Girls Night Out: Shana Tova

Every Rosh Hashanah, I look at the dog-eared copies of  bon appetits piling up in our kitchen and think, "I'm gonna make something new and different this year!" The stakes were really raised this week because my neighbor and I decided to join forces and celebrate the New Year together at her house. My neighbor's husband is an excellent cook, the kind of guy who reads the New York Times Dining section and gets out his fryer on Thanksgiving and fries turkeys in the back yard. Plus, my good friend from high school was coming with her family, as were my mother and stepfather, and my neighbor's extended family. All of these people had eaten my standby holiday food too many times before so I wanted to make something other than brisket, string beans and my mother-in-law Dorothy's sweet potato casserole. But then I realized I didn't really have time to start playing around with new recipes and making eight trips to the grocery store. My neighbor was making chicken and noodle kugel. The most I could do to change things up a bit was to make a new kind of sweet potato casserole, the one Amy had given me last year, which calls for fresh sweet potatoes.

Amy is my younger son's Spanish tutor. She and my mother-in-law are the kind of women who make you relax as soon as they walk in the door. They smile, say something cheerful, offer a compliment, make themselves comfortable and put you at ease, all at the same time, even though it's your house and you should be putting them at ease. The word for these women is "lovely." Amy used to teach Spanish at a local public high school and she likes to cook. She comes over late afternoons, and I always seem to be making dinner while she's here. Last year, she gave me her recipe for sweet potato casserole. It was a little more challenging than my mother-in-law's, in that it required buying the potatoes, boiling them and then peeling them, but other than that prep, the recipe was easy to make and really yummy. Amy's recipe also calls for a bottle of apricot brandy and a jar of marmalade. My mother-in-law's recipe is more old-fashioned, relying on canned sweet potatoes, lots of melted butter, brown and white sugar and graham cracker crumbs. Needless to say, you won't lose weight eating either casserole but you'll be go to bed happy. Greasing an old white Corning casserole dish, pouring in the sweet, chunky mixture, adding the topping, sticking it in the oven and knowing that every hot spoonful is going to be delicious is a wonderful way to spend an hour.

But then my editor at Patch asked me to cover a meeting in town the night I was supposed to cook. I should add that this request came after my editor told me that my stint with Patch was coming to an end, since her freelance budget was being cut to nada for the fourth quarter. "I want to give you as much work as possible before September 30," she emailed, after she'd basically kicked me in the gut. I should add that I really like and respect this woman: I don't know many women who work ''round the clock, but she seems to, and she has two kids who are exactly my kids' ages. I always feel like a bit of a sloth when I talk to her, because she stays on top of a website that is live 24/7 and had to cancel her vacation when Hurricane Irene stormed through our town at the end of August. I suggested that Patch start charging readers for on-line subscriptions like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, and that Patch charge people to leave comments on the Patch website. The ability to leave comments on the Patch website drives a lot of readers to the site, but no one pays to be there. There's a lot of on-line arguing going on, and my editor spends a good amount of time playing on-line referee. "Tell people to leave two cents if they want to leave their two cents..." I said, trying to think of ways Patch could keep making money so that I could.

My editor ignored my suggestions. She just wanted to know if I could cover the meeting. The town sub-committee on Hurricane Irene was planning to listen to residents and business owners describe their seriously bad flood experiences. My editor said the meeting started at 7:30 and was likely to go to 10 p.m or later, on a school night. Oh boy, that sounded like fun. I could just imagine my kids rattling around the house, sweaty from football and water polo practice, cruising Facebook and iTunes and not doing their homework. But my editor was giving me a chance to write my last swan song. She added that she couldn't go to the meeting because she had to go to her son's back to school night. How could I say no? I wasn't happy that my stint with Patch was grinding to a halt---I don't make much money writing for Patch, but I like the steady drumbeat of a deadline. Writing under pressure is a great way to shatter writer's block. But the best part of writing for Patch was having a sharp, gracious editor to talk to and hash out story ideas with. Plus, cranking out stories gets your adrenaline pumping and makes the more leisurely pace of writing fiction and creative non-fiction that much more pleasurable. The yin of news reporting fueled the yang of creative writing. Now, the gig is over. I'm trying to take the advice I'm always doing out to my kids: When one door closes, another opens.

