My essay on friendship

http://www.themillions.com/2012/11/thankful-for-such-friends

MISADVENTURES IN COOKING



I'm a pretty good cook.  I kind of wing it in the kitchen - to me, that's the fun of cooking.  When I read a recipe - and I read recipes for entertainment - certain combinations of ingredients sound good to me, so I try them.  It's the way I put together colors in clothing too: I see em, I like em, I put em on.

I don't cook much from recipes.  I used to, but I don't anymore.  The key to cooking like a lot of other things is Go Forth and Conquer.  Do Not Be Afraid.

This is now.

When I first started cooking - or let me amend that: when I first started having to cook - I was about 13.  My mother was going to school one or two nights a week, and the food prep was up to me. She left things like chopped meat for hamburgers and frozen vegetables - this was pretty elementary cooking - but I liked a challenge!  One night, I took the chopped meat and the frozen vegetables and cooked them along with some seasonings including soy sauce and ketchup.  Not a match made in heaven.  My dad went out for a walk after dinner - something he never did, but it was a nice night, so I didn't think much of it.  Years later, he told me he'd gone out to get something to eat.

Things improved, although not immediately.

When you live on your own and you don't really know how to cook yet, baffling things happen.  The stuffed cabbage I bravely tried took hours.  So did everything from the "60 Minute Cook Book."  And then there was the dinner party.

Or more accurately, the dessert for the dinner party.

It was a strawberry sherbert-y thing.  I didn't have an ice cream maker (I still don't), but this recipe said you could put it in ice cube trays in the freezer and take it out every few hours and stir it up, then put it back again.

The recipe itself was a little odd - it even identified itself this way.  It called for 1/4 cup of salt.  "You'll think this is a lot of salt," the recipe said and yes, I did, I thought it was A LOT of salt, especially for sorbet.  But the salt, the recipe said, would bring out the flavor of the strawberries.  Who was I to argue, I recognized myself as the amateur, I went along, although I did check and re-check the recipe.  Yup.  Quarter cup.

So I made it, and I put it in the ice cube trays and I took it out and stirred it up every few hours.  It had a very nice texture.  I never tasted it though.  I was too tired to taste.

At least, I didn't taste it when I made it.  Or when I stirred it.  I tasted it about 5 minutes before the guests were too arrive.

A quarter cup of salt is A LOT of salt.  It was very pretty to look at - beautiful texture and color - and it was inedible.  SO SALTY!  When I went back and looked at the recipe again, it didn't say 1/4 cup.  It said 1/4 teaspoon.  Someone had obviously changed it.

For a minute I thought about serving it anyway - I'm ashamed to admit this, but it is true.  My dinner guests were in the hall.  What was I supposed to do?

But in the end, what you're told when you work on a newspaper also holds true for food you're planning to serve: When in doubt, leave it out.  Or in this case, throw it out.

Thank God for Hagen Daazs.

FAREWELL TO COOK'S MAGAZINE

Dear Cook’s Magazine,

The time has come for us to part.  I know, we’ve been together a long time and I have been loyal to you.  I never subscribed to some other cooking magazines – not that there is another like you – and rarely went to the internet for recipes.  Well, a few times, but not many.  I have renewed and renewed and renewed – even when you came up with that Country Cooking spin off that might have been put out by pre-diabetic Paula Deen so much butter did each recipe contain (I counted 14 tablespoons in one.  The dairy industry must have loved it.)  Still, my loyalty did not waver.

But, over time, doubts have crept in.  These doubts began as tiny seeds (to use a kind of organic, victory garden metaphor) that grew and grew.  What are they?

Grilling.  A disproportionately large number of your recipes – at least two entire issues per year – are devoted to grilling, which is something most people do in their backyards. 

I live in a New York City apartment smaller, I’m sure, than the Cook’s test kitchens.  My outdoor space consists of a rickety fire balcony on the fourth floor where I am not going to install a Weber.  I don’t care about grilling.  Being a non-griller presented with a grilling magazine is like going on a date to a skating rink without skates.  Or being on a baseball team but sitting out the game on the bench.  I’m sure I can come up with more sports metaphors, given time.  But the fact is I wouldn’t go to a skating rink without skates, why would I want to read a magazine devoted to grilling when I don’t have a grill?

