Off the Menu (6 page)

Oh. My.

Oscar Wilde, my favorite non-food writer, whose famous quote “I can resist everything except temptation” is my slowly scrawling screen saver. And gougères. Wonderful gougères. The first thing I taught myself how to make in my tiny apartment in Paris during my semester abroad, which was the impetus for my returning home, dropping out, and going to culinary school. My first duty during my stage at an auberge outside of Lyon, filling endless baskets with the hot, crispy cheesy puffs for the better part of my first week. Gougères are my own personal soul food. He likes his family, so I assume he will understand and respect my connection to my own crazy brood. And he dreams of a life that isn’t about him, rare for someone his age who is single; most of them are
all
about themselves. Now I am totally sure he is either deeply unattractive or married, or even both.

I pick up the phone and call Bennie, and read her his responses.

“Oh, HONEY! He sounds dreamy. What did you send back?”

“Nothing yet. I mean, do I even want to? Hitting the button the first time was just some strange impulsive move. But this seems, I don’t know, real. What if he’s actually great? Do I have time to meet someone great? Look at my schedule! Look at my life, what there is of it. Is it even fair to him to respond?” I can hear Bennie’s deep, warm laugh.

“Do you hear yourself? You’re already worried about disappointing your
boyfriend
. How about you just reply like a good girl and see what happens before you imagine yourself ruining your relationship.”

I can see her point. “Fine. I’ll respond. But it will all end in tears.” We both laugh.

“Send me a copy of what you send him,” she demands.

“Will do. Talk to you later.”

I stare at the blank EDestiny e-mail screen. I take a deep breath. It has been so long since I bothered to do this that I feel almost like I don’t know how.

It’s like bread baking. Get into the habit and you can do it by feel and sight and smell; no recipe needed. You know by the amount and quality of bubbles if the yeast has proofed enough. The dough will tell your hands when it has had all the flour it needs. You can smell the moment it is perfectly cooked, crust firm and crisp, insides pillowy and cooked through but still elastic. Get out of the habit and your dough doesn’t rise, your crumb is too dense, the middle is gummy and raw-tasting, your crust pallid and the taste insipid. Flirting, communicating, reacting, and generating reactions are all muscles long atrophied in me. My “on the DL” thing with Bruce keeps me perky enough, no pressure, no strings, no complications, no expectations.

Thing is, deep down, maybe a complication or expectation or two wouldn’t be so bad.

I copy and paste a version to send to Bennie, and then, before I lose my nerve, send it out into the ether in the direction of RJ. And grab my bag and head out before someone hands me something that needs attending.

I
jump into the Honda Accord Hybrid that Maria gave me as a parting bonus gift when I left her employ, and head over to Gene’s Sausage Shop in Lincoln Square. My mom has wanted to make pelmeni with me for a while, so I figured with my little gift of time this afternoon we can knock out a big batch while catching up. I have Gene’s coarse grind beef shoulder and pork butt in equal parts, throwing a couple of onions and a few garlic cloves into the grind for me to save us chopping. My mother has not removed the Cuisinart food processor I bought her for Mother’s Day seven years ago from its box, preferring to use her double-bladed chopper and a battered wooden bowl that were part of the dowry she schlepped here from Russia fifty years ago. But while I have time for pelmeni, I don’t have patience for doing everything by hand, and this will save us a world of mutual annoyance.

I park in front of my parents’ small bungalow on Karlov just off Milwaukee Avenue. Every time I come here I am astonished that the six of us managed to live here together; it seems impossibly tiny. And yet, here we were, Mama and Papa; my brothers, Sasha and Alexei; me; and my little sister, Natalia. Three bedrooms, one and a half bathrooms, fifteen hundred square feet. About half the size of my current condo. My Realtor thought I was a little insane when I bought my
place on Francisco, the first floor of what was originally a Victorian mansion on a double lot, complete with the original built-in hutch in the large dining room and a butler’s pantry. All for a single woman who has no intention of starting a family. But after spending most of my life elbow to elbow with not only my immediate family, but also my aunt and uncle and five cousins who lived two doors down and were in and out of our house like it was just the south wing of their own, I have always craved expansive space and deep, glorious quiet. My place is a three-bedroom, two-bathroom sanctuary, and someday I plan to finish out the portion of the basement that is part of my unit to create a master bedroom suite of ridiculous proportions.

My father is raking leaves in the postage-stamp-size front yard, wearing a thick wool sweater my mom knitted for him. The sleeves are too short, but the torso is three sizes too big, dwarfing his ever-diminishing frame. Papa used to be five nine, is now closer to five seven, and retains his wiry strength even at the age of seventy. He was a cabinetmaker and union carpenter, particularly good with intricate work, and made his living mostly on custom built-ins and special-order original commissions through designers, taking general-contractor work when things were slow. His hands are gnarled with arthritis and still callused from decades of hard work, but he would never let me hire someone to help out with things like yard work.

