Famous Beltway Chicken Salad: The Too Hot to Cook Series
For one hot, fragrant, lonely summer, I lived in the suburbs of DC. I was twenty and trying to figure out what would happen after college.
I dated a dark-eyed boy from Beirut who had shrapnel lodged in his calf, a fact which I managed imbue with both cultural gravity and romance for about a week, until some controlling, misogynstic commentary ruined it.
I worked for Hillary Clinton. We met only once, but it was over a piece of lemon cake, which happens to be my favorite sort of cake.
In addition to working on Pennsylvania Avenue, I worked scooping ice cream on Avenue P. I’d come home late, hot and sticky, my tee-shirt reeking of sweet melted cream. It was disgusting.
I also worked at a giant Mexican restaurant. The highlight —lowlight?— was when I had to be brought to the hospital because I’d spilled frijoles a la charra down the collar of my shirt, resulting in second degree burns.
The lesson? In the summer, DC is too hot to cook, or even carry food around.
But unlike New York in the heat, DC smelled good. Perhaps because of the thick quality of the air, rich cooking smells hung, waiting to be enjoyed. Spinach and artichoke dip. Roasting meats. But what I remember most about the food I bought that summer is the chicken salad sandwiches from right outside of the White House.
They cost somewhere in the range of $7 — not cheap for a 1993 intern — and were served on croissants. This is how I have been making chicken salad ever since, and now I’m going to tell you how to do it.
It’s a simple enough idea. Poach white meat chicken until just cooked in water, broth, or stock with peppercorns, onions, and garlic. Cool enough so that you can touch it, and dice or shred. Some people like big chunks of chicken in their salad. I just tear it apart, perhaps to get more surface area for mayonnaise to cleave up to. You could also, of course, use rotisserie chicken.
Mix in mayo. Add white pepper, and add salt. My current favorite is Maldon sea salt. (It’s finely flavored but not too big or too small or even more importantly, rock hard.)
Chop red onion and mix in. Chop a can of water chestnuts and stir in. When the salad is to your taste, add sliced almonds, and a handful of chopped tarragon. Sweetness, bite, and crunch from red onion, fragrance from tarragon, texture from almonds and water chestnuts: it’s a wonderful salad. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.
Running
I’ve written before about yoga and the lovely, mesmerizing happy place it brings me to.
I don’t have the time for yoga at the moment. Nor do I have the cash to flow lovingly from my strong, sweaty, newly well-aligned palm into that of the teacher’s enlightened, lavender smelling palm.
I need something, however. For my figure. For my mood. For myself. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. What’s cheap — no, free — and fast?
I spoiled the riddle by naming the post running, didn’t I?
I’m doing a low-commitment program called Couch to 5K.
Special props to my friend Suzanne, who is my new go-to for information downloads. She told me about the running program, right before she told me about a special kind of lime pie on a stick, covered with chocolate, called a Swingle. So thank you Suzanne! (And, what are you trying to do to me, Suzanne??)
I didn’t get one of the pies yet but I have been running a few times a week. Well, the program dictates that you run a few times, and I think that the definition of “few” is three, right? Whereas the definition of “couple” is two. So let’s say that I’ve been running a couple of times per week.
When I say running, I mean jogging.
And when I say jogging, you start with walking and jogging intervals.
Many people do this with their smartphone, with an app interrupting whatever you are listening to with a tone. However, my smart phone doesn’t have a recent enough operating system to use the app. I’m also nervous at the prospect of being relieved of my smartphone by a ne’er-d0-well, as my mother would put it. Scared of being mugged, is what she means. So instead I’d borrow my husband’s watch and look at it the whole time.
Jogging is pretty easy when you’re distracted looking at a watch and trying to do math. But I soon grew out of the intervals and now I just jog a particular distance, or in the case of this morning, when I went to the gym, I did it for a particular time, which was 30 minutes of uninterrupted jogging. At the gym, I listen to Ted Talks or podcasts from The Moth.
Out in the wild, I focus on nature, or, more likely, real estate.
I’m really enjoying it, and it makes me less mean, and I’m moving in the right direction.
Must go stretch!
Second Child Syndrome
My husband and I are both second children. We secretly think it’s the best.
You don’t get marinated in the same sort of undivided parental attention, but neither are you saddled with the uninterrupted focus and resulting drive that comes with being the first born, either. And apparently you end up thinking that both attention and ambition are negatives.
Wow. I wonder what the baby is thinking right now.
She seems to be dozing cozily wrapped loosely in a soft muslin blanket speckled with polka dots in soothing yet engaging colors, but she is probably being far more productive than I am, growing hair and generating new cells and learning how to suck her fingers and roll over, even while she sleeps.
That baby. She doesn’t need to call the dentist, or try to make sense of the summer calendar, or get her milk production up, or second-guess her behavior in her relationships.
Yet.