Next, equipment.  One recipe said a food mill was good for a particular job (I could be wrong, but I believe the job was making Julia Child’s leak and potato soup) but you weren’t recommending it because few people have such an esoteric and old fashioned piece of equipment as a food mill.  Something that, even though I am not 150 years old, I happen to have.  What you apparently believe all people DO have is food processors.  Also microwaves.  And, that sign of an amateur in the kitchen, a garlic press.

 Possibly most people do have food processors and microwaves and even garlic presses.  I have a garlic press although I never used it and long ago consigned it to service as a PlayDo accessory for my daughter.  Possibly, the number of people who don’t possess food processors and microwaves and let’s not forget heavy-duty mixers with dough hooks is so miniscule, we’re not worth worrying about.  Clearly, we’re not worth translating any recipe for. 

That’s fine.  I can translate recipes myself.  I know how to melt chocolate on top of a pan of simmering water rather than in the microwave I do not have, and how to chop vegetables using that quaint, old fashioned invention the knife rather than the food processor I also do not have, and I will for a dish I’m interested in making.  But that brings me to my next and biggest problem, Cooks.  I don’t want to make any of your food.

The recipes always have too many steps.  They also always include ingredients I will never use.  I don’t want to make my sauces silky by using gelatin.  I know the cooks in Cooks-landia are very proud of having figured out how gelatin mimics the whatever-it-is in slow cooked meat sauces that comes off the bones and thickens the sauce naturally, but gelatin will never make its way into my sauce.  I’m not using liquid smoke either.  And I’m never going to use cream to emulsify a pasta sauce.

This is how you emulsify pasta sauces, Cooks, the ones that just have oil and parmesan cheese, for example.  Or the lemon sauce you tried to duplicate recently.  You make the sauce quickly in a pan (quick is its signature), you add the pasta and some of the pasta cooking water, then you turn the pasta over and over in the sauce.  Over and over.  Add a little more pasta water if it’s not the right consistency.  Turn the heat up if there’s too much liquid.  Putting cream in a non-cream sauce – in a sauce whose reason for being is that it is not a cream sauce –  makes you look lame.

The truth is, in all the years I’ve been reading Cooks I’ve made maybe four  recipes.  Two of the four were awful.  The pasta primavera – the one where you toast the pasta then cook it in vegetable broth – that was just weird.  The only recipes I’ve kept were the ones for Christmas cookies, because I used to do an annual cookie bake when my daughter was young and needed cookies sturdy enough to stand up to the decorating torture she and her friends put them through.  (I didn’t eat them.  Nobody ate them.)  And the recipe for streusel topping for apple crisp.

The recipe is genius – simple, but nobody else thought of it: you pre-bake the streusel topping before you put it on the crisp.  That way the topping doesn’t get soggy.  It’s so good, I’m happy I’m the one making it so I can eat it right out of the oven before I put it on top of the crisp, like granola.  Hats off to you for that one, Cooks.  I liked that no-knead bread recipe too, though I never made it as I’m afraid of yeast.  Which is my issue, not yours.

But what you bring to the table, well, it just isn’t enough.

For years, I’ve been waiting for you to come up with food I really want to make.  I’ve been overlooking the ingredients that make me roll my eyes; the inane tips people send in and you print; the ridiculous food tastings you do where your tasters invariably like the version of the-thing-being-tested that has chemical additives the best. 

I know it’s not just you.  I have Magazine Rage.  Magazines make me angry.  Most of them are meant for entitled rich people who have a spare $4,000 to spend on a pair of shoes.  I had to wait in the doctor’s office for a long time the other day, a magazine and a half’s worth of time and I saw that same pair of $4,000 shoes in both magazines.  “Editorial content” is just advertising.  That makes me mad.

