A Fourth of July Feast…in January

Dinner number two complete! And this one was completely different from the last. Instead of the rugged, earthy nature of “The Last of the Mohicans” feast, we had a very American, very modern dinner in the style of Fourth of July picnics. There was potato salad, coleslaw, grilled chicken…everything you’d expect from everybody’s favorite American holiday. Too bad the book it was based on was anything but a happy occasion. I didn’t mention it in the book review (because I didn’t know), but The Senator in this story is none other than Ted Kennedy and this all REALLY HAPPENED. Maybe I should have paid more attention in history class. History never really was my thing. Ask me the name of the author that wrote Oroonoko or We Wear the Mask, and I can tell you. Ask me if I know when the Civil War started or which states seceded from the union and you’ll see an embarrassed look on my face because I think I should know these things, but dates and the like don’t stick. However, I think I’d remember another horror story involving the Kennedys, in which the drunken Senator drove off the road and into the “black water” of the swamp on Chappaquiddick Island, Maine, and then escaped the sinking wreck, leaving the woman in the car with him, Mary Jo Kopechne, to die a watery death. Why? Because it sounds like a story. And I remember stories. But, as usual, our grammar school history classes like to brush all the bad stuff under the rug, thinking maybe if they don’t teach us, we’ll never find out, and go on believing that we have a shiny, perfect government and it’s the REST of the world who’s dark and twisted. But I’m not about to get into the ethics of modern day American politics. I’ll stick with what I do know: food and literature.

This time around, I made dinner for my dad and stepmother, as well as for my uncle and cousin who are down from Snohomish, Washington for a lacrosse tournament. It was fun to make a 4th of July-esque meal in the middle of January, especially since the 80 degree weather we’ve been having lately feels a lot more like July than January. I was a little worried that Oates wasn’t going to mention food at ALL in this novel, and I’d have to write about my night drinking vodka tonics (what the Senator was double-fisting while driving forty miles an hour around hairpin curves on a dirt road) and beer. Not that I, for one, would really mind. But luckily, almost at the end of the book, there was suddenly a list of everything Kelly Kelleher ate on her last day on Earth. Score. And so, without further ado, here’s the menu. And just like last time, because I want to give credit where credit is due, if you click on these first several pictures, as well as on the following links, you’ll be directed to the blog they came from. Verbal thank yous to Honey, What’s Cooking?, Closet Cooking, What’s Cookin, Chicago?, Our Life in the Kitchen, and Back to Her Roots. Thanks for adding such great recipes!

And so, with no further ado, The Menu, as pertains to Joyce Carol Oates’ harrowing version of what happened, from the victim’s point of view, on July 4th, 1969, in her novel Black Water:

Avocado and Black Bean Salad

Sesame and Ginger Coleslaw

(OK maybe I deviated a little from standard American coleslaw but I wasn’t about to eat anything that had two cups of mayonnaise in it…)

Potato Salad

Chipotle Honey Grilled Chicken

Grilled Blackened Tuna Steaks

Jealous, aren’t you? One thing I definitely have to work on is taking more pictures. I just get so caught up in all the chopping, mincing, bringing to a boil, mixing, marinating madness that I forget. Cooking really is a dance. A dance in which, if you forget a couple of steps or focus so much on your footwork that you’re as stiff as a board, you end up ruining the whole thing. I’ll work on it, I promise.

Cooking in my dad’s kitchen is both a blessing and a curse. It’s a blessing because he has all these awesome culinary gadgets that most kitchens don’t have, like an extendable water spigot over the stove so you don’t have to walk from the sink to the stove with a heavy pot full of water, or a butcher block island, so you don’t need to worry about cutting boards. You just chop everything right on the island. It’s pretty cool. But it’s a curse because my dad’s kitchen is HUGE and has (and I swear I’m not exaggerating) about 50 cupboards, of varying sizes. When I ask him for something like the 3/4 teaspoon, he says, “it’s in the ‘all things measuring’ drawer,” as if I had the faintest idea which drawer that was. Or, if I need a can of black beans: “look in the ‘all things canned drawer.'” It drives both me and my brother, when he’s around, nuts. I refuse to navigate the Bermuda triangle of my dad’s kitchen if he’s not there. It would be an exercise is frustration, I tell you.

