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Remembering Andrea: A Trip to French Laundry and Keller’s Staff Dressing

June 29, 2016 6 Comments

I started this post more than two years ago.

I was supposed to be writing a eulogy and I procrastinated first by cleaning my apartment more thoroughly than I had in months. I then avoided it by starting a blog post I couldn’t bring myself to finish.

I didn’t want to write it because it would make things concrete. But now, two years after losing Andrea, her absence is absolutely, achingly, concrete. And not writing something won’t change that.

And I want to celebrate her at the same time that my heart is cracked open in her absence.

There is motivation beyond that too. For many reasons, not the least of which is that she was always one to knuckle down and get things done and it seems like she’d be sweetly exasperated with me for putting it off. Of course, she was often lovingly exasperated with me. “I can’t” was not a phrase in her vocabulary; she didn’t believe it should be in anyone else’s either. My pessimism, my jokes about eternal spinsterhood were received with her saying my name in an authoritative, yet almost gentle, tone.

Her mission in her last year was to get me to stop apologizing for things that required no apology — a bad habit. One I haven’t quite broken. She’d be exasperated about that too.

Andrea ran full charge at life: marrying her high school sweetheart despite family opposition (and wearing red cowboy boots under her wedding dress to do so), finding jobs in traditionally male-oriented energy industries, getting her MBA from Royal Roads and using her skills, education and experience to become the first female vice-president at an oil and gas company. She was determined, smart and knew what she wanted. She always went after it.

Her positive nature created an amusing oil-and-water friendship between the two of us.

But it was an unshakeable one. Formed in writing classes at UVic when we were all young and away from home for the first time and dreaming of a career built on words. A mutual friend, Julie, drew several of us together and we became a quintet known collectively as the Writer Girls. After graduation, we still met up for girls’ weekends, and caught up over emails and phone calls when our lives couldn’t allow us to be together in the same room.

Girls’ weekends had a few things in common: wine, more wine, spa treatments, giggling like teenagers and talking and sharing problems, solutions, jokes, sad stories, sex stories and more than one game of ‘I never’ — though that was often at my insistence and the other four humoured me occasionally.

There were trips to Tigh-Na-Mara for giggle-punctuated pedicures and a fridge stocked with almost nothing but wine in our cabin. There were visits to Julie’s family cabin on Keats Island. And we met up for five spectacular days in New York City, where Andrea rallied in the muggy heat despite being quite pregnant with her second daughter.

While we were still in university, Andrea had been diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma and was treated successfully. Went into remission. And none of us thought about it again, really.

Until a few years ago when a startling email arrived outlining that a new form of cancer was invading her body and she and her doctor were moving ahead with an aggressive plan for treatment.

Girls’ weekends became more frequent. Not because we were concerned she would leave a ragged hole in our group with her departure, but because it was a sharp reminder not to take anything for granted.

Email updates were marked by Andrea’s unbridled positive attitude — even when they were about new courses of action to replace those that weren’t working. There was always a way to spin it into good news.

And when there wasn’t, even then, she made light of things. Given a cruel timeline of only a few months to live, she made a joke about how she would never eat cauliflower again.

But she lied about that.

Because I made her eat some.

And that’s the story I really want to tell.

I don’t really have a bucket list. And if I did, I’m not even sure if dining at French Laundry would have made the cut; it seemed too far fetched that I would find a way to sit down at one of the tables in the little farmhouse in Napa Valley known around the world for its impeccable cuisine.

It was, then, incredibly unexpected to find myself on the receiving end of a phone call from a friend who said her banker had managed to secure a reservation three weeks from then and did I want to go. Oh, and also, could I think of anyone else who wanted to because it was a table for six and we only had five guests?

Admittedly, my mind didn’t go to Andrea right away. She was going through chemo at the time and the idea of inviting her to California for three days just for dinner seemed a bit silly and likely to garner a no. But Kirsten, another Writer Girl, aptly said there was no harm in trying.

She was right.

The dinner was two days after a round of chemo, but the doctor gave Andrea permission to go. And planning began. And so did the magic.

We needed to rent a convertible, I told her. She booked one. We should try to meet at the airport, if possible. She got a flight that landed 30 minutes after mine.

