dough. He goes at it with intensity and passion. Plus he’s good at it.

When he was done, we rubbed olive oil all over the cleaned bowl and Luca placed the dough inside. The smell was divine, just like a New York pizzeria. Luca must have been reading my mind because just then asked me if he could spin it around in the air when it was time to make the pizza pie. I said he could try it if he wanted, but by that time, he was too involved in playing with his friends.

Luca kneading

Then we covered it with a towel and put it in the oven to rise (the oven was off). I made tomato sauce, grated mozzarella and chopped some fresh basil for the pizza. When it was time, Luca punched down the pizza dough (he loved this). Then he kneaded the dough again, got a little silly with it until I told him to cut it out, and put it back in the bowl for another rise.

punching the dough

Later, after the three boys had had their first fight and then got settled into some friendly Star Wars battles, the three women made bread. Amy made a dill and cottage cheese bread and Marie a gluten-free loaf. I made the White and Whole Wheat Bread from the Alice Waters cookbook figuring that if it was a recipe meant for kids it couldn’t be as hard as washing sheets by hand.

Baking bread is a great excuse to hang out because there is so much waiting around time. Marie brought her mother, so there were three generations of us in the house all engaged in our various activities including kneading, killing off the Death Star, reading, drinking raspberry-infused vodka gimlets, brokering peace among the boys, making soup, taking photos, and of course baking bread in two ovens and trying to keep track of the baking and rising times for each (made harder by the drinking of the vodka gimlets).

I used more whole wheat and less white flour than Alice Waters’ recipe called for. This is what mine looked like before it went into the oven.

This was Amy’s bread right out of the oven.

At the end of the day we sat down to three kinds of bread with a few other things as accompaniment. Marie made a nice barley soup, I baked the pizza and we had some wine. All the breads were delicious. Warmth all around.

The Living and the Dead

Recipe # 12 risotto with mushrooms and spinach

Luca had planned on making risotto for his good friend Jonathan who was coming from the East coast to stay with us for a few days. Actually, Jonathan is my friend from college, but since he is so much fun for Luca to hang out with I can no longer lay claim to him. The minute Jonathan walks in the door he belongs to Luca and only Luca. The minute he walks out the door, Luca wants to know when he is coming back.

Jim, Luca and I spent the day at the Dia De Los Muertos festival at Luca’s school. Jim’s father died in February, and Luca had honored him on the altar his class made for the festival. All day people wandered through the otherwise dull and smelly “cafetorium” quietly viewing the altars set up by the classrooms. It was a stunning sight. Tables were laden with hanging lights and candles, papel picado, paper marigolds, bread and fruit, dancing skeletons, sugar skulls and photos of loved ones who have passed. There were photos of grandparents, photos of dogs and cats, an occasional newborn baby and some too-young, recently deceased parents.

The photo of Luca and Grandpa that he put on the altar

One boy in Luca’s class lost his father one week before school started and on the table he placed a photo of the two of them as well as a New Yorker magazine, addressed to his father, because it was his favorite.

In one corner of the room of altars was a tree full of paper butterflies. People wrote the names of the dead on a butterfly and placed them on the branches.

It is impossible to walk through this room and not be moved both by the visual beauty and the significance of children coming together in this way to honor their ancestors. In Mexico where this tradition originated children grow up in a culture that, once a year at least, laughs at death while acknowledging its power to take from us those we love the most. Here in the USA, there is no such awareness of death and very little sense of our own ancestry.

The making of the altars took several days and during the process Luca said, “I am more sad about Grandpa now than when he died.” I was glad that Luca felt a renewed sadness about his grandfather. This is what these rituals are for, I thought, to remember and give rise to our grief and to give it a place free of the usual distractions. The past two years at the Dia De Los Muertos school festival, Luca has honored my brother Niles who died in 2007. Luca was five when he went to Niles’ memorial service, his first, and then he watched his mother grieve intensely and for months on end. My grief was like an unruly guest, one who makes normal life impossible and shows no sign of of ever leaving.

Luca and Niles in a photo on last year's altar

When Grandpa died, we were told to keep Luca at home, something that went against our instincts as parents. But because we had to respect the wishes of the rest of the family, and because we were assured there would be a service for Grandpa sometime in the future we went back East without Luca. One day in April after all talk of another memorial for Grandpa had died down, Luca drew this card.

He insisted on going to the beach to throw it in the water. So we walked to the beach and Luca threw the card in the waves. Then he built a little mound in the sand and knelt with his hand on it as though praying, although praying is something we don’t do in our household. Jim and I watched Luca carry out his solitary memorial service, a little dumbfounded, a little happy that he had found a way to memorialize his grandfather even though he had been shut out of any such communal experience.

We happen to have a gorgeous copper risotto pan and for this reason and others I always love making risotto. The suggested optional ingredients listed in the recipe for risotto in Fanny at Chez Panisse are mushrooms, wilted greens, fresh peas, ham and saffron threads for a golden risotto. I had figured on mushrooms and spinach and asked Luca if he liked those additions. He did. But first he made his usual announcement: “I don’t want to work with the onions!” (I was already chopping them.)

