Off the Menu Read online

  So what new ingredients do sirens play with?

  Looks like I’m talking your eyes off.

  RJ

  Hello, RJ—

  I am intrigued by this Banana Salad of which you speak. It sounds either very Southern or otherworldly. Possibly both. Or possibly that is redundant. My latest culinary playthings have been very unique and inspiring. Korean black garlic, which is whole heads of garlic that have been aged until the cloves inside turn black and chewy. … They taste like a combination of mild roasted garlic, dates, and balsamic vinegar. And Mugolio, which is Italian sweet syrup made from the sap of pinecone buds. I also recently was given some truly outstanding red grapefruit marmalade from Sicily. My toast has never been happier; it tastes like chunky Campari. It must be that whole pamplemousse thing again. … Anything in the grapefruit family is thrilling to me these days.

  Sounds like your work has been busy, which must be both a blessing and a curse these days. Hopefully it is something you enjoy. Running to a meeting—we are voting on lasagna recipes. At nine in the morning. I have a very strange job.

  Alana

  __________

  Alana—

  Looking at the thread, I appear to be running off at the fingers, so I’ll try (probably unsuccessfully) to self-edit. My father is a Lutheran minister, and we moved around a lot in Tennessee when I was very young, mostly around Nashville. I managed to finish my grammar school education in Nashville, and then he was hired at the University of Tennessee in Memphis to teach classes in comparative religion, and to serve as the minister and counselor for their Lutheran chapel on campus, so I went to high school there, and my folks have been in Memphis ever since.

  I will visit them there for a few days prior to Christmas when my only sister and her kids will be visiting from Atlanta. Couldn’t get out of the near South fast enough, so left for Chicago eleven minutes after graduation to attend the University of Chicago, where I majored in art history, and then went to the School of the Art Institute to do an MFA in visual and critical studies. Every time I move away from Chicago (three years in NY to get it out of my system, two years in Kalamazoo, Michigan, to make a lot of money and be miserable), I return, so I consider myself a Chicago Guy. Learned that NY is exhausting and expensive and much better as a vacation destination than a home, and that Michigan is Kentucky with crappy weather.

  Banana Salad does not truck with modern fussiness or strange sci-fi machinations. Thin, vinegar-y mayonnaise, whole banana quartered lengthwise, crushed Spanish peanuts. Dunk banana in mayonnaise. Dredge in peanuts. Voila. Everyone cringes when they hear about it; nobody eats just one.

  And let’s get to a key point. Pamplemousse is not only truly my favorite French word, it may be the best single word in any pronounceable language. I beg every person I know who gets a dog or has a child to name the animal Pamplemousse. You can confirm this at some point. Your latent urges aren’t about grapefruit. They are about a primal connection to all things pamplemousse.

  RJ

  RJ—

  I’m a native Chicagoan, so I know how addictive this city is. I might have mentioned already that my parents emigrated right after they got married, so I was born here, but my dad, like you, loves his adopted city with a fierce passion. I may have mentioned that I too have only one sister, two years younger, and she is married with two little girls. But I also have two older brothers, both married, and both with three boys. All the kids are under the age of nine, which makes family gatherings loud and messy. But luckily they are all really great kids, smart and funny, and generally well-behaved. Which is how I like my kids … smart, funny, well-behaved, and belonging to someone else! I started at Northwestern as a business major, which was what my parents wanted. The trade-off was that if I stayed home for college I could do a semester abroad. I spent the first half of my junior year in Paris, came home and promptly dropped out and enrolled in culinary school. I am the executive culinary assistant for a TV chef, so I spend my time developing recipes, testing techniques and products, coauthoring cookbooks and the like. The work is interesting, the hours are weird, but I love what I do, and am grateful to be able to make a living at it, despite being a college dropout.

  I have a small, weird-looking dog who is letting me know that I have to take him out before we have a problem, which is good because apparently I can’t Reader’s Digest my e-mails either! Do you have any pets?