Our car was a brand new mustang with only eight miles on it. She had programmed her personal GPS with the address of our hotel in Napa Valley, but it couldn’t get a signal in the parking garage and it kept trying to ask if we wanted to take a ferry, thinking it was still in Victoria. At a T-intersection right out of the airport, it still didn’t know where we were, so Andrea told me to just pick a direction. I chose wrong.

But that meant we ended up driving over the Golden Gate Bridge with the top down, gazing up at the orange steel beams soaring above. The grin split Andrea’s face as she just kept repeating, “I’ve always wanted to go over the Golden Gate.”

And the next night, we sat beside each other in the dining room at French Laundry, poking each other under the table at how lucky we were.

The meal is a bit of a blur now; it feels like forever ago.

A parade of impeccable dishes served by stellar, but unobtrusive staff. Non stop wine. And more magic: a woman at a nearby table sporting a giant hat sitting with two gentlemen — one of whom had a pinkie ring with a diamond the size of a golf ball on it — sending me a glass of champagne for reasons that still aren’t clear.

Server: The woman at that table has sent you a glass of champagne.

Me: Um. OK. Why?

Server: I don’t know, but I would just take it, if I were you.

When a dish arrived containing the most microscopic cauliflower floret, I went into a fit of giggles. “Andrea,” I leaned over and whispered, “you’re going to have to break your vow never to eat this vegetable again.”

“If I’m going to eat cauliflower anywhere,” she replied, with the tiny white stalk speared on her fork, “it may as well be at French Laundry.”

I snapped a photo of her with the offending vegetable just before she ate it.

She left two days later, back home for more medications and chemotherapy. That would be the last flight she ever took.

She did not return empty handed, though. She bought Keller’s cookbooks for her husband, Steve — the chef of the family and one who enjoys a cooking challenge — who promptly began to cook his way through the daunting tome.

A few months later I was in Victoria for a visit, and to have Andrea co-sign my Pucker contract. Steve made dinner for us and Kirsten and her husband. Veal parmesan and a salad made from lettuce leaves picked that afternoon from their garden, served with a simple emulsified dressing that Thomas Keller uses for staff meals at the French Laundry.

By the end of the night, and after several glasses of wine, we all had a ferocious case of the giggles — one of us had fallen out of her chair from laughing so hard — and I had co-opted the bowl of fresh lettuce and was using the squeeze bottle of dressing to squiggle it onto individual leaves like ketchup on a hot dog before eating them like a wood chipper.

As soon as I was home in Calgary, I made it again.

And then I meant to post about it, as an ode to this magical dinner and an equally magical friendship.

But I didn’t. There would be time later.

Andrea passed away less than a year after that dinner. Thankfully after several more girls’ weekends, more wine, more stories, more laughs and a few tears. Even more thankfully, well after when the doctors said she would.

Nothing was left unsaid. More magic.

I made this dressing again tonight. Laughed for a moment at how much better I am at food styling my photos now and how Andrea would think that was so great.

She’d be less impressed with the pity party I’ve had over losing my job, how I haven’t pitched another book and, in a nutshell, set goals and pursued them. But I know her exasperation would be at its most gentle. And she’d say my name firmly but kindly and tell me about five things I needed to get going on. I would say sorry.

And then she’d tell me not to apologize.

Thomas Keller’s Staff Dressing

1 tablespoon chopped garlic
1 1/2 teaspoons chopped shallots
2 tablespoons plus 1 teaspoon Dijon mustard
1/4 cup balsamic vinegar
1 large egg yolk
1 1/2 cups to 2 cups canola oil
Kosher salt and freshly ground pepper, about 1/2 teaspoon each

Place the garlic, shallots, mustard and vinegar in a blender and blend until well combined. Add the egg yolk and blend again. With the machine running, slowly drizzle in the oil until the dressing is thick and emulsified. (A note here: I stopped at about 1 1/2 cups of oil because it was thick, completely emulsified — you’ll hear the sound in the blender change — and because, well, I like my dressing to be a little more acidic.) Season to taste with salt and pepper. You can refrigerate it in a covered container for 1 week.
I completely recommend using a squeeze bottle.

Makes about 2 cups.

Vegetables, Vegetarian

Braised Sweet Peppers and a Memorial to My Grandfather

November 11, 2014 2 Comments

Chocolate Heart.

