The Art of Eating In - Cathy Erway [34]
My life changed profoundly when I bought an ice-cream maker that fall. Beforehand, Ben and I would walk down to the corner convenience store for snacks at night. Usually, it was ice cream. We’d lean over the slide-top freezer chest, arguing over what flavor to choose from the many pint-sized cartons of Häagen-Dazs and Ben and Jerry’s, and how much fat it should have, to the amusement of our neighbor, a Korean couple who owned the small store. Then we’d compromise—sort of—and bring home our icy treat. These pints cost $4.25 each. Now, thanks to the $50 ice-cream maker, I was making vanilla-bean-speckled premium ice cream with a splash of Bourbon, coffee ice cream, green tea and honey ice cream, or fresh peach or mango frozen yogurt by the quart. After I’d learned how to make an ice-cream base, the sky was the limit. We always had at least two quart containers of homemade ice cream in the freezer after that purchase.
I also bought a food processor, which I used a lot at first to make chickpea hummus. Finding that chickpeas didn’t need to be the only type of bean dip in the world, I began creating other spreads, dips, sauces, and pestos using the food processor. With these tools, I had lots of treats in storage at any given time, either in the freezer or in the refrigerator. Thawing a bit of pesto or fresh tomato sauce to mix with pasta, I found, made for an easy route to dinner, as did slathering some hummus on bread with veggies for lunch.
I learned how to pickle in mason jars from my friend Bob, who had recently launched his own pickling business, McClure’s Pickles, with his brother. Soon I had reserves in my fridge of homemade pickled radishes, Brussels sprouts, and any vegetable I could see fit to brine. Other DIY kitchen experiments of mine were less successful. One friend gave me her yogurt cultures after she decided she didn’t have the patience to tend to them daily anymore. After dutifully adding milk and straining the curds from the whey each night for a while, I found that I didn’t have the patience, either. Neither did I particularly enjoy the runny, excessively sour character of homemade yogurt.
My mother came to visit our apartment one day and was awed to find, stacked on top of the kitchen cupboards, the food processor and ice-cream maker. I suppose our extra coffeemaker had added to the scene, because she cried, “You have so many gadgets!”
What a transformation, I thought, that this apartment, once occupied by an old man who for decades never even boiled water on his stove, was now inhabited by a young couple who had kitchen gadgetry on display and a dire need for that kitchen to work properly.
We had an upstairs neighbor who was quite a character. His name was Harvey, and he was the first person I met in the building and the most visible one on a regular basis. Harvey lived alone and worked on his paintings at home during the day. When he wasn’t at work, he was undoubtedly chatting beside someone at a coffee shop down the street, or on another neighbor’s front stoop. He was a thin man, probably in his seventies, with feathery white hair and thick glasses. He had an unpredictable temper, which I’d learned about after a couple of skirmishes between him and our landlord. But the rest of the time, he had an affecting kindness to his voice, like that of a kindergarten teacher. And if you allowed him to, he could keep you talking for hours.
I’d often run into Harvey on the front steps of our building, as he was coming indoors with a pair of weighted-down plastic grocery bags at his sides. I could tell from the frequency of these grocery excursions that Harvey cooked, unlike his friend who had lived in the apartment that Ben and I now occupied. I often wondered what kind of groceries Harvey was carrying. Eggs? Milk? Bread? Things that went bad quickly, or had to be replenished regularly? Maybe he liked shopping for groceries so often just to see what items were marked down that day, a habit of my late paternal grandfather