Bon Appetempt: A Coming-of-Age Story (with Recipes!) (13 page)

But then I suppose this is part of the reason why she loves Jinx so much, why he gets her full supply of smiles and hugs, because Jinx will never say that. If anything, he’ll just lie back submissively and expose his belly for her to give a good scratch.

One month later, I turn twenty-six on a weekday in Wilmington without any major pomp or circumstance. When I get home from school, I head upstairs to my room to open a package from Matt. He’s on a Jonathan Lethem kick and has sent me a couple of his books. My mom and Bruce have sent me a check for $250, and last but not least, there’s a box from Grandma. I open it and find a standard Grandma-style birthday card—a seventies-era image of birds sitting on branches. On the inside is a stock birthday-card greeting underneath which she’s handwritten
Love, Gram
. I dig through the newspaper and find, packed between layers of bundled-up plastic grocery bags, a jar of mayonnaise, about three-quarters full.

I would have been more surprised, but it’s not just any jar
of mayonnaise. It’s an organic brand, and I quickly recognize it as the exact jar Matt and I had brought to the beach house now over a month ago. We must’ve left it there. And Grandma, being Grandma, must have collected it, brought it back to Pittsburgh, packed it up and sent it via USPS (
non
-priority) back to me, its rightful owner, four weeks later.

Grandma has sent me lots of strange things in the mail over the years—an eye shadow kit with fifty different shades to choose from, bundles of Easter seals, and cat-themed calendar tea towels from the 1990s—but this mayonnaise certainly takes the cake.

Without giving it a second’s thought, I put it back in the box, walk downstairs, and throw it into the trash.

Though I won’t ever eat Grandma’s cooking as blindly or as willingly as I once did as a child, in a few years’ time, our relationship will slowly return to normal. I’ll stop refusing her dishes out of spite. I’ll eventually even make some of her famous lady lock cookies alongside her in her own mess of a kitchen. I guess, somewhere along the line, I finally forgive her, and though she never tells me as much, I assume she forgives me too.

I also like to assume that the irony of that afternoon at the beach house wasn’t wholly lost on her either; that when I wouldn’t eat any of her chicken soup, Matt—whom she had so summarily rejected, whom she had so wrongly lumped together with my dad as a bad match for her offspring—had smilingly obliged her, taking a bowl alongside his sandwich and even giving her a definitive “Mmm. That’s good soup!”

T
hough I’m probably close to the median age of students in my program, with my engagement ring on my finger and Matt living 2,500 miles away, I feel simultaneously older and younger. I’m both the mom of the group who goes home early to call Matt and watch
Six Feet Under
as well as the naïve eighteen-year-old who has arrived at her freshman year of college deeply committed to her high school boyfriend.

Perhaps this is why I’m now feeling very ready to set a date for the wedding—to make it permanent. Neither Los Angeles nor Pittsburgh felt like the right setting for the event. So in my spare time, I take solo visits to potential venues in North Carolina. One of these trips takes me to Bald Head Island, an island at the state’s southernmost tip, reachable only by ferry and where the main form of transportation is golf cart. Not wanting to spend the money on a golf cart rental, though, I walk around on foot. I see Old Baldy, the oldest lighthouse in the state. I see a patch of greenery alongside the marsh just large enough to accommodate eighty to one hundred people. I see a red fox stop in the middle of one of the roads and stare at me. But perhaps what is most impressive is the oyster po’ boy sandwich I eat at the little restaurant at the harbor. It’s fried
but not greasy, and the salty brininess of the oysters works perfectly with the mildly spicy, pale pink rémoulade sauce. This is more like the Wilmington I’d envisioned. This is where Dawson and Joey must’ve been hanging out.

I didn’t realize the transformation as it was happening, but as it turns out, I have become a complete and total food snob.

Our little West Hollywood apartment where Matt still resides is situated within two miles of two different Whole Foods. It’s also within walking distance of a Thai restaurant, a Chinese restaurant, and Urth Caffé, which serves delicious and all organic sandwiches, soups, and my personal favorite, a nori plum rice wrap. If we aren’t in the mood for any of those, we could always pick up cheap tacos and burritos at nearby Benito’s. And, of course, Joan’s on Third, whose short rib sandwich recently graced the cover of
Bon Appétit
magazine, is a five-minute drive away. Heck, we even have a Persian restaurant on speed dial that will deliver hot lamb
kofta
and
mujadara
to our doorstep!