Cooks, I didn’t think you were like that.  You don’t run ads.  You’re supposedly for everyone equally, us regular people who just like to cook.  But you have a demographic even if you won’t admit it.  Backyard owning, food processor using, microwave equipped grill enthusiasts with compromised emulsification skills. 

Of whom I am not one.

So farewell Cooks.  Thanks for the memories.  Now, I have to go start dinner.

TIGER, TIGER

Has anyone else noticed the large and growing number of books with "Tiger" in the title?
The Tiger's Wife.
The Life of Pi (which is about a tiger.)
Tiger Mother, which is non-fiction but also about a tiger.
And today I just saw Tigers in Red Weather (which doesn't sound like it has any actual tigers in it.)
What's up with all the tigers?  Do people think that because previous Tiger Titles have done well, other books will follow suit?  And are they wrong?
It's my friend David's contention that the formula for a successful novel is Liquid + Animal (see Water for Elephants.)
Maybe he's on to something.  My new novel, which no one has picked up yet, is titled The Hurly Burly.  I like that title.  It goes with the book.
However ---
As I said, no one has picked it up yet.  Maybe the problem is - I deviated from the formula.  Maybe I should employ the formula, find a new title.  David and I liked Beer for Dogs, but I think I'm better off playing the odds and going with Beer for Tigers.
Soon to be a major motion picture.

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IN PERSON

Outside the Box: From Teaching to Tea Parties

By EDRA ZIESK posted at 12:00 pm on June 8, 2012 6

I spoke to my friend Rebecca the other day. Like me, she’s a writer. Like me, she’s published three books. Like me — and most other people who do creative things — she needs to do something else to make a living. There’s a 99 percent with writers too.

So she teaches, as I also have. But jobs are hard to come by, especially if you don’t have an MFA. A few years ago Rebecca, who’s in her 40s, decided to get one.  In the program she went to, she worked with a couple of writers she admired, and met a lot of other (younger) aspiring writers/teachers of writing. She got the credential the academic marketplace apparently wants. What she didn’t get out of her program was a job.

I could hear it in her voice when we spoke, her panic. She didn’t know what to do. She’d put in time and money to get that degree, there was supposed to be work at the end of it, and there wasn’t.

Or, that’s not entirely true: there are teaching jobs of a particular kind. In colleges. In English or writing departments. It’s just that they’re in hard-to-get-to places and they pay very little. Very, very little. I know writers who take these jobs. It’s necessary to cobble together a schedule of 10 or more courses at various schools to make a (very) minimal living. And forget writing. The teaching and office hours and prep and grading, to say nothing of traveling from campus to campus, doesn’t leave them any time to do that.

A few years ago, I was pretty much in the same place as Rebecca. I didn’t have an MFA, but I’d made a sporadic living from teaching — writing courses, mostly, but also freshman comp and eventually, high school English — to supplement what I earned from my novels. When the high school job turned into subbing and the subbing turned infrequent, I started looking for work.

I talked to everyone I knew who had any connection to schools. I was given “use my name” type introductions from other writers. I spoke to heads of departments. I sent out resumes. I spent time regretting the other high school teaching job I’d turned down some years before when I’d gotten a job teaching at a college. I had teaching experience. I had publication credits. I figured I’d find a job.

But I didn’t. So I expanded my job search. I started looking for tutoring work, which led to homework helper-ing, which led to babysitting. Nothing. I felt panicked, like I was bashing around in a pitch dark room. I couldn’t find a way out.

And then one day, I was sitting in my kitchen and I looked up at the pile of serving platters I have sitting on a shelf. They’re vintage platters — some restaurant ware, some from mid-century manufacturers — vintage china is one of the things I collect in a random, if I find it at a thrift store or a yard sale and it isn’t expensive and I like it kind of way. I use the platters a lot when I entertain. Tea parties.

I’ve been throwing tea parties for years. I’ve made bridal and baby shower tea parties. Birthday teas. Get togethers. Children’s parties. I serve tea sandwiches — turkey and cucumber with, yes, the crusts cut off — and little cakes. Sometimes scones with cream and strawberry butter. Everybody liked them — even men.