Then he said he had to count his money first. I have no idea why he had to count his money right then, but it seemed urgent so I waited. He got out his math notebook and his spending jar and now there was money all over the table.

After about ten minutes I implored him to take a break from the counting and start the rice. “For Jonathan,” I reminded him. He hotfooted it to the kitchen.

The onions went into the pan with the olive oil and butter, a bay leaf and some thyme which Luca read out pronouncing the “th.” He said we needed a sprig and I explained that we didn’t have fresh thyme and showed him the dried stuff which was a decent substitute. He nodded his assent. He stood over the pan on his stepstool stirring and saying “Mmmmmmm…” as he took in the aroma. Alice Waters is a huge fan of thyme and the divine smell of it cooking with oil and onions may be a major reason why. Luca looked at the cookbook and read the part about adding saffron, so I took down some saffron and let Luca smell it. He wasn’t too impressed but I added it anyway.

Luca had decided to double the recipe, so in went two cups of aborio rice and Luca stirred that around, but a bit lazily so I urged him to stir with more energy. He did and then the rice began to glisten.

“Now comes the fun part,” I said, and told him to ladle the chicken stock from the other pot on the stove and pour it onto the rice. Interestingly, this recipe does not call for ladling a bit at a time and then the constant stirring that other risotto recipes do. Instead, it says to cover the rice with the stock, cook the rice for 10 minutes and then pour in the rest of the stock and cook that all down. Much easier! So Luca, cautious as ever, ladled tiny spoonfuls of chicken stock into the rice until the rice was covered.

Then he asked if it was OK to go back to counting his money. What was it about the money all of a sudden? Did it have something to do with spending the day in the presence of the dead? I remembered that when Niles died one of the unexpected effects of grief on me was an intense desire for a steady and robust income stream (to this day unattained).

Luca went back to his money and when the rice had absorbed all the stock I let him know that it was time for more. He called out, “Just a second!” I said that the rice was going to burn if he didn’t add more stock, and he said, “Wait a minute!”
“The rice isn’t going to wait a minute,” I said with a surge of delight. It wasn’t me waiting at the door for him to put his shoes on. It was the rice! His beloved food! He was out of his chair in a second and up on his stool ladling in more stock. He gave it a stir and went back to counting by tens and fives.

When the rice was almost ready, in went the mushrooms and spinach and Luca stirred those around. “Spinach. Yum,” he said. Just then the doorbell rang and Luca ran to answer it.

“Hey buddy!” I heard Jonathan say and he and Luca hugged in the doorway. We all sat down to the risotto with grated parmesan and plenty of black pepper and a little salad and wine. The risotto was delicious.

What better way to honor the dead than to cook for those who are still living?

Aglio e Olio Con Amore

Recipe #11: Pasta With Garlic and Parsley

We make pasta aglio e olio all the time in our house. It’s fast and easy and to my mind it is just about the most perfect meal imaginable especially when lemon and a little crushed red chiles are added. On our second date, Jim made aglio e olio for me. I had never had it before and now I find I could eat it almost every night.

So when Luca was searching for his next recipe and skipped right past Pasta With Garlic and Parsley, I had him take another look. He looked it over and then only got excited by the optional additions to the dish which he read aloud. “’Parmesan cheese, rocket (arugula) or basil instead of parsley.’” Luca looked up and said, “No.” He went on: “’Chopped anchobies (sic) or olives, fresh tomatoes, and pine nuts or walnuts.’” Jim, a huge fan of pine nuts, perked up at the mention of them. “That sounds good.” But Luca said, “No pine nuts. No walnuts.” Then after a moment of considering, he said, “Anchobies, fresh tomatoes and olives. And Parmesan cheese, of course.” I told Luca that half of being a good chef was knowing what will taste good, and I thought he had picked an excellent combination of ingredients. I couldn’t wait.

The next day when it was time to start cooking, I got out all the ingredients and laid them on the counter. Luca washed his hands and then looked at the garlic and panicked. “I don’t want to work with the garlic!” he shouted. This has become a sort of mantra of his. I have no idea where he got this particular phrasing but every time he sees that garlic is involved in a recipe, he shouts out: “I don’t want to work with the garlic!” I tried coaxing him into it but saw almost instantly that it was no use. He will get over his fear of garlic one way or another and it won’t be due to my powers of persuasion.

I started chopping garlic while Luca separated the parsley leaves from the stems. We worked side by side in relative quiet (all but for the new album from Zeep, friends of ours from London who make incredibly fun and sophisticated music that cannot help but put you in a great mood). After a few minutes Luca said, “What is parsley’s protection?” This idea tends to occur to Luca as he is annihilating something at the chopping block. In the case of the onions of a couple of weeks ago, his eyes welled up leading him to marvel at the way the onions keeps predators like him away. The parsley must have seemed defenseless in comparison because Luca was ripping it apart.

