Stir (17 page)

Sweet potatoes are lower in starch than the “regular” potatoes typically used to make latkes. That means a wetter batter. To get a crisp edge on these, you'll want to squeeze the excess liquid from the batter as you form the latkes, so that they're as dry as possible when they hit the hot oil. I get the best results frying latkes in a cast-iron pan, but a stainless steel pan will also do the trick.

For our Chanukah party each year, Eli makes ten times this recipe, and relies on my grandmother Louise's freezing and reheating technique, which turns latkes into a terrific make-ahead food: Instead of draining the finished latkes on a paper towel immediately after cooking, allow them to cool on a baking sheet lined with foil. Then freeze the latkes in gallon-sized Ziploc bags. They will keep in the freezer for up to one month. When you're ready to serve the latkes, heat them for 15 minutes in a 400-degree oven. The excess oil will spill out of the latkes onto the pan, and they will refry a little.
Then
you can place them on paper towels to drain any excess oil before serving. Your latkes will be as crisp as they were when they first came out of the pan.

This recipe is adapted from Joan Nathan's
Jewish Cooking in America
.

¼ cup (32 grams) all-purpose flour

¼ cup (32 grams) cornstarch

2 teaspoons granulated sugar

1 teaspoon brown sugar

1 teaspoon baking powder

¼ teaspoon cayenne pepper

2 teaspoons curry powder

1 teaspoon cumin

2 teaspoons fine sea salt

Freshly ground black pepper

2 large eggs, lightly beaten

1 pound sweet potatoes (about 2 potatoes)

Peanut oil, for frying (canola oil works too; if that's what you have on hand)

Sour cream and apple sauce for serving, if you'd like

In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, cornstarch, sugars, baking powder, cayenne pepper, curry powder, cumin, salt, and a few grinds of pepper. Add the lightly beaten eggs and stir to form a thick batter.

Fit a food processor with the grating disk. Peel the potatoes, and quarter each one lengthwise. Then cut each quarter in half lengthwise, so that you end up with 8 long, fingerlike pieces. This slender shape will produce the most even shreds. Vertically feed the sweet potato fingers through the grater, and stir the resulting shreds into the batter. If you don't have a food processor, use a box grater to coarsely grate the potatoes by hand.

Pour a ½-inch layer of peanut oil into a 10- or 12-inch pan—don't skimp!—and place over medium-high heat for about 3 minutes, until a test fleck of batter sizzles upon contact.

Use your hands to squeeze out the liquid from about ¼ cup of batter, form the batter into a ball, and drop into the hot oil. Repeat, spacing the latkes an inch or so apart. You don't want to crowd them. Flatten each latke a bit with a spatula, and cook for a couple of minutes on each side, until crisp and brown. Place the finished latkes on a paper-towel-lined baking sheet to cool and drain. (Unless you're freezing them to eat at a later date. See my note above.)

Taste, and season with additional salt and black pepper if necessary. We serve these with sour cream and homemade cranberry applesauce.

Makes about 15 latkes.

I
've never been very good at having nothing to do. I like deadlines and action items, making lists and crossing things off. Without a project, I get itchy. (Those closest to me might use a slightly different word.) Take the end of every graduate school semester. Relief sticks around for about a day after the final paper is complete, only to be replaced by the feeling that something is off, but I can't put my finger on what it is. Perhaps I'm coming down with something? Or there's something important I'm supposed to be doing? If only I could remember what. I typically go around like this for a few days, miserable, clueless as to
why
I'm miserable, until Eli—gently, carefully, wearily, I'm sure—spells it out precisely. “Babe,” he says, “you need a project.”

By the end of December, more than four months after the aneurysm had ruptured, that was truer than ever. I needed a project. Returning to my graduate work was the most obvious contender. My comprehensive exams had been postponed, but they'd come around eventually. I decided to try to study.

When I told my family about my plans to get back to it despite my medical leave, they said I should take things slowly. Maybe it's better to wait, they said, but I didn't want to. It was about more than having a project this time. The only way back to myself, I figured, was to pick up where I had left off as soon as I possibly could. So I reached for the book on imperial Russian history that I had been reading before the rupture, and opened to the chapter I had marked months earlier with a purple sticky tab.

I don't know what I expected. I guess I imagined myself getting swept up in the social policies of Tsar Nicholas I, relishing the stories of Jewish writers and the work they produced at the turn of the century. That's how it had always been for me when I would read this stuff. Now I felt locked out. I could read the words, but they wouldn't stick. I'd make it to the bottom of a paragraph, only to climb back up to the top and start again. Then I'd fall asleep. Was this the “lack of concentration” that my doctors had warned might hang around for the next six months? Had my brain been damaged after all? Was I physically still so far from good health that the work was truly too hard?