Before the door slammed shut, I agreed to go to the sub-committee meeting, knowing that the next morning, I'd be churning out copy instead of cooking. Armed with a bag of chocolate covered espresso beans, I spent two and a half hours at town hall, typing like a maniac, trying to make sense of tributaries, reservoirs, river basins, ponds, ground water, overland flow, flood plane storage, bridges, sewage, dredging, basements, and record rainfall, all of which would explain why our downtown flooded so badly during a tropical storm. Despite the espresso beans, I forgot to take pictures, but if you feel like reading about the collective stress of living through a flood in a small New Jersey town, click here.

This afternoon, I set about cooking for the holidays. Unfortunately, I had forgotten to buy sweet potatoes and I had no idea where the apricot brandy was. During Hurricane Irene, we lost power for several days and had to throw out everything in the refrigerator. The jar of orange marmalade I had bought to make Amy's sweet potato casserole last spring was gone. I looked in the pantry: There were three old cans of sweet potatoes. One can was starting to rust but the expiration date said October 16, 2013. That was my brother's birthday! To borrow an old Yiddish expression, it was bashert (destiny). We also had a package of graham crackers. I wasn't sure how old it was, but it didn't matter. Once you mix graham cracker crumbs with the amount of butter and brown sugar my mother-in-law's recipe calls for, it doesn't matter if you're cooking with dust.

Both Amy and Dorothy's recipes are below. L'shana Tova.

AMY'S SWEET POTATO CASSEROLE
5 pounds sweet potatoes
5 teaspoons butter
1 teaspoon salt
1 cup milk
1 cup Triple Sec or Apricot Brandy
1 jar of marmalade
cinnamon

Set oven to 350 degrees.
Boil sweet potatoes until soft. Remove skins.
Mash sweet potatoes with milk until smooth.
Add all the other ingredients, except cinnamon.
Put in a baking dish and then spread marmalade over the top and sprinkle with cinnamon.
Bake for 30 minutes.

DOROTHY'S SWEET POTATO CASSEROLE
Filling:
2 cups (one large can) of sweet potatoes
3/4 cup sugar
2 eggs, beaten
1/2 cup milk (I used skim)
3/4 stick butter, melted
1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
1/2 teaspoons cinnamon

Topping:
1/3 cup brown sugar
3/4 stick melted butter
3/4 cup mashed graham crackers

Set oven for 400 degrees.
Mash sweet potatoes in food processor. Mix together sweet potatoes, butter, milk, sugar, nutmeg, cinnamon. Grease a casserole dish and pour in filling. Cook for twenty minutes.

While casserole is cooking, make the topping. (If you don't want to use graham crackers, just mix the brown sugar with the butter and pour it on top of the casserole). Mix the graham crackers with butter and brown sugar, take casserole out of the oven and cook for 10 more minutes.

Epic and tiny, both

Last weekend, I tried to think of something to write about 9/11. I couldn't come up with anything. A boy who played on my younger son's baseball team for two years lost his father in 9/11. Whenever that sweet-looking, blonde child went up to bat, I thought of his loss and what his mother had gone through. Compared to him, I had nothing to say.

Then I read Colum McCann's essay in the September 12 issue of The New Yorker. McCann is the author of Let the Great World Spin, one of the most beautiful short story collections I've ever read. McCann calls the book a novel but it's really a book of interconnected short stories, with characters who know each other and wander in and out of each other's lives. The one event that connects them is that they all saw or heard about the tight rope walker, Philippe Petit, who lay down a wire and walked between the Twin Towers in August 1974.

