Brooklyn in Love Page 13
The food: As we had known, food matters. But what didn’t matter was that our wedding wasn’t a traditional sit-down dinner. From zucchini fritters to beet-cured salmon; grilled sea bass with preserved lemon and herbs to rib eye with salsa verde; farro with peas, mint and ricotta salata, and tricolor beets with greens and walnuts, plus boards of cheese, charcuterie, and crudités, there was a beautiful abundance of our favorite kinds of food. No one went hungry.
The dessert: There was a lot of pressure on me, as a sweet freak, to have kick-ass dessert at our wedding. I was as confident in our caterer’s desserts as I was everything else, and they didn’t disappoint: salted caramel whoopie pies, mini rhubarb galettes, fudgy brownies dusted with sea salt, and tart little pies of lemon curd and blueberry. But still…we had to do something more. As Julia Child said, “A party without cake is just a meeting.”
Since our wedding fell on the same weekend as Father’s Day, along with the birthdays of my brother, a cousin, and a good friend, we ordered a couple party cakes from Momofuku Milk Bar. These cakes, as expected, were absurd. One was a birthday cake, vanilla rainbow cake slathered with vanilla frosting and chock-full of crunchy rainbow-cake crumbs. The other more “manly” cake was salted pretzel, baked in stout, burnt honey, and crushed pretzels. Both were over-the-top, ridiculously delicious, and brought me back to other heavenly Momofuku moments.
• • •
In 2008, Milk Bar opened around the corner from my apartment in the East Village. It was in the back of David Chang’s second restaurant, Momofuku Ssäm Bar. Since opening his Noodle Bar four years prior to that, Chang, just in his early thirties, had been celebrated for everything from the loud music he piped in (rock ’n’ roll!) to the stark decor (hardwood, hard on bony butts), to his attitude that thumbed conventions and expectations (to say nothing of the richly porky broths and flavors he served up). In short, he was a rock star. He set trends. He changed New York’s dining landscape. He made consistently smart and visionary choices—one of them being hiring Christina Tosi.
Christina was a graduate of the French Culinary Institute, and had worked at two of Manhattan’s more acclaimed restaurants, Bouley and the now-shuttered WD~50. She was young, talented, passionate, and doing what she loved. What more could she ask for as a hungry, twentysomething pastry chef than to join a team that fostered her obsession with such junk food as Lucky Charms, maraschino cherries, yellow cake, sour cream potato chips, rainbow sprinkles, mini-marshmallows, gummy bears, Doritos, strawberry jam, pepperoni pizza, and Ovaltine?
When David hired Christina, he gave her what was essentially a laboratory in which to experiment. She exhibited relentless drive and creativity, making my sweet tooth—anyone’s, for that matter—look like child’s play. After all, this is what she had been doing, eating, and dreaming about her whole life: whipping up crazy concoctions like Crack Pie, a densely sweet-and-salty pie that sits within an oat cookie crust, and compost cookies, which cram chocolate chips, butterscotch chips, pretzels, potato chips, and coffee grinds into one beautiful, buttery mass of goodness. She is unrepentant about using things like shortening, glucose, and corn syrup. Unapologetic about the copious quantities and varieties of sugar in her recipes. She radiates manic glee when she talks about baking. (“Of course I wanted a bakery when I grew up,” she said in a New York Times interview. “It’s the other little-girl dream besides being a princess.”) For Christina, sweets aren’t sacred; they are not meant to be precious. They are fun.
Some of her creations, like the Compost Cookie, turned up for the restaurant family meals that she baked for at Momofuku. She also created Ssäm Bar’s first dessert, a buttery shortcake with Tristar strawberries, as well as the Noodle Bar’s soft-serve ice cream, which went on to become another of her signatures: cereal milk soft serve, which tastes like the sweet milk left at the end of a bowl of cereal. With all the experimentation and collaboration organically happening between Christina and David, they decided to launch Momofuku’s next extension together: milk bar.