I’d done it for friends and family. Why couldn’t I do it for a living?

Some people thought it was a great idea, some people thought it was nuts and some people kind of took a figurative step or two away when I mentioned it to them, as if a writer who taught was someone worth knowing, but a writer who made tea parties — no.

But I didn’t care — I had to do something. So I started to prepare. I sourced breads and found a bakery that could slice loaves really thin. I bought vintage Japanese lusterware cups and saucers and dishes, and 1950s triple-tiered serving trays for the tea sandwiches, scones and pastries. I came up with a name (A Proper Tea), and made business cards. I loved the business cards.

And I tested recipes. Many, many recipes. For sandwiches. For scones. For chocolate cakes with chocolate frosting and little coconut cupcakes and lemon bars and a Victoria sponge with jam in the middle and whipped cream on top. Everyone around me was very happy. I baked all the time.

I was very busy. And being busy — and directed — helped. I felt not so panicked. Not so despairing. I stopped looking for teaching/tutoring/homework helpering/babysitting jobs. Not that I wouldn’t take a teaching job if it came along, but I started to feel like I didn’t have to. Like I could make a place for myself in the world, a place that would allow me to do what I needed to do (write) while still doing the other thing that I needed to do (earn a living.)

I read an article a few years ago about a young man who, like many of his peers, couldn’t find a job when he graduated from college. So he started a business. His first attempt tanked — he hadn’t narrowed his concept enough — but once he figured that out, his second try took off. And once his business was successful, he started a foundation to offer advice and a financial kickstart to other recent college graduates who couldn’t find jobs. There aren’t any jobs, he said. You have to make your own.

I’d always assumed once I’d published some books and had a few awards for my writing I’d get hired to teach the art form I practiced. I’d have demonstrated a certain level of mastery, I figured that’s what writing programs would be looking for. It just didn’t happen.

I wasn’t a recent college graduate, but I had to make my own, alternate way, too.

As it turned out, a catering business wasn’t the right fit for me. It required too much time, and there were too many variables — food service is a tough way to make a living. But whether or not A Proper Tea was a proper fit was beside the point. What was important was that moment when I looked up and saw the stacks of platters on my kitchen shelf and realized I could do something else; that teaching wasn’t the only possibility. My thinking changed.

Not long after I packed up the lusterware and stopped baking little cakes and put the business cards in a drawer (too bad; I loved those cards) a friend said, “Why don’t you sell vintage clothing?”

It wasn’t as random as it sounds. I’ve worn and collected vintage clothing for years, I like it and know something about it. So I did.

In between the suggestion and the going concern it turned out to be, there was a lot to figure out. How do you run a business? How do you price things? How do you store them? Where do you get stuff to sell? Once I’d sold my way through the overflow of my own collection, then what?

I called my friend Sara, who used to own a vintage clothing store and asked her about inventory.

“Well,” she said. “For starters, you get stuff from me.”

Apparently, once you’ve run and then closed a vintage shop, the things that were previously treasures to you become just a whole lot of stuff taking up valuable NYC real estate. Sara had boxes and boxes full of vintage dresses and skirts and coats and hats (hats!) in her apartment, and an overflowing storage unit downtown with more of same. She was happy to sell, and I was happy to buy. And it was fun.

Sara also told me she used to subscribe to a newsletter put out by a probate court clerk. It was a compiled list of settled estates, and it was mostly used by real estate agents who weren’t above (or below) banging on the doors of the recently departed to ask if they could list the apartments.

Sara also used the list to contact heirs, though she wrote them kind notes on nice stationery offering to buy the clothing they probably wanted to get rid of anyway. This, she said, worked. But it made me a little queasy.

Danielle, also the former owner of a vintage shop, said elderly women sometimes wandered in to talk to her about their wardrobes. The pieces they’d kept all had stories — how they’d been acquired, where they’d been worn, who the women had been with/danced with/had cocktails with when they wore them. Clothing carries personal history, it’s meaningful.

