2012. Edinburgh, Scotland
I’m standing in front of the open door of the fridge, in an AirBNB in Edinburgh, Scotland. I’m barefoot, in panties, a big oafish grey sweater, my hair piled up on my head in a banana clip. David is out seeing shows. Which is the whole point of the Fringe Festival, to see shows. But I’d rather be home anywhere, than out anywhere. In my own way I am enmeshed in Edinburgh, the restaurant downstairs where they know our names, where we eat often enough, the market where they know we will be here a short while.
My smallest kids are not even in our family yet. It’s still the original four.
Lucy and Edie are in bed. Although probably not asleep. They are playing Minecraft. They are thinking they are putting one over on me, but I don’t care. They are quiet and happy and we are in Europe. I won’t quibble the details. But I don’t feel like being in bed. I don’t feel like looking at social media or watching UK cooking shows.
I like UK cooking shows though.
I’m in the kitchen, padding across the cold linoleum. Trolling now, looking for some action.
I’m standing with my head inside the open lion’s mouth of the fridge. I grab little fistfuls of spinach leaves from a half-bag of loose spinach. Okay, this could be something. But what? What? What? I push past some pickles, a tub of labne. Re-settle the butter in a new location. I take some spinach in my fingers.
Now, this could look piggish, but I’m actually pretty graceful.
I’m pushing these little bundles of leaves into a mug of blue cheese dressing I made on the fly for Edie. I made the dressing for her because the AirBNB people left the tiniest, most insubstantial drop of ketchup in the bottle in the fridge, creating the illusion there was ketchup, when there really wasn’t. And this tail-spinned Edie into a place where she had to conjure a world where small children are forced to eat their fish sticks without ketchup. For Edie, a world without ketchup is a dark steampunk dystopian netherworld. As a consolation, I mixed up some sitting-around Roquefort with mayo, sour cream, lime and salt. I called it blue cheese, which it is, dammit. I gave it to her with her fish.
Cheese and fish. Oof. That’s a rough combo. But she loved, like totally LOVED, this cheese and fish.
There is a whole mug of this blue cheese dressing left, which saved my ass, and I keep looking at it. I can see the little bumps of cheese popping through the mayo, sky popping through clouds, and it makes me think of David. The blue cheese reminds me of him, because he loves this salad that I make for him for lunch sometimes. It’s spinach and little chunks of hot bacon, smothered in home-made blue cheese. I put a little bacon fat in the dressing.
My face smiles inside the fridge because I think about how much he loves that salad, and also how he makes such a big production of everything I make. Like he always shouts,” Wow! Look at this, girls!” as I put a platter down on the table, as if I had deboned a duck for dinner every night. I think about how I’ve come to expect that, and how I love that, and how I feel all warm and glowy because he likes this stupid salad and a lot of other stuff I do.
Inexplicably. Despite me.
This makes me start thinking about his chest hair, because I remember noticing his chest hair the first night we met. Well, not his chest hair exactly, but that little patch of skin that is visible just above where his shirt is unbuttoned and that also involves chest hair. And how that was enough to make me imagine us. And when I imagined us I couldn’t stop imagining us. I wish he was here right now, because his chest hair, and the rest of him, would be here too. But he’s not, and all I have is this mug of blue cheese and a half-eaten bag of wilty spinach, and a pound of uncooked bacon.
Oh and British bacon. Let’s discuss. English bacon is a little too much like Canadian bacon for my tastes. Not real bacon. It’s mposter bacon. More ham than bacon. Meaty instead of fatty. So not what bacon is about. How do the British not understand this?
Rashers. Embrace the rashers.
Not that I’m going to cook the bacon anyway. I’m feeling lazy. I don’t want to wash dishes. Or make a big show of the food. I just want to eat inside the fridge. Also, the bowls are very far away, like I’d have to push my left arm up to the left, and slide two steps in that direction and stick my arm into the cupboard to get a bowl, maybe on tip toes, which seems exhausting. And just too much. I pick up another fistful of leaves and smash them into the mug of blue cheese. And again. With my fingers, because fridge eating requires, even demands, no utensils. And this allows me to get just the right amount of blue cheese on the spinach, but not so much that I’m eating only dressing. Also not so little that I’m eating only vegetable.
