Pimento Cheese Spread

Back in the days when we probably still weren't grownups, we vacationed in Corolla, North Carolina on a split of land where the ocean lulled us to sleep every night, no matter what happened during the day. In the earliest of those days, the family of Gary's college roommate had a house just down the blacktop street from us. Really, it was a lovely cottage, in the best sense of the word, with a screened-in porch facing the dunes and the waves. Dave's mom had an open-door policy, and I'd often walk the beach, climb the steps up and over their high dune line, and knock on the porch door to see if anyone was home. When someone was, we'd sit on the porch or the hanging swing with a glass of tea and shoot the breeze. I know now that I wanted to be part of that family, especially on the nights we visited for a clam feast, when the small kitchen would be overrun by perspiring chefs, when the dining table would be covered with newspaper, when beer and salt and butter coated our sunburned lips. My children learned to eat clams there, Laura, Andy, and Rachel piling their paper plates high with sprung-open shells first and then later with steamed shrimp.

I think I wanted to belong to Dave's mom mostly, this generous-spirited woman who would talk books and words with me, spinning away beach afternoons and evenings on her porch. I think I sometimes didn't want to go back to our house, a place I wasn't sure I fit into the larger scheme of things, a house larger and grander than the cottage down the way, with people who often didn't get me. In the long run, she lost her Dave too early, but not before he'd shaken hands with loss a few times himself.

Usually, I'd cook dinner for our friends, a high-calorie mess of seafood, cream, and pasta. This dinner involved a trip to our local seafood stand after a trip to Tommy's Market, about 20 minutes away in Duck. Tommy's was pricey, but it stocked those lovely vacation foods that we craved--salty, fresh-boiled peanuts, fancy potato salads, and bottles of clear white wine. I'd wheel the mini cart through the tiny store, overloading the basket with homemade pasta, cheese wedges, and blueberry pie. At the prepared foods counter, I always grabbed a large container of pimento cheese spread. This spread was so unlike the small jars I could find at home, this one containing thick shreds of cheese in a garlicky dressing. For as long as I could remember, my mother'd longingly described the pimento cheese spread of her southern youth. "Mom," I told her through the phone. "Tommy's Market has it!"

Little did I know that making Tommy's Market quality pimento cheese spread was so easy. And, so it goes...some things turn out to be easier than others.

If you have ten minutes, you can have pimento cheese spread, which will make your day a better one, I promise. This recipe is mighty comforting. I'll do a throw down with Tommy's Market if they'll agree to it.

 

Here's what you need:

• 1 pound shredded cheddar cheese. (I buy a block and shred it myself. Do it...you'll be glad when the fresh cheese curls melt in your mouth...just watch your knuckles!)
• 1/2 red onion, grated (Do yourself a favor and buy a hand-held grater. You can lay it across the bowl and grate directly into the mixture. Don't chop or mince the onion--you want the shreds to curl up against the cheese.)
• 2 garlic cloves, grated. (I use my micro planer for this...I saw Rachel Ray grate her garlic this way a couple of years ago, and I've never gone back to the dicing or smashing method. This way, the garlic melts into the mixture, rather than popping up in hard pieces.)
• 1 4-oz. jar of pimentos, drained and chopped. (I bought mine in strips, so that I could chop mine a little larger than the small dice of the jarred version.)

• 1-2 teaspoons of Worcestershire sauce, depending on taste. (I used two.)
• 1 to 1 1/2 cups mayonnaise, depending on the creaminess factor you want. (I'm an eyeballer, folks. It's hard for me to give exact measurements, so I suggest starting with one cup, and then adding a little more at a time, if you like. Also, use the good mayo. There's no way to lighten a dish that already has a pound of cheese in it.)

• Sea salt and freshly ground pepper to taste. (Yes, ma'am, I'm an eyeballer, all right.)
• Mix together, and eat. (I guess the pimento cheese purists would advise refrigerating for an hour, but those of us, who can't help ourselves, we eat it right out of the bowl.)

 

Einstein, Say It's So

The outdoor rotunda, Pittsburgh's Pennsylvania Railway Station

The Broadway Limited left from Pittsburgh's Pennsylvania Railway Station around 1:06 a.m., the hour late enough to make my mother cranky about having to drive me downtown. We'd park under the great rotunda, never looking up at the circular patterns of terracotta-colored stones topped by centered slices of glass. Later I'd think about the lovers who parted from or joined to each other under this shelter all because of these tracks, the cumulative comings and goings, the damp jackets where faces had buried themselves in angst or relief. Then, though, I thought only about getting to my destination, maybe trying to sleep a bit through the night's journey, nodding off but shaking myself awake as every station was called, each clackety-clack of the rails taking me closer to him.

