The Art of Eating In - Cathy Erway [90]
“I think it will be good for you,” she said again.
Back in Brooklyn late that night, I walked into my apartment and plopped down my luggage at the door. The living room was still littered with boxes. It was about midnight, and after a long weekend away, I was tired and found myself missing my old home, and barely recognizing my new one.
When I sat down a few days later, trying to come up with my next “Reason of the Month for not eating out” blog post, I felt a little bit at a loss. I got up and walked around my apartment. There was a large stockpot on the back burner of my stove simmering with a big batch of vegetable stock I was making. It smelled wonderful, the carrots, celery, onion, and turnips slowly seeping their flavors into the hot water with a steady bubble. I went back to my computer and tried to write again.
I’d had such an overwhelming change of pace eating in restaurants in Morocco and San Francisco—I was lucky to have eaten at some pretty good places throughout, and this didn’t exactly represent the typical restaurant-food experience for most people. But still, I began to question what I was gaining from this not-eating-out experiment that was so great in comparison to perhaps just eating in really great restaurants. Or, what was I taking away from this experiment that was so much better than what I could gain by traveling around and experiencing new foods all the time in different places?
But that wasn’t the point of it all, was it? I wasn’t ever trying to say all along that not eating out in New York was somehow unequivocally better than eating in restaurants. No, in a perfect world, a good balance of home-cooking passion and a hearty appetite for exciting and new restaurant food would do me just fine. The problem was expense and practicality. By knowing how to cook all the time, I was saving myself a huge bundle. And I’d made it practical for my busy lifestyle.
I walked around my living room again, stopping to open the stockpot and stare at the vegetables at the bottom. The translucent, loose rings of an onion were flapping in the bubbles like a winged creature trying to take flight. I closed the lid and walked down the short hall to my bedroom. I opened the door—I’m not sure why I ever closed the door in the first place; it’s not like I needed to for privacy—and stared at the messy room for a minute.
I sat back down on my living room couch and opened my laptop again. The screen flashed on with a slight beep and returned to my half-written blog post. I erased the text and rewrote the title. “Reason for Not Eating Out #19: Because You Can (Almost) Afford to Live Alone.” In it, I estimated the food cost for an average month’s worth of eating solely from grocery-store purchases. I compared that to an average month’s worth of eating a combination of grocery store and restaurant food, in a breakdown that resembled how I used to eat before I began my blogging quest. The difference in spending, month to month, came surprisingly close to the couple of hundred dollars more I was paying in rent than at my old place, with Ben. It didn’t make up the deficit for my own one-bedroom completely, but it made a compelling argument for sacrificing restaurant spending as a way to budget for something else—something more valuable, perhaps. And for New York City, space commands a very high value.
Ben and I saw very little of each other after the move. After tying up some loose ends regarding the apartment, my mail, and the like, we didn’t really communicate. I guess neither of us felt the need to.
One cold night a couple of weeks after moving, I went out for drinks with Jordan and a few other friends. We’d gone to a nearby bar and had a good time. Once it had gotten late, we all took off in our separate directions. As I biked my short ride home, I thought about how I was going to put on a record and cook up a hot bowl of noodles with a splash