  Alana

  A—

  May I call you A? As in A’int you grand, and A-List, and A for effort and any other positive thing you can associate with A’s. I do have one cat. His name is JP (for Jackson Purcell). He is fifteen years old, and in sprightly health, much to my chagrin. He is a devil in a cat suit and I let him loose in the neighborhood every day in hopes he won’t return, but he keeps coming back. My ex went out to the farmer’s market for broccoli one day and came home with him instead. I would have preferred broccoli. When we split it was decided that he was too old to move to a different home. I mentioned that she was a lot older than the cat and she was moving, but that did not go over terribly well. I have reluctantly come to love him in spite of his horrible personality. I will miss him when he is gone. But not for long.

  I wish you a lovely evening whatever your plans, and hope that I get to meet this dog of yours one day, as I have always preferred canines as furry companions. (See what I did there? Because if I get to meet the dog, then I get to meet YOU, which is rapidly becoming a major focus of my day and a serious distraction from my work.)

  RJ

  “Barry, this guy is IN MY HEAD.”

  “He sounds fabuloso. What on earth are you worried about?”

  I chew on the end of my pen, a horrible habit I picked up when I stopped biting my nails. All chefs are orally fixated, we suck straws and chew toothpicks and smoke like fiends and bite our nails till the cuticles bleed. I’m down to just pen chewing, which I find the least offensive of the chefly jawing, and is only bad when I occasionally get too aggressive, which you can tell by the stain of ink in the corner of my mouth. “I am worried about his fabulosity. No guy is this great right off the bat, no red flags. And he is COMPLETELY un-Googleable. I can’t find one thing online about him, no Facebook, no MySpace, no articles or references. And you know, in this day and age, if you can’t Google-stalk someone, it is because they have taken great PAINS to not have an online presence. So what is he hiding? Is he using a fake name so that I can’t find him? Witness protection? What?”

  “Do you even HEAR yourself? You sound like an insane person.”

  “Because I am having a really hard time being calm and casual about this, and we know what happens when I get too excited about a situation with POTENTIAL.”

  “Oh, yeah. That isn’t so good historically, is it?”

  No. It isn’t.

  8

  The movies have ruined me. Don’t get me wrong, I love movies. But as someone who spent my formative years watching an endless combination of John Hughes teen flicks and early Meg Ryan romantic comedies, I’m sort of broken when it comes to dating. My expectations aren’t just high—they’re stoned out of their gourds with one hand on the Mallomars and Pink Floyd on the stereo. Deep down I sort of have always believed that my Mr. Right will appear outside my window, boom box akimbo, blasting Peter Gabriel. That he will come running to find me before midnight on New Year’s Eve to tell me that when you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with someone, you want the rest of your life to start right away. That we will “meet cute,” that he will woo me in some silly and utterly romantic fashion, and that, despite a setback or two, we will eventually live happily ever after.

  When I met Andres in Barcelona during the last month of my fellowship and he wooed me in a way that only a Latin man can, I completely got caught up in the amazing movie-ness of it. The late nights spinning around the city on his classic Vespa. His murmured passionate endearments, in softly purring Spanish. Taking me home to meet his family, a raucous group so like my own, that it m
ade me deeply homesick and powerfully nostalgic. My parents met at the wedding of a mutual friend, and were married themselves within weeks. When we fall, we fall hard. So when Andres begged me to marry him three weeks later and said he would move home with me, I said yes, and we wed in a tiny judge’s office, with a family-dinner celebration at his parents’ home, and had a three-day honeymoon in Majorca en route back to Chicago, where I had to try to explain him to my family and all of my friends. Once he had successfully learned English by watching a lot of daytime television it became clear that language had not really been our barrier to communication, and that we had nothing in common. He refused to find work, was indifferent to my family and dismissive of my friends, and began to spend late nights out, coming home smelling of booze and sickly sweet perfumes that I tried to ignore. Once he had gotten his green card and completely ruined my credit rating, we divorced, and I was thrust into a dating scene that I was ill-prepared for.