Once the women saw Danielle was as interested in them, their history, as she was in the clothes, they sold them to her.

I don’t own a shop, so I don’t get any off-the-street traffic, but I set up an online vintage clothing business. I sell mostly the mid-century pieces I like best. It’s a lot of work, and I don’t quite make a living yet. But I’m getting there. And it’s a good — a better — fit than A Proper Tea. I like the stories too.

Listening to Rebecca’s voice that day on the phone, I could hear she was struggling the way I’d been a few years earlier. I told her how I’d gotten from that same place, to this one. That the hardest part isn’t the work, it’s getting yourself to think differently; getting off that single-minded track you’ve been on, the one that says writing is to teaching, as the dish is to the spoon, and finding another path.

I could tell she wasn’t there yet. A lot of her sentences started “Yes, but–” She went and got that MFA, she just couldn’t believe it wasn’t going to help her find a job. Maybe it will.

Maybe I should call her back and invite her to tea.

Image Credit: Wikipedia

PUBLISHED IN THEMILLIONS.COM 6/8/2012

Most writers teach to make a living.  I don't.  Check out my essay on the subject at http://www.themillions.com/2012/06/outside-the-box-from-teaching-to-tea-parties.html

There's No Place Like Home

I ran into my neighbor this morning.  She lives on the first floor of the little walkup building in Yorkville and I live on the top – which is not called the penthouse in a walkup.  We aren’t friends.  We don’t make plans to see each other, we don’t talk on the phone, we don’t have meals together: we’re neighbors.  We stop and visit when we see each other on our way in or out.  I held the door for her and her dogs.  She remembers when my daughter was born.

There were movers on the stoop when I came home this morning, which happens a lot in this building.  It’s a transient place, people move in and out of here all the time thought they might be for the couple on the third floor who cook delicious smelling food most nights.  Or the couple on the ground floor who’d been living in a studio about the size of a college dorm room. 

But my first floor neighbor’s door was open and she told me it was she who was going.  To Florida.  She lost her job, and couldn’t find another one, and New York is just too expensive.  She cried when she hugged me goodbye.  She has lived here for 35 years.

Do people expect to spend their whole adult lives in one place?  Do they want to?  According to data from the most recent Census released at the beginning of April,  Americans are less likely to move, and more likely to go shorter distances when they do, than at any other time since the Depression.  And a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center found 56% of U.S. born adults have not lived outside their birth state. 

My neighbor never expected to leave this building.

I never expected to stay.

The apartment came to me through New York serendipity – the kind of thing that hadn’t ever happened to me before, and hasn’t happened since.  One morning a man stopped me on my block.  He was small, rabbity, he wore a filmy short sleeved buttondown shirt and a short sleeved T shirt underneath that, and he made me nervous.

“I’m the super of that building. Know anyone who needs an apartment?”  He stood too close, and didn’t sound entirely on the up-and-up.  He sounded like he was offering to sell me hot goods.

But I said, “Me.  Maybe.”   I’d been thinking vaguely of moving.  The apartment where I lived then, in the building next door to the one the super had pointed out, faced a brick wall.  Not a lot of light came in, and what little there was, my roommate, who slept a lot – a lot – did her best to obliterate.  I told the super – Eddie – I’d take a look.

The building made me nervous too, at first: a walkup tenement made of red brick that was old and smoked-looking, as if it had lived its life near a factory.  But inside, the hallways were clean, and the apartment was filled with sunlight. It overlooked gardens. 

I took it.  I wasn’t even old enough to legally sign a lease, but the landlord didn’t ask for i.d.  He gave me a month’s rent free, to celebrate.

That’s where I was living when I turned 21.  My parents wanted to give me a piano for my birthday.  They didn’t just give me one, pianos are personal things, I was supposed to come and test one their piano tuner was re-building, to see if it suited me.  I’d played for years, but not much since I’d left home, when I was 16. 

My mother and I went to the piano tuner’s place way out in Brooklyn.  He was working on a professional upright he wanted to sell.

