Argh Ink

The days are growing shorter and colder, and the sky has turned gray and bleak, and it’s Thanksgiving Day, and in the fine tradition of my foremothers, I cooked fat and starch. Not for anybody, though. My family gets together between the two holidays so we can concentrate all the stress on one day. Makes it more special that way. And on that day, I make a Coke ham which nobody can screw up. But today, I am making turkey and dressing and gravy which I love and which can only be made in November and December because the rest of the year it just doesn’t taste right, but which can be easily botched, especially the gravy part. And since I am trying to eat more sensibly—not easy if you’re me—I used olive oil instead of butter and high fiber whole wheat bread instead of white in the dressing. This is the kind of thing that would get me shot if I were cooking for my family—last year I screwed up the chocolate pie and my brother bit into it and screamed (he takes his pie seriously)–but it’s just for me, so I can do this.

The truth is, the dressing needed the butter and the squooshy white bread. What I got was still dressing, and the spices and the onion and celery were still in there (where I come from, we don’t do none of that commie dressing with apples or sausage or god forbid chestnuts), but there was a definite this-is-good-for-you flavor which, as the folks at Dove and Krispy Kreme know, is not a draw. But it didn’t matter because the gravy turned out just fine, based as it is on turkey fat, and I realized that while I like dressing a lot, it’s really just a delivery system for the gravy. In fact, my Theory of Holiday Cooking can be summed up in two words: More Gravy.

I blame this, like everything else, on my family.

I come from good solid German stock (emphasis on the “solid”) and the holiday meals of my youth could be described as “starch with gravy.” Atkins would have had a stroke if he’d seen my Thanksgiving plate as a kid. South Beach would have barred us at the city limits. (Well, South Beach would have anyway. My family winters the same place they summer: Central Ohio. Our summer place is the gazebo in the back yard.) It started with turkey, of course, both white and dark, and mashed potatoes heavy with cream and butter, and dressing also glistening with butter, and thick slices of bread-so-white-you-could-go-into-a-diabetic-coma-just-looking-at-it, and when the plate was full, the adult who was setting you up to be fat your whole life would pour gravy over everything. By the time they put your meal in front of you, it was pretty much a lake of brown sauce with some lumps of protein and starch in it.

It got worse if you were sitting next to Great Aunt Clara.

I loved my Great Aunt Clara, now very unfortunately deceased. Sometimes I look around and think I may have modeled my life on hers. She was a school teacher in inner-city Cleveland back in the twenties and thirties, and in the summer she traveled all over the country by herself. She loved her job and never married, and when she retired in her fifties, she kept on traveling and lived in a succession of beautiful little houses filled with the things she’d collected, remembrances of a life well-lived. While the rest of the women in my family always looked like they were an eyelash away from taking an ax to somebody, Aunt Clara was pretty serene. The only time she became a maniac was when she got near food.

I don’t know a lot about my German heritage, but based on my family, we feel about food the way the French feel about sex: There’s no such thing as too much and you should give it to a lot of people. Aunt Clara was a master at this. If you were sitting next to her, making good headway on that lake of gravy, she’d spot the places where the china was showing through and swoop down on you with the ladle. Meals next to Aunt Clara were Sisyphean: You kept eating and eating and just when you thought you saw the end, you had to start all over again. Combine this with my grandmother’s insistence on the Clean Plate Club, and it’s a miracle any of us survived childhood.

So fast forward fifty years and I’m now a gravy junkie. I’m starting to think that maybe I should just skip the turkey and dressing and get a straw. The one thing I have given up is Gravy Bread, the fine old family recipe that consists of the afore-mentioned Heart Attack Bread covered in gravy, my favorite food as a child but you have to draw the line somewhere. Also, very few restaurants serve that. Like, none. But gravy and I will go on forever, like Celine Dion’s heart in that song. (And probably in real life; I bet she never eats gravy.) In fact, I make better gravy than my grandmother did (she’s dead, I can say that). I follow the fine old family recipe in Rick Rodgers’ Thanksgiving 101, one of the greatest books ever written, much better than Moby Dick, because the gravy is spectacular. Labor intensive, but spectacular. If you, too, have a gravy habit, by all means, get this book.

I’d write more about gravy—it’s like Proust and his madelines only not–but I have to go stir the turkey stock I have simmering on the stove. Because after you’ve carved the turkey, you have this huge carcass, and you can’t throw it out because it’s like Gravy Seed, so you sauté it with onion and celery and parsley and thyme and bay and then cover it with water and simmer it down to thicken . . .

So I have to go, but I did have one Deep Thought. You know how the male poets are always rhapsodizing over youth and springtime and mourning their lost Salad Days when the sap was rising and so were they? Well, salad leaves me cold, and I wouldn’t have those days back as a gift. I love the age I am now (although a little plastic surgery wouldn’t hurt), and I’m thinking this is about when Aunt Clara retired and hit her stride, in fact when most of the women I know are really coming into their own. So I’m thinking that maybe for women, it’s not the springtime of our lives when we shine, it’s when the days grow shorter and darker, and we turn on the lamps inside and light a fire and put the stock on to simmer against the coming cold. I think maybe women bloom in their Gravy Days. I am, anyway.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Usually I craft these blog entries, rewrite them, try to hone them so they make sense (except for the Trudy entries) but I’m behind so I’m just going to zap this one out so the people who are chanting in the background—yes, there are people on the JCF list who are typing “Blog, blog, blog,” believe it or not—will shut up and go away. Although now that I’ve responded to them they’ll just keep doing it because I’ve reinforced them. One damn thing after another.

