The Art of Eating In - Cathy Erway [162]
“It’s like he never knew you before or something,” she said, after telling me that my dad had reported having a good time that day. She’d been slightly surprised by this.
“You know, he never really paid much attention to what you were doing,” she went on. “And now he’s all like, ‘Whoa! This is what you can do! You can cook like this!’”
I smiled. In the last couple of years since I’d been cooking so much, my dad and I had found more things to talk about through a mutual appreciation for cooking techniques, traditional dishes, and so forth. I was touched that my chili from the cook-off that day had inspired him to make a copycat batch.
I spent the rest of the afternoon walking around the Chile Pepper Fiesta and stopping to watch Pete Seeger perform. I bumped into a couple of old friends, as well as members of the Chili Takedown gang again. I was stopped by a middle-aged couple who told me how much they liked my chili and that they had voted for it. I popped into a cooking demonstration from a family-owned artisanal chutney company and ate several of their homemade Indian specialties with the sauces. After the demonstration, I chatted with them for a few minutes about the intricacies of making chutney. They beamed as they described their process, passed down from family recipes for several generations, in between shushing their grandchildren as they scampered noisily about. I decided I wanted to try making my own chutney sometime soon. I bought two jars of theirs and thanked them for the demo.
Cooking is infectious, I thought, patting my belly. It can be passed up and down through families. It can be spread all around. It was something I wanted to keep doing, and keep learning from, for a long time yet. There was so much left to explore about food and cooking, without limiting myself to things like not eating in a New York City restaurant.
After the Chile Pepper Fiesta, I headed straight to Jordan’s apartment for her birthday party. When I arrived, a small table in the living room was filled with bowls of sushi-making ingredients, just like we had seen at Aaron and Mai’s apartment. I spent the rest of the night there along with several of my best friends. At some point in the night, we got to talking about dim sum. Dan, Jordan, and I made a plan to satisfy our cravings the next morning with a dim sum brunch in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. It was past midnight by then. Opposite week was officially over. So was, as a strict rule, not eating out in New York. A part of me felt bittersweet to see the journey over. But most of all, I was hungry to move on. After dim sum, who knew what would be next? I’d have to choose carefully. There were a few new local and sustainable-minded restaurants that I wanted to check out. Cuisines of the city’s ethnic populations that I’d never tried. There were whisperings about underground supper clubs that I’d never been to happening all the time. There was another cook-off around the corner, organized by a new host at a bar I’d never been to. There was a local farm benefit and an amateur beer brew-off the next night in Brooklyn. There was a pig roast that I was helping to cook for. I was doing a cooking demo at the Grand Army Greenmarket in a couple of weeks, making risotto with vegetables, wine, and cheese from the market. There was the food newsletter with Saha, and we’d decided to start the project by throwing a dinner party first. My clip on the Ask Aida show was going to air soon, and I wanted to have friends over for lasagna to watch it with me. There was Mark’s Brooklyn-themed dinner to go to. Michael’s crazy mock-French Laundry menu to prepare. A new restaurant in my neighborhood. And we still hadn’t held a second SOS.
But for now, I was excited about going to dim sum with Jordan and Dan the next morning. I opened my cell phone and began typing a text message to Keith, asking if he wanted to join us. My mouth watered as I thought about all the steaming trays of bite-sized