“My leettle baba romovaya.” He grins widely and opens his arms to me, letting the rake fall where it may, and calling me by the endearment of my childhood, a reference to a yeasty cake soaked in cherry juice and plum brandy and covered in a creamy sauce—round and plump and pink and sweet, which is how he saw me. “Come give Papa a kisseleh.”

I put my arms around him, and kiss his cheek, smooth-shaven and smelling of bay rum. “Hello, Papa.”

“How you are doing, eh? No work meedle of day?” He shakes his hand up and down. “So fancy!”

“Got done early, thought I’d come make pelmeni with Mama.”

He smiles even wider, closes his eyes and inhales deeply, as if he can already smell the little meat dumplings, swimming in butter and onions and dunked in rich, thick sour cream. “Then I not keep you. Thees is important work, for you and Mama. Not for hens to laugh at.”

I laugh. Russian idioms never translate particularly well. “Yes, Papa. Very serious work.”

He kisses my forehead and smacks my ample bottom. “Go. Make pelmeni. I do leaves.”

He turns away in his voluminous sweater, wrists exposed and somehow dear, picks up the discarded rake from the ground, and returns to meticulously and laboriously making piles of fall foliage. I know my dad; he will not come in for dinner until every leaf is gone from the yard; he is passionate and proud about keeping his home immaculate. We moved in here when I was a baby, and he and Mom paid it off by the time I was in high school. It might be small, but it’s in perfect condition, everything kept in good working order by Dad, and impeccably clean by Mom.

I open the door, and call out. “Mama! It’s Alana.”

My mom’s head pops around the corner from the kitchen. She is wearing her usual pale blue cotton kerchief over her gray curls, which are as unruly as my brown ones. Over her housedress she is wearing a crazy hand-painted
WURLD’S BEST GRANDMMA
apron that Sasha’s boys made her for her birthday last year. It leaves a little sprinkling of silver glitter
behind her when she walks, like she is the Wurld’s Oldest Strippur, but she loves it and wears it religiously. Whenever I bring Dumpling over it takes me a week to get the sparkle out of his paws.

I head for the kitchen and kiss her cheek, wordlessly handing off the package of ground meat as she reaches out for it, like a delicious drug drop.

She squeezes the package, and sniffs it appreciatively. “Pelmeni or cevapcici?” she asks seriously—dumplings or Serbian sausages—one recipe from her Russian paternal grandmother, one from her Romanian maternal grandmother.

“Pelmeni, please.”

“Goot. Come. Tea first, then cook.” My mother turns to the stove and puts a flame under a kettle. She reaches above her head for two thick glasses from the cupboard. She takes the jar of syrupy sour-cherry jam from the counter, and puts a healthy dose into one glass, knowing how I love the old traditional tea sweetened with the preserves. I get much of my economy of motion in the kitchen from her, every gesture practiced and simple. Coasters and squat, heavy glasses from the bottom shelf of the middle cabinet. Tea leaves from the old tin delivered in a fat pinch into the battered white china teapot, painted in an intricate netting of cobalt blue, its gold accents chipping off. She catches the water just as it starts to steam, but before it hits a full boil, tells me, “Boil makes bitter,” for the gazillionth time in my life. She brings glasses and spoons to the oilcloth-covered table, along with the teapot. I stir the thick, purple-black jam until my tea is clouded and little pieces of cherry float and spin. My mother takes a dense sugar cube from the bowl on the kitchen table, and places it delicately between her teeth, sucking the hot tea into her mouth through the cube, a sweetening method I have never
been able to master without eating about seven sugar cubes per cup of tea.

We don’t talk while we drink our tea, but my mom reaches over and pets my hand while we drink. I love this about her. She always gives you room to breathe and be, without needing noise all the time. I think after the barely controlled chaos of my siblings and me growing up in that house, she, like me, loves the quiet. She knows we will talk while we cook, but for now we can just drink tea and hold hands. It is enough. Our sips are measured, and we finish within seconds of each other, my mom crunching the last morsel of sugar in her teeth while I shake the final cherry morsel from my glass. She smiles.

“Pelmeni.” It is a statement, not a question. She gets up and I put our tea things in the sink while she gets the big bowls out. “I make dough, you do meat, nu?”

“Yes, Mama.”

She dumps flour into her bowl, adding eggs and salt and milk, mixing by hand until she has smooth, plastic dough. I put the ground-meat mixture into mine, seasoning with salt, black pepper, and ground caraway seeds, an unusual and delicious family addition to the traditional recipe. She begins to roll thin rounds with a small wooden dowel, flours them and stacks them on the table between us so that I can fill them. She’ll finish the dough well before I finish pinching the fat dumplings closed, her hands a blur.

“Zho. Why you no bring my Dumpling to make dumplings, eh?” She loves Dumpling like another grandchild, and adores dressing him up and taking pictures when I leave him with them when I travel. She especially loves theme pictures for holidays, and while I would never in a million years dream of dressing him up myself, I secretly love the photos she takes
with the ridiculous outfits and props. My favorite so far is the Dumpling Lama, draped in an orange scarf like a monk’s robes, in honor of Chinese New Year.