smitten kitchen

A small miracle happened in our apartment this week: we paid someone to clean it, and seriously, you could lick the floors [but of course, really shouldn’t for a reason that rhymes with Shmatatouille, not that I really want to get into it].

I have spent too much of my adult life trapped in this faux-Buddhist state of thou shalt clean thy own messes; it’s good for you, I reasoned. Cleaning should be a Zen experience. Please, stop laughing. Quit it.

Needless to say, at some point between work and more work, errands and, I don’t know, waking up on Saturday mornings with a desire to leave the apartment and not scrub the edges of it, our little penthouse turned into a place we were not exactly proud of. And when you are as obsessive as I am, this is a very bad thing. I’d look around the apartment before I left each morning and sigh; this is not what I wanted for us, and come home too tired to do anything but sigh at it again.

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Today is Alex and my second anniversary.

Some longtime readers might remember that Alex and I met through our blogs–yes, we both used to whine publicly about our laughably bad dating lives and, yes, are really glad that phase has passed. Some newer readers might demand to know why they haven’t been privy to this information and the truth is, though Alex and I have been together for almost three years, I still haven’t found a non-awkward way to say “We met on the internet.” What usually happens is that I try to reduce my own discomfort with the way it must sound by, well, making it sound much worse: “In a chat room!” I’ll add, and then “About kittehs!” and then “No, wait! About polyandry!” Once big mouth strikes again, I can’t shut her up and I talk myself into a deeper and deeper hole: “Just kidding! We met on JDate!” “I mean, through friends!” “Uh, at summer camp!” Without fail, just as my blathering really hits rock-bottom–”Actually, he was stalking me. Isn’t that cute?”–it hits me that the truth, well, it might actually be better than the alternative.

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Adding to my infinite list of gastronomical oddities–I consider meat a side dish, cilantro tastes like dirt to me, I don’t drink tea and the only seafood I can stand is mussels–Alex and I finally ate at Mario Batali’s heroical West Village gastropub, The Spotted Pig, two weekends ago and all I’ve been able to talk about since were the salads.

With house-cured bresaola, proscuitto and various homemade sausages on the menu, it’s not named after swine for nothing. And while these are not to be overlooked, the salads were something of a symphony. I’ve said before that I don’t go to fuss-worthy restaurants because I fancy myself some sort of in-the-know foodie; I go for inspiration. Restaurants that don’t give me any new ideas for the Smitten Kitchen rarely get revisits.

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Last week someone said to me, “You know, my tastes are more Julia Child but my lifestyle is more 30 Minute Meals,” and I thought–really quite smugly, I’m embarrassed to say–”I’m so glad I have all this free time.”

This week I am more certain than ever of the crack I was smoking. Seriously, does anyone else have such denial over what their schedules are and are not? Let me tell you what actually happens in the Smitten Kitchen most nights of the week: My husband, being management and all (I tease), leaves work at 5 p.m. but first asks me if we need anything from the store. I IM him some goofy aspirational shopping list in segments (”this is for dinner,” “this for a side dish,” “and these are for the frozen yogurt I am making for dessert,” “and this is so I can get a head-start on the cake I am baking this weekend!”) and then actually end up leaving the office at 6:30 p.m., running two errands, coming home dead exhausted and always a bit winded from four flights of stairs to a neat cluster of grocery bags on the kitchen floor and say meekly “Order sushi?” Because if there is anything I am not going to be starting at 8 p.m. on a Tuesday night, it’s dinner. And a side dish. And frozen yogurt. And cake.

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I spent the summer in Israel when I was 15 years old, and while I know I did all of the expected stuff–day trips, stays at hostels and kibbutz, the big cities and the desert–one of the things that stands out most clearly in my memory is something sort of random–the way the Israeli kids dressed on hot days: black jeans and often long-sleeved shirts. I’d look at them, so covered, so dark, and want to scream. “Don’t you know how HOT it is here? I’m melting in my Tevas and tank top and you’re there wrapped as tight as you can in WINTER clothes.” Clearly this penchant for melodrama isn’t a recent phenomenon.

I feel the same way on days like we’ve had this week, when the air is so oppressively thick and stagnant (seriously, I think the breath I left on our front step last night greeted me there this morning) and I see people, probably dressed for important jobs in aggressively air-conditioned offices in these woolen suit layers and shoes with covered toes and sleeves (fine, I’m talking about Alex) and I want to melt for them at the thought of having to walk more than a block in such a getup. My Eastern European genes are inconsolable in this swelter, thus if you need us we’ll be over in the corner, hugging it out with the a/c this weather stops being such a brat.

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