For the first time in my life, there was not a single thing that I was “supposed” to be doing. There were no paper deadlines or readings to finish for class. There were zero expectations. All I had to do was keep breathing, and people practically cheered. I'm sure there's something very Zen that one could say about this, about slowing down, stepping back, “just being.” But doing things is important. Creating things matters. It's not that we live, but how, that makes us who we are.

 • • • 

“Why don't you start a food blog?”

My friend Megan has a way of tossing off questions like this with the utmost nonchalance, questions that turn out to be big ones.

“A what?”

“A food blog,” she repeated.

This was January 2009. Food blogs had been a thing for half a decade, but I had no idea. I'd heard of blogs, of course, and vaguely knew what they were, but I don't think I'd ever even uttered the word “blog” out loud.

Megan is my best friend from college. She started off as Eli's, then, lucky for me, he shared. I actually didn't know her well at all when we were in school. Megan was Eli's friend, the beautiful one with the bright eyes and pixie cut who had danced professionally in New York before starting her freshman year. I'd met her a few times at Eli's place, but it wasn't until senior year that Megan and I took the same seminar on epic literature, were equally slayed by Derek Walcott's
Omeros
, and became friends ourselves.

Every week, Megan sat at the end of the long seminar table directly opposite our professor. She took notes with a mechanical pencil on plain white printer paper that she'd slip into a manila folder at the end of class. When she got especially worked up about a line in the text (which was often), she'd rake her fingers through her short hair and grab the top of her head so that her elbow pointed straight out into the room. Then she'd furrow her brow so deeply that her eyes would nearly cross and say something freaking brilliant.

I remember the first time I got the impression that we were maybe starting to be friends. We were on the bus, on our way with some classmates to our professor's house for an end-of-semester dinner, when she said something about my commenting style in class, about how the thoughts “bubbled out” of me. She said it in a manner so loving, even then, as though she got a kick out of me and just plain appreciated the way I was.
Oh! She likes me back!
I remember thinking.
This awesome person likes me back!

Every year, Megan came to visit us wherever we were. To Seattle, where we brought her down to the market for grilled cheese by the water; to Cambridge, where she helped us eat our way through my first buttermilk-biscuit-baking bender; and San Francisco, where I supremed grapefruit after grapefruit for us to eat with avocado and bitter greens. She was there when I rounded the corner onto the West Side Highway in New York for the final stretch of my half marathon. She rode her bike alongside me, waving and cheering as I ran.

Now here she was again, with me and my helmet, sitting on the floor by the sofa, telling me to start a food blog. I'd been saying how I missed my studies, but couldn't seem to get back in, how in any case, I missed my everyday even more, especially in the kitchen. Sweeping the excess flour from the top of a measuring cup, unlooping a saucepan from the pot rack above my head, bringing a knife down with enough force to chop an onion in two. I missed waking up early, comfortable in my bed and in my body, contemplating the leftovers in my fridge and a second life for them beneath fried eggs; I missed braiding challah dough on Friday afternoons, carrying a heavy stack of dishes and a fistful of silverware to the table, standing around in the kitchen with Eli at the end of the night scraping plates, rinsing glasses, wiping down counters.

Megan had put it all together. It was important, she said, to spend those days doing something I loved. If I wanted to be in the kitchen, that's where I should be. If my everyday was what I needed to find, I should go and get it. A blog would be a place where I could gather the bits of normal life that were slowly sprouting up again and make something of them, a place where I could show up and do something. “And it would be fun,” she said.

So I typed “food blog” into Google, blinked at the two million hits that popped up on my screen, and started clicking around. Recipes, photographs, stories. One jewel box after another. The whole thing was a revelation: people sharing food and stories
on the Internet
, like one sprawling dinner party, tables and chairs for miles. The next day, I typed some words into an empty white text box, hit publish, and marched into the living room feeling as though I had just invented the Internet. Eli gave me a quizzical look.

“I started a blog,” I said. I called it Sweet Amandine after my favorite almond cake and kicked things off with a post in celebration of toast, mostly because I could make it myself. It had just started tasting good again. I love toast. But a food blog needs more than toast to feed it. I would have to get cooking. That was the whole point, of course. I longed to be back in the kitchen. I also feared it.

I had felt something similar when I was sixteen, just learning to drive. Everyone I knew in high school couldn't wait to get their license. Not me. The thought of sitting behind the wheel of a three-thousand-pound vehicle racing along at thirty-five, fifty-five, sixty-five miles per hour was terrifying. I'd have nightmares of driving off the road and wake up incredulous that humans had ever deemed driving safe at all, that there were no rails or grooves in the road to keep people from skidding off, and
la la la
, everyone was just okay with this?

The kitchen seemed equally treacherous now. Fire! Knives! Hot oil! Blades and mixers that spin! I felt a rush of adrenaline every time I stood beneath the pot rack, wondering if my helmet would protect me should the whole apparatus come crashing down. To calm myself, I'd think of Eli hanging from the stud in the ceiling a few years earlier and remind myself to trust him, that the pot rack was secure.

