The Art of Eating In - Cathy Erway [9]
Something had to give, I resolved. But I was already living with two roommates at this time, in a cheap apartment in the outer borough of Brooklyn. How many other corners could I possibly cut? Set aside sustainable food and eating with a conscience for a moment: My eating-out lifestyle was not sustainable—with my income, that is. I was going to have to separate some of the needs from the wants. Buying food that’s already prepared is a want, even if buying food itself is definitely a need, I reasoned. Since I was beginning to get bored and disillusioned with many of the restaurant meals I was eating (for example, the beer garden burgers), and because I felt a creative urge drawing me into the kitchen more and more often, I decided that the prepared food-or eating out—was the one habit I’d try to kick. But what was going to motivate me to rush through a frenetic grocery store, drag back ingredients to my apartment, and cook up enough food to feed myself, twenty-four/ seven?
Doing it with panache, I eventually decided. And showcasing my recipes as well as my kitchen disasters in a food blog oxymoronically called “Not Eating Out in New York.”
Granted, I am very grateful to be among the fortunate minority of the world’s population to have had the pleasure of eating at a restaurant. I happen to hail from one of the richest, most developed countries in the world, the United States, whereas billions of people have never seen anything like the luxuries of restaurant dining. So I’m happy for that.
You could also say that I am a native New Yorker. I was born in Manhattan, at Cornell Medical Center on the Upper East Side. But just before I reached the tender age of two, my parents put a down payment on a house across the Hudson and whisked my older brother and me from the playgrounds and promenades of Brooklyn Heights to the clipped lawns and tree swings of Maplewood, New Jersey. Growing up in a middle- to upper-middle-class family, I was exposed to restaurants early on. My parents are very fond of food and love trying out new cuisines through both cooking and eating out. They are experts at finding the “good” Chinese restaurants of New Jersey, meaning the ones that serve truly authentic Chinese food that is good. When a “good” restaurant was discovered, there was a dramatic scramble to invite an uninitiated couple or family, or to round up the several Chinese families my family was friends with, and get to the place before the rush. (It should be noted that bringing friends was less socially than gastronomically motivated; with family-style Chinese dining, the more people you have at your table, the more dishes you can order, and the more varieties of deliciousness you can sample. According to my father, it’s completely not worth it to have dim sum with two people.) I remember crawling underneath the white cloth-covered tables at endless Chinese banquet dinners with the children of my parents’ friends. When a good restaurant closed without apparent reason or warning, it was bemoaned for months. My parents were willing to drive forty-five minutes each way to towns we had never heard of—or take the train to New York City—to get good dim sum. We would also walk to the local diner on the weekends every now and then for filling breakfast specials, or pick up a couple of pizzas for dinner at home. My brother and I never begged and squealed for our parents to buy us restaurant food, as I had seen my young friends do. I am a fortunate foodie for that.
As much as we enjoyed the occasional restaurant trip, my family had strong ties to the home kitchen. My parents cooked, much more often than not, and they demanded a certain ritual of communal eating every night. I remember the embarrassment I felt when I couldn’t meet up with friends until after dinner. My parents insisted on eating together every night, and my brother and I would take turns washing the dishes after the meal was done. When it was dinnertime, my parents would sit at the table (usually hollering at us to come) and not start eating until both