Sandy unleashes her fury.

That’s what I heard on TV, in a teaser for the 11 o’clock news, as Mark and I watched the Detroit Tigers play the San Francisco Giants in Game Three of the World Series on October 27, 2012.

My mother’s name was Sandy. And hurricanes were always a big thing for our family, since we had that vulnerable little stucco cottage on an ever-eroding spit of seashore.

One of my clearest early-childhood memories is of waking up at the beach one morning and coming downstairs to witness my father on the other side of the window wearing a pair of faded blue swim trunks, hammering planks over the glass as the wind whipped around him.

I always had a bit of extreme-weather anxiety, which got worse for a time when Rex was a baby. By my mid 40s, though, that had subsided, and I tended to hope for a storm that would be dramatic enough to keep the kids home from school—board games, anyone?—and uneventful enough to cause at most minimal damage.

There must be a primitive instinct in times of stress or danger to add an extra layer of fat for protection against a potentially less abundant future. It had to be primitive instinct that compelled me, as the storm gained strength over the Atlantic, to lay in a food supply for the four of us that included three pounds of stew meat and a veritable ton of sauerkraut, smoked pork chops, and sausages for choucroute garnie. That night, not yet in full-blown bunker mode, we’d had big bowls of Italian chickpea soup with cabbage, which I served with hearty chunks of toasted bread.

But back to Sandy.

“Do you think she’s still that pissed?” I texted my sister while watching the weather report between innings.

“No shit!” Karen wrote back.

After our mother died two years earlier, my sister and I had done our best, selling Mom’s apartment through a respected friend of the family and her Connecticut cottage to the next-door neighbor who clearly had the most love for the place and its charming-if-eroding waterfront surroundings. Still, we wondered and worried about whether she would have approved.

Mom had not been ready to go. She was mad. When Hurricane Irene struck after she died, soon after we’d sold the beach house, it sent a tall tree crashing down onto the house’s roof. Coincidence? Perhaps.

Now as “Perfect-Storm Sandy,” as the meteorologists were calling it, approached the coast from both east and west, and the full moon threatened to swell tides to their highest point in history, I wanted to imagine that our Sandy was looking down thinking, “Good job, girls.” But honestly, given our mother’s—shall-we-say—opinionated tendencies, there was no way to be sure.

What I did know was that if she’d still been around, she would have wanted nothing more than to hunker down in her house, fierce and fearless as always, taunting Karen and me for not being there with her while slurping glasses of prosecco and a bowl of something fortifying, like my Italian chickpea soup.

On that late October night in 2012, watching baseball with Mark while the kids slept upstairs and Hurricane Sandy set a path for Atlantic City, I still liked to think that nothing really bad could happen, as long as I’d laid in a supply of the good stuff.

Get the recipe here.

Share

My mother spent childhood summers in Maine, which may account for her near fanatical adoration of the lobster. I’ve never seen anyone eat one like she did—I don’t think anyone has.

Sandy Schoenfein insisted that a crustacean under two pounds wasn’t worth bothering with, and if you were planning to put as much energy into consuming one as she was, then you might think so too. Two and a half or three pounds and now you’re talking. (I, on the other hand, always insisted that smaller is sweeter.)

After eating the tail and the claws more or less like a normal person, my mom would start in on the little spiny legs, then suck on and ingest all of that feathery white connective tissue, along with the red roe and/or greenish tomalley—what most people consider the gross goop within. All the while she’d be cackling with pleasure, slinging the occasional comment about what everyone else at the table was wasting.

Subscribe now

I’m a huge lobster fan, but my interest in excavating every edible morsel from the shells pales in comparison to my mother’s. For her, it was gastronomic sport. With her birthday at the end of July and mine in August, we always celebrated with at least one lobster dinner on the porch in Westport.

This particular summer though, with mom undergoing chemo, we were stuck in the city and our birthdays came and went. Instead of elbows on the big white outside table and butter dripping down our chins, we had gotten dressed up and gone to the expensive Italian-seafood eatery Marea for a downer of a dinner.

Now we were in Westport—Mark, the kids, and me, along with mom, Karen, Rob, and the girls—and by god, we were going to have lobster.

I am the resident lobster cook in our family, having inherited the position from my father, whom I watched and helped with this, as with other macho household tasks, throughout my childhood. The cooking is the easy part: Boil a few inches of water in an enormous, heavy stainless-steel stockpot, then place the lobsters inside and clamp on the lid.

