The Art of Eating In - Cathy Erway [38]
“I made them a little strong, so watch out,” he warned.
“So what are you cooking tonight?” I asked him.
“It’s a recipe that I tried once; it was in Gourmet. It’s called tarragon chicken. Really nice, because you can really taste the tarragon, which is something I never really tried much of with anything else before,” Sean explained.
He scooped crème fraîche from its container into a measuring cup.
“It smells wonderful,” Ben added.
“Oh, yeah, and sorry it’s taking so long. I just realized that it needs to be served with rice, and I forgot to make it until about two minutes ago.”
We waved our hands, signaling that it was all okay. But by this time, I was starting to feel my stomach churn with hunger. It was funny; in all the time I was cooking for myself—or for myself and others—I’d forgotten what it felt like to not be in control of when exactly I ate. It suddenly came back to me: the anticipatory minutes of sitting in a restaurant, waiting for your meal, hoping that the waiter who just emerged from the kitchen was coming over to your table.
We sat and chatted for a while about our day, telling Sean and Meredith about our brunch with Sam and Richard.
“I guess we can start with some cheese,” Meredith said. She swished around in the kitchen for a bit and came back with a platter of crackers and three different wedges of cheese.
“Oh, and is that Brie still in the oven?” Sean suddenly said.
“Yes,” said Meredith. “Oops.”
The two of them scrambled around to find hot pads and finally pulled a large, uncovered casserole tray out of the oven. On it was a bubbling wedge of Brie surrounded by a thick orange sauce.
“What is this?” Ben asked.
“I just love this. We’ve made it before a couple of times. It’s just baked Brie with mango sauce. It’s a little overcooked right now, but it’s the best thing ever on crackers,” Meredith explained.
“How do you make the mango sauce?” I asked.
“Oh, you can just buy it in a jar. It’s just two things, really, cooked together.” She took a spreader and spread a mixture of the melted Brie and some of the mango sauce on a seeded flatbread cracker. Ben and I followed her lead and dug in. The hot mango sauce mingled with the mild cheese in my mouth as it went down with the crunch of the cracker.
“It’s delicious,” I said.
Our dinner was served about twenty minutes later. On my plate was a helping of white rice topped with boneless chicken in a creamy, fresh tarragon-flecked sauce. A heap of soft carrot slices spiced lightly with grated cinnamon lay on the other side. The portion was generous, and I ate heartily.
“This is the kind of food you just want to keep spooning up,” Meredith commented, after we had all congratulated the chef. “It’s just so soothing, and mushes together really well.” We agreed.
After our plates were cleared, Sean came back to the table bearing what looked at first to be a tall, iced wedding cake. When he put it down I noticed that the icing on it was stiff, like a ginger-bread house’s.
“Viennese meringue pie,” he declared. It looked like a fairy had made it appear with a swish of her wand. On top, the meringue had been dolloped in spokes toward the center, finished with a piped tube around the rim. Once cut into, the crisp, yet light surface gave way to a cognac-spiced whipped cream with fresh blueberries and blackberries embedded inside.
We left dinner that night completely filled up, boozed up, and saturated with anecdotes on European culinary history, as well as everything from men’s fashion to 1980s British comedy TV Sean was a men’s neckwear designer by day, and we had also gone to the same college together. Over dinner, we shared a few stories about characters from those days as well. Meredith worked in public relations, and she hadn’t attended school with any of us at the dinner. Often when I was with Ben and Richard and Sam, I felt as if talk about their old college days dominated conversations. It was a refreshing change of pace to experience the opposite this time.
As we walked home,