Cooking, part two

Living on Staten Island in a large apartment in a Victorian house suited me. It was there that I did baking for the first time. I tried making oatmeal raisin cookies from a macrobiotic recipe. They came out horrible. Then I found a recipe in Vegetarian Times for making a chocolate cake with creamy chocolate icing. That one came out pretty good, although I overcooked the cake so it had a crispy crust around. Unfortunately, I couldn't find anyone to eat the cake, so I had to eat it myself, and it turned stale before I could get through half of it.

As much as I liked living on Staten Island, I was floundering, working a string of low-paying retail jobs. So I turned to education, and left Staten Island to go to graduate school for musicology at Columbia University.

Columbia gave me an off-campus apartment, where I shared with 4 other graduate students, including sharing one refrigerator and one tiny kitchen. I had to be strategic about when I cooked my meals, especially dinner. Two of the guys never really cooked, so that helped.

I spent my 2-1/2 years at Columbia subsisting on very little, since the salary I got for being a student-teacher left little after I paid my rent for doing anything. Typically, my first meal would be in the middle of the day, and consist of a toasted bagel (or two) with margarine. Then for dinner I would have ramen noodles with mixed vegetables, or pasta with spaghetti sauce, or brown rice with beans and vegetables. When I had a little extra, I indulged myself and bought Entenmann's cakes or cookies, using the sugar to stave off the oppressive feeling of being a graduate student.

Near the end of graduate school, the pall of being a student began to lift, and I became a little more adventurous in the kitchen. Under the influence of a friend, I started eating seafood now and then, ordering Chinese shrimp fried rice and such. Also, I experimented with making cheesy-style sauces for my pasta. I knew I shouldn't eat dairy, but if I ate a tiny bit of cheese mixed with margarine and flour and water over my pasta, other than getting a bit of a gravelly voice, I was ok.

After graduate school, I moved to the East Village where I once again cohabitated with some bohemian types. But these people were decidedly more upscale than the ones I had living among in New Brunswick. And food was one of the few things that we spent money on when we had it. One of my roommates, a German guy staying in New York for 6 months for an internship, loved to socialize and entertain. He was always having barbecues on the roof of our building, and he would always make sure to make a skewer for me with no meat on it.

And I was cooking up a storm myself. I baked bread numerous times, baked cookies and muffins, and all in a rickety little convectioner's oven. With Chinatown nearby, I shopped frequently in Asian supermarkets and bought soy-based mock meats and spice packets and hearty noodle dishes.

Then one Thanksgiving, I ate turkey for the first time in probably 8 years. My roommate invited her friends over, and I invited my new girlfriend, and we had a blast. I don't remember what I made, but there was turkey and lots of vegetable dishes, and then one person made a sweetpotato dish with marshmallows that nobody liked but me, so I got to eat all the leftovers of that!

My girlfriend and I got engaged, and then a short time later got married, and we moved in together to an apartment in Flushing, Queens. This was a huge place by New York standards, and included a large eat-in kitchen. Now that I had another person to cook for, I really went to town. I baked cookies. I baked pies. I perfected a number of dairy-free and vegetarian adaptations of dishes I had loved as a kid, like macaroni and cheese and tacos.

But while Kristin and I were together, my dedication to being a vegetarian began to soften. First, at Thanksgiving and Christmastime, we would get a turkey. We told ourselves it was mostly for our pet cats and dogs, so that they could have the treat of having fresh warm meat. But as the years went by, we started eating the turkey more than the animals did!

Next, Kristin was a big fan of getting pre-made hero sandwiches at a local deli. Whenever I didn't have anything planned for lunch, she would grab one of those sandwiches. Then over time, she stopped eating what I made, opting for her deli hero sandwiches. So eventually I gave in and ate the sandwiches sometimes myself. But when I cooked, I would still make vegetarian food, except for those twice yearly turkeys.

After 8 years of marriage, Kristin and I split up and I moved to Brooklyn. As far as appearances were concerned, I told everyone I was still a vegetarian, but now I started occasionally eating meat, especially from fastfood sources. After a year of being on my own, I dated a woman who was supportive of my being a vegetarian, and she even made really delicious vegetarian dishes for me. But she also liked to eat meat on a regular basis. For example, her job working for a university occasionally called for her to attend events that would sometimes include dinner. When one of the options for dinner was filet mignon, she would order that. She really enjoyed her meat, that I could tell. And I wasn't offended by that. On the contrary, I found her relish for chowing into a big steak very sexy.

Unfortunately, my relationship with that woman did not last long. But a year later, I found a new girlfriend. She had a tiny kitchen in her West Village apartment, but we made the most of it. In addition to making lots of the usual things, omelets for breakfast and pasta for dinner and such, we tried making some exotic things, like fresh pesto sauce and chicken pot pies from scratch. And then when Thanksgiving came around, we really went to town: several of her friends came over, and we spent several days making side dishes - cranberry sauce, homemade stuffing logs, sweet and sour red cabbage - leading up to the day, when in addition to making a huge turkey, we made garlic mashed potatoes, haricot verts with slivered almonds, and a beet-centered appetizer that my girlfriend had found in a magazine. And for the crowing touch, the night before Thanksgiving, we peeled, chopped and cored numerous pears and made a huge yummy pear pie with raisins.

By this time, I was no longer identifying myself as a vegetarian. My girlfriend encouraged me to try heavier meats to see what my digestion would tolerate after being a vegetarian for so many years. Eventually, I found lamb was ok, but beef was sitll off-limits. At home on my own, I would still cook mostly vegetarian, although I did begin to buy chicken sausages to put in my pasta rather than vegetarian sausages.

OK this is getting long, so I will finish up the story tomorrow.