The Art of Eating In - Cathy Erway [142]
To my relief, when comments started flowing in the next day from readers, they were all congratulatory and positive. Comments continued to trickle in through the day, and no hard feelings about my decision were expressed. I was immensely grateful. The uneasiness that I’d tossed and turned about all night long was quickly draining off. Readers even asked about where I was planning to eat out first, as I had mentioned I was doing “opposite week” sometime this month to end my streak.
There were many different angles I could give to my week of only eating out. I pondered over how to best set up the week’s meals. Should I try to score tables at the latest, greatest hot spots in the city like a true restaurant zealot? A few of my friends suggested this, a whirlwind tour of the city’s most awesome eating-out delights. Or should I play it more by ear? In the end, I decided to combine a couple of carefully chosen restaurant outings with an eating-out regime that seemed typical for the young professional. This would be more or less the way I used to eat two years ago, and the way many of my peers still did. This might include breakfast sandwiches from the deli, Thai takeout weeknight dinners, and a couple of meals at hot new restaurants with friends. I had no set goals or expectations for opposite week beyond these. I figured I’d just enjoy it and see what happened.
I looked at my calendar and chose a week that didn’t have too much going on: There were two back-to-back weekends where I was cooking dinners with A Razor, A Shiny Knife. I decided to begin my opposite week the Sunday following the second one. The only caveat was that the following Saturday, I was supposed to compete in a special, small-scale Chili Takedown being held as part of an annual chili pepper festival at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. It would be the last day of my supposed “opposite week,” and it would require me to cook, since I had already promised Matt Timms that I would participate. We would also be celebrating Jordan’s birthday later on that Saturday night, and she planned to throw the party in her apartment and serve homemade hors d’oeuvres. These events were both not-eating-out adventures in my book. I sighed and settled on that week anyway (the following ones had cooking events, too). It had become more difficult for me to avoid cooking than to avoid eating in restaurants by now.
“Normal week” officially began on a Sunday in mid-September. After eating a leisurely oatmeal breakfast, I arrived at Michael’s apartment in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, to start prep for the supper-club dinner we were hosting that night. Daniel and Gene, two other cooks who collaborated with the group, were there already. Previous all-afternoon-and-evening supper-club preparations had taught me how easy it is to forget to eat real meals while we were busy cooking. So I came armed with six chocolate-chip muffins that I’d pulled out of the oven that morning, to share.
“What’s that you’ve got in the pan?” I asked Gene. It was chicken livers, he explained, for the pate. I hadn’t seen mention of pate on the menu for the night when I’d checked it. The pate, he explained, would eventually be spread on top of the braised short ribs and torched individually to create a brûlée effect.
“Do you like pâté?” Gene asked.
“Yeah, I love it,” I said.
“Would you want to take over with it? I’m not really a huge fan,” he said.
“Sure,” I said. I’d made pate from chicken liver before, so I had a pretty good idea of what needed to be done. Using Michael’s food processor, I slowly ground the simmered livers and onions with their reduced wine sauce with some butter, cream, and fresh thyme.
The rest of the afternoon’s preparations went fairly smoothly. But when the diners began to stream in at around six or seven o’clock, the kitchen was in full swing and utterly packed.