This matter of trust was really at the heart of it—trust in myself, most of all. I didn't know how to. My newly broken eye kept throwing me off. I was never quite sure where my body ended and the rest of the world began. I'd lean in over the stovetop to lift the teakettle off the flame and clunk my helmet on the hood. My impaired depth perception had me catching only air when I'd grab for a knife in the block and dropping eggs from their shells onto the counter just to the left of the bowl. This was the kitchen where everything had once felt automatic. That I now had to think, slow down, take extra care made me feel clumsy and frail.

The kitchen became my arena for testing myself physically. I'd page through my cookbooks and stack of rumpled recipes in search of ones that felt safe. My favorite buttermilk biscuits, for example. I misjudged the depth of the bowl as I sank the whisk into the dry ingredients and sent some of the mixture flying. I scraped it back into the bowl. My wrists ached from rubbing cold butter into flour with my fingertips, but wait, hadn't they always? The familiar discomfort brought me back to myself.

I went along that way, gauging the strength of my body with each recipe, reorienting myself in space at every spill and burned fingertip, as my brain remapped itself and my depth perception improved. Meanwhile, I figured out how to compensate, holding the rim of the mixing bowl with one hand and tapping it with the other to determine the bowl's position before I poured. I curled my fingers as far away from the blade as possible as I chopped potatoes for Sunday breakfast. I left the skins on the apples for a
tarte aux pommes
and took my time slicing them into thin half-moons.

When the making and the eating were done, I'd sit down and write. Often, after a few minutes of staring at the screen, my eyes would begin to ache and my neck would tighten with nausea. I'd wish I could unscrew my head, so heavy and big, and just lay it down beside me for a while. Every few sentences or so, I would take a break. Sometimes, I would move to the sofa and close my eyes, string together the words for the next line in my mind, then make my way back to my desk and write some more. It might sound painfully slow, this limping, bit-by-bit way of writing, but as phrases became sentences became paragraphs, I felt like I was flying.

The tendons in my shoulders and groin ached, maybe because of the medication, maybe because of so much time in bed, maybe because of any number of things that no one bothers to figure out when you've been so sick, when there was pain that could actually kill you and that pain has been resolved. I would wake up in the middle of the night too uncomfortable to sleep, feel my mind speeding off into the darkness, fear closing in, and I'd know what to do. I'd think about squash. About cornmeal cherry scones. I'd think about how to package up a head of cabbage or a can of sardines on the page, how to get it all down in words.

It seemed whenever I'd enter the kitchen, I'd discover a story, one that would nudge me over to something more real and more permanent about my life than illness. They were the kinds of anecdotes and reflections about food that I had been shooting off to my family and friends in letters for years, the stuff of dinner table conversations and postdinner phone calls with Amy about soups and salads and olive oil cakes gone wonderfully right and horribly wrong. Only now, it no longer felt like small talk.

The stories I remembered, the stories I made, let me know there was a life beyond the narrow world of recovery. At their heart were the protective powers of kneading, salting, sifting, and stirring, because you can't be dead and do these things. There are no available statistics on how many people die each year while baking an apple pie, and I'd like to believe that it's because you can't. When you're cooking, you're alive. You've got no choice. To fry an egg is to operate with the perfect faith that you will sit down and eat it. To season it with salt and pepper is a statement that you will do so with pleasure, according to your taste. When you're sick and broken and sad and afraid, it feels good to think of a time when you weren't. It feels good to remember a life when you were hungry, when things tasted good, and to try, in some small way, in one small room of your home, to reenact it.

I baked lemon bars, the curd bringing to mind my first encounter with lemon meringue pie, tall and regal like my grandmother Marion who made it. I remembered the way I'd expected my spoon to sweep through the frothy meringue and how it bounced off instead, how I lifted the meringue from my slice like a lid and went after the lemon curd alone. I stirred pots of polenta, baked coffee cake, cookies, and tarts. I wrote about home, good neighbors, and friends. Unpacking groceries into the pantry, setting a pot of water to boil and a colander in the sink, toasting a lacy scatter of sesame seeds—this was my life creeping back in. Writing about these everyday things was my way of registering them, really seeing them, and believing in them once again. My way of saying, “I'd like to talk about something else now.” I didn't mention my illness on the blog at all.

Being sick is like walking around with a microscope strapped to your face at all times with your own body squished beneath the slide. You don't look away, at first because you can't—you're too sick—and then because you're afraid that if you do, you might miss a symptom or a sign and die. That cooking shifted my attention away from myself was a tremendous relief. In the kitchen, I got to care again about the small stuff that's not supposed to get to you, but does when you're normal and well. Now, when the biscuits burned, it was my privilege to care. The twinge of annoyance as I whisked them from the oven was proof I was getting better.