He chopped the anchovies and then went to wash his hands. Then he chopped the olives (one by one until I intervened) and now there were five piles of delicious things ready to go into the pasta.

olives, parsley, anchovy...

Luca poured the olive oil into the skillet and I added the garlic. He stood on the step stool and stirred it gently. “Be careful not to let it brown!” he remembered from the book, and I thought of how faithfully he adheres to Alice Waters’ directions. How much easier our mornings would be if only she would write a recipe for getting to school on time. “Step one: get out of bed precisely when you are told. Step two; put on your clothes and go the bathroom to brush your teeth. You must do this right away.”

The water was boiling and Luca poured in the pasta. He jumped back a bit when he felt the steam on his arms and I realized that this was his first time putting dried pasta in a pot of boiling water. Not a milestone exactly but one of a thousand hurdles that will make him more capable in the kitchen and the world beyond. I hadn’t realized until Luca embarked on this cooking project that the kitchen provided so many opportunities to conquer one’s fear; fear of knives and heat, fear of garlic, fear of getting it wrong.

This last has to do with risks other than the physical ones. Because what is cooking if not an offering? And with any offering we hope that it spreads some joy and also that no one laughs in our faces. For this reason baking is infinitely more terrifying than making things like pasta sauces and stews. With baking there is no hiding the ugly mistakes (see the post below). Luca’s desire to cook comes from his love of food. When he is cooking he learns about chemistry and flavor and how to manage utensils and fire. He is learning that some aspects of cooking are tedious and tiring and that therefore the whole enterprise requires a certain amount of generosity. He is learning that even though we have to put dinner on the table every night we can try to do so with imagination and sometimes even a sense of adventure. He is learning the joy of giving pleasure. In short, he is mostly learning about love.

When the pasta was ready, Luca read that we were supposed to drain it and put it in the skillet with the olive oil and garlic. Luca took the tongs and tried transferring the pasta to the skillet but it was a big mess so I took over. With the tongs, he turned the pasta over and over in the oil and garlic. Then he put in the olives and parsley and turned that round and then the rest of the ingredients.  He added salt and pepper and mixed it all together.

Luca’s first pasta dish ended up looking like this:

Perfetto!

Because this is exactly the kind of food that I live for, I dug in happily and then remembered to grate some Parmesan on top. I scraped my thumb on the cheese grater and it started to bleed a little. I was too busy eating to care.

“Luca, “ I said, devouring the pasta. “What do you think? This is incredible!”

But he was worried about my thumb. With a full plate of food in front of him, he came around to my side of the table and gave my thumb a serious look. Then he hugged me went back to his food. Neither of us spoke until our plates were empty. Then we went for seconds.

Now that’s love.

Magic

Recipe # 10 biscuits

I was wondering if Luca was bored with cooking since he hadn’t wanted to make his beloved tomato sauce the day before. But right after dinner that night he picked out his next recipe: biscuits.

I am not much of a baker. With the exception of Alice Waters’ Plum Upside down cake which for some reason always turns out great, I don’t have much luck with cakes and pies. Cookies are OK as long as I don’t try for anything too complicated. I once made an apple pie with homemade pie crust to bring to a friend’s Thanksgiving dinner. This friend happens to be an expert baker. His pies and cakes come out looking like something you’d want to put on your wall if they weren’t so unbelievably delicious. He is more like a magician than a baker. I spent the day working and reworking the pie crust and ended up with a pie so ugly I thought of a hundred lies to tell about how it had met its demise. It was wrinkled and brown with stray pieces of crust that were badly patched together. After dinner the desserts came out and there was my failure on display along with an astonishing array of perfectly stunning cakes and pies. I couldn’t bear to listen to the nice guests try to find something nice to say about my hideous pie so I invented a story. I said that it was called an Estonian Apple Pie, and that in Estonia the tradition is to make pies as ugly as possible to deter pie thieves from stealing them off the kitchen window sill. They get prizes in Estonia, I elaborated, for the ugliest and tastiest pie. For about a minute everyone believed me and then afterwards nobody felt the need to say anything nice about my ugly apple pie.

Luca’s first order of business was to place his army action figure on the kitchen counter, so now we had a witness in the form of a plastic army guy on steroids. Luca measured out the flour (1/2 whole wheat as is the custom in our house), baking soda, sugar and salt. Then Luca poured out the milk and mixed it together. He loved watching it get lumpy. “It looks like a fossil,” he remarked. Then he formed the dough into a ball, gently working it inside the bowl.

He sprinkled some flour onto the counter and rolled out the dough. Then he went to work kneading it. It was something of a wonder watching him do this. He was silent and heaved his shoulders into the work as though he had been doing it his whole life. Watching him, one would have thought that perhaps he had come from a long line of bakers. And he was fast. Some days it seems like all I ever say to Luca is “Come on. Can’t you do that a little faster?” So watching him work the dough so swiftly was a revelation.