That’s my grandfather’s nickname for me.

He bestowed it on me the first day I drew breath, after opening the first window on an advent calendar and finding a little heart-shaped chocolate behind the perforated cardboard. He didn’t use it often, though always on my birthday, scrawling it in his deeply slanted handwriting on cards, exclaiming it lovingly when I called to thank him.

It’s a special nickname, a personal story between the two of us; other family members rarely use it.

We are not a family for rituals, but hearing him call me Chocolate Heart each year was one I looked forward to. As was the phone call I made to him each Remembrance Day when I would thank him for coming home from the war. It started back in 1996 when I was working a co-op term for the Peace River Block Daily News in Dawson Creek. There, Remembrance Day took on an importance I hadn’t seen in the cities I lived in. Each year, the newspaper put together a special section dedicated to sharing stories of the veterans who called the northern B.C. town home. That winter, we wrote the stories of war brides who had married Canadian soldiers and returned with them after the war to Canada, settling in the then-small community with no sidewalks and dirt roads. Touched by their stories and recognizing how important the act of remembering those who did not make their way home was for those who lived there, I went to the Remembrance Day ceremonies. And when I got back home that afternoon, I called Papa.

If he had not come home, I would not be here.

This day last year was the last time I heard his voice. This year, there is no phone call.

Two weeks after we chatted, he passed away unexpectedly in his little cabin on the parcel of land overlooking the waters of Active Pass and the stand of soaring Fir trees he refused to chop down, despite them blocking much of the view. It was two days before my birthday and among all the things I mourned about losing him was the fact I wouldn’t hear him call me Chocolate Heart one more time.

This is the man who nurtured in me a passion for good food and wine, who introduced me to prosciutto and Riesling, who shared his love for cooking with a little girl who loved to be in the kitchen with him. Somewhere there’s a photo of the two of us leaning over a pasta rack, fresh noodles dangling from the sticks as we grin behind them, proud of our efforts and patiently waiting until we could eat them.

JASMacdonald. Untitled, year unknown.

An artist and former art instructor at UBC, he showed me the beauty of art and how to appreciate it, even though his skills and talents didn’t travel through the mess of genes to me. He taught me how to catch fish by jigging over the side of a row boat bobbing in the waves from the BC Ferries as they slid through the pass between Galiano Island and Mayne. In his studio’s makeshift kitchen, at a counter made of a length of plywood on sawhorses, he showed me how to make pesto from the basil he grew in his greenhouse. We’d eat it on bread with cheese, looking out through the Fir trees to the blue water, listening to jazz.

He dreaded Remembrance Day, refused to go the legion for any ceremony, choosing instead to stay at home and drink tumblers of wine while watching the birds flit around the feeders he kept filled and past them down the steep grassy slope to the ocean. It was a reminder of friends he lost during the war and those he had served with who had died in the intervening years. But he liked the phone call. And so did I.

Sometimes I could persuade him to share stories of his time overseas. He didn’t linger on the atrocities of war, of those fellow soldiers he lost. Instead, with his trademark chuckle, he’d weave tales about his misadventures and mishaps as a navigator. Like how he convinced his superior officers that he didn’t know how to swim — a key skill when one is threatened with the chance of being shot down over water — and was ordered to learn, which meant he spent afternoons in a heated pool learning the basics of front crawl (“Which is the easiest to learn?” he’d asked before demanding he only learn that one stroke.) while the other soldiers ran drills outside.

From the time I was young, I heard the stories of how he was shot down while on a bombing mission to Stuttgart. Hearing the tales before I was old enough to fully understand the dangers he was in made his funny anecdotes more amusing than scary. Half the crew was killed when the plane went down. He had parachuted to safety and spent three days wandering the French countryside, hiding in barns and haystacks, eating raw eggs and mulled wine before he was connected to the French underground and smuggled into Switzerland. The northeastern corner of France was occupied at the time and it was only by chance he was not discovered. He never focused on that part of it, instead spinning stories about how his cover was that he was ‘Jacques’ a deaf-dumb gardener because he had no aptitude for language and if he spoke, he would immediately be identified as a Canadian. “Which was dumb,” he would later say, “because if anyone made a loud noise near me, I’d turn around.”