When milk bar opened around the corner from me, Ben and I went for Breakfast Club, our informal, semiregular get-togethers that brought us everywhere from the Four Seasons to Doughnut Plant to Clinton Street Baking Company for such nutritious ways to start the day as french toast with “Nutella bologna” and bananas Foster pancakes. This Breakfast Club was a little different. Milk Bar was brand-new and under the radar. We sat in the empty bakery space on a weekday morning—probably the only time milk bar was ever empty in all its history; it didn’t take long for lines to start forming out the door—and I think we had some biscuits or breakfast buns. I strangely can’t remember. My memory of the experience was eclipsed by the cookies.
There were five of them. The corn cookie had that lovely melty, buttery corn flavor of a quality corn muffin. The blueberry and cream was sweet and crunchy, like a fresh-from-the-oven muffin top. The double chocolate was exactly that: twice the heart-stopping dark richness. The Compost Cookie was bitter, sweet, salty, crunchy, and chewy. And my favorite was the cornflake marshmallow: a chewy, sticky-sweet, crunchy collision of textures and flavors. Every one of the cookies was warm and weeping with butter. Every one of them was a bit deviant. “I love unexpected flavor combos,” Christina enthuses. “They always make sense in my head, though not always in others’.” But these cookies made sense; they made perfect sense to both Ben and me as we annihilated them at the ripe hour of 8:00 a.m.
Just like David, Christina went on to conquer the city, and it’s her attitude and warmth as much as anything that has earned her incredible success. She has always been true to her love for home baking. She has never shied away from traditionally frowned-upon ingredients. She is not afraid to fail; she just goes for it. This passion has resulted in seven milk bars in the city, along with Toronto, DC, and Vegas. She has written two cookbooks, received two James Beard awards, and has been a judge on MasterChef and MasterChef Junior. Her milk bar cookie and cake mixes are sold across the country, and she’s constantly appearing in magazines and newspapers. The world loves her. I love her. It made perfect sense to “invite” her to our wedding by way of her party cakes.
“The birthday cake almost seemed like a bad idea at first glance,” Christina admits, but then continues: “I grew up on boxed Funfetti cake and consumed canned sprinkle frosting into my college years, but who else really loves it that much?! Is it too obvious? Not obvious enough? Too close to the processed, grocery-store specialty? Not something folks will relate to? Turns out, I have a world of vanilla-scented, rainbow-sprinkle-loving, birthday-cake-fanatic soul mates.”
Indeed, there are birthday-cake soul mates out there in the world. There really are soul mates.
• • •
The memory: It was such an amazing night. I remember dusk changing the sky from yellow to orange to purple, and everyone toasting with prosecco. A full moon rose over the Woolworth Building and Freedom Tower, and we danced and danced. Fireworks shot up over Chinatown, and the room got louder and darker and crazier. Andrew and I reveled in all these beautiful, fun, generous people who had come together for us. In every photo, I had an enormous smile on my face or I was laughing. There are a few when I was crying. I was always beaming.
The takeaway: Screw the rules! It’s your wedding. Wear anything you want, say your vows where you want, and do what you can to appease everyone while remaining true to yourself. Just remember, not everything is going to go exactly according to plan. But even with imperfections, your wedding will be perfect.
THE ULTIMATE NEW YORK DESSERT TABLE
If we had thrown a “dream” wedding, I would have created a fantasy dessert table with anything and everything I love in the city. It would have included the very same Momofuku party cakes that we did have, along with all the other sweets mentioned in this book. And because you can never have too much of a good thing, I would have also added just a few more things.
Peanut butter cookies from Birdbat
h, an offshoot of City Bakery with locations all over the city. These cookies are like little scoops of fresh peanut butter, baked to a perfect crunch. They’re moist and dense, not hard or crumbly, and pack plenty of peanuty sweetness.
I’m a sucker for cream-laden breads, so we would have had Jack Daniels bread pudding from Dessert Club, ChikaLicious in the East Village. As any worthy bread pudding should be, it’s dense and eggy with a sweet glaze and boozy punch.
I think a modest selection of malt balls and gummies from Sugar Shop in Carroll Gardens would have been in order too, given the many times Andrew and I stopped there on our urban treks. Besides, who doesn’t love a little candy to fuel their night?