The recipe says to knead the dough only for a minute and Luca had gone over, so I stopped him and went to look for something to use as a cookie cutter. I came up with a small wine glass. Here again, Luca was incredibly fast and precise. He loved making the biscuit shapes and then reworking the dough so he could cut more round biscuits from it. When we were done we had 14 biscuits.

We poured the melted butter into a bowl and Luca dipped the biscuits in the butter one by one and placed them on the baking sheet. My arteries were hardening just looking at how much butter was dripping off the biscuits and then the biscuits sliding around in the butter on the baking sheet. I told Luca to get his mitts on and he did that but the top oven was too high for him so I placed the baking sheet in the oven.

Luca went back to playing with his army action figure but when he smelled the biscuits baking, he came over and stood in front of the oven. “Oh, yum!” he said with a deep growl of appreciation. Then Jim called. Luca told him the biscuits were baking and that they smelled so good he was planning on putting his head in front of the oven so that his hair would smell like them.

When the biscuits came out of the oven they looked and smelled divine. It really was a little bit of magic, I thought, mixing these ingredients together, putting them in an oven and ending up with something so deeply satisfying. We ate one right off the baking sheet and Luca’s eyes rolled back into his head with the pleasure of it. Just then I remembered the biscuits my mother used to make for Thanksgiving. My mother was a really terrible cook and we almost never had dinner around the table together. Instead we would sort of forage on our own and as a result eating was a lonely affair. But on Thanksgiving my mother would roast a big turkey and make mashed potatoes. Best of all she’d pop open a pressurized can of Pillsbury biscuits, and ten minutes later we’d have them right out of the oven and smothered in butter. They were so warm and buttery and comforting that they almost made up for all the TV dinners eaten, not even in front of the TV, but alone at the dining table.

Luca’s biscuits were light, slightly nutty and of course buttery. “I’m going to divide them up into three,” Luca said apparently planning on eating them all that very night with dinner. I wanted to do that too but I didn’t let on. “We’re each going to have one or two tonight and save the rest for tomorrow,” I said doing my best imitation of a grownup.

Over dinner I told Luca how great it was going to be when he went to college and could cook a nice meal for himself. “All your friends are going to want to come to your place for dinner,” I said.

“Oh yeah, because in college the mommies only make their lunches,” he said.

“When you’re in college, you have to make all your own meals because your mommy and daddy won’t be there. You’ll be on your own then.” Luca just stared at me and I felt just terrible. He has heard this before, about how one day he will move out and be on his own, but he continues not to want to hear about it.

“Then the teachers make the lunches,” he said. This was tremendously satisfying to him and he slathered a big lump of blueberry jam onto his second biscuit.

“No, the teachers don’t make lunch. They are too busy teaching to make lunch. You have to make your own lunch.”

“Or go out to a restaurant,” Luca said.

“Right,” I said and then tried changing the subject. “You are so lucky that you’re learning how to cook so you will always know how to make something really good at home.” But it was no use trying to come up with something cheery to say. At the thought that Luca could not imagine a world without nurturing, lunch-making adults my eyes welled up. Likewise, I cannot imagine a world without a seven year old boy asking his constant questions and driving me crazy with how long it takes to put on his shoes. I looked at him across the table, not even trying to hide my eyes that were swollen with tears. We are both blind to a future without each other. We know it is coming, but we are happier when we choose not to think about it. And happier still when there are fresh, warm biscuits on the table.

Next up: pasta with garlic an olive oil (plus anchovies, olives and fresh tomatoes).

Alien Species In My Kitchen

recipe #9 (sort of): tomato sauce

Pasta with tomato sauce is Luca’s favorite food, but he didn’t want to help me make it even though I had a big bag of fresh tomatoes that needed cooking. He wanted to make Halibut in Fig Leaves – again. Every time I ask him what he wants to make next, he mentions the halibut. I told him we didn’t have the halibut or the fig leaves and that I wouldn’t know where to find fig leaves even if there were time to go hunting for them. And anyway what about the fresh tomatoes? He shrugged and went off to play with his Star Wars action figures.

I started chopping and Luca came in throwing pretend grenades. There has been a marked escalation in recent days of fake violence, guns and shooting noises, and more elaborate explosions. Even in his drawings, Luca has graduated from rescue scenes involving helicopters and ambulances to bloody stabbings and people falling off cliffs. Luca wasn’t particularly interested in guns when he was younger. While all the boys around him were playing guns and war, Luca was building things with blocks or playing violin. I thought, with a hint of smugness, that he just wasn’t that type of boy and was glad I didn’t have the problem of how to tolerate the gunplay.

Luca found this when we were camping

 

Along came Star Wars and first grade and surges of testosterone that I swear are actually visible. Luca started playing with guns occasionally and I found that it didn’t bother me as much as I thought it would. There was even something vaguely wholesome about the sight of two boys playing army. I don’t believe in censoring imaginary play, and I do believe that boys need to learn how to manage their aggression. At the same time, I don’t want guns in my house for the simple fact that I don’t like them. Likewise, I don’t let Luca put stickers all over the furniture not because I think stickers will damage his character, but because I don’t like them.