He broke the rules of internment in Switzerland, reaching out to his wife back in Vancouver with their baby daughter to say he was alright, even as she was receiving telegrams to report he was missing in action. And when boredom in Bern reached a fever pitch, he and a few other soldiers smuggled themselves back into France and down to the coast to try to get back to England.

The upside of all those boring days was he wrote everything down; I have one of those journals, his words written out in his signature slanted handwriting, as well as a typed version of his story. So those stories won’t be lost, at least. It’s the stories I didn’t get to hear that make me wish for one more day at his side with a tumbler of wine and the sound of his voice.

He leaves a legacy, though. It is in the food I make and the skills I learned at his side. It’s in my love of Italian food and a good Gewurztraminer.

I miss him dearly.

In the days just after he passed, I wanted to make something that would connect us in some way. I can’t make Fettuccine con Piselli e Prosciutto without thinking of him. (That post is also about him.) Nor Pasta Carbonara. But I remembered all the times we also made Sweet Braised Peppers from his favourite cookbook by Umberto Menghi and I knew that was the perfect way to honour his memory. It’s one of the first things I remember making with him. It’s also the first time I learned you can’t touch your eyes after touching a hot pepper — a lesson that had my grandfather making me lay on the couch with a cold, wet facecloth over my eyes. Why he was using hot peppers, which the recipe doesn’t call for, remains a mystery to me.

So, in my grief, I chopped peppers and made a tomato sauce and ate it all with crusty, buttered bread that I used to swipe the last of the sauce from my bowl. And I know he would have been nodding his head in enjoyment and telling me I should just eat a little more.

Peperonata (Braised Sweet Peppers)

From The Umberto Menghi Cookbook.

1 tablespoon olive oil
1 medium red pepper, quartered
1 medium green pepper, quartered
1 small onion, diced large
Salt (to taste)
Freshly ground pepper (to taste)
1 clove garlic, finely chopped
1/3 cup tomato sauce
1/4 cup Parmesan cheese, coarsely grated

Preheat oven to 400F.

Saute peppers and onion sin oil in a skillet on medium heat for 4 to 5 minutes.

Season with salt and pepper.

Put peppers and onion in a casserole dish. Sprinkle garlic on top of peppers and onion. Pour tomato sauce over peppers, onion and garlic. Sprinkle Parmesan cheese on top of peppers, on, garlic and tomato sauce. Put casserole dish, uncovered, in oven and bake at 400F for 15 minutes.

Serves 2.

Baking, Breakfast

Cinnamon Rolls for Michelle

January 31, 2011 41 Comments

This has taken more than a year to write.

Because although I’ve composed this dozens of times in my head, when it came down to actually sitting at the laptop words have completely escaped me.

And, I guess, the timing just wasn’t right.

This is for my friend Michelle.

On Dec. 30, 2009, Michelle Lang was in a two-LAV convoy returning to the Canadian Forces base in Kandahar when they hit an IED. She and four soldiers — Garrett Chidley, George Miok, Zachery McCormack and Kirk Taylor — were killed in the blast. Five others were injured.

Three weeks earlier, we were out celebrating my birthday. It was her final weekend before she flew out to Afghanistan for what was expected to be a two-month stint reporting on the conflict in that country for Canwest News. Despite the fact she was less than 72 hours from taking off and had myriad errands to run and things to organize before leaving, she came out for dinner and then drinks, staying out well past bedtime. Friends always came first; that’s just the sort of girl she was.

And she was from the start.

When I moved to Calgary I had arranged for a couple of places to stay in those first few weeks, but there was a four-day gap where I had no plan, hoping to depend on the kindness of another reporter with whom I had a mutual friend. Instead, Michelle stepped in, offering up her couch to me — a virtual stranger — for as much time as I needed. She apologized it wasn’t nicer.

I live in that apartment now. On the night before I was to move in, Michelle stayed up until the early morning to get it into tip-top shape for me because she knew I wasn’t happy about giving up my old place. That’s also the sort of girl she was.

She was a huge supporter of this blog, she wasn’t afraid to scold me over my ever-growing shoe collection or dish out the tough love when it was needed. She offered up praise for a good story or kitchen victory; she listened when things were going sideways; she was my sushi-and-Buffy buddy (take-out and DVDs for a mid-week pick-me-up).