Why haven’t I blogged? Well, I’ve been BUSY. Busy trying to figure out Trudy (and I love her), busy trying to find things in my office, and now busy in New York, the greatest city in the world, trying to get business and social stuff done. I’m in the West Village in this great apartment in this wonderful brownstone, and I’m in love with it and with the Village. I came into town because I needed to meet with my agent and editor, and to have lunch with Mollie and Dale and Gail and their friend Susan at the Knickerbocker Grill where the waiter kissed me so I’m going back, and then Katherine Ramsland caught the train in from PA and we had a Moroccan girl’s-night-out dinner party at Dale’s. (Dale gave me the address and I said, “What apartment number?” and she said, “There’s a doorman. Do you think we live like ANIMALS?”) Dinner was wonderful except that Katherine would keep talking about the undead. I finally had to say loudly during dessert, “I’M EATING HERE” so she didn’t get blood all over my flourless chocolate cake. Then Dale told a great story about when she was in Africa that I cannot repeat here without her permission but it’s a beauty, involving a famous person and sex. Then Gail talked about her three marriages, which she compares to Gilligan’s Island: The professor, the millionaire, and the gynecologist. Yes, I missed the gynecologist episode, too. The important thing is, Gail didn’t.

And then Bob came into town so we could get our publicity photos taken. I hate getting my photo taken, so I’m awful to work with, but Bob is much, much worse. Of course Mollie was here to run everything including Bob, which I have to admit I enjoyed the hell out of. She showed up with four shopping bags of clothes, looked at what Bob was wearing, and said, “Strip.” He tried on the jeans she got him, came out of the bathroom in his old ones, and said, “They were too big.” She said, “Show me.” Not a woman to trifle with, my daughter. He changed back into them so she could see exactly how they didn’t fit so she could get him the right size which she did by the next morning. She said, “Did you bring a belt?” and he said, “I don’t wear a belt,” and she handed him a belt. Now he wears a belt. He made a brief fuss about a corduroy jacket, but it was futile. In the end, she had him looking really good, GQ good. Not that he wasn’t perfectly fine before, of course, I am not criticizing. (Note to anyone who was in Maui: If I ever get my hands on that damn volcano shirt, it’s history.)

And then the photo shoot started with the amazingly talented Jen Maler. (See www.jenmaler.com.) Mollie and Jen made Bob try on everything she’d bought for him until they had a look they liked, which I enjoyed until they started on me and then I became Difficult, so I’m sure they wanted to smack me. And while I was refusing to wear the jewelry they’d brought, a very nice hair-and-make-up guy was straightening Bob’s hair. When I realized what was going on, I said, “Hold it.” I mean, that’s like looking at Chaplin and saying, “You know, we have to do something about those eyebrows.” Hundreds of women have swooned over that curly hair (while I cackled in the background); you do not get rid of it for a publicity shot. We’re trying to sell books here.

Of course, Mollie was in charge, so they straightened it anyway. During it all, Bob looked like my dog Bernie does when I’m giving him a bath. He hates it, he’s in hell, but he knows he’s trapped and he has to do it. I kept handing him beer all day and that helped, but he still looked at me like a kicked puppy. And the thing is, the pictures Jen took of him were fantastic, although she went nuts trying to get him to smile. Mollie said when she and Jen went through them, 90% of mine were unusable because I was talking or making faces or my head was out of the picture because I was lurching about, but almost all of Bob’s were good except that he had the exact same expression. Best line of the day: Jen to Bob: “You have the range of expression of Kevin Costner.”

But now everybody’s gone and we’re both exhausted and in bed although not together (see earlier blog entry: Things I’m Not). Bob’s in the living room on the sofa bed with the sliding doors to the dining room shut watching Firefly on his computer, and I’m in the bedroom with my sliding doors to the dining room shut answering my e-mail and typing this blog entry. Every now and then somebody e-mails me something that Bob needs copied on, and I e-mail it to him, and I can hear this little echo-y voice from the living room saying, “You’ve got mail!” Then I laugh. This is interspersed with Bob’s trips to the kitchen for more beer—he’s still recovering from the photo shoot—during which he says through the door between the kitchen and the bedroom, “You’re pathetic.”

Sometimes I think, maybe I shouldn’t write this stuff in the blog. If I kept my mouth shut, people would think I have an exciting, glamorous life. But then those other people start with the “Blog, blog, blog,” and I tell the truth. So like I said, this really isn’t a well-written entry, and I apologize for that. But by God, it’s a blog entry.

Now stop chanting and go away.

(Note: I wrote this last week and then couldn’t find my password to post it to Blogger. So to update: Bob likes his hair straight and wants to know how to keep it like that. Everybody went nuts for the pictures and SMP picked out one they love for the book jacket: I’m giddy with exhaustion and Bob’s smiling and looking relaxed with his chin on the table because it’s five o’clock and he’s been drinking since 10AM. We both got great solo head shots (for me, this is a miracle and I give Jen and Mollie all the credit) but the ones that are the most interesting are the ones nobody will see because we can’t use them because we’re making faces.

Like this:

Or this:

Or this:

But if you ever need a head shot done, call Jen Maler. She’s a genius with the patience of a saint who also gave me permission to post these on the blog for your amusement. Also, she’s good with picking out hairstyles; just look at Bob.)