Consulting other parents is no help. Parents I admire are all over the map on this issue. One friend lets her son play with guns in the house as long as he doesn’t point them in anyone’s face. Another does not allow toy guns in the house but doesn’t stop her son from making a gun out of whatever is lying around and then shooting at will. Another mother I know lets her son do anything he wants while a mutual friend of ours enforces an absolute ban on violent play on sociopolitical grounds. I have fallen somewhere in between these extremes, which is another way of saying that I am inconsistent. We don’t have guns in the house (real or pretend), and when Luca makes one out of driftwood, it doesn’t bother me. When he’s outside he can do pretty much whatever he wants, but in the house, the rules change, although not with much consistency. And wherever we are, I don’t like being shot at. Where Jim will pretend to fall down dead, I make a vaguely disapproving comment with only half-hearted conviction. I know he doesn’t mean to kill me and that it may be important to his development to shoot at me. But I can’t help it. It offends me.

Luca's driftwood pistol

Along came second grade, the Star Wars obsession has only grown and with it (because of it?) more interest in weaponry and violence. Now he is asking for an X-box so he can play the Star Wars video game. The answer to this is “No. No. And, oh by the way? No.” I tell him video games are like MacDonald’s for the brain. Because this is a food metaphor, Luca gets it and grows quiet.

I remember 17 weeks into my pregnancy being shocked to learn I was having a boy. It didn’t seem possible. It wasn’t what I was picturing. And besides, I was not equipped to be the mother of a boy. I had the thought that this child would be Jim’s and the next child, a girl obviously, would be mine. Then I began hearing from mothers of boys about how they love their mothers forever and how the mothers of girls must brace themselves for the day they will hear their daughters say “I hate you.” OK, I thought. Maybe this having a boy thing would turn out all right in the end. Yet I wonder about Luca’s Star Wars fixation, coupled with his new love of missiles and grenades. Is it working out a healthy instinct or succumbing to mainstream America’s idea of what it means to be male? And whichever it is, do I have to like it? When presented with a drawing of someone getting shot, replete with blood spatter and a thought bubble that says, “Die, Scum!” am I required to say  “Great drawing?”

This is what I was thinking about as I made Alice Waters’ tomato sauce for the first time. The smell of thyme filled the kitchen. The recipe called for the use of a food mill at the end of the cooking to strain out the skin and seeds. Being more phobic about food mills than I am about skin and seeds, I planned on skipping this part. The recipe also calls for covering the sauce for the first 20 minutes and I thought this might make it too thin. If so, I could always thicken it with some tomato paste.

While I was topping and tailing some green beans Luca ran in, hid behind the kitchen counter and then peered around and shot me. We were in different worlds.

Luca was “starving” when he sat down at the table. He took one look at the pasta with tomato sauce and panicked. “I want more sauce!” he said. I told him that there was no more, that it had turned out a little thin, that’s all (I was out of tomato paste and cooked it down as long as I could). He took another look at the food and burst into tears. I have made pasta with tomato sauce for him hundreds of times and he has never noticed any variation in consistency or flavor. Now he was crying and demanding to know what went wrong. I told him he was welcome not to eat it, but there was nothing I could do about the state of the sauce.

“Did you make it from here!?” he demanded incredulously, pointing to Fanny at Chez Panisse. Then he went searching for the recipe for evidence of my misdeeds. My patience was wearing thin. I told him if he was going to whine about the food he could just get up and leave the table. He had after all been invited to cook it himself. He cried a little more and then settled down and ate. In a few minutes he was in a good mood again.

“Do you know why sand troopers are cool?” Luca asked. “Because they have two lives.”

I may have to get a food mill.

Math and Other Dangers

Recipe #8: chocolate kisses

The recipe for chocolate kisses calls for 3 1/4 oz of chocolate, and the bar of Scharfenbergers semi-sweet chocolate was 9.7 ounces. This was bad news for me. If these had been rounder numbers, or if I were less of a mathematical moron, I could have seized the opportunity to turn this into a teaching moment. You know, showing how to apply math in everyday life and ending up with chocolate kisses! Instead, I punched numbers into a calculator and got nowhere. I looked at the bar of chocolate and started over. No number came up that was useful. Luca was watching me fumble around and in an effort to hide my fear of math, I turned it into a comedy act. I stared at the calculator and made funny faces at it and banged it on the table as though it were broken. Luckily, Luca is at an age where his mother can still crack him up.

I have truly despised math all my life, and I will feel horribly guilty if Luca inherits my deficiency. I realize that in certain fields, math is power and that it even contains a certain beauty. I was too bored by math drills to appreciate any deeper mathematical concepts, and now I see that I missed out. In drumming, for example, I can see that having even a basic understanding of math would be beneficial. For this reason, I lie to Luca regularly, saying things like, “Math is fun, right?” And, “Math is cool. You are so lucky to do math every day!” Luca is already a lover of books and words, and I am determined that if he decides to hate math it will be his own doing and not mine.

