The Art of Eating In - Cathy Erway [33]
After many harried trips up and down the block with our friends helping, we managed to move all our stuff into the center of the living room, and called it a night. The next morning, I discovered a new problem with the apartment. When I called the gas company to register for service, the rep was confused. There was no record of our particular unit in the building in their files. But it had been occupied for the past twenty-five years, by the same tenant right until we moved in. How could this be, we asked?
It turned out the previous tenant had had the gas turned off for some twenty years. Before it had been renovated, the kitchen hadn’t even had a working stove. We’d seen how spare and decrepit the old kitchen in the apartment had been on our first walk-through of the space, before the contractors gutted it and installed new appliances. Unless he was remarkably handy with a microwave, it was pretty clear that the previous tenant had never really cooked at home. So there I was on my first day in the new place, flicking the round knobs of the stove fruitlessly.
“Maybe you should give yourself a break. Let’s order a pizza or something,” Ben suggested.
We were unpacking. The tarp and tools that were on the floor the night before had been removed mysteriously sometime during the day, while we were at work. Here and there little tasks had been hastily finished off, like the addition of the mirror on the bathroom cupboard. We had a huge chore on our hands between unloading our stuff and arranging the place, and I had to admit, the takeout option sounded pretty tempting. But I shot Ben an annoyed glare instead. He shrugged and went back to ripping boxes open.
I’d picked up a package of frozen gyoza dumplings and edamame beans from a Korean grocery on my way to the subway after work. Heating them up had been my idea of a quickie, shortcut meal. Now they sat stiffly on the counter, impossibly frozen through. We didn’t own a microwave—neither Erin nor I could find much reason to get one at our old place, and the microwave at Ben’s old apartment had belonged to his roommate. I looked at the polished, never-before-used stove. How was I going to cook these things? I’d never felt so eerily out of my element before. How did humans accomplish anything without fire?
I watched Ben unloading a cardboard box of kitchen tools. He lifted one of my towel-wrapped knives out of a box, then pulled out my shoddy plastic coffeemaker. Then it hit me: the rice cooker. It had a steaming tray inside, and it ran purely on electricity
After that first night of steamed dumplings and edamame, we had to wait an excruciating week and a half before the gas company could properly install a connection to our unit. I survived the week by eating a lot of salad, bread, cold cheeses, fruits, and cured meats. I’d bring sandwiches or chopped salads to work. But every now and then, I had a hankering for something hot.
One of my favorite comfort foods growing up, and also one of the first foods I can remember eating, was a bowl of foamy steamed eggs. Its custardlike texture and bubbly, yellow froth that clung to the sides of the bowl it was cooked in was unlike anything else in the world. It was essentially half eggs, half water, gently seasoned with salt and white pepper, and every spoonful of egg came with a hot slurp of water. My mom said it was a common Chinese baby food, since it was so soft. Because I had only the steamer to cook with that week, I remembered the comfort food and began steaming scrambled eggs, sometimes with bits of chopped vegetables and cold cuts like ham scrambled in. I made steamed omelettes, deliciously soupy and hot—perfect for the early fall.
I shared some of my first batch with Ben. He decided he preferred traditional scrambled eggs cooked on a pan but ate it anyway. When we were living apart, I never imposed my eating-in-only diet on Ben, and I didn’t plan to now that we were living together. But it was clear now that whenever I was cooking at home, there