Minestrone and Baked Apples

From winter 2006 in New York
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Renee is a college friend of mine, a rare one I have kept in touch with even through my more recent tumultuous and less proud moments. We are also the only two people I know in our age group and ambition proudly supporting 718 as the area code of choice for our cellular phones, representing our adopted home boroughs of Brooklyn (her; she is cooler) and Queens (me). We meet up maybe once a month in irregular intervals to catch up and for me to tell her things I don’t care to share with anyone else.

I don't have many female friends. Truth be told, I don't have many friends to start with. Since my job more than fulfills the casual socialization requirement part of a standard social life, I have a few people very close to me to whom I go, infrequently but consistently, for the most serious things in life. Then again, maybe this is just an excuse; maybe I just don't have many friends. Period. Whatever the reason for my loner status, Renee is one of such few friends I have who happens to be female, making her an even rarer breed.

One of my fondest memories of Renee is when she got hit by a truck. Let me rephrase this, since the sentence invites a horrible misunderstanding. Or rather, let me recount the story of a freezer in Brooklyn packed full of minestrone in winter of 2006 and very drunken apples that nearly killed my friend who survived a car accident.

Accidents involving pedestrians getting hurt by automobiles is a scary and every-day occurrence in New York City. Everyone here knows someone who has gotten into a serious car-related accident while walking in the City. Renee was able to avoid the worst. Diving into the sidewalk as a semi blindly trudged on was a smart move on her part; she escaped with a broken foot after this traumatizing experience. I nearly wrote "only with a broken foot" and decided not to, because having a broken foot, as I learned from her, is not an insignificant inconvenience, especially when it comes to one's love life.

Renee was house-bound in her Carroll Gardens first floor apartment for a good month. As her cast became smaller and lighter, we ventured out again. I remember fully using her handicap as a persuasive prop to snatch a table at the ever-so-full Spotted Pig in the Village. I also think that the mini skirt she had to wear to best accommodate her cast in the middle of winter helped with the gentleman at the host station. But months before this, she was literally house-bound. And I cannot imagine how lonely and miserable that might be in a gloomy New York winter, away from the Christmas lights and decorated show windows. And so I decided to ride the F train from Queens, through Manhattan and all the way to Brooklyn to cook for her.

Cooking with and for Renee has always been fun. She enjoys food without pretension and with style. For her it's not just about the food, but also the occasion and how it is presented. My goal that day was to bring some sign of comfort and safety in the form of a meal. I decided to cook minestrone.

And I cooked a lot of it.

Literally, it was a stock pot full of minestrone. This yields to about two gallons. I like my soups with a lot of things in them (in such way that canned soup companies might use the term "chunky"), a trait I have inherited from my mother.[1] Two gallons of soup filled with vegetables, beans, pasta and pancetta for flavor is a lot of food for a single woman. I packed the rest of the soup in Tupperware and into the freezer they went.

To picture how I stacked these containers in the freezer, one might imagine a game of Tetris. As I tucked away the Tupperware figuring out how to best fit the pieces together, I thought, if there was a nuclear disaster right now and became unsafe to get out for 50 days, we would survive on this soup alone.

The soup that did not get saved for such misfortune was served for dinner that evening. It was accompanied with bread from Alain Ducasse New York, carefully picked up the night before by yours truly and a lovely salad that Renee somehow composed, chopping seated at the dining room table with one leg propped up. For dessert we had baked apples.

You see, there was this wonderful apple dessert at ADNY that season, which had little balls of apples simmered in Calvados. One of my favorite late-night bites at work were those apple balls accompanied by crème Chantilly for the famous Baba au Rum as we snuck in the kitchen and waited for the last guests to finish their lavish dinners. My delinquent restaurant snack was the inspiration for the delinquent home-cooked dessert.

I cored tart apples, stuffed them with raisins and a mixture of brown sugar and cinnamon, topped them with a pat of butter each and drenched them in apple liqueur. It was really more like a bain-marie of apple liqueur; place the stuffed apples in a baking pan and pour a pool of alcohol until the pan is 3/4 full. Baking in the oven for 40 minutes does evaporate some of the alcohol.

But not all alcohol evaporates and these apples were very drunk. After I cleaned up and left the Carroll Gardens apartment, I prayed that the amount of alcohol in the dessert would not mix badly with the pain killers Renee was taking. Throughout the dinner as I drank champagne found in her refrigerator, my friend on drugs was disappointed that she could not join me. By disappointed, I mean, really unhappy. Renee enjoys her alcohol and buys wines by the case (mix-and-match) from wine stores.

I was too embarrassed to confess my fear that I may have killed my dear friend with the amount of liqueur in the dessert. When we spoke again a few weeks later and casually made plans to meet and eat together, I hid my relief behind a cool tone of voice, secretly letting out a big sigh in comfort that I did not accidentally kill the woman who survived a semi-truck running over her.



[1] My brother and I used to complain as kids that her udon noodle soups were 60% noodles, 35% vegetables and 5% soup. Somehow I've adapted her taste as I grew up.