The best I could do was to come up with an approximation of how much chocolate to use. Then Luca looked at the recipe. “30 kisses,” he read. “That’s a lot,” he said looking doubtful. Then he said, “Oh, because they are small.” But I didn’t see how the little block of chocolate could amount to 30 kisses no matter how small they were. Luca agreed. “Let’s make the whole thing,” he said. We decided to double the recipe which made the math calculations only marginally easier.

Cutting the block of chocolate was hard so I did that and then Luca put it into a metal bowl. When the water was “just bubbling,” I placed the bowl over the water and Luca got up on his step stool and started stirring. The chocolate melting into thick goo was a divine sight. Luca kept stirring. The metal bowl was smaller than the pot of water underneath it so that I had to hold it in place. Even so a little water got inside the bowl of chocolate and I had to pour it out. Luca had on his blue mitts and kept stirring.

When all the chocolate was melted, I got out the “cold butter,” and cut out two tablespoons worth. It went into the bowl and Luca stirred some more. We took turns stirring until the butter had disappeared into the melted chocolate. I don’t know why this was so much fun but it was.

“Now it has to cool,” I said. Luca read from the book. “Place chocolate in a small plastic bag and squeeze into a corner.”  I looked for a good plastic bag and when the chocolate held its shape, we spooned it in. Luca laughed because it was messy.

“This is easier said than done,” I said and he laughed some more.

“Is that an expression?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“Is it an expression people say all the time?”

“Not all the time, but when something sounds easier than it is.”

Once the chocolate was in the bag we had to get it all into one corner. Luca went to work on this as I lined a baking sheet with parchment paper. Luca was being extremely thorough about getting the chocolate into the corner of the bag and when he was done he said, “Now we need scissors.” I told him that all of the scissors were in his room, probably three or four pairs, because every time we have a pair anywhere else in the house, he takes them and they subsequently disappear into the unholy mess that is his room. He grumbled something on his way to his room and then emerged holding a pair of child’s scissors. He cut the corner of the bag.

“Here comes the fun part,” I said. I squeezed out the first kiss. Really it was more of a blob than a kiss. The second one looked like a slug. Another cooking mystery: how do you get a perfect kiss shape? It seemed impossible to get them to look like the picture:

Luca took the bag and made a few. “These don’t look like kisses,” he said, and I told him that they would taste great no matter what shape they were in. We took turns squeezing out the kisses, and then we did some together. Luca started getting silly with it and filled a second baking sheet by himself. Doubling the recipe made 36 kisses, not 60, and some of them were very small.

Who cares what they looked like? They were delicious.

Chocolate smudges

Luca’s own batch tasted just as good.

Now these are kisses!

Luca went to work on the bowl with a spoon and his fingers, and I put the kisses in the refrigerator to cool. Just then I got a call from my bank saying that someone was at that moment trying to cash a check from my account for 996 dollars. I didn’t know this person, and she was just then fleeing from the bank. She had all my account information including my home address. I was instructed to go right away to my nearest bank to close the account. Since my husband’s name is also on the account, I wasn’t sure they would let me do this, but I told Luca we had to go right now. He got on his shoes and we went to the bank.

Luca seemed unfazed by the fact that some strange person was trying to steal our money. He has seen a few bikes stolen from our old house in Venice, but that is about it as far as his awareness of criminal activity goes. When I was his age, my house was getting broken into regularly. I’d come home from school and find that the place had been ransacked with a chilling ferocity. Other times we’d wake in the middle of the night to the sound of people breaking in and rifling around through our things. Once we even saw a dead body in the street moments after a stabbing. And then of course we lived under the forbidding shadow of the Brooklyn House of Detention which was next door. So the life of crime and its aftermath was never far from my consciousness. Luca, on the other hand, has been largely sheltered. He knows there are “bad guys” out there in the world, but he hasn’t brushed up against them much.

The “personal banker” closed my existing account and moved all the money into one with just my name on it. She did all this without so much as a phone call to Jim. So this is how easy is to steal from your spouse, I thought. I’d put Jim’s name on the account as soon as we could get to a bank together but how did the banker know that? As Luca and I were leaving the bank, my phone rang again. This time it was another bank asking if we had authorized a check in the amount of 998 dollars to a woman with a different name than the first one. I didn’t know if they were two separate people or if it was one person with fake ID’s. I explained the situation adding that if the woman was still in the bank, she needed to be arrested.

It felt strange asking for someone to be arrested. I have taught writing in prisons, mostly to juveniles and women, and have heard about the desperate circumstances that lead to incarceration. Many women end up in jail because some guy has coerced her to commit a crime. I had no idea what the story was behind the woman (or women) who was trying to steal our money, just that right then I couldn’t feel much sympathy. Still, whoever she was, she was having a shitty life and sending her to jail wouldn’t solve any of her problems. Nor would it make me any safer from thieves. In any case there was little chance of her being arrested because the bank teller couldn’t exactly jump over the counter to detain her and what were the chances she would hang around long enough for a cop to arrive?