Oh, and another problem I have: I ALWAYS forget that chicken needs to marinate for at least an hour. So, without fail, I get towards the end of  my chopping, grating, zesting frenzy, thinking I’m almost done, while whoever’s waiting to be fed politely (or not) lets me know that they’re getting quite peckish, when suddenly I realize I haven’t marinated the chicken yet. SO ANNOYING. And I did it again tonight, but other than that it went well.

That’s my bean salad. Really yummy.

Those are my tuna steaks, with homemade blackening seasoning. I have no experience with fish, really. And neither does my dad, who did all the grilling. The tuna was good, but I think we may need to hone our searing skills. Or, at least, I do. My dad’s what he calls “fish challenged” because raw fish gives him the heebie jeebies so I don’t think he’ll be anxiously anticipating his next meal of seared tuna. That’s his “fish challenged” face above. But I already knew that, so to make sure everyone enjoyed the dinner, we had the chicken as well.

It was really tasty. The marinade was super easy to make, using only chipotle peppers in adobo sauce, honey, and cilantro. Next time I make this though, I’ll make sure to marinate it before I start doing everything else, because I think more time in the marinade could only mean good things for this chicken.

Vodka tonics! Classy and tasty. For anybody who likes vodka, Vox is actually a really good one, and it’s only about 17 bucks. INFINITESIMALLY better than Smirnoff and, I think, better than Absolut or Gray Goose. This is also my favorite picture of the night.

Voilá! Dinner a la story of a skeezy American Senator who left a woman to die. I feel bad having this much fun about something really terrible. But at least I learned something new, however unpleasant, about American history. And now, because as usual this post is way too long, until next time. I have to go enjoy the dessert expressly mentioned in the book: Häagen Dazs vanilla ice cream. I’m already reading the next book, which is Fear of Flying by Erica Jong. So far, the only eating that’s going on would be more appropriate for a blog (or site) that focuses more on, say, adult entertainment…Hopefully, Jong will mention SOMETHING else so I can do the food portion. I do really like the book so far though. It’s all about girl power!

Thanks for reading!

You’re An American Girl

I believe in coincidence. Simply because I believe that people who don’t believe in coincidences are just explanation-happy and having problems fitting their minds around the fact that not everything happens for a reason. Maybe that makes me cynical. I’m not convinced I’m right, but that’s where my instincts lead me. But coincidences happen. This is one of them.

My last entry was a review of a book written by a family member about her brutal sexual assault and rape in 1988. Black Water by Joyce Carol Oates, the next step in my literary quest, is a book that, while no physical rape actually occurs, is absolutely rife with aggressive sexuality and misogynistic language. It’s the story of a young woman who meets a man only referred to as The Senator at a Fourth of July party. The action takes place all in one day, although the timeline continually drops, in a rather stomach-somersaulty way, into the past, and then hurtles you into a future that you only hope is true, yet in that same deep, dank place inside us, the same place in which I believe coincidences are just coincidences, you know that the future is just a happy dream. A happy dream, in which the present is the nightmare.

The style of the prose is, at first, confusing, until you realize that the narrator is the protagonist, Kelly Kelleher, and that the reader is being transported by her thoughts, which, like most of our thoughts are disjointed and often completely removed from reality. But it is this stream of consciousness that makes this novel so haunting, and so familiar. At first, I thought that the main theme here was normality. What does it mean to be normal? What do normal people do? How do normal people think? Now this may be the overt theme of this book, and the reason that Kelly finds herself slowly drowning in the black water of the Maine marshes, but in my opinion, it’s not the important theme in this book.