On the day before she left, I called her quickly to say I was going to miss her, to have fun, tell good stories and that I would see her in January. And then I said I would bake whatever she wanted when she was back in Calgary.

“What’s your favourite thing?” I asked.

“Cinnamon rolls,” she replied.

And I promised they would be hers when she returned.

A few weeks after her death, after the repatriation ceremony at CFB Trenton, the funeral in Vancouver and memorial service in Calgary, after the media coverage quieted, I set out to make the cinnamon buns. The fog of grief was still thick and I wanted to do something, some tiny thing, some personal thing, to honour her and follow through on my promise.

I set out to make the cinnamon rolls.

They were a complete failure. As in, the dough didn’t rise at all. Frustrated and angry — at more than just a baking misstep — I threw the hard lump of dough away and broke down. I didn’t attempt them again.

(Yeast-based goods are a downfall for me anyway, hence my love of all things no-knead. Although I did make some no-knead pumpkin cinnamon rolls that were successful, for some reason I feel this neither fulfilled nor broke my promise to make some for Michelle. I guess I figured the fact they were pumpkin made them a different kind of cinnamon bun altogether.)

Leading up to the one-year anniversary of losing Michelle, I started thinking again about those cinnamon rolls and my promise. But I wasn’t ready. I dug my heels in trying to fight against the approaching day — a futile task.

And when it passed I knew it was time.

Michelle, this one is for you.

gwendolyn

(Immense gratitude for the Pioneer Woman who had a recipe that was easy to work with and delicious. Thank you, I needed that.)

Incidentally, these red bowls were a birthday present from Michelle a few years ago. Now, when I pull them out (which I do a lot, since they are awesome ones from Williams-Sonoma), I always think of her.

Pioneer Woman’s Cinnamon Rolls

I have halved this recipe, which still made an insane amount of rolls, as in two 9-inch cake pans’ worth and they were jammed full. This is as I made it, but you can easily double it if you want to feed an army. The glaze/frosting recipe is loosely based on hers, but I changed it quite a bit because I wanted something lemon-y.

2 cups milk
1/2 cup vegetable oil
1/2 cup sugar
2 1/2 teaspoons (1 package) active dry yeast
4 1/2 cups all-purpose flour, divided
1/2 teaspoon, heaping, baking powder
1/2 teaspoon, scant, baking soda
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup melted butter, plus 2 tablespoons for the pans
cinnamon

In a large pot, mix the milk, oil and sugar and heat until scalded, just before boiling. Remove from the heat and let it cool until lukewarm, about 45 minutes to 1 hour. Sprinkle over yeast and let sit for a minute. Add in the 4 cups of flour and stir. Cover and let it rise for at least an hour until doubled (or more).

Add the remaining 1/2 cup of flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt. Stir together. (I had to knead it a little bit to get all the remaining dry ingredients worked in.)

Sprinkle the area where you’re going to roll out the dough generously with flour. Divide the dough in half and roll it thin into a rough rectangle. Drizzle half the melted butter over the dough and then sprinkle half of the sugar and a generous dose of cinnamon. (I went too easy on it and wish I had used more. Don’t be afraid!) Roll the dough in a neat, tight line and then pinch the seam together to seal it. Slice the rolls into even pieces, about 1-inch wide. (Mine were probably closer to 1 1/2-inches.)

Spread 1 tablespoon of melted butter into a cake or pie pan (she calls for 7-inch pans; I used 9-inch ones) and lay in the rolled dough slices. Let them rise for 20 to 30 minutes.

Preheat oven to 375.

Bake rolls until light golden brown, about 15 to 18 minutes.

Lemon Glaze

1/2 bag powdered (icing) sugar
zest and juice of 1 lemon
pinch or two of salt
1/4 – 1/2 cup milk
2 tablespoons melted butter

Mix all the ingredients together. Add more milk if the mixture is too thick or more sugar if it is too runny.

Pour over the rolls when they are still slightly warm.

Remembering Andrea: A Trip to French Laundry and Keller’s Staff Dressing

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Braised Sweet Peppers and a Memorial to My Grandfather

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Cinnamon Rolls for Michelle

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