Bon Appetempt: A Coming-of-Age Story (with Recipes!) (19 page)

A
s a beginner cook whose chosen educational method involves following somewhat advanced recipes precisely and meticulously, the first thing I’m struck by is how the majority of cookbook and magazine recipes gloss over many of the necessary steps or leave them out altogether. This is most egregious in the listing of the ingredients, e.g., “Two medium leeks (white and pale green parts only), halved lengthwise, then cut crosswise into
⅓
-inch pieces,” so that when you come to the section of the recipe that calls for leeks, it’s understood that you have already washed and chopped them. It’s therefore also understood that you know what a leek is and that you know how to properly wash one.

Matt’s twenty-eighth birthday falls a week after the epic IKEA fight that almost did us both in. I tell him I’m going to make him one of his favorite dishes, pasta carbonara. The recipe from
Bon Appétit
calls for two leeks, ingredients I felt fine about when I wrote them down on the back of an old envelope, but now that I’m standing in the produce department holding up a leek, which is much larger than I anticipated—
more like a branch than any onion I’ve ever seen—I suddenly feel much less confident. “This is a leek, right?” I ask a nearby employee. He confirms my suspicion. I grab two and move on. Other ingredients that give me pause? The parsley. Curly or flat? I choose flat, remembering a recent episode of
Barefoot Contessa
in which Ina used some in her linguine with shrimp scampi. Last, I wonder why cream isn’t on my list. Isn’t pasta carbonara a notoriously rich, creamy pasta? But then again, I’ve never made pasta carbonara, so what do I know?

I arrive home and get to work, addressing the leeks before anything else. The Internet tells me to slice off and discard the root end as well as the dark-green tops. I’m then supposed to halve the remaining leek parts lengthwise, slice these halves crosswise, and place them into a bowl of cool water in order to remove the dirt. After five minutes, I’m amazed to find a layer of grit at the bottom of the bowl. Dealing with the parsley is much more tedious. I don’t yet know that I love parsley, that you can eat the stems, and that as a parsley lover, I can certainly use more than the one tablespoon the recipe calls for. Instead, I spend more time than I’d like pulling the leaves off the stems, one by one, washing them, patting them dry, finely chopping them, and measuring one measly tablespoon.

Next up is another first for me: cooking bacon. Despite my using a pan that is so small that bacon fat covers much of the surface of the stovetop, this goes surprisingly well. The recipe tells me to pour off all but two tablespoons of the fat from the skillet. Novice that I am, instead of saving this precious animal fat for later uses, I pour it right down the drain in a move
that I now know is referred to as a big culinary and plumbing
no-no
.

I sauté my leeks in the bacon fat, cook the pasta in a pot of boiling water, and whisk my two eggs with the Parmesan and some of the pasta water. Adding the pasta water to the eggs and Parm feels strange, but again, I trust that the staff of
Bon Appétit
knows more than I do.

The next step is the real head-scratcher. I’m supposed to add the drained pasta to the leeks in the skillet, remove the skillet from the heat, and then add the eggs-Parm-water mixture. Of course I haven’t timed the cooking of the pasta properly, so my leeks have already been cooling for a while now. Second, who wants a bunch of raw eggs in their pasta? And third, I’m intimidated by the directions, which specify not to overcook and curdle the eggs or undercook them and end up with runny sauce.

Even though it’s his birthday meal, I call in Matt to get some advice from a third party. His face falls. “Wait. Where’s the cream?”

“There is no cream.”

His eyes widen, like a cartoon character’s. “I don’t think I want my birthday dinner.”

“OK, you know what? You’re not helping.”

On my own again, I decide to turn the heat back on the leeks and sauté them for another minute along with the pasta. Then, moving as quickly as possible, I turn off the heat and pour the egg-Parm-water mixture on top, stirring almost frantically for exactly two minutes, at which point I have to admit that it does
look
creamy.

I stir in the bacon and parsley, divide it between two plates, and come out of the kitchen smiling, ready to sell my dish.

“Don’t worry,” I say, “the eggs
totally
cooked just by coming in contact with the hot pasta and leeks.”

But it’s too late. He’s seen too much. He eats half his plate skeptically before giving up altogether. “I can’t do this,” he says, and gets up to make himself a frozen pizza. “The uncooked eggs are all I can think about.”

Happy birthday!

After our IKEA marital meltdown, life is different. Not only is Matt quite literally hitting the pavement with a stack of résumés in hand—leaving the apartment for long stretches of time every day—he has also signed up for an LSAT prep course. That decision feels sad, like we’re giving up on our artistic dreams, but also strangely empowering. We may be struggling, but it’s no longer as aimless. We have a
plan
now.