But as you can imagine, my second child has been keeping me busy and happy, so busy in fact that I haven’t even tried to blog in two months. The other factor, in addition to the business and general haze of having a new baby, or perhaps relating directly to the diffuse focus on everything else as well as lack of sleep, is that I’ve spilled a vast quantity of pickle juice into the remote crannies of my computer keyboard, or at least those crannies directly related to the function of q,w,e,r,t,y,u; the numbers; the return key.
And it turns out that one really does need the whole suite of letter in order to communicate. I am using my husband’s Dell, which works just about as well as a pickle-crippled Mac.
When I reflect on the accident, I like to think vague, scientific thoughts about the salt in pickling brine and electrical conductivity and isotopes. My thoughts are vague because I am uninformed about the effect of salt on electrical function, or rather, I have been informed but I forgotten all but the fact that there is some connection. Can you make a battery with saltwater? Perhaps. Does chewing on tin foil hurt? It does.
My husband and I often have heated and yet underinformated discussions about science, wherein each of us tries to explain a concept and how it applies to the situation at hand to the other person. At a certain point one of us will pause and look at the other long enough to say “Start the tape,” in acknowledgement of the fact that the mini-lecture would be a perfect addition to our fake science podcast, which we have named “Meredith and Matthew’s Science Crapola.”
The baby is crying. Today’s podcast and the associated blog post was brought to you by the pickling team at Fairway Market, Red Hook, Brooklyn.
Pregnant, are you?
Until recently, I was there myself. And every time I see a woman whose skin is stretching to accomodate the miraculous, alienlike being inside of her, I feel a twinge. A twinge of horror, but of hope for her that I desperately want to convey.
Do you feel awful? I want to ask. If so, it will end soon!
But chances are good that she doesn’t feel awful. Or that she doesn’t need me approaching her in public to suggest to her, in as supportive a way as possible, that she might appear to the naked eye as if she feels awful. Not everyone responds to insults, be they the physical insults of pregnancy or the verbal insults of cheerful well-wishers, in the same way.
But chances are also good that the poor wretch does feel awful. Waiting in line for her — jeesh — decaf latte — she questions whether it was worth it, and whether she is up to the tasks ahead.
Her back is aching, she is resenting her partner, and she may have forgotten for the moment that veins are swelling out of her legs and dare I say butt, but they are: veins are probably popping out of her butt. She is concerned about finances. If she is a professional type, she fears brain atrophy when a newborn comes. If she’s like me, she is worried about sleep deprivation, about labor pains, about not having packed her bag for the hospital, about whether she has the capacity to love a baby like you are SUPPOSED to love a baby.
If it is not her first, she is concerned about integrating a baby into the family. Will she love it as much as the first? How could she? Will she ruin the first one’s life and the pleasant balance of her existing little family?
Will her milk come in, and will there be enough of it? Are hand-me-downs good enough for her kid, if they allow her to spend as much time as possible with the baby rather than going back to work?
When I was pregnant with the baby who is now snoring sweetly next to my bed, sweating in her fuzzy green swaddle, tucked into a fleece-lined carseat like a bright-eyed angel who really could use a neck bath, I worried. And I was flustered beyond compare, physically.
I showed my flustration by spitting into a Gatorade bottle. From mid-July until one week after my daughter was born in January, I spit into a towel or a bottle or a sink. If you are nauseated enough that you cannot swallow your own saliva, then the last thing you need is to be catching whiffs of it wafting up through the wide mouth of a Gatorade bottle. And do other people want to see this drama playing out? No, they do not.
I teach and for months, I had to do crazy things like eat Korean fried chicken during the break. Smelly, delicious, hot and oily Korean fried chicken with kim chee coleslaw. I had to drink hot decaffeinated tea, constantly having the tannins strip my mouth of extra saliva so that I didn’t have to spit it out. For every swallow for every class, I needed to have tea in there with the spit, so as not to gag and vomit. How convenient!
Once, in the pre-Christmas shopping frenzy, I lost my spit bottle in the toy aisle. As Henry wagged his head drinking in visions of the toys he coveted, I wagged my head around seeking out my bottle. Where was my bottle? Would I have to spit on the floor in the toy aisle? I didn’t think I could make it to the bathroom. Or would I swallow it and throw up on the floor?
Pregnancy doesn’t leave a lot of good options, at least not if the pregnancy is anything like pregnancies can be.
It can be hard. Hard. Hard. Though I was blessed—blessed—with reports of a healthy gestating baby, I myself was a mess. I experienced dehydration, heart palpitations, faintness, confusion, anxiety, extreme irritability, vomiting, nausea, and embarrassment. It made me feel unattractive, like a needy whiner, and awfully lonely. Spitting into a bottle? I had never heard of that. Very few people had ever heard of that. It made me question my sanity. Did you see that movie where the super athletic guy trapped down in a cave drinks his own pee and eventually saws off his hand or is it his arm in order to escape?
That was a reasonably accurate cinematic facsimile of my pregnancy.
But I am here to tell you that it ends.
I am also here to tell you that now that my baby is here, I think about her a LOT. Aside from my son, she is mostly what I think about these days. But even this overwhelming love, this big project of totally stewarding a human into life, this 24-hour post and all-consuming relationship of the new mother, requires less effort and brain space than my pregnancy did.