When Luca and I got home, he suddenly looked panicked. “What about my account?” he said. He has exactly $52 in his account, one dollar for every week of 2008 (more math!). I told him not to worry, that we didn’t pay bills with that account so his money was safe. He was relieved.

The chocolate kisses were cold by now and we ate a few of them. They were buttery and melted instantly. “Mmm, so good,” Luca said. My phone rang again and this time it was a policeman saying that he did indeed have the woman with the bad checks in custody and that he would call back later with more information. Luca was excited that I was talking to a police officer and he got on another phone and listened in. I was very surprised that the woman had been caught. This was probably the first time I have ever been the victim of a crime where the perpetrator had been apprehended.

Luca and I went to meet Jim for dinner at Mozza Pizzeria. We had three different kinds of pizza: clams and garlic, funghi misti, and what we called the Pig Fest: sausage, salami, bacon and guanciale.

Outside Mozza

The View From Mozza

When we came home Jim saw the bowl full of chocolate kisses and opened his birthday present. We watched “Bringing Up Baby” with Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn and ate all the kisses. I can’t think of a better combination of mood elevators. Luca laughed all the way through the movie.

Right before bed he asked, “What would happen if there was no such thing as money?”

Captain Rex in the Kitchen

Recipes 5, 6 & 7: Lemon Sole Fried with Bread Crumbs, Clarified Butter, Bread Crumbs.

Jim had to work on Saturday on his birthday, so Friday night’s attempt at Alice Waters’ lemon sole fried with bread crumbs turned out to be his birthday dinner celebration. This meant that Luca and I had to keep stopping in the middle of cooking to call Jim who was stuck in traffic so we could gauge how much longer it would be before we could start the fish. Traffic on the freeways was terrible. Luca read the last line of the recipe with urgency: “Mommy,” he said. “It says serve right away!” Right, I said.

Actually the stopping was fun for Luca. He had just gotten his Halloween costume and had done little else for two days besides walk around in it making very realistic shooting noises. I told him the sole would be messy and that he would probably want to change, but I knew there was no way he would agree to this. Instead he tied on an apron and rolled up his sleeves. In the pauses of waiting for Jim, he took off the apron and resumed his role as Captain Rex. I expected the costume to distract him from cooking. But the responsibilities of clone trooper captain and home cook must be pretty compatible because Luca had no trouble handling them both simultaneously.

We put on some music; Baaba Maal’s new album, Television, our current favorite. Luca keeps playing his two favorite songs, the 1^st track called “Television” and 7^th track which is a gorgeous song called “Dakar Moon.” I beg him to let the whole album play out but he keeps running to the stereo to skip the songs in between. I wonder if all kids get stuck in a groove this way; the costume, the songs repeated over and over, the favorite pair of shorts that turn shiny and stained with overuse. As a character trait, a certain amount of obsessiveness has its good sides: the intense focus, the loyalty to people and work. But because I am a catastrophic thinker, I look ahead to the bad girlfriend, the one who loves sex and methamphetamines. There will be no turning Luca’s head from the object of his fixation.

Having a child is a lifelong exercise in relinquishing control little by little. I marvel at the parents of sixteen year olds who sigh and say, “Jake just got his driver’s license.” Lock him up! I think to myself. I know one day I will get there but I can’t for the life of me see how. I have no idea how my own mother managed with four kids who rode the subways at all hours all over New York City. We had no cell phones. She never knew where we were and half the time she was better off not knowing. I remember as a teenager coming home late and hearing her voice from the bed saying, “Sweetie? Is that you?” The poor woman never slept. One day Luca will be out there on the roads with the drunks and the texters, and along with the usual dangers over which I will have no control will be Luca’s own intensity.

But for now, Luca was laughing at the bread crumbs. He put a handful of bread cubes in the blender and pushed grate. The bread jumped up and down a few times before it settled into the grind. Each time bread went into the blender, it jumped up and down and Luca erupted in delighted fits of laughter. It is so much fun to cook with a person who gets a kick out of watching bread jump up and down in the blender.

Clarifying the butter was a mini science experiment. Luca liked watching the butter melt and then foam up. I understand the concept of separating the fat from the milk solids and why it is necessary. But whenever I do something like “skim the foam from the butter” it turns out not to be that simple. We took turns skimming the foam and putting it into a bowl. But the milk solids and fat seemed impossible to separate and the contents of bowl and the pan were identical.

We called Jim. He had moved less than a half a mile since the last phone call. I lay my head down on the counter and said, “I am so hungry.” Luca came over and patted me on the back, and there we were; a grown woman being comforted by a seven year old boy in full Star Wars regalia. He went back to playing and I drank some wine.

A little later, Luca cracked his first egg ever. He was good at it and he liked it. He got to crack another and then mixed them with a fork. Then he put flour in another bowl and the bread crumbs onto a plate.