Imagine if I'd only looked up!

After the saying goodbye (I'm going, I'm going, I'm going!) and the thrilling sound of "ALL ABOARD!," if I was lucky enough, no one would sit next to me. Twice I remember not being lucky at all, sitting once next to a girl who was actively determined to save my apparently sorry soul before the train pulled into Trenton. Another time, I spent the entire trip turned fully toward the window in an effort ward off my seatmate, who was trying his best to "accidentally" touch the curve of my breast.

The Broadway Limited rounding Horseshoe Bend in Altoona, Pennsylvania.

When the conductor called "NEXT STATION STOP, ALTOONA!" ..."HORSESHOE CURVE COMING UP!" I never failed to rub my eyes, turning sleepily toward the window, to watch the train nearly meeting itself as it rounded the great bend.  Altoona was midpoint, or a little over, in my trip. From this point on, I was fully awake, anxious to be free of the train, to be jumping down the three iron steps, to be scanning the crowd for his face, to be kissing and falling and spinning and losing myself in the suddently very solid fact of us.

While Gary's strengths don't always include being on time (When we got married, I told him the ceremony was at 1:30--when it was scheduled for 2), he never was late to meet the Broadway Limited. We rode back to campus in his roommate's taped-together green Dodge Dart, feeling ourselves becoming invisible to the world. For the next 72 hours, there would be only two.

One of the many Princeton arches. Imagine your back curving against its stone, face rising to the one bending to you.

"Princeton was a great place to be in love," I tell my husband from the back seat of our rented SUV. Our oldest son rides shotgun because of his long legs, and three of us sit hip to hip behind them. We are making a lunch stop in Princeton, having left Philadelphia on route to Fairfield, Connecticut as we follow Rachel's college lacrosse team that's come East for Spring Break.

Gary drives down Nassau Street slowly, ostensibly looking for a parking spot, but I can sense he's searching for something else . He eases into a parking garage that wasn't there the last time we visited, and we spill out into a crossroad where our past looks haughtily at our present.

"We may not have lived up to your expectations," I whisper.

I can feel us here, still here, and while I'm glad for all that is, I want to weep for all that's lost. Would I sell a little bit of my soul to be young again, my long hair swishing mid back, the skin around my eyes smooth and taut, our married life yet to be, hanging before us like a glossy ripe plum? If our youth is fossilized anywhere, it is here.

And, if Einstein was right about the fabric of time, our past, present, and future exist simultaneously. Might an 80-year-old Jill be tapping her way down the street? Today, I'd be happier to find the 20-year-old Jill, who could be walking across campus after a Cat Steven's concert, the fingers of her left hand looped in Gary's belt, his arm slung proprietarily across her shoulders. Dorm windows open to the May air, a mash-up of "Morning Has Broken" and "It's a Wild World" floats above us.

If it were late enough, we might hear our young selves calling "HOT DOG MAN!", desperately in search of the vendor peddling steamed dogs and buns at 2 a.m. Sometimes we ate at The Grotto, a tiny storefront decorated with white fencing and plastic flowers, where candles dripped down the sides of rope-wrapped pot-bellied wine bottles. At The Grotto, we ordered either eight-inch club sandwiches or featherweight gnocchi (I've judged every dish of gnocchi by The Grotto's standards since then). We often tripped down dark stairs to a basement bar called The Annex where we'd drink Sicilian Kisses (Southen Comfort and Amaretto) until I spoke only in Spanish. Then we'd order the 99 cent ham and cheese special to bring back my English. Once we lunched at The Nassau Inn, our tureens of clam chowder served on a table carved deeply with initials of long gone boys and men. I believed the silver pitcher of cream served with the soup prophesised our future.

The Peacock Inn



If there is a place in which our younger selves could manifest, it would certainly be the Peacock Inn. Set back from the bustle of Nassau Street on Bayard, the Peacock seemed to be a spun-sugar house, lit from within. Was it our future selves climbing the steps,already transitioning into our next, more formal stage? We dressed up for those dinners, ordering wine, holding hands across the crisply-clothed table set along a curved wall of windows in this glorious old house.The details of what we ate have faded, but my fingers remember the silver's heavy curves. We walked in tandem, slowly, me crying a little at the end of our Peacock nights.The next day I'd again board the Broadway Limited, this time moving too quickly backwards, clack-clackety.

