Cooking & Screaming - Hardcover

Kane, Adrienne

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1416587977 ISBN 13: 9781416587972

Publisher: Gallery Books, 2009

Synopsis

Kane, Adrienne

About this title

About the Author:

Adrienne Kane is the author and photographer of the popular food blog Nosheteria.com, which has a permanent link on Huffington Post. She is a food writer, recipe developer, and food photographer whose work has appeared in Natural Health, Chow, and Digs, and on FoodandWine.com. Her personal essay, "Bring Tenacity to a Boil: Then Serve" is featured in Note to Self: 30 Women on Hardship, Humiliation, Heartbreak, and Overcoming It All. She currently lives and cooks in New Haven, CT.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Chapter 1

Tagliatelle with Grated Zucchini

Pasta. Nourishing, quick, easy, and wholly satisfying. I practicallylived off the stuff in college. This recipe has remained one of thevestiges of my college days, with good reason. The zucchini becomesan altogether different vegetable upon grating -- as velvety andsumptuous as any vegetable can become.

2 tablespoons unsalted butter

1 tablespoon olive oil

1 small dried chili, like chili d'arbol, or a healthy pinch of red pepper flakes

2 1/ 2 cups grated zucchini

2 cloves garlic, thinly sliced salt and pepper to taste

1/ 2 cup heavy cream

8 ounces dried tagliatelle pasta

1/ 4 cup minced fresh flat- leaf parsley

1/ 2 cup grated Parmesan cheese

1/ 4-1/ 2 cup reserved pasta cooking water

In a large skillet, over medium heat, melt the butter and olive oil. Crumble the chili and sauté briefly. Turn the heat to mediumhigh and add the zucchini, garlic, salt, and pepper, tossing to combine. The zucchini should be glossy and completely coated in the butter and olive oil. Flatten into a large pancake so that the zucchini begins to exude liquid. Continue sautéing and flattening for 8-10 minutes, until the liquid is gone and the zucchini begins to brown and has reduced in volume by a third.

Add the heavy cream and bring to a simmer. Reduce the heat to low and cook for 1-2 minutes, allowing the flavors to marry. Meanwhile cook the pasta according to the package instructions until al dente. Toss the pasta with the sauce. Add the parsley, cheese, and any of the pasta cooking water that might be needed to make the sauce loose and flowing. Taste for seasoning and serve with extra Parmesan cheese.

serves 2, with leftovers

Baby Food

I had been eating a lot of pasta lately, in all of its many forms. As college life got busier, my meals became increasingly brief, tossed together with ease, eaten, and oftentimes forgotten.

Through the back windows in my kitchen, the sun illuminated the pile of dishes resting in the sink. I will get to those, I thought. I had been a bit frantic lately; my rear end had seemed fused to my desk chair as i spent hours in front of my computer working on my thesis. The end was in sight; this life of imminent papers and stacks of textbooks was coming to a close. My days as a student were coming to a close.

It was a tome, or at least it was in my narrow, nearly postcollegiate world. I left the warmth of the kitchen, and walking to my desk, pulled the final pages of my paper from the printer, neatly placing them into the stack. I grew proud and hungry. grabbing a bowl of pasta I had made the night before, I took a seat on the floor. I was surprised by my eagerness to lunch on leftovers. But this tagliatelle was one of my favorites. There are certain foods that take on a different identity when reheated, one that makes them exciting and new, if those adjectives can even be used to describe a bowl of pasta. This pasta was blanketed in a pale, creamy green sauce, like a light pesto, but with the smooth, luxurious flavor of another pasta altogether. In the moment's respite I had the night before, I stood grating zucchini into piles of shaggy shards. The vegetable had nearly melted, and its traces, combined with a splash of cream, turned the contents of the pan into a sumptuous sauce. By the next day, the pasta grew drier, soaking up the cream and leaving behind bits of fiery chili while the zucchini clung steadfastly to each noodle.

I slurped, then chewed. In my right hand was my senior thesis, "The Memoir as a Means to Freudian Psychoanalysis as Seen in Nabokov's Speak, Memory." I had loved this book, voluntarily becoming lost in Nabokov's language for these final weeks of college. My life had become a to and fro, stripped down to the bare essentials. Days were spent in the modern dance studio; in the evenings, I would hunker down in my apartment, curling up on my couch with my dog- eared copy of Speak, Memory and stacks of Freudian reference books.

I had just enough time to put my pasta bowl in the sink, grab a sweater to ward off the chill of Berkeley in the late spring, and meet Maia, my best friend, who had diligently agreed to give my thesis a final read before I turned it in.

