Stories

No story, memoir, recipe or review here…just a list.  My food list.  There are certainly a few people who won’t understand this, like those who don’t wake up thinking about what they’re going to eat that day or the unfortunate man I once met who had no sense of taste or smell.  But if you’re reading One for the Table, you’re undoubtedly a foodie, bon vivant, epicure, connoisseur, gastronome, gourmet, gourmand, grazer or nosher – and you will understand.


First food I ever loved:
Gerber baby butternut squash

Favorite dishes my mother used to make:
Breaded veal cutlets
Spaghetti with her homemade meat sauce
Fry beef sandwiches (the kosher answer to a BLT)
Mac and cheese (yup, made with Velveeta)

Food I disliked as a kid and love as an adult:
Beets

Food I loved as a kid and dislike as an adult:
Lamb

Two foods I love that I wish I could live without…but can’t:
Cheese & Bread

It’s amazing that some can go through an entire detective novel or TV series without eating. I’m not talking about readers or Netflix viewers; I’m referring to the characters, for whom the ratio of meals to angst seems to be inversely proportional. The band of agents in Criminal Minds has stopped to eat, by my count, just twice in seven seasons. The Bones team, however, logs almost as many hours in the diner as in the lab. The biggest mystery of the show is why Booth doesn’t weigh 350 pounds.

It seems to be feast or famine for anyone trapped in a crime story. In episodes of the British shows Inspector Lewis and Midsomer Murders, the upper-class villains eat far better than the coppers. The downside for the affluent is that they rarely get out of the dining room alive.

The protagonists of culinary mysteries—from Rex Stout’s gourmand Nero Wolfe to Virginia Rich’s chef Eugenia Potter to Joanne Fluke’s baker Hannah Swenson—enjoy breaking bread as much as breaking cases. Most enforcers, however, subsist on coffee and whiskey (Law & Order—all versions) and the archetypal donut (Dexter).

Yesterday, Shannon gave me a karmic, completely unintentional, gift. He got really, really sick.

And though I can think of eight bazillion things I’d rather do than listen to a man whine in bed, it was an opportunity for me to put a little something in the Bank of Caretaking. My surgery is tomorrow and I know I’ll be making quite a few withdrawals over the next couple of weeks. It’s important to be sure your credit is good before you complete a lot of transactions, you know?

In truth, he slept most of the day, so I got to focus my energy into healing from the kitchen – which is basically my favorite thing to do anyway. Winter has finally arrived in New York (it was in the 50’s last week but won’t get out of the 30’s this week) and I’ve had a taste for something spicy and Asian.

The drinks menu is easy—anything from scotch on the rocks to wine to martinis to Mint Juleps. And we know what brand mad men and women smoke, at least for now—Lucky Strike. But what do mad men and women eat? When they dine out in season four, it’s Chicken Kiev. And when they’re staying in—well, it’s easy to see why they don’t eat in very often.

In the first episode of the new season, Dan’s housekeeper told him that she had made pork chops—surely enough to drive a man not only to drink but to thoughts of an earlier season, when Betty, jumping up from the table to fetch his dinner, perkily asked, “Hot or cold”? Did we ever see Betty eat, even when she was pregnant? Most evenings she was brooding at the kitchen table, nursing a glass of wine. As little Bobby says, “Mommy doesn’t eat.” I can recall only two noteworthy exceptions: the vision of Betty—in the same episode as Bobby’s observation—devouring a chicken leg after her one-night stand with a stranger and her tryst in a sweet shop over a dish of ice cream with future- second-husband and Freudian-father-figure Henry Francis.