  One of the problems with loving all those classic rom coms, is that it puts me in a constant state of observing my romantic life with an eye toward “the story.” And frequently, it backfires. I’m so convinced that I’m supposed to have some sort of adorable first meeting with the soon-to-appear love of my life, I forget that I am not Meg Ryan, circa 1987, and I am just a normal girl and that it might not be guaranteed. I had not really considered when I decided to pursue this odd career of mine, which keeps me in a fairly small social circle and is rife with weird work hours, that there are not, in fact, a whole lot of single men wandering aimlessly around my apartment on any given day. So meeting guys has always been, to say the least, difficult.

  A couple of summers ago, after a wine-soaked lunch with Barry, I hailed a cab to take me home. And when I got in, I sat on something uncomfortable. A BlackBerry. Not my BlackBerry.

  I put the treasure in my purse, arrived at my destination, and took Dumpling for a walk. While wandering the neighborhood, Dumpling managing to mark every tree on the planet, I thought of the BlackBerry and my pulse quickened.

  This was it. This was the way it happens.

  I will call the first name on the call-back list, explain that I have someone’s phone, and give my number. A voice like honey over gravel will call me back, thank me for saving his life, and take my address. And then a tall, handsome, salt-and-pepper gent with a confident bearing will arrive at my house, tell me I’m amazing, and offer to take me to dinner to thank me for my Good Samaritan ways. We will talk easily until the restaurant closes, head somewhere for a nightcap, and fall madly in love. For his birthday I will order a cake in the shape of a BlackBerry. He’ll propose on the corner of Michigan Avenue and Washington, where I got in the cab. At our wedding we will toast Yellow Cab number 1472 for bringing us together.

  I pressed redial, and got a gentleman named Robert, who announced that he was a colleague of the phone’s owner at Rush University Medical School … so now I know that not only is my innamorato a doctor, but a professor type as well. He praises my good nature, takes my number, and promises to get the info to my future hubby.

  I head home, chuffed. The phone rings. A voice like honey over gravel thanks me for saving his life, takes my address, and announces he will be by around six. He jokes that he would call me from the car to tell me when he was close, but I have his phone. Sigh.

  I primp. Not excessively, but I spruce up. Change clothes, add some makeup, tweak the hair, floss. At six fifteen I hear the gate unlatch, and Dumpling begins his fearsome barking. I peek out the window. The gentleman heading up my walkway is tallish, handsome-ish, salt-and-peppery. I take a deep breath.

  The bell rings. I go to answer it. He smiles broadly and hands me a small gift bag. “For you. For renewing my faith in people.” As he hands the bag to me, I catch out of the corner of my eye a glinting sparkle.

  Of his wedding ring.

  Fuckety fuck fuck FUCK!

  He left with his phone, and I came inside to unwrap my consolation prize.

  A pound of chocolate-covered raisins. A pound of Swedish Fish. A pound of salted cashews. Three of my favorite food groups.

  So now, not only don’t I get a husband, I have to sit home alone and listen to my ass grow. Great.

  Second on the list for us hopeful romantics, in terms of finding love, is the inevitable return of a lost love or a past crush. A while back, I joined Facebook. Shortly thereafter, I received a “friend request” from Marshall Jordan, who noted that we “went to high school together.”

  Oh. My. God.

  Marshall Jordan was my personal (it should be mentioned, totally unrequited) Jake Ryan. He was a senior my freshman year and, due to some academic glitch, was in my algebra class. He sat behind me. I was madly in love with him. I was also, at the time, madly in love with about six other guys, but during third period at least, my love was only for Marshall. Emily, Lacey, and Mina all had Spanish that period, leaving me alone in the class with Marshall, so I spent my time trying to be winsome and mysteriously appealing, giving him the rare but fraught-with-meaning look. In retrospect I am sure he probably thought I was either lightly damaged or gassy. But, he was sweet to me, totally uninterested in romance, but at least friendly.