I’ve never felt guilty or squeamish about cooking lobsters. I’ve read that they have such primitive nervous systems that they don’t register pain or anxiety the way larger-brained animals do. (Jasper White writes authoritatively about this in his fabulous Lobster at Home.) What bothers people, I think, is that they are actually killing a living creature—killing it themselves—whereas they are able to stay removed from the process when they buy most other meat at the store.

I ordered our lobsters from Pagano’s, a little fish market in Norwalk. When I went to pick them up, there was a customer already there, who, when she heard me request my lobsters, said to the fishmonger, “I just can’t stand the idea of cooking live lobsters. It makes me want to throw up.” Then she looked over at me, standing three feet away from her, smiled tightly, and said, “Sorry.”

Part of me wanted to mention that whatever she was buying had recently been alive as well, but all I did was mutter “Nice” and turn away. Back home, as I pulled each lobster from a big brown paper bag and unapologetically dropped them into the steaming pot, I told the story to my mom and sister. Mom hooted while cracking her best wicked-Sandy smile, and she and Karen agreed that if they’d been there they’d have given my squeamish aggressor a piece of their murderous minds. In any case, we three witches cackled over our cauldron for the next fifteen minutes, until the lobsters were done.

Then came the messy part, my lobster-preparation ritual: First I drained the water from the pot and brought the whole thing out to the porch, where I’d set up a cutting board, a hammer, and a big sharp knife. Wearing a pair of faded green oven mitts used exclusively for this purpose, along with an old apron and huge sunglasses to protect my eyes from the inevitable hot, fishy spatters, I reached into the pot and pulled out the first lobster, placed it on the cutting board belly side up, then stabbed and sliced down it’s center until I got to the end of the tail. Next, I took the hammer and whacked up and down the big claws, cracking the shells enough to make the meat accessible without too much prying with a nut cracker. I served up that lobster and went on to the next.

Meanwhile, we boiled water for corn. (Mom’s rule: We didn’t cook it til the very last minute, so it was hot when we sat down.) We melted tons of butter and poured it into small ramekins. A big platter of sliced tomatoes and fresh mozzarella with basil and red onion, and we were set.

Often, we drank prosecco with this dinner, but that night we ate our magnificent meal with mom’s wine of choice, a Kim Crawford sauvignon blanc from Marlborough in New Zealand. It was just right with the lobster, the citrus and green apple cutting the richness of the buttery meat.

We were all so delighted—I certainly hadn’t imagined we’d be sitting down together that summer to such a decadent, happy feast. That lobster supper was a grand finale of sorts.

That night, I emailed my friend Amy to tell her about the meal, and she wrote back: “There’s a country song on the radio sometimes that says ‘live like you’re dying’ and it seems to me that’s wonderful advice. The way you are treasuring the time, why don’t we all do that?”

After dinner, my normally peripatetic mother sat patiently on the couch holding a magnifying glass, while six-year-old Teddy showed her one Pokemon card after another, earnestly explaining, while she earnestly listened, how many “damage points” and “health points” each cartoonish character possessed and enumerating in great detail all their other esoteric attributes.

“That one looks like a lobster!” Granny Sandy said, and she and Teddy put their heads together and laughed.

Share Life, Death & Dinner

I remember the night I started writing about dinner. We’d just finished eating—turkey tacos with black beans, topped with thin, crescent-shaped slices of mango and avocado, one of the kids’ favorite meals. Mark had shaken up a batch of his famously potent Mark-a-ritas: silver tequila and Cointreau, fresh lime juice and a little simple syrup. We listened to Ry Cooder’s Chavez Ravine.

Eleven-year-old Rex and six-year-old Teddy dispersed, and Mark cleared the dishes while I opened my laptop at the double-pedestal mahogany table that had been my grandparents, which took up half our living room. Encouraged by the breeze coming in through an open window, hot wax from a pair of candles dripped in rivulets down one side of their holders onto the table’s cracked veneer.

Out the window the sky was lavender above the tops of the trees, which had turned a dusky green. Lights were starting to go on, twinkling within the low buildings of upper Manhattan beyond the northern tip of Central Park. Our music stopped and I heard Mark reading to Teddy in the kids’ bedroom, his made-for-radio voice low and resonant. I heard someone’s dishes clanking in a neighboring apartment, the clock ticking on our kitchen wall, and the faint whir of traffic fifteen floors below. I wrote it all down.