Nothing like a good old cup of Joe to bring us back to reality.

Today, our present selves are meeting old college friends, Bryan and Audrey, at P.J.'s Pancake House, one of the few eateries that hasn't changed much since Gary and Bryan graduated in the seventies. We sat in the corner nook, our younger selves crowding the booth, all of us catching up over P.J.'s best.

The corner table at PJ's, where we rubbed elbows with the past.

Rachel may have had the best plate: Eggs Benedict...

 

...with a side of strawberry pancakes!

The Sunday Table

I am standing at the stove, my mother's apron wrapped twice around my waist, the ruffled hem floating an inch or two above my sneakers. Cubes of potatoes and fat chunks of green peppers and onion crackle in my grandmother's cast iron skillet. This skillet (once used to conk my drunken grandfather on the head one after he struggled up two flights of stairs with a bottle in one hand and a toy train in the other) will accompany me to every kitchen of my life.

Scuttling sideways, standing on my toes, I peer through the kitchen window at the alley behind our house. "Did he say he was coming for sure, Daddy?"

My father looks up from the crossword puzzle in The Pittsburgh Press, nodding and licking his pencil with the tip of his tongue.

I don't remember his name now, some neighborhood friend coming to help my dad with work around the house. Fifty-two when I was born, my father slipped and fell one night on the ice, no one finding him until the morning. His artificial hip, the first of its kind in Pittsburgh, was made of titanium, but his hip always ached like a "son of a bitch." Between that wounded joint, arthritis, and emphesema, his home-repair abilities were limited. One summer, this neighbor visited almost daily, and I cooked breakfast, taking such pride in sliding shimmering sunny-side ups onto a plate.

Admittedly, I was a strange child, cooking breakfast for the workman, dreams of bacon and omelets and french toast running through my head as I drifted off to sleep. If I wasn't reading, I was cooking. My sister still delights in telling stories about me holding prayer services for our family on certain nights, me assigning seats to my atheist father, my Presbyterian mother, and my siblings whose faith emerged from that difficult match. A fleeting memory shoots across my mind: me stomping my foot and pointing while I stood behind the couch, which served as an altar.

I stopped holding mandatory prayer meetings, but I haven't stopped cooking...or reading about cooking or watching television programs about cooking.When my children were babies and their father played on two softball teams, the five of us spent Sunday afternoons watching food shows on the local PBS channel, me rocking at least one baby, the recipes offering a salve for my frazzled nerves. To this day, my grown children can be lulled into contentment by watching The Barefoot Contessa, Everyday Italian, Chopped, three of them sitting shoulder to shoulder on the couch, the other often at my feet.

You know what they say, baby...food is love. I certainly know the way to people's stomachs.When my daughter's friend Ben visited us this summer on his way from playing baseball out East to his family's almond farm in California, I blended tri-berry smoothies, folded tender goat cheese omelets, and topped grape tomatoes with balsamic glaze. This is what I do: dish up bowls of wine-laced boeuf bourguignon, spoon cornbread into my grandmother's skillet, mix lemon vinagrette with a light hand.

Sitting at the Sunday table is a good thing; we laugh a lot; we share stories, weaving ourselves back together once again. But just as we know that a skillet can conk someone on the head as easily as crisp homefries, sometimes our table witnesses tears, misunderstandings and recriminations.Why don't you join us? I can't promise what you'll find...a mom with her head in her hands or a table crowded round with extra chairs.

Last week, our Sunday table moved to Meat and Potatoes in Pittsburgh. Andy, son number two, invited us to brunch, where no one conked anyone on the head. Take a look:

Every brunch should start with monkey bread. I decided to buy an extra large muffin tin after these over-sized cupcakes arrived at our table. Think of the possibilities!

 

Two Sundays ate chicken and waffles (the cheddar/jalapeno variety) with bacon-and-bourbon- infused syrup. My southern-born mother made the silkiest skillet gravy to accompany her version of chicken-fried steak. My tastebuds want to pair chicken and waffles with my mama's "milk gravy" as she used to call it.

 

 

Papa Sunday chose Irish Benedict (corned beef/ swiss/ poached egg/ and Thousand Island hollandaise. One egg was so full of yolk that it burst when pricked with a fork, spraying his dark green sweater. I only mention this because I'm usually the one spotted with brunch.

 

 

Our adopted Sunday girl loved the short rib hash, contentedly boxing half of it up for another day at another table.