And in honor of AJ, her favorite in the city: banana cupcakes from Billy’s Bakery. They’re soft, fluffy, and flavorful with a nice savory cream cheese frosting. I’d also add cupcakes from a few of my other favorite spots: Butter Lane (both the chocolate caramel and the strawberry), Sugar Sweet Sunshine (chocolate with chocolate almond buttercream), and Sweet Revenge (peanut butter with ganache, Mexican vanilla, and raspberry red velvet).
CHAPTER 10
I’ll Take a Manhattan
“You’re living my dream!” Sandra, the nurse at my obstetrician’s office, smiled at me, both conspiratorially and shyly.
“Oh?” I wasn’t sure what she meant. I had never met her before and therefore wasn’t sure how to respond. I was just there getting tested for gestational diabetes—not exactly living the dream.
She surged on, putting the band around my arm to take my blood pressure. “I’ll be forty-one next month, and I’m trying to get pregnant.”
“Oh, awesome!” I told her, my initial hesitation immediately replaced with affection and empathy.
As Sandra entered my vitals into the computer, she continued to pump me with compliments. “I saw that this is your first child, and you just look amazing! You look like you’re thirty-five!” This woman, a stranger three minutes ago, was totally making my day. “Are you going to have more?” she asked and then continued without giving me a chance to answer. “Say yes. You’ve got to. That’s the only way you know you’ll be taken care of when you’re older.” She went on to share that she was the oldest of eight children. When her grandmother was ailing in her eighties, she and her siblings all took turns housing and caring for her. It was a beautiful and compelling argument, one which I’d heard before, to have multiple kids so there’s no pressure on your child to look after you later in life. And because Sandra was so earnest and optimistic, I didn’t have the heart to tell her the truth: that Andrew and I were most likely holding at one. We knew we were already lucky to have gotten this far, and we were content with the prospect of having just one child. It’s not a popular choice—people don’t seem to understand the concept of one and done—but Andrew and I felt comfortable that it was right for us.
But that day, there was no need to dash anyone’s hopes. I believed she would get pregnant, she believed I might have more babies, and we both felt a bit uplifted at the end of my appointment.
• • •
So six months in, I was doing pretty great. Fast-forward a couple months, and a different story was emerging. I was still pretty lucky—summer’s end was approaching, and I was mobile and energetic enough to work out a few times a week and cycle through the same few sets of maternity outfits I’d been wearing in steady rotation. But otherwise my body was starting to rebel.
My ankles had swelled to cankles, I battled hemorrhoids and heartburn, I peed myself every time I sneezed, and I got woozy when I thought about labor. My back and hips ached, I could feel my rib cage expanding, and indeed, if I stayed still, I could literally sense my skin stretching and my insides shifting, trying to accommodate this little person inside me. My own body suddenly seemed too small for my organs, giving me pains and cramps like when you wear tights or pants that squeeze your middle for hours, making you gassy and cranky. I got wicked Charlie horses in the middle of the night, and the general fatigue from hauling around an extra fifteen pounds started wearing me out. It was getting harder to bend over to put on underwear or pet Milo, and whenever I washed my face or brushed my teeth, I left pools of water all over the bathroom floor because my bowling ball of a belly prevented me from getting close to the sink. Emotionally, I might have wanted to drag out the pregnancy forever, but physically, it was time to have this baby.
The discomfort lit a fire under my butt—or maybe it was just the hemorrhoids—but here we were approaching the end of the pregnancy, and we still had tons of stuff to do. We’d been in a blissful dream mode for months, talking about what to name our baby, whether we should take a babymoon, and when to go to all our favorite restaurants while we still had the freedom to do so. But now that she was the size of a large cabbage according to What to Expect, we had to prepare for the imminent onslaught. We had to enroll in some birthing and newborn-care classes so we could at least let pretend to know what we were doing when the baby arrived. We still needed to transform our second bedroom, which had enjoyed a brief life as an office, into a nursery. And perhaps the most daunting bit: we had to register, as friends were hosting a baby shower, and we had no idea what we needed.
