Thursday afternoon my parents had just come back to town to help me with household management in my post-Paris pneumonia recovery phase. It is surprising how much energy is required for everyday life and parenting, even to a low-maintenance (almost) 15-year-old, and I was ready for reinforcements, especially because I was facing 4 days straight of baseball activities. And of course my regular job.
Thursday 7:15 pm
S: “Mom, could you go to Santa Rita tonight and order some food to bring to school tomorrow?
Me: “What? What for? Why? For the whole class??”
S: “Don’t freak out. Why do you always have to freak out?? It’s no big deal.”
We finally get out of him that he has not done any other option for the big project due the next day – in, oh, 12 hours - for Spanish class – so we’re down to the “bring a food of Mexico” option. And it can’t be queso and chips or guacamole. And well, yea, it is a big deal.
I grab from the cookbook shelf a lovely but never-used cookbook to peruse during son’s baseball clinic, which we are racing to with my mom as a storm is coming in. The book is Patricia Quintana’s Feasts of Mexico. A cookie recipe looks promising in terms of authenticity and ingredients list. We debate whether to do flan. That would be simple. Classic, but not trite. My son rolls his eyes. He does not understand what the big deal is. A consultation with Mexican cuisine expert and friend Melissa leads to her also suggesting that we just get a flan at this point, given the hour. But neither Fonda San Miguel nor Central Market sells a whole flan. And we weren’t driving down south to La Mexicana, even if they might have a flan, as a staff person at Fonda San Miguel nicely suggests, as the skies had turned black and the wind was picking up and lightening was everywhere in the distance as we drove home from baseball clinic, which turned out to be not happening at all. Logistics kill the flan idea: no way the son is going to get a flan to school in one piece in the morning.
So these “tejas” – which look like French “tuiles” cookies as they are thin, crispy, dainty - but are redolent of walnuts and almonds - will have to do. Labor would be a challenge I feared. It was.
There was first the ingredient of clarified butter. This required melting the butter, skimming the foam, then pouring off the butter leaving the solids at the bottom to have just now what is the nice and clear, “clarified,” butter.
It needed to be cooled.
It is 9:00 pm now.
We can’t move on until the clarified butter is cooled for fear of what will happen to the egg whites beaten up to a certain firmness and glistening with the added sugar once we slowly add to them the (cooled) clarified butter. I come back to kitchen from working in my office on edits to brief due that night. We put our clarified butter, in its own bowl, into a larger bowl of ice.
Must butter 4 baking sheets. Can only cook 2 or 3 tuiles at a time per baking sheet. Must have limited quantities to work with them quickly as they exit the oven, for they can only be molded into the half-moon crescent shapes around a buttered rolling pin while they are hot out of the oven.
I go upstairs to finish edits to brief. I go back downstairs. The clarified butter is cooled. We start adding it, alternating with the toasted ground almonds and ground walnuts. Something is very wrong about the consistency of this “dough.” It is far from being remotely dry. “Add more butter if dry” the recipe says – no need here, and nowhere near using the minimum amount of clarified butter called for. Busted recipe?
Executive decision: add more almonds, which requires toasting another 1 cup of blanched almonds gently before pulverizing them in the Cuisinart.
It is 9:45 pm now.
The son comes downstairs. He stands in the doorway of the disaster zone that is my kitchen where my mom and I are sweating it out, literally, over the texture of the dough, rolling pins, and buttered glasses of various sizes everywhere and a mass of kitchen equipment: pans for toasting almonds, buttered baking sheets, bowl of ice, the Cuisinart food processor, the Kitchen Aid mixer…
“Thank you,” he says.
By the next morning, the crispy tuiles, not finished until 11 pm, have held their shape but gone moist. There is nothing crispy about them at all. I have since read that humidity is bad for making tuiles (so named, at least in French, this is the word for “tile” - because when you have nicely molded them around a dowel or rolling pin and stack them up they resemble tiles for a tile roof). I also have since found recipes -- at least for the French version (tuiles) -- that do not require clarified butter. And, in fact, they do not require toasting almonds and grinding to a powder those walnuts and almonds.
In the morning, Mom and I clean out small plastic bins that have been storing nails and picture hangers and wash them out with scalding hot water and soap. We place the cookies delicately into the two bins. Son manifests embarrassment to bring two such bins. We consolidate our best examples into one bin. He refuses to have his name written on the bin with a Sharpie. I am ok with never seeing this bin again. Time for me to do the carpool. As we arrive at school, I see him jam the entire bin into the backpack. I wince. I am surprised how at this moment though, once I am done wincing, I am noting to self how much I love this kid.