In The New Yorker essay, entitled "Dessert," McCann describes watching a woman on the East side eat a slice of chocolate cake the day after the Twin Towers came down. The woman eats slowly and deliberately, and McCann is appalled that anyone can eat dessert the day after such a catastrophe.

"The woman unrolled a fork from a paper napkin, held it at her mouth, tapping the tines against her teeth. She ran the fork, then, through the powder, addressing the cake, scribbling her intent.

Our job is to be epic and tiny, both."

McCann ends the essay this way:

"I still have no idea---after a decade of wondering---whether I am furious at the woman and the way she ate chocolate cake, or whether it was one of the most audacious acts of grief I've seen in a long time."

After reading that essay, I thought about how and why food takes the edge off of tragedy and/or the aversion of it. My family dodged two bullets on 9/11. My brother was near and my first cousin was in one of the Towers when the planes hit. My cousin had a meeting on one of the top floors and stopped on the first floor to go to the bathroom. He ran out of the building as soon as he heard the plane hit. My brother worked a block away. He jumped on a ferry to New Jersey and then took a train to the station near our house. His cell phone wasn't working and we were all frantically wondering where he was when he showed up at our front door. My father drove over and I started taking out cans of tuna fish and mayonnaise, heating up bagels and making everyone lunch. We stood around the kitchen and laughed nervously. My husband was out of town. Our sons were 5 and 1 then, and I remember thinking that if I just kept everyone safe and fed, crammed into one room together, everything would be okay. Of course, that's not true and it's shocking that some people can survive a disaster and go on and eat cake, but I think food and the sharing of it can provide some relief, some of the time.

This week, I did what I usually do in early September: I wrote, prepared to start teaching again, made dinner, walked the dog, exercised, drove my kids around, talked to my neighbor. Nothing was particularly difficult. My class was filled, my kids had no pressing issues, the back to school dust was settling. But in the middle of the day yesterday, I had a surge of anxiety. I made a cup of hot chocolate, spiked with coffee grinds, which usually serves well as Mommy's little pick-me-upper but I still felt rattled. I decided to make dinner. It was still early in the day---I had just eaten lunch--and way too early to start thinking about dinner, but I was supposed to interview someone at 4 p.m. and I rationalized that I should start getting dinner early so that I wouldn't have to rush home from the interview and start cooking. But really, I was just looking for a distraction and leafing through old cookbooks and defrosting chicken breasts provided it.

I took down Ruth Macpherson's Food For Friends. Macpherson used to live up the street from me, in a charming Tudor on a busy, main road. The train tracks ran behind her back yard. Shortly after I moved to town, my neighbor gave me Macpherson's cookbooks as a birthday present. Her other books are Discover Brunch and That's Entertaining. They are little spiral notebooks, with soft covers and no illustrations. They're the kind of thing you see in a school, synagogue or church bookstore.

Macpherson doesn't break new culinary ground but her books are small blessings. The recipes always work. Her prose is charming, and she writes in an offhand, friendly way that makes you feel she's just dashing this great recipe off and emailing it to you. There is something simple in her approach in that she does not necessarily expect you to have fresh herbs on hand and she never expects you to make breadcrumbs from scratch. She offers practical advice, such as, "You may wish to pass the soup in mugs before sitting down for the main part of this delicious meal." There are all sorts of menus for tennis team luncheons, elegant baby showers and friend's going away lunches, which make the books feel lady-like and a bit anachronistic, but in a lovely, old-fashioned way that works. Her voice is straightforward and comforting. She just knows you'll figure out a way to get the appetizers in the oven before company comes.

I used to see Macpherson walking her dogs in the reservation. She wore her hair in pigtails and she was always eager to talk about her dogs, the weather, and whatever was going on in town. A few year ago, I heard that one of her dogs wandered onto the train tracks and was killed. Macpherson sold her house and I don't see her anymore but I still use her recipes and am grateful for her voice.