I hopped into the car, making my way down the hill to the flatlands near the university. I passed the elementary school, the playground empty and swing set still on this Sunday afternoon. Letting my elbow rest on the open car window, I allowed the cool breezes of May in the Bay Area to mingle with the car's stale air. The wisteria were in bloom, the lavender vines drooping heavily along the entrance to a stately brick church near my apartment. Farther down the hill, the Greene and Greene house, an emblem of the Arts and Crafts movement, with its oxidized copper trim and pagoda-esque eaves, stood alongside the frat houses, ramshackle, littered with beer bottles, and lawn furniture poised on the roof. Berkeley had become my home. It was a place where I was given the opportunity to encounter a variety of different people.

Sitting next to the grubby college student, the politically active classmate, the jocks, and the theater people in giant lecture halls, I steered my way through these countless niches but never truly found my own. Being at Berkeley was as much about a solid college education as it was a place to try on identities. It was difficult to find the ideal, but I had discovered a few things about myself along the way. I loved to dance; I could curl up with a good book for hours; and nothing was more restorative to me than a homecooked meal. I was young and unencumbered. Living in Berkeley offered me the freedom of endless possibilities. But these endless possibilities also kept me wide-eyed in the middle of the night, raising the question: What do I want to do with the rest of my life?

Maia met me on the corner of Haste and Telegraph, right near Amoeba Records, which was blaring a forgotten hit from the sixties. Over the past four years, I had spent countless Sunday afternoons there, thumbing through the overstuffed racks while some ultraobscure band played in the background.

Maia was punctual as usual, and we walked to get a cup of coffee near campus. Prattling on about our weekends, we traveled arm in arm, as we often did, creating a barrier against the students stumbling home single-mindedly during finals week. Introduced through a mutual friend, Maia and I had become fast friends when we both stayed to enjoy Berkeley in the summertime. When the students go home for their break, Berkeley becomes a ghost town, and Maia and I enjoyed the quiet. I am not sure if it comes from the warm weather, or maybe it is the length of the days, but everything seems to move at warp speed during the summer months. Maia and I had many late-night talks and shared many evenings cooking elaborate meals for no one but the two of us. Now, almost two years later, she had agreed to proofread my thesis, despite the craze of finals week for her as well. Maia was so articulate, even her slang was grammatically correct.

Telegraph Avenue, the main street leading toward UC Berkeley, offers an odd assortment of typical college town shops, bookstores, and retailers selling "Cal gear," mixed in with the unsavory sort of tattoo parlors, tobacco emporiums with giant hookahs in the window, and ancient Mexican restaurants serving grilled burritos. I had traveled these blocks so many times that it seemed the sidewalks had grown accustomed to my footprint. Maia and I pushed our way past rows of vendors selling tie- dyed T- shirts toward Wall Berlin, the leftist coffeehouse that had the blackest coffee. We were only blocks away when I casually mentioned that I didn't feel well.

Suddenly my vision narrowed. My surroundings were spinning, my mouth went bone-dry, and my stomach felt as if I had ridden on a rickety carnival roller coaster after consuming too many corn dogs. So I sat down on the curb of Telegraph Avenue. Littered with trash and cigarette butts, smelling of a mixture of urine and patchouli-scented incense, Telegraph Avenue is not a place where anyone should be sitting, let alone lying down, yet I then assumed a prone position. As Maia watched me drift off, my body beginning to go limp on the sidewalk, she called 911. Moments later, the ambulance came and she rode with me to the hospital, preparing to make the phone call that no one ever wants to make.

It wasn't one of those phone calls that wake a mother in the middle of the night, when the ringing of the phone at 3:00 a.m. signals doom, but that phone call, alerting my mother that her youngest daughter was taken to the hospital at 4:00 p.m., was met with the same amount of dread. Maia told my mother that she had gotten me to the hospital, that I wasn't feeling well, that the doctors hadn't told her anything yet. My mother told my father to stay at home and wait for her call. "I'm sure everything is fine," she said, and then she left to pick up my sister Jennifer, who was living only fifteen minutes away.

It had always been just my sister and me. She was six years my senior,and from the time that I could walk, I trotted around behind Jennifer. I idolized her, even through those gawky middle school years. Even with the pain of bad haircuts and elasticized shorts, I thought that she was beautiful. When Jennifer was driving in high school, I looked forward to her picking me up after school, the latest New Wave band blaring out of the speaker of her petite Ford Tempo. That May day, she made the drive over the Bay Bridge to the East Bay with my mother. It seemed that everyone was out for a Sunday drive, as my grandma used to say. A trip that should have taken forty-five minutes turned into an anxious two-hour journey.

As they drove, I weaved in and out of consciousness. My recollections of that day are spotty. I do not remember the whirling lights of the ambulance, or Maia making the call to my parents' house, or calling my boyfriend, Brian, who also rushed t...

About this edition

• Publisher: Gallery Books
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 1416587977
• ISBN 13: 9781416587972
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288