What We Eat When We Eat Alone - Deborah Madison [51]
Roasted Sweet Potatoes with Goat Cheese
This sounds simple and it is simple because many of us like to make a meal of just one vegetable. However, the combination of tangy goat cheese with the sweet, moist orange-fleshed potatoes (it must be these and not the drier white-fleshed varieties) works well, the sweet and salty flavors colliding under a crunchy sprinkle of sea salt. Good enough to share, and often. Add a salad and you’ve got a meal.
SWEET POTATOES, SUCH AS JEWEL OR GARNET YAMS (YES, THEY REALLY ARE SWEET POTATOES)
FRESH, TANGY GOAT CHEESE
SALT AND PEPPER
1. Heat oven to 375 degrees F. Select your potatoes (smaller ones will cook more quickly) and scrub them well. Poke them in a few places with a paring knife, then put them in a shallow baking dish and bake until tender, about 11⁄2 hours for large tubers, 1 hour for medium-size skinny ones, and 30 minutes for those tiny 3-inch sweet potatoes one can occasionally find. Or steam them over boiling water, which takes less time.
2. While the potatoes are roasting, allow the cheese to come to room temperature. When they’re done, slice them in half, season with salt and freshly ground pepper, then soften up the flesh with a fork. Lay some goat cheese over those hot middles, add a little more pepper, and enjoy.
Alone Every Day
“I eat alone all the time in this my seventy-ninth year, and I love to eat alone! Nobody to please but myself.”
Betty Fussell, writer
“Eating alone is a hard thing. It’s hard to energize yourself to do it when it’s just you.”
Nick Ault, private eye
There are people who go through life without a daily dining companion, those who never marry or form a partnership. Young people, just out in the world, working their first jobs or toiling on graduate degrees, frequently don’t have partners other than roommates. Then there are slightly older singles who, maybe in their thirties or early forties, just haven’t gotten around to finding someone to settle down with. The years after divorce but before a new marriage are a time when one returns to eating alone, and there are those years at the end of one’s life when a partner is lost and one is alone again. In these cases, solo meals are not the fruit of those rare and welcomed spells when a spouse is out of town or the kids are away. This is when every night is likely to be an eat-alone night—unless something is done about it. A friend of ours, for example, made sure that after her husband died she had a reservation for herself and one of her many friends at a restaurant practically every night of the week. While people deal with these periods in their lives in very different ways, for many it is a challenge that is hard to meet. Others meet it with grace and style.
Laura Calder is a young woman who lives in Paris part of the year. She writes about food in France today, and she has a television show on French cooking in her native Canada. Cooking is a big part of her life.
“But the fact of the matter is, I don’t cook much for myself,” Laura writes, admitting that she is usually the queen of grilled cheese sandwiches when left in her own company. “Instead, I throw dinner parties and cook for other people. But lately I have been living in a place where you couldn’t pay me to throw a dinner party, so I have found myself cooking for me.The other day I made a huge Swiss chard gratin and ate the whole thing (half for lunch, the other half for dinner). And tonight, like at least three other nights a week, I made a pan of roasted vegetables, grated over some Parmesan cheese, and gobbled them up. I change vegetable combinations all the time, just to keep life edgy: sometimes it’s root vegetables (potatoes, beets), more often there are leeks involved, and lately I am obsessed with fennel and aubergine. The secret to great roasted vegetables, no matter what the combination, is to chuck in a few handfuls of cherry tomatoes. They’re the ticket, because they really caramelize and get sticky and sweet and go great with whatever else you’ve got