Meanwhile Jim had budged another few feet. Luca suggested I have some chips. I had a little more wine instead. Finally Jim called and said: “Start the fish!” At first Luca said, “I don’t want to touch the fish.” I have found that if I sometimes utterly ignore him he does a complete reversal. I have no idea why this is and have spent no time trying to figure it out. But here it worked again, because a few seconds later Luca said, “Oh! Actually I do!” And he picked up a sole filet and started dipping it in the flour.

“Mommy! What about the lemon?” he said suddenly. I panicked for a second and then found a lemon. But there was no lemon listed in the recipe. Luca looked at me as though I were a complete idiot and, just like a teenager with a driver’s license, he said, “Lemon sole?” I had gotten plain old sole. But I cut the lemon anyway because it would be good on the fried fish.

Luca dredged each filet in flour. Then he dipped it into the gooey egg and then into the bread crumbs. His fingers were covered in eggy batter. He put the filets in the skillet and stood on his step stool. As the bready mixture began to sizzle it sent up a delicious buttery fried smell. Luca rubbed his stomach and said, “Oh, yum,” in a deep whisper.

Jim came in and said it smelled great. We opened some champagne and Luca gave him the best pieces of fish because it was his birthday. We added some salt and some lemon. But I found the fish a little disappointing. The bread crumb mixture had not stuck to the fish the way it is supposed to (maybe the crumbs were too big?) and the fish itself seemed little slimy (not cooked enough?). But Luca and Jim loved it and it was good to be home all together on a Friday night. Just as I had predicted, Luca’s eyes rolled up in his head as he dug in. “Mmmmm…”

Gadgets

Luca has been reading Fanny at Chez Panisse every morning at breakfast. The book is open on the table and he chews on his toast and reads the recipes. Today he read “Candied Orange Peels” and “Lemon Sole Fried With Bread Crumbs.” When he reads ingredients he says “one slash two cups water.” When he reads temperatures he says “two-seven-five faramites.” I don’t correct him. I figure I can stop time if I don’t correct him. For years instead of Portuguese he said “Porkagese” and I’d have to remind myself to say it like this so he wouldn’t catch on and start saying it correctly. Since I speak porkagese and we have Brazilian friends and lots of Brazilian music that we love, it’s a word that gets mentioned pretty regularly. Anyway, now he says “Portuguese” and is one step closer to leaving us to go off to college.

This morning Luca was reading about candied orange peels and we were all getting pretty excited about them, especially the part about how the cooks at Chez Panisse like to dip the ends in melted chocolate and then “chop them up to put them into pies and tarts, ice creams and on top of cakes and custards.” Luca looked up from the page and said “Ooooooh. Yum!” He read on. “Let them boil for five minutes, then turn off the heat and let them sit in the pan for… twenty-four hours!” We all let out a big disappointed, “Oh!” This is why you always have to read a recipe all the way through. I remember being interested in a recipe for lamb in Alice Waters menu cookbook and the first step was this: “Roast the lamb on a spit.” Obviously I read no further. I don’t have the most equipped kitchen. Any recipe that mentions a double boiler or a food mill is out. Zesting used to be a problem until I got a really good zester and now it’s a breeze. But I can tell you that a spit is one item I will go without for the rest of my days. Unless I move to a big chateau in the French countryside or a stone farmhouse outside of Lucca, Italy. These are the types of places I imagine a spit would fit right in. Not so much in my Los Angeles kitchen.

When I was a kid my mother bought a crockpot. She thought this was the greatest invention ever created. Since her idea of cooking was to fry a hunk of tuna and call it a tuna burger the crockpot didn’t improve things much from a culinary standpoint. But for her it was a revolution. She could start a pot of rice in the morning before work and come home to… rice! I think she used it every day for about a month and then it sat on the counter gathering grease from the fried tuna burgers.

Another gadget intended to modernize the kitchen was the garbage compactor. Remember those? My mother bought one of those too. Considering that she was a single mother with four kids living on a secretary’s salary, she must have believed in the power of these things to make her life better. No more cooking! No more garbage! The problem was that we lived in Brooklyn and had what could politely be called “a cockroach problem.” You can imagine therefore that crunching up garbage and saving it in the kitchen until it weighed over sixty pounds was perhaps not the wisest idea. It made the roaches happy, but none of us wanted to lug it out of the house.

One day I will get over my fear of double boilers and parchment paper and food mills. (At the end of Fanny at Chez Panisse are a few recipes that call for an ice cream maker.) But for now I am looking forward to Luca’s Friday night attempt at breaded lemon sole. I really think Alice Waters is a genius for making this book for kids. I imagine Luca’s hands all sticky with egg and flour and breadcrumbs and then his eyes rolling up into his head as he digs into the buttery fried fish. Really, what could be better than gourmet fish fingers you made yourself? Maybe just watching Bringing Up Baby afterward and waiting for Saturday.

Next up (after the fish): chocolate birthday kisses for Daddy: