Give the Gift of Chomp.
me and my little friend without eyes
Everyone wants my money. Toys ‘R Us peppers me with hourly pre-Christmas emails. I actually feel sorry for J. Crew when I consider all of the money that they will not be getting from me before the end of the year. The poor things really seem to have no idea.
And those poor bastards over at Land’s End have their fingers crossed that I will buy some warm hats from them in the next ten days. I just know it.
It’s not just stores. Even the non-profits want cash. Carnegie Hall has me on speed dial, and frankly, I am a terrible prospect for them.
My husband works for a radio station, and all day long in the background, his colleagues are asking me to include them in my year-end giving plan. I recognize this as a personalized, if veiled, threat to the financial security of my family. Ie, perhaps Ira Glass is going to come out and slash my tires or at least make it impossible to pay my mortgage unless we grease the NPR palm. Isn’t the thrice-yearly pledge drive we participate in, in addition to the time we tithe to you, enough?
Tonight the cat rescue place from the neighborhood sent over a note trying tried to explain to me that I am not doing enough to support the pathetic-cat community. They say that if I donate at the lowest level, which is $100, they will mention me in their newsletter as a “Manx” giver. What sort of enticement is that? If I am not mistaken, a manx is a cat lacking a tail. Whereas I am a person who taken in cats with no eyes, which, I’m sure you will agree, is a far more dramatic thing to not have. I have spent more on rehabilitation, deworming, shots, spaying, and medical boarding each year dealing with the feral problem in my neighborhood than I spend on a year’s worth of car insurance to park on the street in Flatbush, Brooklyn. So “manx,” my ass. With no further effort on my part, I would expect to show up in the newsletter at the “Eyeless and Hypothermic Runt” level.
In other news, my blood relatives also appear to want presents.
This holiday season, everything is adding up. I’m sure it’s the same for you.
But you know what is free? To get and to give?
Church Avenue Chomp.
So this year, for your year-end giving plan, I urge you to keep all of your money, and opt out of the social pressure to give gifts that will cost you anything. Instead, give the gift of this blog to someone else who you think would like it.
People who you give my blog to will get recipes, personal essays, and rants and accolades from a part of Brooklyn that is becoming very hip. They will know when I am tired because my child is getting molars (that’s a spoiler for the next few months!) as well as be privy to a picture of a very fetching giraffe, some snow that actually moves around, and more.
So, screw presents. In addition to being free, urls take up less space on the mantel. Also, they are greener.
Readership has grown considerably in the last few months and for that, I’d like to thank all of you who have tweeted, stumbled, shared on Facebook, or simply spread the word.
Believe me when I say that if I publish a book, then I will be urging you to spend, spend, spend on your friends, neighbors, bosses, underlings, and people you haven’t yet met. However, we are not there yet. So relax! And implement my idea for this year, please.
Happy Chompidays to you!
Polka Dot
My five-year-old niece Amelia is probably the nicest and the best-accessorized person I know.
To be polite, I should say “nicest and best-accessorized while still being under five feet tall person I know,” but that modifier would just be to make everyone reading this feel better about themselves; it’s not factually necessary. I’m confident that she is nicer than you. She also has better tights. I’m sure of it.
Sometimes I think of her as Henry’s big sister. She is always giving him hugs and making complex arrangements of the toys she has that she thinks Henry would like most, and welcoming him to ravage them in whatever way he likes. But then I remember that eager and cheerful sharing is not really what siblinghood is about. Siblinghood, instead, is about fighting for the better seat on the couch. Which seat is the better seat is totally arbitrary, of course. It’s just what the older sibling decrees it is in their never-ending quest to gain control and crush your spirit.
Like I did, Amelia is growing up with a sibling five years older. (This blog post isn’t about him, but let’s give him six adjectives: handsome, brilliant, rigid, alien-obsessed, creative, really stubborn. Okay that’s seven, but he deserves the “really,” trust me.) But I know that he can be a petulant one who won’t let her touch his stuff, who tells her she’s ugly, and who can trounce her physically, when he’s not gushing about how much he loves her or trying to protect her from something.
But Amelia doesn’t do these things to Henry. She just says, “He can play with all of my toys but if one has a battery in it, tell him to don’t suck it.”
Granted, Henry lives out of state, but she actually does appear to have his best interests in mind.
A few weeks ago I took her out to dinner. We were at a diner but for the heck of it, she was wearing a fancy red dress with some white tights with huge black polka dots on them. Over the dress, she was wearing a red cloth apron with her name embroidered on it that her dad had made her bring, after giving her an admonishment not to order anything that would stain her dress if she spilled it.
Before we left the house her dad made eye contact with me, and said in his signature fake-stern way, “Do not order her any non-red food.”
Ok. Right. We will only eat red stuff. I swore up and down. And off we went.
At the conclusion of our ketchup-intensive dinner, she takes a moment out from eating a bowl of ice cream — chocolate, I admit — to point to a display of frisbees.
She asks, “Can you get me one of those?”
It was a Sunday night. She’d been told on Saturday morning that her mom had died. So I try to figure out how to answer the frisbee question.
I tell her no, for two reasons. One, every time her brother asks me for a frisbee when we are at the diner—which is every time we are there—I tell him no. They have a lot of frisbees at home. And if I don’t buy him one, I shouldn’t buy her one. Fair is fair, right?
The second reason is that I used to curate a reading series for One Story magazine, and one writer read a story about a kid whose mother had died when he was four. His grandfather felt so terrible that he let him choose four different colors of orange paint for his room, and then bought them, and then created a truly disastrous room because he was at a loss for how to comfort the child; he felt so bad that he wanted to do anything he could. And if I remember the story correctly that turned out to a not-totally-great way to deal with things, so I decide to stick with my answer. No frisbee.
“No, you guys have a bunch of frisbees at home,” I say.
Phew. Case closed.
But, then she shoots a follow up at me.
“How does a soul separate from a body?”
Oh, jeez.
It’s not that I don’t want to talk about it, but that seems like something I should try hard not to mess up, considering how fraught the question probably is, and because I hadn’t been the person to explain what had happened in the first place.
I, too, am trying to get used to her mom dying, and the fact pops up at me whenever it wants, like it was popping up to her. La la la la la we are eating ice cream and negotiating frisbees then BAM, is the way I can best describe it.
I remember being afraid of asking the wrong questions as a child, and worrying about making someone uncomfortable. That might happen because grownups don’t know what’s coming, and because they don’t want to mess up and say the wrong thing in too authoritative of a way.
I’d like to figure out a way to welcome her questions, and to not be a squelching figure in her life.
But how do you do that? If you act very sure, you give a small person a certain impression of what you are like as a question answerer, but while you might sound like you know what you are talking about, there will likely be some holes in your answer or in your delivery.
I think that some of the best answers are essayistic — ie, meandering in their exploration of possible answers. Exploratory.
The soul is metaphorical, I think, but a comforting principle to an adult, let alone to a little kid. She was seeming okay for the most part, and I didn’t want to undo any good work that had or would continue to comfort her, so I sidestep with a classic adult deflector that is both unhelpful and possibly unwelcoming to questioning:
“That is a great question, honey. But it’s a tough one.”
I don’t know how a soul separates from a body, nor do I know how to answer questions in a way that will comfort you, nor do I know how someone can separate thoughts of death from dessert and frisbees.
I certainly can’t.
Then she says, “Heaven is better than the hospital. My mommy can walk in heaven.”
She says this frequently, perhaps to convince herself and everyone else. Everyone gets whiplash from nodding, is how eager we are for her to be convinced of this. I’ll sign up for that version of things. Or I’ll sign up for that to be your version of things, at least.
Then we do connect-the-dots of a lion on her place mat, and when we get to number 38, about two thirds of the way through the lion, I point to it and tell her that my birthday is coming.
“You never have birthdays,” she says very seriously.
I remind her of how, under the stewardship of her uncle, she and her brother made me a cake for my last birthday, about a year ago, and that she could prepare to do that again if she felt like it.
“How old are you?,” she asks. “Are you forty four?”
Forty four is how old her mom was.
Plus, last time she asked how old I was, which was maybe when she was four, she said “Are you a kid still, or are you old enough to drive yet?”
I point to the 38.
She looks closely at the numbers.
“Oh,” she says. “You’re eighty three.”
I stand by the fact that she’s still nicer than pretty much anyone. And she’s got better tights.
Roast Beast, continued, if you can believe it.
First. Does anyone else’s mother call it Roast Beast? It’s apparently a Seussian reference, though he may have gotten from my mom, too.
Yesterday I really wished I could make a sidebar, because apparently writing 1500 words about a good sandwich is not enough for me. I want you to know about my personal history of great roast beef sandwiches.
You must know.
But don’t worry, I am narrowing it to three snapshots. What’s amazing to me — and this is not limited to roast beef— is that when there is something delicious involved, I can remember all of the other details in a snapshot of time. Maybe it’s when something strong and sensory is involved (and the sense doesn’t have to be taste; I have strong visual memories, too), then something is imprinted better than it would when it isn’t.
Enough philosophizing. Onward with the sandwiches.
1. It’s a Friday night in the 1980s. My friend Heather and I are, surprise surprise, watching MTV. Shortly my dad will arrive home with his brand new car. Meanwhile Heather and I are in the den, eating sandwiches. The meat is from Bliss Market in our town, where they tie, season, and roast the cut themselves, so depending on where you are in the roast, it’s more or less well done. This is the only place we would even consider buying roast beef.
If there is a gap between processed deli meat and elegant real food that just happens to be cold, and wow, is there, this is solidly on the real food side. We’re eating the roast beef on soft Portuguese rolls that leave a slight flour mustache when you bite into them, and the sandwiches have with crunchy iceberg for an excellent textural contrast, mayo, and salt. Maybe pepper. To me, this represents a seminal moment in the history of eating. I am not sure that it gets better than this.
Condemn me for liking iceberg on a sandwich if you must, but I am just not sure that it does.
2. A few years later, Heather and I shared a job as lifeguards at a swimming pool at a small condo. In a different state, you would definitely not need a lifeguard at a pool like this; a saucer might have been considered a better accessory than a lifeguard when it came to this vessel containing water.
But my sister had the job, which she then bequeathed to me, and then Heather and I did it together. Somehow, we were all fantastically well paid, and had almost nothing to do except for visit with the few tenants who used the pool and whichever of our friends stopped by for a swim.
On one of Heather’s days off, she brought by a roast beef sandwich for me. I cheerfully started to eat it. It tasted good, but different. Hmm. It had cheddar on it, but and she made sandwiches on hard rolls, rather than Portuguese. (It feels strange to write and admit that we had a teenage friendship where we cared so much about roast beef sandwiches, but that’s not all we cared about. We also cared about chicken sandwiches. And steak sandwiches. But back to our story.)
I asked what was different. Rather than answering, she asked if I liked it. I said that I did, which was when she announced that it had mustard on it. Mustard! Mustard which was a condiment I’d refused to eat before. To get me to try it, she’d hidden it on a roast beef sandwich. It’s the sort of trick you’d be furious with a parent for, but it was somehow amusing when she did it. And, hey! I like mustard! Now, I was a mustard liker.
(Currently, I like mustard on almost anything, and I credit her. However, I prefer mayo—or mayo with horseradish—on my roast beef sandwiches.)
3. It’s probably another Friday night, maybe of 1988. I’m in the car with my sister and my first boyfriend ever, Jamie. The three of us are going to the Big E, which is what we call the Eastern States Exposition fair in Massachusetts. I don’t remember us being at the fair even at all, but I definitely remember the sandwiches we ate in the car.
Jamie had a perfectly appointed house with lots of brothers milling around. It was frequently full of good food, because their dad owned a few grocery stores scattered around Connecticut. Not chain ones, but independent markets where they had a great deli and very good things to eat. When we came by to pick him up, his mom told us to take some sandwiches to take along. They were on really soft white bread, with juicy roast beef that was made in their store, and salt. I can remember how it tastes, and how the bread looked and felt, and the meat’s juice running into the bread.
Jamie runs the business himself these days. I see him sometimes and we talk about politics, and our kids, and of course high school, but we I also always circle back around to the roast beef.
Yes, they still sell it.
And that concludes today’s roast beef segment. And hopefully, it is all of the roast beef writing I will do for the week.
Oh! Except Yorkshire pudding season is bearing down on us, so, you never know. Well, I won’t write about classic roast beef sandwiches again, at least, probably.
Indeed a Flintstoney Pleasure
“Eataly,” people kept posting on Facebook. As in “I love Eataly!” or “Truffles half off at Eataly!”
What is this Eataly?, I wondered briefly. I pictured a terrible festival thing in Little Italy, where the food doesn’t represent the glories of simple and perfect Italian food. Or even complex and imperfect Italian food. Except for the occasional gem, it represents bad traffic patterns, dying cultures, and the disappointments in life.
And then, time passes, but not a lot of it.
For work one day, I got sent out to a recording studio. The studio was on 23rd street, the session would be from noon–1pm.
It sounded fun, except I had a lunch planned that day with a friend who I haven’t seen in quite a while. We both freelance for the same company but are rarely there at the same time. I emailed her that I was going to the sound studio for a while, and that since the session would surely run over, the outlook for meeting that day was grim.
“YOU KNOW THAT THE STUDIO IS RIGHT NEXT TO EATALY, RIGHT?,” she emailed me back, with a tone of urgency. Again with the Eataly? My interest was piqued. My friend had just returned from 3 weeks in Italy, and she has even tricked the Italian government into giving her a passoporto. She is serious on the topic.
I asked for more info and learned that Eataly is an Italian emporium Mario Batali opened, modeled on one in Turin. It has food to eat but also, lots of imported goods: wine, pastas, condiments, cookware, and other things.
I was once flown to Milan at great expense to the Italian goverment and spent a week eating in and around Turin. It was awesome. I was suddenly VERY interested in Eataly.
After the recording session, I stopped in. Not to ruin the surprise, but Eataly gave me an immediate headache. It’s huge, unmappable, and swarming with New Yorkers who have a lot more money than I do, as well as tourists. And while I love tourists*, they have a lot in common with toddlers: standing in the middle of the flow of foot traffic, looking around with no discernible purpose, not respecting the value of my time. If they don’t do the thing where they collapse to the floor when we’re holding hands, that’s probably only because I’m not trying to hold hands with them.
*the mayor made me say that
I’m crabby, I realize, and I need to stop ruminating and start masticating — whoa, holy cow joke! how apropos if you know what’s coming here! — so I can make it back to work.
I see a stand called “Contorni,” meaning vegetable sides, and I love vegetables. But I breeze past that, since you have to sit down and it looks expensive. I see a sign saying “pasta,” where i figure I can get pasta and vegetables together.
But the pasta cost $16, except for the ones that cost $19, and that doesn’t fit into my budget. I make pasta at home when I am feeling cheap. I might choose to spend that much on a great dish, but I’d also be paying for the ambiance, which wasn’t happening in this airport-hangarlike space.
Then I see one saying “Pizza,” but you need to sit down and get a whole pie. I was starting to think that Eataly might be a more fun experience to have with someone else, anyhow. Couldn’t I just grab something to eat and run?
I see some pieces of foccacia at one stand. I throw myself at the mercy of the guy working there, all the while eyeing a beguiling onion slice. It’s winking at me. Maybe it’s just glistening at me. It looks great, but I’m still aiming slightly higher than bread and onions and what might be some really exquisite olive oil. Wait, do I want it?
“This is very confusing, isn’t it?” I say to the man behind the counter.
He nods. “I’m afraid of getting mowed down, or lost,” he says. “I just stay behind my counter,” he adds.
I ask if there is to-go food other than his slices and he suggested a sandwich place where you can get a cold panino, like in the Milan airport, or a place called the “Rotisserie” where you can get a “huge, meat filled” sandwich. Sounds very Flintstoney.
I cast a last questioning glance at the slice and go off to look for the disappointing sounding airport kiosk. I’m vaguely hoping for some mortadella, the Play-Doh of the meat world. It is soft and of uncertain provenance and riddled with pistachios. Still, it is my friend and I love it. But first, I come upon the rotisserie where are were selling porchetta sandwiches, and “porcini-rubbed prime rib.” Both cost upwards of $13.
Which is better? Porchetta is marinated pork roast with rosemary. Roman, I think.
While prime rib reminds me of a station at a wedding where there are little rolls and a guy dressed in precarious whites ready to slice you a few bloody pieces with visible fat. It doesn’t ever look great, but it’s festive, for sure. My other prime rib association is with a barbecue place in Texas where, when you enter, you’re afraid of getting sucked into a huge fire pit roaring out of the floor. And you tell them your meat order whilst living in fear.
If it’s a normal day, you can have some pork chop. If it’s a special day, you can get smoked prime rib, and eat it at a table with a knife chained to it, and a little container of salt and pepper mixed together so that it’s reminiscent of ash. There are none of the normal bbq accoutrements, like beans and sauce and potato salad, but you can buy yourself a hunk of avocado or onion or cheese if you want. Whether you do or you don’t, you take a bite and and then your eyes roll back in your head. Those people have a way with fire and with meat. It used to be called Kreuz Market and you have to drive way out of town to get there. I think it’s called something else though now. I wonder if it’s still as wonderful.
Reverie complete, I note that the prime rib sandwich is more expensive. It costs $14.80 as opposed to $13, I think. Neither is even slightly in the budget, but I decide that the prime rib might be $1.80 better, and I order it.
The counter guy takes a very large piece of baguette out and slices a hunk of it down the side. He removes prime rib from the oven and starts slicing meat into the sandwich. Then he drizzles some olive oil on, and salt and pepper. He wraps it up and hands it to me with some instructions as to where to bite first to avoid a disaster wherein the sandwhich would unravel immediately.