Have you ever seen an upright?  Not a spinet, spinets are small, an upright has a case almost the size of a baby grand, though it’s oblong and, well, upright.  Vertical, rather than lying belly down, baby grand-wise.

“You know what?” I told my mother on the drive back to her house, also way out in Brooklyn, though not end-of-the-continent far, like where the piano turner lived.  “I think we should wait.  My apartment’s temporary.  It’s a walk up.  The delivery charge will be really high to move a piano up 4 flights, and where would I put it?  Let’s wait till I move into someplace permanent.”

That was years and years ago.  Decades.  And, like my first floor neighbor, I’m still here.

When I told my mother where I lived was only temporary, I thought that was true.  I didn’t plan to spend so long living in one place. 

I’d looked at apartments in Washington Heights and Inwood with a boyfriend.  But I had a feeling that move would have been a mistake, as the boyfriend turned out to be, so I stayed put.

I bought a house in the country with a previous husband.  The walkup apartment was cheap, we couldn’t afford the house and a “better” apartment, so we went on living here.  The house in the country disappeared.  And the husband.  I stayed.

Some years ago I moved in with a man who lived in a co-op in Chelsea.  His apartment was small, but there was another for sale in the building; we hoped to buy it and combine the two.  I’d kept my apartment, though, then, I was only working in it, going back and forth every day.  I wrote there, and ran writing workshops, but that was it.  We decided to sublet the co-op and move back up to Yorkville, to save money for the down payment.  Much of my life has been lived in this place.  My daughter was born and raised and fledged here.  When she comes home from college, I wonder if she looks around the apartment and thinks, “Was it always so small?”

           No, not when I first moved in.  Then it seemed huge, double the size of the gloomy, lightless two room place next door.  But places fill up: with things, with people.  I’ve fallen asleep many nights counting ways to make the apartment bigger.  

        By the time my daughter was ready for school, we could’ve used more space.  We looked at an apartment on the Lower East Side, in a building friends hoped we’d also move into.  But there were no parks nearby, and the neighborhood schools weren’t as good as the ones uptown.  When you don’t have much money, these things make a difference. 

One of the nice things about living in a place for a long time is that you get to know the other people who’ve been there for years and years.  The seamstress around the corner made dollhouse furniture with my daughter.  The men in the butcher shop give me chocolates on Valentine’s Day and when I order something over the phone, it comes with a sticker that says VIP Ziesk.

So, have I stayed because I live someplace where people know me?  Because this apartment costs less than another one would?  Because I haven’t been brave enough to move out and on, as my first floor neighbor was forced to do?

The building’s not as well kept as it used to be.  Eddie died years ago and the succession of supers who’ve come after him have treated the building with increasing neglect.  I haven’t played the piano in years.

DIY

Frederick Busch, who was my friend and mentor, once told me about a writer he knew.  She was one of the best short story writers out there, he said.  But no one wanted to publish her.

I didn't know who he was referring to, and I didn't ask.  The admission felt painful to me, something the writer had confessed to, and who Fred was talking about felt both irrelevant and none of my business.  I don't know if the situation changed for her.  I hope so.

Now it's me.  I'm, apparently, in the same situation.  I've published 3 novels and lots of short stories and won grants and some prizes for my work - and no one wants to publish me.  That's not easy for me to say either.

I had an agent for years who dropped me when I handed in my (then) most recent novel, saying "Another small, beautiful book," she said.  That sounded like a compliment to me, but it wasn't meant that way.  She meant: another book she couldn't sell.

I hunted for other agents, but as one told me - If your previous agent couldn't sell it, I can't either.  So I shopped the novel ms myself.  And placed it.  But that was then.

When I finished my latest novel, I once again looked for an agent.  I don't know how many people I queried but I can tell you what they all said: some variation on Wow.  And, No.

So I started to shop this ms too.  I got questions from editors this time around about my sales figures and social network connections - things I hadn't been asked before.  But the reality of publishing has changed.  That's what I want to talk about.  I'm thinking of DIY for my new novel.  I'm not sure what else to do?  Anyway, I thought I'd do a step by step, and see how it goes.