It wasn’t a special night, not really, but thinking about it now I’m reminded of the last act of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town,” which my mother’s friend Vivian took me to see at the Westport Playhouse for my twelfth birthday, and which I found so painfully beautiful it stuck with me forever.

The character Emily has just died in childbirth and her restless spirit decides to revisit a day in her life on earth. The spirit of her late mother-in-law, Mrs. Gibbs, advises her to choose the least important day, saying “It will be important enough.” Emily chooses her twelfth birthday and finds herself observing the quotidian commotion of her family’s morning routine. Spirit Emily watches as adolescent Emily asks her mother for a moment of attention, an acknowledgement of the occasion, and her mother responds by giving her a birthday present. Spirit Emily is quickly overwhelmed by emotion and cuts her visit short.

“Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it? — Every, every minute?” she asks the Stage Manager character, and he says no.

No, it wasn’t a special night, though of course in hindsight I see that differently. At the time, what distinguished it from any other of the period was only that it was the night I began keeping a dinner diary.

I had decided to start the project for a few reasons. I was cooking all the time in those days—for my family, friends, and extended family, especially my mother, Sandy, who lived on East 71st Street in the apartment I grew up in, and my sister, Karen, and her husband and daughters, who were about a mile down from us on the Upper West Side.

Cooking was more than a daily task for me; it was my creative outlet. It was also what I did for work, because at a certain point—thanks in part to a pivotal conversation I had with my mother soon after I got married—I managed to figure out that you can sometimes be lucky enough to do what you love.

I realized I was making all these seriously good meals, riffing on recipes from my ever-expanding cookbook collection or coming up with dishes inspired by what I found at the market, my mood, or what I’d eaten in a restaurant or at someone else’s house. I’d create something we were crazy about, but when I tried to reproduce it a couple of weeks later, it was never the same. If only I’d taken notes!

I have a well-honed food memory, in that I remember what I was eating at this or that event or significant moment in my life, and usually with whom. The night Mark and I, having been dating for about nine months, had an argument about the merits of marriage versus living together—at that point he subscribed to his older brother Ken’s anti-marriage philosophy—we were sitting at a high table by the door of a narrow Mexican restaurant near the Magic Box Theater in Chicago, where we lived at the time, eating chicken tacos and pork-filled tamales. On the night a few months later when my parents met my future in-laws, we had hummus, babaganoush, and kabobs at a place called Reza’s.

But what had I cooked the last time our friends Rob and Lisa came to dinner? Maybe my lamb tagine, or a big platter of roast chicken and vegetables? There were too many meals to keep track of: the dinner parties on Saturday nights, the family gatherings on Sundays, and the last-minute “Why don’t you come by because there’s going to be a lot of food” evenings. So I decided to document what I cooked.

I wanted this to be another kind of record, too. My dad died in his mid-fifties when I was twenty-seven years old. My grandparents were gone. I remember all of them in all sorts of ways, but most concretely I remember them through what we ate together, and what was happening when we shared those meals. Now in my early forties, I was beginning to understand that life is full of impermanence, and that food was a kind of scaffold for me, lending comfort and sustenance as needed—and that recipes, little chronicles of flavors and family memories passed down over generations, could act as a kind of anchor.

One evening when I was an adolescent—around the same time I saw “Our Town”—my father taught me the concept of carpe diem, seize the day. We were sitting together on the sofa in our living room before dinner, Bach playing in the background. My dad was drinking Dewar’s on the rocks from a heavy, monogrammed glass—always the same sweet-smoky-spicy smell; always the same clinking-ice-cubes sound. This was his evening ritual: He’d walk in from work and quickly change out of his business suit into Levi’s and an “alligator” shirt. Then he’d fix himself the drink and go into the living room to relax until my mom said dinner was ready. I didn’t know he had chronic leukemia yet; they kept it from us for a very long time. Even so, as we sat together on the sofa that night, I grasped that he was telling me something important.

This dinner diary would be my way of seizing the day; of documenting a mundane task that was much more than that to me. Writing about food and family would connect me to my history while celebrating the present, and at the same time, become a record for the future.

What I didn’t know that night when I began the project was that I was recording a period that would be gone shockingly soon. It was so fleeting, in fact, that I’d be left in only a few short years with a life that hardly resembled the one I imagined for myself, Mark, and our kids on that peaceful spring night after eating turkey tacos.

But I did what I set out to do. I have a chronicle of that time and of the series of events that followed. Every dish I made as my world spun off its axis played a part in keeping me grounded. And every recipe tells a story.