Mac & Cheese

Planning dinner a few nights ago, I thought I’d make some mac & cheese. All the rage in restaurants these days. Sounded easy enough. Sounded wintery and soulful. My loyal companion didn’t protest too loud, and Layla always expects accidents in the kitchen when I’m cooking, so I was good to go.

A favorite restaurant, The Blue Point, on the Outer Banks offers a tasty mac & cheese side dish. I like how the cheese crisps the macaroni for a salty tang. Back a few years ago a sweet southern waitress gave me their cornbread recipe which starts with a hotel pan. I imagined she was pulling my leg–even taking the recipe down by a quarter, it still makes way more than a single dinner party’s worth. But my, is that good cornbread. Here all those years I was inflicting Jiffy corn muffin mix on my sons and dreaming about the cornbread the black ladies in the school cafeteria used to make back in Carolina.

photo from www.webstaurantstore.com

So I skulked around the Web, reading over several mac & cheese recipes, then–oh wait–I see an even better one with lobster! Say no more. Sixty dollars poorer and six gorgeous lobster tails later, I was ready. I think it might have been the ticket price of the lobster tails that caused consternation on D’s part. Certainly it couldn’t be the calories; she works out.

Once the ingredients were assembled, however, it became obvious this particular recipe was more like mac and cardiac arrest. Cheeses, plural cheeses, three to be exact, cheddar, gruyere and Romano, five and a half cups grated. Plus light cream, flour and a stick of butter for a pound of elbow pasta and six lonely lobster tails. Onions and garlic to pretend veggies might also be involved. But when I dumped the elbow thingies into the baking dish and realized I still had to add a similar mass of melted cheese, cream and flour requiring digging out the largest casserole dish (not a hotel pan ‘cause we don’t have one) that might have been a first clue.

The topping consists of bread crumbs browned in–more butter. I skipped the last three tablespoons of butter, being concerned about eating healthy.

Twenty maybe thirty minutes in the oven–and if you’re Julia Child, you’ll use your kitchen torch to brown the pasta tips. (You don’t keep a torch handy? Maybe the lighter for the grille?)

After dinner, I needed a bowl of ice cream and a glass of milk to smooth out my digestion. If anyone would like the recipe, I’ll send it along, but I will not be responsible for the 911 call, the ambulance, ER and so forth. It’s winter and we all need our warmest foods to get through.

The Meaning of Death To A Child

Reading last week’s reviews of children’s books in the NY Times Book Review addressing the subject of death, the opening paragraphs were about the very pregnant reviewer’s four-year-old’s query whether her father would die like a twig being snapped. [The reviewer not the query was pregnant, to qualify the last sentence.] Being pregnant confronts parents with a stark reminder of catastrophe. You want zero chance of risk when you’re thinking about children, but you know that’s impossible, so the reviewer’s opening touched me. Here she’s facing the challenge of bringing a second child into the world, and writing about books on death. Not sure I’d have wanted that assignment.

In twofold ways it brought to mind my own life on this rock. As a child, I did not need lessons from a book to introduce me to what happens when someone close to you dies. Even to a child, it’s obvious they’re gone from your life. That was the thought reading the review.

I learned the meaning of death early–bluntly at four years old–my father, someone I desperately needed, was gone. Gone before I knew him, really. Gone from my mother as well, she who remained the only one protecting me so I feared for her, for all of us. I don’t mean this to be pitied–I survived–but only to remark on the suffering of children. I probably couldn’t write a children’s book discussing death–they’d all be balling their eyes out, and that’s not what such books should be about, I don’t think.

Since then, however, I learned the larger meaning of death, of that unmeasurable loss later when my son, Ryan killed himself. When you’re four, it’s the fear of being lost to the living yourself, a very real danger–being fragile and so very dependent–how will you survive? When you’re fifty-two, it’s knowing with certainty that you never will be whole again, that your teenage son’s glittering arc, ablaze like a star across the sky, barely begun would never be completed.

So I spent the next decade after his death struggling to insure Ryan wouldn’t be forgotten. Selfish like a child no doubt, I designed gardens and furiously wrote poems knowing if I didn’t I wasn’t going to make it.

My wife threw a party for my sixtieth birthday and the question running through my mind that evening was where had my 50s gone? The decade gone–like a shooting star.

Ryan taught me a key lesson: that love is the nuclear energy of living, that life itself is an amazing power, and that consciousness is a precious gift we share with all living creatures. Did Ryan know this himself and still reject it? It’s hard to believe he didn’t–he so keen an observer–but if so, why would he destroy his own life? His above mine to be sure. My mother would say in her resigned yet hopeful expression that “when we get to heaven, we’ll have to ask him,” as she used to say about our father.

Poinsettias After Christmas

Please don’t, is all I ask. No more potted gifts, kind people.

Joel Pionsett was a South Carolinian, diplomat and amateur botanist who claimed discovery of the damn things in Mexico. Americans are always sure to claim first discovery, although in this case the Mexicans already had named them ‘Flores de Noche Buena’ or ‘Flowers of the Holy Night’ including them in their celebrations of Christmas. Nevertheless, South Carolinians are quite proud of poinsettias and their native son.

Poinsettias are endlessly fascinating, the way their top leaves look like vivid, red flowers. Sadly, after a short if glorious bloom, in this clime they slowly wilt, leaf by leaf, until they’re like grim prison survivors, gaunt, a few wilted leaves clinging their now naked branches finally carried out with the trash pickup. Cut flowers you expect to whither eventually. There are a multitude of poems about the brief lives of flowers. But poinsettias come potted, with green foil wrapping the pots, even Christmas ribbons, and so everyone assumes they can be cared for. It’s a mean trick on both plant and household gardener.

I know some people can keep poinsettias alive for a while after Christmas, even though the red ‘blooms’ fall away, leaving a plant with green leaves veined and textured vaguely like hydrangeas, and we’ve got lots of those outside so why on earth would we want to tend them indoors?

But the real reason for my plea asking for no more poinsettias is this: D seems to keep them flourishing year ‘round and we’re out of room. Red and green, just like in the flower shop windows. She didn’t learn right off, but after the gifts of several years, she currently maintains a two-tiered grouping that occupies the whole of a large floor-to-ceiling, south-facing window. Which is curious because while the window (only one of a handful) faces the sun, outside the trees and older rhododendrons block most of the direct sunlight. Maybe originally being understory plants in tropical dry forests, this suits to them?

Just outside this same window, it’s begun snowing–a wet snow just in time for Layla’s afternoon walk in the slush. Not that Layla minds too much because she’ll be properly toweled off upon returning. But the Management won’t be looking forward to it, even while gazing at the lovely poinsettias.

I have a nice size quantity of eggnog chilling three days now in the frig. Maybe I’ll have a cup or two to help balance the mac & cheese…