It’s a delicate balance, innit?
See what I did there? Here in Edinburgh we make statements with questions.
I taste a mouthful of the salad and I wonder if I washed the spinach. I can’t remember, probably because I’m well into my second gin and tonic. So I think about salmonella, and puking in a Scottish emergency room. I wonder what Scottish emergency rooms are like? I consider a doctor giving me a diagnosis in a barely understandable thick Scottish accent. I picture him with an auburn beard and spectacles. But then I remember a mad cow outbreak happening in Italy and I try to remember the symptoms are for Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Then, I remember how my hand gets super-tingly a lot, and how the kids would be crushed if I got mad cow disease. And why did we eat that fucking carpaccio in Naples?
Did you know there is no Ketchup in Naples. The whole city.
Edie was devastated.
Then the cheese hits my tongue, and jolts me back to the present. I get that spark of blue cheese. Some funk in my mouth. And then the creaminess. And its all cream and funk and cream and funk and cream and funkety funk funk, and my mouth is like the cast of Glee singing a mash-up of cream and funk. It’s good. So very fucking good, and I realize it wouldn’t have tasted this good had I put it in a bowl, or eaten it with a fork, or waited for the imposter bacon to cook up into something. And really, eating it at a table with a napkin in my lap would have killed the whole point. The urgency of it. The improvisation, the sneakiness, the things we do alone. And things we do hoping to get caught, not get caught, the silly vulnerability of being found with blue cheese smeared across our lips. All that slow chewing underneath a closed smile as you try to explain yourself with blue cheese fingers. The sheer thrill of having this one minute alone with food, and to make all the decisions about food, and be completely indelicate and irreverent with food. How wicked and thrilling that is.
I close the fridge door. The kitchen is super-dark. I am a pleasure thief. I come in the night. My secret life. I hear my feet on the floor. I feel the cold of the floor under my toes. I wrap the ugly sweater even closer around me. I take the rest of my gin and tonic to bed. I consider going back to the fridge, there’s a bit more blue cheese in the bottom of the mug. But I don’t. It was enough of a good thing.
Anyway, it will be right there waiting for me at breakfast.
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END NOTES:
On the other side of the holidays, I’ve realized a couple things. I do not want to post recipes here. LOL. (See Kitchen Suppers).
I do like posting a kind of very casual recipe-like situation on Instagram @KimintheWest and have been doing that for years, but I am not so into doing it here. Some of you have liked the Kitchen Suppers section - thank you for cooking along! - so I’m sorry if that disappoints readers. As David reminded me in a date night come-to-Jesus: I write about social justice issues and community and class, writing recipes is a way for me to divert my attention from the bigger, more meaningful projects.
He’s right, of course. So aggravating. LOL.
So I am disbanding kitchen suppers, and simply posting essays on Thursdays. If you would like to pledge financial support, that’s wonderful. But it will be just for essays. I’ll hit the donation button next week. I soooo appreciate all of you who have pledge to support the newsletter and your lovely notes. It means the world.
Thank you, as always, for reading. xo
I love this bold kind of food writing. Lord, you can weave a story that I gobble up like a pig that hasn't eaten in a week. The maw of the open refrigerator door. Yeah, fuck recipe writing — you're way beyond that. Geezus, this essay is ripe and rich and makes me want blue cheese and bacon in the worst and best ways. My fridge is packed with containers of food I don't eat — garlicky chicken wings, handheld beef and bean tacos needing sauce, meatballs, red sauce, and green chile grits. I cook, he eats. I stand at the counter and eat oats, soups, tortellini salads, and lately, a gluten-free almond ricotta cake that eats like a meal. Okay, yes, it has most definitely been a meal. Lord, it is so good. I wish we lived closer — so much cake.
The Brits have a lot of confused ideas about food. 😂