I was feeling very New Yorker-y on Friday. Elena and I went to Bloomingdale’s (I refused to go to Herald Square again–you get this feeling like you could crowd-surf, but if you did you wouldn’t get anywhere, since the 89 zillion people are all milling in random directions), and I took four buses and only one subway over the course of the day.
Also, to celebrate Mary’s birthday on her birthday, I agreed to meet her at Gobo–an allegedly vegetarian restaurant that turned out to be largely vegan, as well. As a dedicated meat-eater, I normally might have gently given her a bit of a hard time, but the fact is that it was delicious, and now I want to go back and try the twenty other things on the menu I considered having.
In point of fact, after the most flawless scallion pancake (with the de rigueur mango salsa) I have ever had, I ended up with a giant mound of spinach. I had expected “spinach and orange saute with cashews” to be more of a balance of all three, but no–almost entirely just spinach. Delicious spinach, you understand (in a bit of this maddening savory ginger broth), but there’s only so much spinach you can eat without interruption.
Mary, who is always vigilant about the possibility that I will loathe anything I have ordered at a restaurant that she has selected, assumed the worst about the half of the spinach that remained on my plate, but the fact is that I was already daydreaming about turning it into a side dish for something appropriately Asian-inspired the next day.
And so yesterday, realizing that I had all the necessary ingredients (and even some of the know-how) to make panko-encrusted chicken, that is what I decided to do. I got out the poaching pan Nick uses, even though it’s a pain in the neck to wash, and set out little bowls of flour, egg, and panko crumbs, since most of the recipes I looked up a while back involved dipping the chicken into all three.
“Make sure the oil is nice and hot,” was Nick’s only recommendation. So I dropped about half an inch of oil into my pan and turned the burner on low-ish while I triple-dipped dipped my chicken. And imagine my dedication at this point, considering how much I hate touching icky things.
When I returned to my stove, the oil looked exactly the same, except for some sort of coil of texture that I ignored, because any way you slice it, this was not hot bubbling oil. So I began washing some dishes to kill time, which is what I was doing when the oil first exploded.
I’m talking about a four-foot-high jet of scalding oil, followed shortly by more of the same. I was able to dart in to turn down the burner a bit, but the eruptions continued, oil spattering everywhere. Now I know how Nick always makes such a wreckage of my kitchen, although I’m pretty sure I would have heard the gunshot-like reports if he had ever done anything quite this appallingly wrong.
I developed this idea that maybe the oil would settle down if it had something to focus its energy on, so I slid over to drop in some of the chicken. I got two pieces into the pan, but the second one set off a series of explosions so violent that I had to hide behind my refrigerator. “You probably overheated the oil,” Nick mused today. “That happens.”
I could kill him; I swear I could.
It was all smooth sailing from there, though, and the chicken was a perfect counterpoint to the still-excellent spinach. Unfortunately, this drama put me even further behind for my trek out to Brooklyn for Mary’s birthday (observed).
It was a great party once I got there, though; everyone was having a great time, and there was grilled pineapple, which is always a bonus. My highlight was when Mary’s coworker, Jerome, whipped out his digital camera. “How impressed you are will depend on where you’re from and how long you’ve been here,” he warned. Then he turned it around, and my jaw dropped as three or four photos slid by of a 4 train covered in a massive piece of graffiti–every car was tagged, and we’re talking one of those thorough, full-color murals here.
The kind that isn’t supposed to be possible anymore.
I have not lived here long enough to have ever seen such a thing, myself, but I know enough to know how incredibly special it is to see now. The party spent the next half-hour arguing about whether it was commissioned, how and where it had been done, whether Jerome’s assertion that it was by some group of Europeans had any merit, and how it had ever been allowed to leave the train yard that way.
Ever feel nostalgic for a place you’ve never been?
Another of Mary’s coworkers walked with me to the train, while his friend dropped back and lit a joint. The contrast to the pot-smokers I knew in college who thought they were so reckless and daring could not have been more palpable as the slightly sickening scent wafted along the deserted sidewalk. And the stories the two of them swapped about falling asleep on late-night trains and waking up in trainyards to the sound of seagulls made me feel like a New York dilettante for all the cabs I have given up and fallen into over the last three years.
When I eventually got to 96th St., the subway station was packed, and there was a 1 train heading in just behind the 2 I had arrived on. And while I had had every intention of taking a cab, people being around is what makes me feel safe, so how could I be so arbitrary as to say that just because it was 2:30am it was too dangerous to walk seven minutes in Washington Heights?
As I walked up wide, well-lit St. Nicholas with the restaurant/bars still hopping, and then turned onto 185th with the three Yeshiva security stations in two blocks, I felt sick, if only because I felt so safe. One more barrier between me and the real life of this city has come down; I no longer have to find a way to be surgically dropped at my doorstep just because it’s dark out. I no longer have an excuse to “have to” drop money on a cab.
I am one step closer to waking up under seagulls.