It is three in the afternoon on a Monday, but she is just arriving home from the grocery store that she left for fifteen minutes ago. She took her corduroy purse her mother bought for her (at age seventeen, the last purse anyone ever bought for her) to the store because it is perfect for carrying the amount of groceries one person needs, which is how many people she is usually cooking for.
She struggles to open the front door because it has been humid and hot this week and the lock has swelled and the small part doesn’t fit with the big part quite right anymore and the corduroy bag full of groceries awkwardly restricts her range of motion so her right arm flails uselessly as she slams the left side of her body against the swollen door to force it open.
She leaves the groceries in the bag on the kitchen table and goes to check her e-mail even though all of the groceries are perishables. Butter, cream cheese, sour cream, and mushrooms all sweating and breeding bacteria all over themselves in her bag. Are mushrooms perishables?
She remembers that everything is perishable except honey and styrofoam.
She is on a vacation. She has been on a vacation since 9am this very morning. She is not out on the Olympic peninsula or on the road to California or flying to the other coast to visit her family because she can’t afford to leave, so she is using her empty Monday to bake. She is busily embarking upon a four hour cooking odyssey that will keep her from verbalizing exactly how trapped she feels being too poor to travel, making mushroom turnovers for a dinner party.
The recipe for the turnovers is simple: 1. make a cream cheese based dough with four ingredients: cream cheese, butter, flour, and a little salt. It will roll out like a dream, not like pie crust dough, which would much rather be a ball than a nice flat sheet. She likes how cream cheese dough gives in, how it amicably rolls out. It doesn’t even stick to her jar-for-a-rolling-pin.
2. Make the filling, which is just chopped up and sauteed button mushrooms (why roll up better tasting mushrooms in something as overwhelming as cream cheese pastry, she concludes at the store, putting the criminis back) with some spices and sour cream.
3. The assembly is not very difficult. Roll out the dough and use the lid from the sour cream container to cut circles out of the dough. Put a teaspoon of filling (just a teaspoon, even though it looks like nothing and makes her wonder why the store she used to make these at sold them for the price they did) in the bottom half of the circle. Fold the top half over the filling, press the two halves of the dough together with the fork so it makes a half moon shape. Like big raviolis or circular Hot Pockets. Brush their tops with egg yolks and bake at 350 degrees for twenty minutes. Simple.
Mushroom turnovers are about as dignified as pigs in blankets, but they sure do look pretty.
She chops the mushrooms with a cleaver that is so gigantic and bulky it looks like it should be in a cartoon or she should be decapitating live chickens. She can barely get her fingers all the way around the handle so her chopping is clumsy and haphazard; the button mushroom tops squeak and shoot out from under the cleaver onto the floor, but the cleaver is her favorite knife and the only one she uses. She likes its weight and has used it so many times that all of the other knives feel like toys when she tries to cut with them. Now when she cooks at other people’s houses she uses their cleavers too, if they have them.
She loves mushrooms but hates chopping them, and she is glad no one is around to watch, because she likes to pretend she is a great cook, even though her knife skills give her away immediately. When she did kitchen prep in the cooperative kitchens during college she always hoped no one would be around when she had to chop mushrooms because it took her such a long time to chop them, twice as long as it took her to do any of the other prep tasks. She used to offer to trade chopping mushrooms for dicing onions with the other prep cooks (who were happy to oblige because everyone else hated chopping onions the most). One time a head chef chastized her in front of other cooks for not getting anything else but the mushrooms done in an hour’s time.
She gets all of the mushroom turnover mushrooms chopped and realizes she has forgotten to dice the onions, which are supposed to go in the pan first. It would have made a lot more sense to do them first, and she hates that she has made a mistake. She puts a heavy skillet on the back burner, turns the gas on to medium, throws a stick of butter in the pan and challenges herself to dice the onion before the butter melts.
The melting butter smell reminds her of smelling her mother’s cooking at nine years old, sitting at the kitchen table plodding through her spelling workbook while her mother worked through dinner each night.
She doesn’t quite finish with the onion before the butter melts and burns a little as she cups the pieces into her hands from the cutting board and drops them in. She picks up the bits of onion she dropped on the floor en route, looks around to make sure no one is watching her disregard all her knowledge of health codes and sanitation, and drops them into the pan too.
Before she salts, peppers, and thymes the onions, she turns on her roommate’s I-Pod stereo. She is feeling a little lonely and quiet, cooking alone in the afternoon, even with the sounds of the onions releasing their juices in the butter.
Neko Case starts crooning out of the speakers. She doesn’t believe in owning Mac products, but she enjoys having housemates who do. “Old John the Baptist…”
She is cutting up chunks of butter for the crust as she wails along: “Old John Diviiiine…”
The last time she heard this song was a month ago when she was making breakfast for a friend. She was whisking eggs for an omelette. When the song came on she belted out the Old John the Baptist part. Her friend belted out the “Old John the Baptist” part too. This surprised her. Their friendship was new and she didn’t know her friend liked Neko Case. They sang together as she moved around the kitchen, making eggs.
She was overflowing the cuisinart with butter and cream cheese when she realized she would always think about whisking eggs and her friend who also liked to pretend to be Neko Case whenever she heard that song again. This was not the sort of conclusion that excited her.
As the dough mixed without her help in the machine, she added the heap of mushrooms to the pan with the onions, spilling a few (again) onto the floor that had not been swept in weeks. As the mushrooms cooked and the dairy products combined with the help of modern technology, she was moved by a wave of productivity so she found the broom to sweep up her and everyone else’s mess. She poked at the corners of the kitchen, swept the stray mushrooms and onions and old bits of dust and food into a pile in the middle of the kitchen floor.
The sun was not shining anymore. Neko Case was in the background. She was quiet. As she searched for a dustpan, she thought to herself ‘Miranda July’ would kill to be filming something like this right now’, and she immediately felt ashamed of the way she associated everything, even the quiet humanity of her life, with representations in pop culture. She finished cooking the filling and mixing the dough, but she did the assembly and the baking without stopping to think again about how beautiful life was even though it was sometimes too quiet, afraid that if she did, she might begin to model her life after a director’s overcompensatingly earnest artistic vision
When she arrived at the dinner party much later that evening, turnovers cooled and perfectly colored and perfectly arranged on a small platter, she assured the rest of the guests that it had taken hardly any time or effort at all.