I made her recipe for Lemon and Tarragon Baked Chicken, went to do the interview, and came home. My older son called and said he'd missed the late bus. The late bus is the last bus, which meant at 6 p.m., I had to drive forty minutes round trip to retrieve him. My younger son had a Spanish test the next day and wasn't feeling well. I was not happy but I knew when I got home, I would stand at the kitchen counter where I had stood with my father and brother all those years ago, and spoon buttery crumbs of chicken and tarragon into my mouth.

I got in the car, and put on Jill Scott's The Light of the Sun. This album combines feminism, gospel, rap and rock with love and the longing for it. The first song on this gorgeous album is called, "Blessed." Scott sings of wanting to finish recording so she can go home and see her baby boy. She sings of feeling blessed.

If we can eat, drive, listen to music, and read, we are too.


Lemon and Tarragon Baked Chicken
1 stick (1/2 cup) unsalted butter, melted
2 garlic cloves, minced
2 tablespoons Dijon mustard
2 tablespoons lemon juice
1 cup dry bread crumbs, unflavored
1 tablespoons grated lemon peel (takes two lemons)
1 teaspoon dried tarragon
6 large chicken breasts, with bone and skin (can also use boneless)
salt and pepper

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Line baking pan with foil.
Melt butter over low heat. Add garlic to butter and saute one minute. Remove from heat and sir in mustardd and lemon juice.
Mix bread crumbs, lemon peel and tarragon in a bowl.
Wash and dry chicken. Turn chicken breasts in butter mixture to coat, then turn in crumbs, coating completely.
Arrange chicken in prepared pan, add salt and pepper.
Bake about one hour. Baste, occasionally.

If you are using boneless chicken breasts, bake for 50 minutes.

Meditate This

The other day, I was having a catch with my younger son. It was a warm June night and we were throwing the ball back and forth on the driveway without talking much. My younger son is ten; he's usually pretty chatty. But this night, he was in a funk; his baseball team had just lost the second game of the playoffs. If they'd won, they would have made it to "Family Day," a.k.a the end of season, Little League championship game. Making it to Family Day is as close to nirvana as a fourth grader gets in in our small New Jersey town.

My son and I have been playing catch long enough that he knows I'm not good at catching pop-ups and if he throws the ball too hard, I wince. This night, the rhythm of our throws was steady and my mind started to wander. I've been thinking a lot about the connection between exercise, writing and meditation. It had been a long baseball season. For a while, my son's team was losing pretty badly. Their fielding wasn't great and some of the kids kept striking out. My son is a big, strong kid and I knew he had it in him to get bigger hits so I started to meditate a bit with him before his games. Not long marathon Dalai Lama type meditation sessions but just a minute or so of telling him to close his eyes, clear his thoughts and imagine himself hitting that ball out of the park. It worked---for the next couple of games, he got more runs and RBI's.

One of the assistant coaches asked what I had done to him.
"We meditated before the game." I cringed. I figured the coach, a nice but tough guy from Brooklyn, would roll his eyes.
"Really?" he said. "Could you meditate with the kids before the next game?"
"Sure."

I learned to meditate in high school. I was supposed to keep my mantra a big, dark secret but I'll just tell you right now, my mantra was and still is "Ima." This is the Hebrew word for mother; it was also the name of the AFS student who was spending the year at our school. That was back in 1980. I haven't been meditating non-stop all these years but a year ago, I read Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way, and in it, she writes, "As artists, we are spiritual sharks. The ruthless truth is that if we don't keep moving, we sink to the bottom and die." In the same chapter, she writes of the zen of sports and moving meditations. "The goal is to connect to a world outside of us, to lose the obsessive self-focus of self-exploration and, simply, explore." I started to think that if I wrote every morning just as I woke up and meditated once the kids went to school, my writing might improve. I started meditating for fifteen minutes every day after I took our dog for a run---not long enough to fall asleep but long enough to calm down and come up with a couple of new ideas for short stories. Strangely, sitting still for a few minutes gives you creative energy that lasts for hours.