  I looked at the friend request, from a man I had not seen in twenty years.

  This was it. This was how it happens.

  I will respond, we will reconnect, we will meet up, and it will be easy and fun, and soon we will fall madly in love and he will propose to me on the steps of Whitney Young High School, and we will live happily ever after.

  We began an e-mail reconnection, during which he reminded me that I had written a mushy poem about him. I remembered the poem, but not that I’d had the chutzpah to give it to him. Mortifying. We found out that a friend of mine is a favorite author of his, and planned to meet up at the launch party of his latest book. He hadn’t changed at all, and we fell easily into conversation, reminiscences of days past and talking about what was going on for both of us now. He was charming with my friends, and four of us ended up leaving the party and heading for a late supper and cocktails. He suggested, when I dropped him off well after midnight, that we should “hang out.”

  This is not a good thing for a forty-year-old man to say to a woman. What does that mean? Hanging out? Hanging out like playing PlayStation with a buddy, or hanging out like naked with the Sunday crossword before pancakes?

  I invited him to join me for a soft opening at a new local restaurant. I dressed up. Okay, I brought all my cleavage with me. My friends on the staff told me I looked fantastic, and were duly entertaining, praising me in front of Marshall, and winking at me when he wasn’t looking. The food was amazing; we were invited to hang out after closing with the chef and owners, offered free booze and great food, and I got to introduce him to a bunch of big-name people on the Chicago culinary scene. Our conversation continued to be easy and fun and we laughed a lot. We left the party and went to a bar, and ended up closing the place, talking until nearly two in the morning about everything and nothing. We made a date to “hang out” again, to watch a movie at my house.

  He came over in the afternoon. I bought his favorite beer. We watched the movie. And when it was over, he said he had to go.

  Because he had a date.

  Guess that “hanging out” thing means the same thing to a forty-year-old as it does to a fourteen-year-old. Probably wouldn’t have shaved my legs if that had been clearer.

  You would think that after the Marshall debacle, I would be more careful about how I Facebook. But even the smartest girl, it should be noted, can be tricked.

  A few years ago, a gent named Seth came to the studio for a meeting about some media stuff, and how his company might be of assistance with a project Patrick was doing. He got there early, and I gave him coffee and fresh muffins and we chatted a bit. I thought he was cute, but didn’t think much beyond it.

  A few months later, as this was during my horrible online-dating phase, JDate sent me his profile as someone I might be interested in, a
nd I sent him a note saying essentially, “Ha-ha, JDate thought we were a good match … isn’t that funny?” figuring it was up to him to say, “Maybe they are right!” and ask me out if he was intrigued. He replied that it indeed was funny and a small world and that he hoped I was well and that he would probably see me around one of these days. Message received: not interested. No biggie. We have bumped into each other here and there, always very sweet and friendly, but never sparky.

  So about a year ago he “friends” me on Facebook. I checked out his profile, saw a couple things that I thought were interesting and I sent him a note. It was totally innocuous. He replied immediately and we began catching up via Facebook messages.

  Two days later I got an e-card for Chanukah. Sweet. I sent him a thank-you to his regular e-mail. The next day he sends me an application on Facebook inviting me to find out Which Shakespeare Play Are You? and telling me that he is A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

  The following e-mail correspondence ensued:

  Seth—

  So apparently, I’m Romeo and Juliet.

  I’m not sure how I feel about that, always felt more Much Ado, myself ….

  Alana

  __________

  Alana—

  Hey, you could have turned out to be Titus Andronicus, and no amount of therapy in the world would have undone that one! I figure as long as you don’t engage in double suicide at the end of a date, you’re okay being in the R&J category. Plus, you get swordfights and sex; I get a donkey head.