I’m writing this from Las Vegas, where I’m presently teaching at the University of Nevada and living in a faculty suite in a student dorm. Escaping the New York winter, for which my karma has substituted an unseasonably chilly period here — even rainy, overcast, gray some of the time. But still warmer than back home right now.
This two-room apartment has everything I could ask for except cooking facilities. For those purposes it offers a mini-fridge and microwave, period. I can’t afford to eat out every night, and what surrounds the campus, predictably, are mostly fast-food outlets. So I’ve purchased an electric wok, a blender, a toaster-oven, and a rice cooker, enabling me to prepare adequate basic meals. But I don’t have my pantry, my spice rack, my utensils, serious refrigerator space . . . so, while I’m not even a little homesick after six weeks out here, I really miss my kitchen.
Last night, while heating up some canned soup, I recalled a meal I made before I left in mid-January. As a bachelor, I cook for myself all the time, of course, but I do so perfunctorily, for the most part. I enjoy cooking for others, always have, going back to my childhood when my parents trained me to make them Sunday morning breakfast in bed. I loved doing that, coordinating bacon and pancakes or waffles and juice and coffee, and thought it wonderful that I could have this competence and fine that my parents could enjoy the luxury of it. (I’ve since made breakfast in bed for many people. I can count the number of times people have breakfast in bed for me on the fingers of my two hands.)
Arrangements for this stretch of time away preoccupied me in early January, so I hadn’t made myself a meal (as distinguished from simply putting together something for myself to eat) in some time. I’d done a bit of shopping that afternoon, half an hour in the Rosebank A&P, but I actually hadn’t thought about dinner, hadn’t bought anything for it. So I came downstairs from the office around 7 p.m. fully expecting simply to throw something together once again. Pamila, my just-arrived house-sitter from Toronto, was going out to spend the evening with a friend, so there wasn’t even the opportunity to cook for her as a motivation.
I think what actually sparked the end result were the new plates. Down near the St, George ferry terminal I’d passed, on the bus, several times, Fish’s Eddy, a job-lot ceramics outlet run out of a former car-repair shop. From the bus windows I’d seen it and wondered — just a bare, undecorated cement cubicle with a roll-down metal front, nothing fancy. One Friday afternoon, while on an errand in Tompkinsville, I’d taken the opportunity to stop in.
I was just looking, had only fourteen dollars with me, didn’t expect to buy anything. The dishes were simply stacked around — on the floor, on top of upturned crates, on a few tables. There was a rough counter with stacks of newspaper for wrapping, plastic grocery sacks for carrying, a cellotape wrapping gun. The man behind it looked busy. I started to browse.
Restaurant ware, exclusively, mostly ceramics with some glassware. All new, but broken lots and seconds. Plates, cups, saucers, side dishes, platters. Heavy-duty, hard-to-break stuff, the kind I’ve always liked and picked up frequently in second-hand stores: It doesn’t break easily, or often, and has a reassuring solidity. Beyond that, I associate it with diners, with the idea of simple, ample fare, breakfast on the road. I don’t need to draw you a picture.
Roaming around this space, about twenty feet square, I marked some areas worthy of further investigation as I took a rough survey of the options. In passing, I met the eye of the manager, nodded and exchanged a grunted hello. He continued his work.
Eventually, after about ten minutes, I concentrated my attention on the area to the left of the door as one walks in. It had stacks of big dinner plates, eight or nine stacks, each about 18 incheshigh. These plates were made of the same vitreous china, but they were not the traditional diner plates. These were the new dinner plates of the ‘80s and ‘90s: about the size of an LP record, 12 inches or so across, with wide, variously decorated borders. The areas to hold the food measured about nine inches across. Most of them had no mates, or only one or two. He’d priced them at two dollars each.
I love those plates. They represent a kind of cuisine that’s a mix between the comfort-food aspect of the diner and the elegance of nouvelle cuisine. They’re a form of frame for food as art, the decoratively organized one-dish meal — our era’s version of the blue-plate special. At the same time, their proportions are such that they guarantee ample quantity. I suppose they also make me think of my estranged son, Edward, the chef.
In any case, I spent some time going through these plates. I decided that I didn’t want a matching set, but a mixed lot, so I ended up picking out four, each distinctive, each different. I also found an oval platter that appealed to me, in a quite different pattern, and a small round plate with a green fleur-de-lis motif. The lot came to ten dollars, no tax. The vendor put paper between the four plates, wrapped them around twice with plastic tape, taped the platter and smaller plate together, stuck the lot in a double plastic grocery bag, and I departed.
They sat on a chair in my kitchen all weekend. Then I took them out, washed them, and admired them. They stood waiting in the drying rack this particular evening when I came into the kitchen.
What I had on hand for ingredients included several eggs, half an avocado, a red onion, a sweet red pepper, some fresh sour cream from the supermarket. In the refrigerator I found also a last slice of broiled New Jersey tomato that needed eating soon.
I sliced the pepper and the onion on the cutting board, poured the juice from the broiled tomatoes into a small frying pan, amplified it with a few spoonsful of olive oil, and added the cut vegetables — all the pepper, half the onion. I minced the other half-onion more finely and put it into a ceramic bowl, one of a pair that my friend Nina and I had purchased during our three-month stay in Tucson several years ago.
I cracked two eggs one-handed, a trick I taught myself a few years back (girls go wild) and put them into a small shaker, to which I added a few spoonsful of cool water and some tarragon. Shook it up and let it sit. Pitted and peeled the half avocado, cut it into chunks, threw it on top of the minced onion, augmented it with a slosh of bottled lemon juice, some garlic salt, and several hearty jolts of salsa habañera. Smushed it up with a potato masher for a slightly chunky guacamole.
After checking the simmering vegetables, I added to them that remaining tomato slice. I took my omelette pan off the hook by the stove, set a high flame going beneath it, threw in a pat of butter and, once it melted and began to bubble, shook the eggs again and poured them in, covering the pan with a handy enameled pot lid.
So far none of this was extraordinary. But I went to pick out a plate, decided to use one of the new ones, put it down on the table, and something changed.
The omelette cooked up fast, I could smell it getting crisp, just the way I like it. I’d planned to put some sour cream inside it and fold it in half, but its circular shape clicked in my head, so instead I flipped it over to brown slightly on the other side. I turned the heat off under the vegetables. Once the omelette was nicely firm and slightly toasted underneath, I slid it onto the new plate, whose rim bore a kind of vaguely folk-art, arguably southwestern motif in black and white. It fit perfectly, a golden-brown circle, with a thin circle of white ceramic between it and the plate’s rim.
Onto the center of the omelette I scooped a layer of the red vegetables, clustered in the middle. In the center of that diversely red area I dropped a goodly gob of pure white sour cream. And around the edges, between the omelette and the border, I placed dollops of the guacamole.
Then I sat down to admire my handiwork and eat my dinner. I gave it my full attention. It turned out both beautiful and delicious, and I took great pleasure in eating it.
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