All along, well-intentioned friends who were new parents gave us books about sleep training, pureeing baby food, and reading newborns’ facial expressions. I welcomed anything that might enlighten me as I stepped toward this new phase in life, but these guides felt premature. I didn’t even know that it was necessary to train a baby to sleep or when you were supposed to transition from breast milk to actual food. It was hard to appreciate why I’d devote valuable hours reading about what a furrowed forehead meant when I didn’t even know what she looked like yet. It was the same with registering: How were we supposed to know what items to request when we had no idea what we were in for? Besides, I thought, how much could a newborn really need?
Then one of Andrew’s colleagues gave us a spreadsheet that was both enlightening and terrifying. Within this document’s many cells were the brand names, details, pros, and cons of all the baby gear ever created. It included diaper bags and diaper genies, booties and caps, bottles and nipples, nursing pumps and pillows, bath slings and soaps, burp cloths and swaddle blankets, sleep sacks and snuggies, swings and slings, video monitors and wipe warmers, activity mats and bouncers, snot catchers and toenail clippers, to say nothing of car seats and strollers, some of which cost four figures and all of which came in infinite varieties and required hours of analyzing their sizes, attributes, and functions and seemed to require an engineering degree once we got them. Registering was supposed to be fun, but once we realized how little we knew about any of that stuff, it proved to be one of the most stressful parts of the pregnancy.
Even as we became increasingly informed of the enormity of our changing lives, we were still inundated with questions and choices that left us baffled. We browsed online and went to a couple baby stores, picked our friends’ brains, and emailed questionnaires, and at the end of it all, I still wasn’t entirely sure what the difference was between a Pack ’n Play and a Co-Sleeper. Did a glider really have more soothing capabilities than the oak rocking chair I had managed to hold on to during the move, the one my mom sat in with me when I was a baby? Were we cheap and already bad parents if we bought a crib at IKEA instead of the thousand-dollar models at Giggle, the baby boutique? What did people do before all this gear was invented, anyway?
Along with the research being passed along from newly minted parents, we were accruing all kinds of hand-me-downs. We had stacks of hand-crocheted blankets and sweaters; a new library of baby books to complement the parenting guides; and lots of large, brightly colored plastic objects that required packs of batteries. To top it all off, my mom, the ultimate bargain shopper, had already amassed a wardrobe that would take this girl to her fifth birthday in style. As all this stuff was gifted to us, piles of loosely organized items accumulated in corners around the apar
tment without anywhere to put them. The pristine, spacious post-renovations feel that we had enjoyed for not even a year was slowly sliding out of our grasp. It was the preview of all the things we would lose control over in our very near future.
• • •
God, I missed cocktails.
In some ways, I had been pretty lenient with my diet during pregnancy. A couple glasses of wine per week and the occasional unpasteurized cheese had crossed my lips. I took a relatively relaxed approach to my health, which was fully supported by my obstetrician. But from the list of foods to avoid during pregnancy, there were three that I dutifully abstained from: sushi (tough), raw cookie dough (really tough), and hard alcohol (really, really tough).
In all truthfulness, eschewing cookie dough was probably the worst (the raw eggs in the batter could have salmonella). I mean, what’s the point of making cookies if you can’t eat the dough along the way? I simply put an embargo on baking rather than deal with the temptation.
But not having a cocktail wasn’t so much forgoing the taste as it was missing the experience. It wasn’t just deprivation; it was inconvenient. Andrew and I spent a lot of time around the city, relaxing over drinks. It was fun and sexy. A moment to pause and feel the day’s needs and stresses slip away while the night unspooled before us. Whether we were uptown or downtown, Manhattan or Brooklyn, in a bar or at a restaurant, it was sublime to feel the alcohol, sip by sip, unknot my shoulders, while Andrew’s hand rested on my thigh. Having a cocktail was a small luxury. It was a ritual that I loved. Going out for drinks made me feel connected, young, and relevant. And at a gorgeous bar like Bemelmans, it could make me feel like a million bucks.