The Art of Eating In - Cathy Erway [69]
Once in our new apartment, every time Ben came through the door with takeout, bathing the apartment in the scents of chicken shawarma or enchiladas, my mouth would water uncontrollably. It was also becoming increasingly dangerous to go out with friends and stay out late because there was always that point in the night when somebody wanted to get food. I learned to settle for a bodega snack if I was also hungry at times like those. I’d get chips or over-salted nuts, maybe an ice cream bar. But the allure of a late-night slice of hot pizza still remained, untouchable.
So to satisfy my cravings, I set out to re-create a few of my favorite takeout restaurant foods. I missed sushi, so I tried making my own seaweed-wrapped maki rolls. It seemed daunting at first: The rice needed to be carefully mixed with vinegar and then kept damp. The nori wrappers were unfamiliar to the touch and easy to tear. I scoured the Internet for tips on this technique, and for Christmas, I hinted to Ben that I might want to own a sushi cookbook, a hint he took. I also got myself a simple straw mat, sold at most Asian markets, that was used for making maki. After trying it out once, I realized that it was really easy to get the hang of. And almost any vegetable I had on hand tasted good in a maki roll. The nori is first placed on the straw mat, then covered with an even layer of sticky rice. From there you could place any slivered vegetables at the bottom. At first I had put mostly fresh vegetables, such as julienned cucumbers and carrots. Then I began experimenting with more cooked ingredients instead, or in addition. For rolls, I fried long slices of Japanese eggplant that had been dipped in a flour batter and a sprinkle of salt and cayenne pepper. I placed fresh spinach leaves on top of the rice that had been stuck to the nori seaweed, piled on the fried eggplant pieces in a neat bundle at the bottom edge of the square, and spread mayonnaise on top before rolling the rice and seaweed into a neat, tight log. It turned out that I didn’t need the raw fish after all to sate my craving for sushi—the sushi rice and seaweed took care of that for the most part. All I needed were the rice, vinegar, nori, and a few vegetables, and I was set. I began making fresh cucumber rolls and, a couple of times, lightly steamed asparagus or roasted okra pod rolls to bring with me to lunch. I found that a package of nori seaweed wrappers goes a long way—there were usually between thirty and fifty sheets in each. Also, that maki rolls were a great food to transport wherever you needed to go, like work.
Because I was cooking so much, I was also producing a lot of organic waste—onion and garlic peels, husks and stems of vegetables, and so on. I began storing these in a sealed plastic container, and on Saturdays I would take them to the composting center I was fortunate to live a short walk from. I would try to use every part of a plant—or an animal, for that matter—as much as possible. I’d do different things with broccoli stems once in a while and even learned to make orange-peel candy once. I had no delusions of low-impact grandeur with these experiments. It was more of a way of fooling around with whatever stuff I had on hand, making the most of it. But I liked that they didn’t end up going to waste.
By early spring, there was one staple of cheap, greasy, takeout food fun that I was still struggling to get right: pizza—perhaps the most iconic takeout food of them all. But I was determined. I wanted to eat pizza. The more I tried and failed at making a decent crust, the more I yearned to run to the pie shop down the street and just gobble up a thick, oil-slicked slice. It didn’t matter how good the rest of the ingredients on it were. I wanted to bite into a slice that tasted and felt like a