Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant - Confessions of Cooking for One and Dining Alone

Informationen zum Autor Jenni Ferrari-Adler Klappentext In this delightful and much buzzed-about essay collection, 26 food writers like Nora Ephron, Laurie Colwin, Jami Attenberg, Ann Patchett, and M. F. K. Fisher invite readers into their kitchens to reflect on the secret meals and recipes for one person that they relish when no one else is looking. Part solace, part celebration, part handbook, Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant offers a wealth of company, inspiration, and humor—and finally, solo recipes in these essays about food that require no division or subtraction, for readers of Gabrielle Hamilton's Blood, Bones & Butter and Tamar Adler's The Everlasting Meal. Featuring essays by: Steve Almond, Jonathan Ames, Jami Attenberg, Laura Calder, Mary Cantwell, Dan Chaon, Laurie Colwin, Laura Dave, Courtney Eldridge, Nora Ephron, Erin Ergenbright, M. F. K. Fisher, Colin Harrison, Marcella Hazan, Amanda Hesser, Holly Hughes, Jeremy Jackson, Rosa Jurjevics, Ben Karlin, Rattawut Lapcharoensap, Beverly Lowry, Haruki Murakami, Phoebe Nobles, Ann Patchett, Anneli Rufus and Paula Wolfert. View our feature on the essay collection Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant. Introduction Call it seven-thirty on a Wednesday night. No one else is home. A slight hunger hums in your body, so you wander into the kitchen. In front of the window a plant's stems wave like arms from their hanging basket. In the pantry bin, potatoes eye the onions slipping out of their skins. An apron hangs from the closet door like the shadow of a companion. Reflexively, you open the refrigerator and nod at the condiments, grab the hot sauce, and close the others back into cold darkness. Bottle of sauce in hand, you gaze around the room, inspecting the contents of the cabinets, the pile of paper menus from nearby restaurants, the spines of your cookbooks. You turn from the bookshelf and catch a glimpse of yourself in the window. In the heat, your hair has puffed wildly. You experience one of those weird lost minutes inside your head. Loneliness, you think, loneliness with its lyrical sound; you look like a lone lioness. You hear Alvy Singer, the young Woody Allen character from Annie Hall , say, "The universe is expanding." Bananas Shaughnessy from The House of Blue Leaves cuts him off: "My troubles all began a year ago?two years ago today? Two days ago today? Today." Then you remember your mother mixing cream cheese and lox into a pan of scrambling eggs. You don't need a literal eggplant on hand to realize?with the pleasurable shock that comes from recognizing a small truth?that you are alone in the kitchen with one. This book had its genesis in August 2004, when I spent the first of many such nights alone in Michigan. I was twenty-seven, a born-and-raised New Yorker, and I'd never lived by myself before. It was unsettling to be without a job or roommates, to have so much time alone in my tiny house in Ann Arbor. As a graduate student in fiction writing, I spent a few hours each day at my desk, following my characters around and trying to get them into interesting trouble. That left a lot of downtime. I ran on the treadmill at the YMCA, hiked in the arboretum, and drank many solitary cups of coffee. I hauled my laptop and bag from one cafÈ to another until it started to seem as if the hauling itself were my job. I was seeking, I suppose, some form of company and conversation, even if the majority of conversations were ones I merely overheard. In my first semester I took a literature course, Exile and Homecoming, that contributed to my somewhat indulgent delusion that I was in exile. Where was the subway? Where were the bodegas and stoops? Where was my mother? Through the windows of my house I watched the neighbors rake leaves in the autumn and shovel snow in the winter. On the floor of my kitchen was a hopeful dog bowl?I didn't have a dog?and on the refrigerator...

Product details

• Authors: Jenni Ferrari-Adler
• Assisted by: Jenni Ferrari-Adler (Editor)
• Publisher: Riverhead
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 30.09.2011
• EAN: 9781594483134
• ISBN: 978-1-59448-313-4
• No. of pages: 288
• Dimensions: 140 mm x 210 mm x 18 mm
• Series: Penguin Pocketbooks
• Subject: Guides > Food & drink > General, dictionaries, tables