It’s different for everyone, but if it’s bad for you, please know: it will come to a joyous end, and you will tumble deeply into the well of delighted love.
You will fall so far and so fast that you may even think about doing it again.
Happy Birthday to Henry, Happy Time to Us
A little more than a year ago I wrote a post called “On This, Your Last Night of Being One.”
Henry turned three a few weeks ago — well, slightly more than a month ago, but I’ve been occupied with other things — and I want to memorialize this period of time in a similar way.
I cannot believe how much a kid can change in so short of a time. I also cannot believe how much cake he believes he deserves on a daily basis, regardless of birthday status.
Ivy was born in late January, and while we were in the hospital, Henry, who has a great passion for cooking, made a birthday cake for his gummy, squealing, 3 days old sister. Chocolate with white icing and a big R written in dried cranberries on the top. (The “R” stands for Rainbow, which is what we called the baby when she was gestating. It is also admittedly what we often still call her. (What’s the baby’s name? someone will ask Henry. Rainbow and Ivy, Henry will reply.)
He and his grandmother made the 2 layers of the cake into 2 cakes, actually: one had an R and one had an H: Henry’s own birthday would be coming in a few weeks. We sang to a dozing Rainbow and Henry blew out the candle. I figure that any celebration that your new sibling is alive should be seized upon.
Henry, at 3, sweet and stompy and bursting with stories and new vocabulary words and some misused vocabulary words, makes me happier than I would otherwise be every single day.
Lately, he’s faced his new challenge with real grace, knock on wood. Becoming a big brother has been, in a way, a pile of presents and praise and pancake breakfasts during which we all wore crowns we’d made, but in another way, it means that Mommy has other priorities and is generally sleepy and bleary. Recently he climbed on top of me one morning when I was sleeping and said “Mommy, can you have open eyes and be in the kitchen now?” A reasonable request, but no, not really, I’ve been up all night with your sister, who sleeps in a carseat stuck in a cosleeper facing me so she can be sure that I am there, at her service, all night. She is a dear baby but a noisy one, and the sounds of her underdeveloped trachea make her hick and hitch and whistle and wheeze. Her father clamps an extra pillow over his head. I sit bolt upright and worry.
We’ve divided childcare by gender. Matthew has been doing the lion’s share of the care of Henry, and Rainbow is like a new appendage for me. Henry goes to bed early but gets up early, too. Rainbow will sleep in if she goes to bed late, and I put her to bed when we go to bed because it’s what is working for me, and this time around I am less concerned about what baby books say and how we will almost certainly ruin the baby if we don’t do what they tell us.
And should we ruin the baby, I feel more confident that we will be able to fix her.
We realized at a certain point, though, that Henry became hysterical if his father so much as held Ivy, and he was downright rude to me if I tried to come into his room with her.
“DO NOT COME IN HERE WITH MY BABY.”
Or, “DADDY DON’T HOLD MY BABY: GIVE HER TO MOMMY!”
He had written me off as a parent and was depending wholly on his father. It hurt my feelings, and made me cry to have him say “don’t come in here with my baby.” But we fixed it, I think:
You see, we were granted the gift of an amazing paternity leave. My husband was able to take eight weeks off. It’s almost like we are happy go lucky Canadians. Oh no wait, they get two years. Not quite Canadians. But still, for Americans, what a cozy time we’ve had! It’s allowed me to have a lot of alone time with Henry, once we realized that we really needed me to have a lot of alone time with Henry, just like he has been accustomed to. (And frankly, just like I have been accustomed to.) Trips to Fairway, the playground, errands, lunches out after I pick him up from preschool: just like the good old days. We even went to a marionette-style puppet show together, though we left 10 minutes in after an ogre scared him sufficiently.
Today will be my husband’s first day back at work. After school pickup at noon, I’ll be alone with a threenager and an often smiley but just as often colicky seven week old until after bedtime.
Clearly, I can do this. Lots of people do this. But with a young baby who won’t consent to be put down and a three year old who is used to the undivided attention of one (or more) parents, I am gearing up for it to be like when I was a receptionist at a huge architecture firm when I was right out of college, responsible for I think it was 27 phone lines, and sometimes the entire board would be lit up with flashing, every line either on hold or ringing, and I needed to just take a moment and take a breath and take in the lights and laugh about it all, knowing that I would screw some calls up but that I’d just try to keep my cool and apologize when necessary.
I often joke that I was better at being a receptionist than I’ve ever been at any of my other myriad jobs. I act like I’m kidding, but I’m not really kidding. I really was good at that job. I begged to be transferred to something editorial at that company, something with more status, that required more brain power, and that would yield higher pay. But it was hard to get someone to fill the desk well, and they gave me the pay I wanted in order to keep me there.
It will be my strategy to think back on the pressure of the flashing switchboard and laugh when everyone at once is crying. I know I’ll lose my cool sometimes, but I am prepared to apologize when necessary. I can do this.
Church Avenue Chomp 