I don't know exactly what happens to the brain when you meditate, but something lovely and soothing kicks in. In her book, Secrets of Prayer: A Multi-Faith Guide to Creating Personal Prayer in Your LIfe, Nancy Corcoran writes: "During meditation, our brain shifts from beta waves (thirteen or more cycles per second) to alpha waves (eight to twelve cycles per second), a deep internal state of concentration. " This state leaves you feeling calm and purposeful.

It's ridiculously easy to meditate: Find a room to be alone in, shut the door, put a cushion or a pillow on the floor, sit down on it, set the timer, close your eyes, concentrate on your breath and repeat your mantra over and over for at least fifteen minutes. If you can't take fifteen minutes, take five, look up, check up the clock, then go back in. Even a minute or two of this focused rest does something magical to your brain. Annie Dillard writes about this process in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. "The world's spiritual geniuses seem to discover universally that the mind's muddy rivers, this ceaseless flow of trivia and trash, cannot be dammed, and that trying to dam it is a waste of effort that might lead to madness. Instead you must allow the muddy river to flow unheeded in the dim channels of consciousness; you raise your sights; you look along it, mildly, acknowledging its presence without interest and gazing beyond it into the realm of the real where subjects and objects act and rest purely, without utterance."

For four games, I "meditated" with my son's team. It was a little bit voodoo, a little bit therapy, and a little bit everything I'd ever read about writing thrown together into a five minute pep talk, which ended with the kids meditating for a minute. The coaches would gather the kids in the dugout and I'd ask each of them to say his or her name out loud and talk about what they did in the last game that they were proud of. I asked them to articulate exactly what they wanted to achieve in the game they were about to play. Then they uncrossed their legs, closed their eyes, and let their minds wander as they meditated for a minute. I watched them as I timed them. Some squirmed, some seemed to doze off but their eyes stayed closed (mostly) and they sat still. At one game, I was late and couldn't meditate with them beforehand, so some of the kids came up individually and asked me to "meditate" them. I did; they won. In fact, they won three out of the four games that started with a meditation. The kids were ecstatic; I started to feel that everything I had learned about writing could also be applied to baseball. And vice versa.

Did they win because of the meditation? Who knows? (My younger son, who is standing next to me as I write this, says, "No.") But I think the meditation prompted them to think about what they wanted from themselves in the game. Most of the kids on the team were second and third children. They were used to being told what to do and they were used to being part of large group. How many times in life do you get to articulate what you want to do and then go and do it five minutes later? Second and third born kids rarely have this luxury. Plus, there was the whole "we're a team" dynamic to contend with. Baseball appears to be a team sport but so much of it is individual: Standing at bat, pitching, catching the ball, throwing it, running around the bases. You do all this alone. The meditation had them each imagining what they could do, alone.

At one point, I told my sister-in-law, a psychologist, that I was "meditating" the kids.
"What are you medicating them with?" she asked cautiously.
"I'm not medicating them, I'm meditating them!" I sounded like a ten-year old.

The last game was rained out and rescheduled for a day I teach in New York. I taught a a three hour writing workshop, raced to Penn Station so I could make an earlier train, missed the train anyway and made it to the game in time for a rushed "meditation." I was distracted. I can't remember what the kids said or I did. We were playing a team we had beaten before. The final score was 4-3. If a couple of plays had gone differently, we would have won. Of course, meditation can't perform miracles; sometimes the other side is just luckier. Who knows? Maybe they had been meditating too.

This may all sound like hokum but meditation does tap into a mysterious part of your brain, which yearns to be touched. Believers in God might argue that the Divine Spirit resides there. I'm not particularly religious but it could be. Meditating does summon something approaching bliss; just remembering that you meditated this morning will bring you a wave of peace this afternoon. Next time you prepare to do something that takes courage---writing, painting, acting, competing, performing---close your eyes, clear your mind and breathe in and out. Repeat your mantra. Keep a notebook nearby. When you're done, write down everything that flew in and out of your mind. This conscious resting is what your mind wants to be doing, and your brain will thank you by giving you a generous and unexpected gift.