It became apparent slowly, like turning the lights off in a dark room and slowly the objects in the room reappear as your eyes adjust. It started with what I saw as an interesting description of sexuality:

You know how it is, basking in the glow of a sudden recognition, his eyes, your eyes, an ease like slipping into warm water, there’s the flawlessly beautiful woman who lies languorously sprawled as in a bed, long wavy red hair rippling out sensuously about her, perfect skin, heartbreak skin, lovely red mouth and a gown of some sumptuous gold lamé material clinging to breasts, belly, pubic area subtly defined by shimmering folds in the cloth, and The Lover stands erect and poised above her gazing down upon her his handsome darkish face not fully in focus, as the woman gazes up at him not required to smile in invitation, for she herself is the invitation, naked beneath the gold lamé gown, naked lifting her slender hips so subtly toward him, just the hint of it really, just the dream-suggestion of it really, otherwise the advertisement would be vulgar really… (32).

I mean, isn’t that just the quintessential stereotype of what makes a woman attractive? Notice the indistinct face of the man. He could be any man. There is no other description of him, besides his “handsome darkish face.” The man doesn’t matter. He’s Everyman. But the woman (who, you’ll notice, also has no definable facial characteristics, nothing that would make her an individual) is the paragon of the slightly vulgar, woman-as-vessel, man-as-penetrator, sexual icon that women today still try to embody, and anything less can only be a failure.

This description is bad enough, but slowly the novel’s language becomes more and more overtly sexual and misogynistic. Phrases like “thrust yourself up to the hilt, oh Christ” or scene descriptions like “in a shallow ditch…the headless naked body of a flesh-pink doll…the hole between the shoulders like a bizarre mutilated vagina where the head had been wrenched off” (149) are littered throughout the text. But it’s the protagonist, Kelly’s, attitude about her own survival and the man she’s with that is the most haunting. When the Senator, who had a vodka tonic in hand while driving, sped around a hairpin turn on a dirt road and spun off into the black water, the speed of the impact crushed the passenger side of the car, essentially trapping Kelly in the quickly submerging vehicle. Little by little, we realize the extent of Kelly’s injuries. But that’s not the horrific part. In his struggle to get out of the car, the Senator violently wrenches himself out of Kelly’s terrified grip, actually kicking her in the head in his frenzy to escape the Toyota turned death trap. And still, as the car slowly fills with water, Kelly is convinced that he’s coming back to save her. For every minute that goes by, she reinvents her story so that she doesn’t have to admit that he’s not coming back. As she fades in and out of consciousness, she goes over the events of the day again and again, constantly reminding herself that He chose Her out of all the other girls at the party. Until the moment she finally succumbs to the water in her lungs, she has to believe that he is coming back to her, to save her.

The only time in the whole book where we, the reader, are removed from Kelly’s interior monologue is when we see the Senator escape from the car and find a phone. Now, we’re in the Senator’s head, and there are no noble intentions, no humane desire to save the woman that he put in danger in the first place. Instead, there are only fears of what this will do to his political reputation, whether this will bar him from ever being voted President of the United States. So he calls his friend who was at the party and says that the girl was drunk, the girl grabbed the wheel, the girl drove the car into the water. This is the part that really drove home the story’s similarity to rape: the transference of blame from the guilty person to the victim. Kelly made herself available to this man, this man that “chose” her, even remarking to herself that “I’ve made you want me, now I can’t refuse you” (115). And he threw her away. He used her for his own gain and then abandoned her to her fate, even using her as a means for his own survival, at the expense of hers.

I wish I could say that the real world is a different place from the world that this story takes place in. I wish I could say that women no longer make themselves the sexual playthings of men, and then allow these men to throw them away. I wish politics was really about making the world a better place, instead of about shifting guilt and blame around, like an anorexic does with the food on her plate to make it look like she’s doing what she should be. I wish a lot of things, but wishing isn’t being. This is why fiction is important. It’s not facts, it’s not a timeline, but it chronicles the things that cold indifference never could. It brings unpleasant truths into the light. And bringing them into the light is one step towards changing them.