As for me? In between writing my thesis novel—which is due in a few months—cooking, and job-searching, I’m spending my time organizing our tiny apartment into some state of viable dwelling.

One of these afternoons, I’m listening to music on my iPod via shuffle mode as I tackle organizing our bedroom/office for the second session (this time with IKEA-sourced file organizers). But soon I find myself distracted by this
mess
of papers under the desk I share with Matt. I had
just
cleared out this area. How could it have become such a nightmare already? But as I begin to go through it, it’s clear what’s happened.

I’d recently asked Matt if he could free up a dresser drawer for me, and while he graciously had, he had simply moved its
contents to the cabinet under our desk, an area I had just emptied the previous week.

As I sort through everything, I discover a kind of time capsule of the various creative projects he’s worked on since we moved to LA four years ago. There’s page after page and notebook after notebook of research on topics from Django Reinhardt, the inspiration for one of the main characters in “A Blueprint for Successful Living,” to Appalachia, the region where a different feature-length script of his takes place, to Stephen Hawking, the inspiration for another project that never really got off the ground, to, of course, big game hunting and mythical creatures, which they had used to write
Safari
. Then of course, there are drafts of all these scripts, some with notes that agents and executives have given them. Intermixed with all of this creative work are old time cards from temp jobs, new-hire orientation packets, paperwork on his stock options from his Internet start-up job, paperwork from filing (and refiling) for unemployment as well as a giant binder from The Change Program—basically a collection of CDs documenting various people’s struggle with panic disorder, which Matt found helpful after that panic attack that sent him to the emergency room.

As I make piles of what I think can be tossed and what I think he’ll want to hold on to, the song “Festival” by Sigur Rós comes on. It’s a beautiful song on its own, but when I hear it, I’m reminded of the film
127 Hours
, in which it’s heavily featured. If you haven’t seen it, the movie is based on the true story of a young mountain climber who gets his arm trapped by a giant boulder while exploring an isolated desert canyon in Utah. He tries everything to free himself, but eventually (specifically,
127 hours later) he realizes that the only way he can do so is by cutting off his own arm.

The scene is gruesome and hard to watch, but at the same time, it’s ultimately uplifting because he has finally realized, after five days, that it’s not the boulder that’s keeping him there, it’s
his arm
that’s keeping him there.

It’s a nine-minute song, and as it builds and builds, I begin moving more things into the to-be-tossed pile, including a couple of scripts, which I notice have drafts of short stories and essays I’ve written on the other side. And suddenly, instead of feeling sad, I feel gratified to have a physical record of all of this
work
, to see it in this giant stack instead of as myriad separate digital files on a computer screen. But mostly it feels good to let go of it, to move on.

I’ve always lamented the fact that there is no map for how to make a living as an artist. We can major in Creative Writing or Filmmaking in college and then again in graduate school, but of course that doesn’t guarantee we’ll be able to make a living (or even pay back our student loans).

This is one of the reasons why I think I was initially attracted to cooking; a recipe is a kind of map.

But here’s the thing: Even with a detailed map, it can be hard to pinpoint your exact location once you’ve started your journey, once you’re on the trail and no longer just planning your route from the comfort of your own home.

When you start to cook after a lifetime of not cooking, you suddenly discover exactly what goes into a dish you’ve been eating at restaurants for years. And with this discovery, you can appreciate the
work
involved.

You discover that pasta carbonara doesn’t have cream in it.

You discover that while there may not be a map for how to make a living as an artist, there is a map for how not to: by
not
writing, by
not
creating, and
not
trying. This stack of papers, I realize, isn’t a testament to failure, but a testament to effort, to not giving up, to the work itself.

When Matt comes home that afternoon after a day of handing out his résumé, he collapses on the couch, admitting that he applied for a job at the Swatch store at the Beverly Center, the nearby mall that I find so palpably depressing, I avoid at all costs despite my love of shopping.

Knowing that he’ll never even notice, I don’t tell him about my momentous cabinet cleaning. Instead, I curl up on the couch with him and ask him what he wants for dinner.

This world recognizes results: clear success and epic failures. We’re drawn to stories of those who made it as well as those who had it and lost it. But for the first time, I float the camera up to get a bird’s-eye view of Matt’s and my coordinates. And for the first time, I recognize the effort in our journey. And though we may be far from our desired destination, at least we’re
on
the map. At least we’re still trying.