He’s done with his part, and I appreciate the instructions, but I admit that I’m disappointed. It’s just so simple looking. Barbaric, almost. Dare I say boring? Where will the contrasts be? I love maximalist sandwiches. The more vinegar and hot peppers and avocado and mayonnaise and onion slices and freshly ground black pepper and Swiss cheese and whatever else is on hand, the better. So where will this leave me?
I go outside to eat in a little park that has been oddly installed into the traffic pattern where 23rd meets Broadway and 5th. I grab a table and begin to follow the instructions of the sandwich maker.
One bite, and my life changes. I am not disappointed. Rather, I am like a person in a cartoon who is flattened backwards onto the pavement by some extreme force — be it wind, or someone’s bad breath, or being rolled over by a truck.
But this time, I am flattened by a simple and yet intense pleasure, one that people have been enjoying forever: meat / fat / bread / salt. This is indeed a Flintstoney pleasure. I had forgotten. I had forgotten about the simple and transformative pleasures of great roast beef. When you start with something Platonically perfect, like roast beef and bread and salt, the trimmings, or vinegar, or sauces, could only serve to dilute the experience.
And then I boing back up, fluffed and reanimated, ready to reconsider my sandwich at my tiny metal table in the middle of the traffic. This is good. It’s crazy how good it is.
How do I save this experience? What do I do? I took a picture with my iPhone. Then I dialed my husband at work. “I’m eating one of the best sandwiches I’ve ever had!,” I say, breathless with the need to share. Not share my sandwich, but share my enthusiasm, and my sudden and complete understanding of the way roast beef works.
He is a reporter and therefore tries to keep a cool head, even in the most dramatic situations.
“Good for you,” he says. “Where’d you get it?” His tone is encouraging, and he sounds happy for me, but I sense, as I often do when I call, that he is trying to make sure that the city that we live in gets its information in a timely manner. Ie, he might like to be working. And while information that I convey occasionally shows up in the news, I could tell that he wasn’t taking the sandwich quite as seriously as he might have.
But, Eataly! It’s trending! I think. Then, with a glower, Don’t keep the people from knowing about your wife’s lunch, just because it’s your wife’s lunch.
But what I say is, “I’ll tell you about it later!” and let him get off the phone.
I look at the sandwich again. It’s very, very large. I still want someone else to share in this feeling of delight with me, even if that means sharing the sandwich. Maybe I can bring some back to my friend Jennifer, at the office. She’s technically my boss, and she loves a good sandwich as much as I do. She’d really like this sandwich. Except that whoops, while I’ve been imagining myself doing good deeds, I’ve actually started on the second half. Jennifer’s half.
“Here,” I imagine myself saying. “Here is a ragged bite of a sort of cold and yet very expensive sandwich.” Prime rib isn’t really known for the way that it looks. It would probably oxidize and look scary. I’d better just finish this one off myself.
But you? You should get a sandwich like this of your own.
One Month Later
Yesterday I found myself all weepy and about to wallop my hairdresser.
Bad haircut?
No: it was after enduring an imaginary conversation with her. I hadn’t even arrived at my appointment yet; I hadn’t even left the house.
I was at home and putting on my coat when I started to imagine imagine her making comments about how long it had been since I’d made it in to get any hair maintenance done. She does this, and I know this about her, and I do not like this about her, though I do like certain things.
I have not been going every month, and it’s true, there was visual evidence of that. She’s friendly enough but even moreso than beauty, her business is making money and trying to get people to spend more. If she brought it up, what would I say? I have had a lot going on. But if she is going to make me uncomfortable, perhaps I should say the thing that would make her uncomfortable.
I felt defensive and horrible. Before I even left the house I was in tears.
I admit, it was totally weird.
I started to wrack my brain for what and why would have provoked this reaction. Seemed like hormones, but that wasn’t it.
Ah. I realized. I was right at the one month anniversary of Beth’s death. I always thought of us as exactly 5 years apart, though now I realize that she was five years and six weeks older than me. And so she was 44 and I was 38 when she died, because she had just turned 44 and I hadn’t had a chance to turn 39 yet.
I arrived at the salon. Late. Even more defensive than I’d imagined. But it was fine. No comments. Good haircut.
I find that I am walking around normal a lot of the time, and then at others, poised to deck the one person who [does my hair right, or fill in the blank].
Trying to be nice to myself, though. And to others: no punches were thrown.
Church Avenue Chomp 