Volume 14: When the Party Ends
A story about broth and a recipe for tomato-y broth-y beans with chicken
If my last newsletter was a meditation on destruction, you might be relieved to know, reader, that lately, I’ve been ruminating on formation. The way things come to be, come together and endure. Last week I received a text from a friend that he had made too much chicken stock and asked if I wanted some. It was unusually neighborly for New York, adequately friendly from this person I have not known for very long but who I have come to adore. I said yes and we issued an exchange: I would take the chicken broth he made and use it to cook dinner for him and his roommate. I showed up to his door around four to pick up the stock, which was in an almost comically large tupperware and which I conspicuously carried through Tompkins Square Park, shouldering as well an oversized bag of groceries and weird looks from passersby. Then, some hours later, they showed up at my door with wine and we ate dinner, baked risotto with charred zucchini and shallots and fall salad with apples and squash, around my kitchen table as it poured down rain outside.
When I had woken up that morning, the day had stretched before me with noticeable emptiness. Every move I made from the coffee I drank to the run I took in early morning echoed. But as I prepared my menu for Friday’s dinner and shopped for the necessary ingredients, I felt giddy with the ease that certain parts of my life had taken on recently. It is this ease that I wish would spread over my entire being, fill me up like hot tea on cold days. There was once a point in my life when making plans and then seeing them through was the most exhausting part of my week. Moving to New York is as much an exercise in who I will spend my time with as it is who I won’t. But now, plans come together with the simple mention of chicken stock and everything else flows quietly from there. The process of things coming about feels effortless and the result is so wonderful. But if I think too carefully about how these particular friends came into my life, I can see with a clarity that has the power to send a shiver down my spine, the perilous ground on which things rest. It’s as if I believed my life was founded on a plane of concrete but upon closer examination and with the premonition of falling like that of approaching the drop of a rollercoaster, I realized I have actually been standing on sand.
One of the friends who came to dinner was a regular at Smør. But it wasn’t until we realized we were from the same hometown, running into each other on a train platform just outside of Boston while we waited for an Amtrak headed to New York, that we ever spoke to one another. Smør has given me so many of my friends in the way that all coffee shops as well as wine bars are uniquely posed to foster, if not community, then at the very least conversation. But it’s hard not to view, with profound unease, the comings-about of these relationships as random. I have increasingly wondered what my life would have been like if I had worked at a different coffee shop, which was almost the case on not one but two occasions. Or if I had taken a different train, stayed a day longer at home, then I would have never run into the regular that became my friend. I am reading a lengthy series called My Struggle, the irony of which is not lost on me, and I am wary of merit in Karl Ove’s assertion that “as your perspective of the world increases not only is the pain it inflicts on you less but also its meaning.” If the way our lives unfold is according to a series of random instances and interactions, does it make them any less meaningful? Perhaps not. But it gives them a certain fallibility, and makes me wonder if meaning is something we sew into our own lives out of the fear that if we don’t, nothing will hold.
I sometimes fear that if my mother had been good at knitting or if my grandmother had been more persistent with her sewing lessons, I would not have been a cook. I would have been making garments instead of cookies and my knuckles would be aching instead of my knees. I think about this a lot lately as my career in food stalls. I’m finding it hard to get a job in the field and I’m worried that my passion for food can’t withstand such a profound confrontation with the checks and balances of reality. We hear so often that we are meant to find our passion. Gag. Barf. Sigh. Comply.
But what if our passion finds us. Like when we are crossing the street on a Tuesday or when we are reading an article over breakfast on a Sunday. I know that I will make it through this phase of my life but I’m worried that my values won’t be so resolute. After all, if they came into my life with the same amount of chance as everything else, with the ease of dinner with friends on a Friday, who's to say they won’t leave as well when the party ends.
Ingredients
5 tbsp olive oil
1 cup finely chopped carrots
1 cup finely chopped white onion
1 cup finely chopped celery
¼ cup chopped fennel
½ cup roughly chopped cremini or bella mushrooms
2 cups Primary Beans cranberry beans
1 whole head of garlic
2 bay leaves
4-6 boneless, skinless chicken thighs
2 cups tomato passata or tomato puree
½ cup dry white wine
Juice from 1 lemon
1/3 cup chopped parsley
¼ cup chopped dill
Salt and pepper to taste
Preparation
Prepare your vegetables and set aside. Add 3 tbsp oil to a 6-quart dutch oven and set over medium heat. Add carrots, onion, celery and fennel and cook for 6-8 minutes until veggies begin to soften and the onions are translucent. Add mushrooms and continue cooking for 3-5 minutes until the mushrooms are soft and just beginning to brown and stick to the bottom of the pot.
Add in your beans and cover by 1 inch, about 5-6 cups.
Remove the top of the bulb of your garlic, exposing the cloves but keeping the bulb together. Add to the beans with bay leaves and a generous sprinkle of salt, about 1 heaping teaspoon.
Reduce heat to low and cover, leaving lid slightly ajar, cooking at a simmer for 1-½ hours.
With roughly 10 minutes left in simmering the beans, begin cooking your chicken. Heat remaining 2 tbsp oil in a saute pan over medium-high heat. Generously salt and pepper both sides of your chicken thighs and place in the pan. Cook until golden brown, about 4-6 minutes, flip, and repeat on the other side. Remove from heat and drizzle with the juice of half a lemon. Set aside.
When your beans have finished cooking, remove garlic and bay leaves. Add in tomato puree, white wine, juice from ½ lemon, parsley and dill. Stir to combine. Salt and pepper to taste.
Add your chicken and the juice from the fat and lemon to your beans, covering completely with the sauce. Cover the pot fully with the lid and continue to simmer for 30 minutes until the sauce has thickened and the chicken is tender. Remove from the heat and serve over creamy polenta or with a side of crusty bread. Garnish with fresh parsley or parmesan cheese and enjoy!