Late Friday afternoon another great mom shows up for comic relief to the exhaustion setting in from late night tuile-making. This is my friend Maureen, born and raised in Boston, former professional ballerina and mother of 7, splitting her time and work/career between Paris and Houston now — also known as the best hostess ever when I stayed with her in February in the tiny studio Ile St. Louis. She is in Austin for this one night during her Houston stay to make sure I am alive and well.
She is bearing gifts of 2 bottles of French wine, flowers, and 3 cards: one for Mother’s Day, one for my birthday, and a get well card with a cat in crutches and bandages on the front, signed by her and our Paris cat friend “Oliver” – from Le Tresor, our favorite work café in the Marais.
Maureen begins to talk, and talk, as only she can. With what she says is not a Boston accent but, uh, yea.
We marvel at this wonderful red wine she has brought. Where, where did you get this? HEB, she says. We like this red wine as much, if not more so, than the nice Côtes du Rhone Mom and Dad and I had at Gusto the night before, where I also so very much enjoyed my favorite dish of late, hanger steak. Mom begins setting out, quickly before we’re done with the wine, all the makings for apéritifhour: almonds, smoked gouda, some Middle Eastern crackers. A bottle of Argentinean white, a nice Torrontes, is found in the fridge. (Hard to find with so many bottles of holiday champagne still taking up all the room in the produce drawers.)
Musician friend implored to arrive for entertainment purposes arrived just in time for the aperitif hour to discuss obscure movies, arcane historical matters — and to be maneuvered subtly into my surprise Mother’s Day treat for my mom – jazz piano on the Steinway. Mom gets teary-eyed when I play, so I knew she might be overwhelmed at having a real musician person play some New Orleans improv-type jazz on this beautiful piano. When he started, she pulled up a chair right next to the piano with her glass of wine in hand, with that dreamy look she gets, or used to get, when I play. I tried to play like I could accompany the vocals on a round of lovely French chansons. This was unwise on my part. I think Mom lost the dreamy look about then. So I just sang and/or did the spoken word thing with the French.
By Saturday night music is still on the mind. Based on the lovely Friday night salon experience, we break out of our Austin rut and find some music. The Austin Civic Orchestra is at Bates Recital Hall – and piano is on the program: Franck’s Symphonic Variations. I worry about the first piece though, Samuel Barber, Overture to the School for Scandal. Too mod for mom? By her smiling the entire time, that dreamy look again, from first notes to the finish, I’d say no.
At the intermission we are researching Samuel Barber on the iPad for her. And she starts to tell me stories. She tells me how by hearing me play piano, and having music in the house like that, it was a whole new world, one that she was so proud and pleased to be a part of – and all because of her daughters. She tells me, for the first time, that on that mother-daughter trip to Paris way back when, when I managed to get us in at the last minute with some tickets to the performance of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons in Sainte Chapelle, that music, in that place, was transforming for her. I had no idea.
After Sunday morning mass at the Cathedral downtown, on Mother’s Day, we are all sitting outside at Starbucks, and I hear more of my parents’ stories: New Orleans memories of school, church, and, of course food. I hear of breakfasts of chocolate and bread for my dad’s mom that the French nuns would serve at her boarding school in New Orleans. I hear my mom’s memories of how after the Friday morning mass at school there would be a cart serving hot, fresh doughnuts: two doughnuts, in a waxed paper bag, per student.
Back in the day, when my marital status was different, I was told that I should not expect both a birthday and a mother’s day event. That was too much – they came too close together: just one week apart more or less. It may have been a joke, but after that I never really thought much about Mother’s Day, never enjoyed it or got it.
But now I get it. And I kind of like it, this holiday of sorts.
It must have happened, this change of heart, some time around the late-night cookie-making with my mom; the sheepish, sincere thank you from my son; spending so much convalescence time with my parents so I get those quiet times for story-telling; my son and my dad mowing my lawn; and the family dinner late afternoon on Mother's Day, on the upper deck of an Austin restaurant overlooking Lake Austin -- when no one, not even Dad, noted that it was less than ideal, theoretically, with the din of Foreigner and Styx blaring on the speakers making it hard to hear.
When Dad said: "You know, you don't even notice it (the din of the annoying bad background music) after a while," I figured he had it about right.
As we close in on the one month anniversary of my getting back from Paris and getting admitted to the hospital two days later, I'm grateful on this Mother's Day for the real family stuff. That good stuff gets lost sometimes amidst the background noise of everyday tedious stuff.
My family pretty much dropped everything to take care of me and has now hung in there this long time of a slow but steady recovery. But in that time they've met and entertained my wonderful friends who have come by with gifts of food and cards and flowers - and wine and more food - and piano playing. That's all good stuff - and good stuff for Mother's Day.
But even though I'm ok with Mother's Day now, I'm never going to be ok with the rote Mother's Day Brunch thing. Unless it's at The Four Seasons. Or maybe in Paris.
Santé!
Comments