What We Eat When We Eat Alone - Deborah Madison [18]
When I asked the “What do you eat?” question in a workshop I was giving at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, Marty, who had said almost nothing during the entire class, quickly volunteered for this one. He had it all worked out.
“When alone, I eat standing up next to the sink,” he started off saying, describing what you might think of as typical man-alone behavior. Then he went into the details.
“I pick the oldest and fastest foods to prepare, or what my wife doesn’t want,” he continues. The oldest food? The food that needs most to be eaten? This we hadn’t heard before, except from our teacher, Suzuki-roshi, who, when he had the occasion to shop for his own food after first coming to America, also used to choose the oldest, saddest vegetables. Someone had to eat them. His father, also a Zen priest, was known to pluck vegetables discarded by farmers out of the stream and then cook them. This approach, both tender and fierce, is not one that’s often talked about. In Marty’s case, it may have been about sympathy for the oldest vegetables, but it was also about frugality.
“I’m genetically frugal,” he explained. “For example, we had some sliced Velveeta cheese around for a long time. I bought it, lots of it, by mistake for a big party we were having. I couldn’t throw it away, so I ended up making a lot of toasted cheese sandwiches over a period of many months.
“First I get some bread out of the freezer. Multigrain is best for long-term freezing,” Marty explains, saying he’s had quite a bit of experience freezing bread.
“Second, I toast the bread,” he continues. I assume he adds the cheese about now.
“Third, I find those things that have been there for months, like pepper jelly. The correct amount is important. Too little and it’s too bland, too much and it’s too much.”
I suspect that a lot of us have ancient opened jars of pepper jellies and chutneys and other condiments hidden, forgotten about, neglected, and ignored that we’d do well to use up. And this is not a bad combo. In fact a grilled cheese and pepper jelly sandwich can be very good indeed. I recall my grandmother sitting down to a quiet morning bite of toasted rye bread with Cheddar and jam or marmalade. For her, it wouldn’t have been pepper jelly, but the salty-sweet twist of the rye, cheese, and jam is what makes such combinations appealing. Add chile or vinegar, and they’re even more interesting.
“While I’m chewing,” Marty continues, “I go to the pantry and look around for cookies. If it’s a really bad day and there aren’t any, I get another piece of bread and make toast and jelly. And I drink V-8 juice. It’s my healthy compensation.”
And not a word about eating over the sink. Marty is, it turns out, a pacer.
In contrast to all this cooking, there’s Charlie Johnston, a retired banker from Arkansas, who’s had one too many hip replacements. He isn’t too keen on cooking. Patrick has even sent him boxes of soup in the mail, and his friends who are geographically closer try to help out in the kitchen as well.
“Cooking messes up the kitchen too much,” Charlie says. “Cooking is a stand-up sport. I can think about breakfast, but cooking is a pain in the ass. No wonder women rebelled.”
Polenta
Polenta is one of those fundamental foods on which you can build entire meals. Many say that 1 cup of polenta cooked in a quart of water will serve four, but it’s more likely to feed a hungry man just once or twice.
1 CUP POLENTA
SALT
BUTTER OR GRATED CHEESE
Bring 4 cups of water to a boil. Gradually stir in the polenta in a slow, steady stream, then add 1 teaspoon of salt. Lower the heat to medium and cook, still stirring, until the polenta has absorbed enough water to make a more or less even mass. Then, lower the heat still more, almost as low as it will go. At this point you can leave