In Wilmington, there is no Whole Foods—not even a Trader Joe’s. Instead, I split my shopping between a small co-op grocery store a few miles away and a giant Harris Teeter. And as for my takeout options? There’s a Panera and a Chinese restaurant that looks so sad I don’t even go inside. There’s also a burrito place called Flaming Amy’s that everyone raves about. Though when I try it, it only makes me think I should ask Benito’s about franchising opportunities.

My two roommates are both younger than me. The older of the two, the daughter of the poetry professor, is a graphic designer and isn’t around much. The other, Erica, just graduated
from college in May. She’s in my program, though we don’t have any classes together. She’s as sweet as she is tan, which is
very
. She has dyed-blonde hair and wears heavy black eyeliner and mascara. Her groceries include Diet Coke, bags of frozen, precooked Tyson chicken, and I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter spray. In the mornings, I pour my bowl of organic cereal and try to hide my horror as she spritzes her white toast.

By the end of September, I realize that I’m not only a food snob, but I’m a hungry and helpless one at that. Without the occasional turkey BLT from Joan’s or Matt’s weekly giant-size bowl of pasta, the vast majority of my diet is comprised of things you might find in a United Airlines snack box: hummus, pita chips, peanut butter, carrots, cheese, and a few squares of chocolate. Sure, I’ll occasionally find a ripe avocado and mash it up on toast or heat up an Amy’s Organic pizza, but neither of these are exactly the kind of meals one can call
rib-sticking
.

Then, one day in early October, in the waiting room of the auto shop where I’ve taken my car to get an oil change, I pick up an issue of
Real Simple
and begin flipping through it. A full-page photo of a bowl of rigatoni pasta with broccoli, Brie, and pine nuts stops me in my tracks. The Brie is melting and seemingly covers every ridge of the rigatoni and broccoli florets. The pine nuts are glistening and toasted. And when I read the recipe, I’m surprised to find that those are the
only
ingredients: Brie, pasta, broccoli, and pine nuts. As soon as my car is ready, I take myself to the nearest Teeter.

Sure, I’ve baked cookies here and there, but this is my first time working from a recipe to make something savory, and I treat every direction extremely seriously, e.g., the recipe calls for pine nuts and I assume the recipe is no good without them.
So, despite my meager budget, I spend the $7.99—what seems to me an astronomical price—for a small bag of the teardrop-shaped nuts and grab the rest of the ingredients.

Upon closer inspection, I see that the list of ingredients calls for broccoli that’s already been steamed and pine nuts that have already been toasted. Never having done either of these things, I have to Google how to steam broccoli (sans steamer) and how to toast pine nuts. I leave nothing to multitasking, waiting until my pot-simmered broccoli is tender before moving on to toasting the pine nuts in a dry skillet over medium flame.

The recipe tells me to chop the Brie “with rind” into one-inch pieces. Up until this moment, I’ve been one of those people who eats
around
the rind. I consider removing it, but again, I decide I must listen to the recipe
exactly
. Who knows what’s liable to happen if I don’t?

I cook and drain the pasta according to its packaging, put it back in the hot pot, and then add my chopped Brie, steamed broccoli, toasted nuts, salt, and pepper. While I stir the pasta and watch the Brie melt almost magically into some kind of one-ingredient pasta sauce, though I don’t yet realize that this meal will mark the beginning of my love affair with cooking, that I will make this dish at least a dozen more times before I graduate (quickly coming to the conclusion that it doesn’t need the pricey pine nuts), some part of me at least
does
realize that this is exactly what I need.

Because at the moment, my life is unsettled enough. I’m living in a ten-by-ten-foot room with a mattress, a bookshelf, and a pegboard with Martha Stewart’s “Wedding To-Do Checklist” pinned on it. But there is nothing unsettling about a steaming hot plate of pasta made by yourself for yourself.

Because while Matt and I choose to live on opposite coasts in order to continue to throw ourselves at potential careers as artists against separate tides of resistance, I can at least cook myself a proper dinner. I can at least do myself the favor of boiling fat rigatoni noodles until al dente and then watching as the heat from these drained noodles melts the Brie, coating everything it touches.