Summertime

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I’m going to have to mention this once more: I’m a nomad.

Constantly moving through the years, from the time I was very small and the moves were with my family, one apartment after the other, one move a year until moving was normalcy and staying still was not. Moving to California and back, that unsettling feeling that was “coming home” after a year, an important year where I felt as though I’d grown up, and then being forced back into a shell I’d outgrown.

Bigger moves followed, a reaction to that feeling that I now know as the definition of that oft-quoted adage, “you can never go home:” summer camp, France, boarding school. University in Canada, then Cannes, then here, to Paris, with lots of semi-homes in between. When “going home” became sleeping on the couch in my family’s final apartment (I sometimes find it funny that my parents finally decided to start moving just as I started), putting myself to sleep by listening to old Daria episodes play on Noggin at night.

This wasn’t “home,” and neither was my dorm at boarding school or my apartment in Toronto. Home was, home has always been, not a place but a time: summer on Long Island.

My birthday, June 7th,  always fell right around the time that private schools were letting out for summer, and some years, if it fell just right, that first morning of waking up in my room, the only room that had ever felt like mine, my room on Long Island where the sun shone in through the windows and made everything–the flowered wallpaper, the red-checked quilt, the familiar powder blue carpet–seem bright and right, if the planets were in alignment, that first morning of summer would fall on my birthday.

In the winter, I slept with my windows shut and curtains closed, my mother’s rule, but in the summer, I had control over the shades that covered the three glass-paned windows of my room, and they were forever raised. I could see the tree, our tree, the climbing tree that had been my home for summers in elementary school, directly outside my window. Sometimes, a squirrel would mistake the mosquito screens outside my window for a climbing apparatus, and I would be shocked awake by the pitter patter of claws scurrying up the screen.

Summertime was home for me, where days blended and blurred together, where time was all relative to the sun: every day was a beach day, lunch of sandwiches and iced tea on the boardwalk, afternoons spent floating in the ocean, permanently attached to my boogie board. Pruny fingers shucked corn on the patio, and dinner was nearly always local fish: clams and mussels in my mother’s paella, simple grilled swordfish or “pink” fish–salmon, sole with lemon and butter and bread to soak up the sauce.

Every once in awhile, there was a change in routine, when the day was too long to even imagine eating at home, when all our friends from the beach didn’t want to separate after a long day of playing and running. We would shower at the beach, a strange feeling of walking back up the boardwalk with clean, damp hair, wrapped in a towel, back to the lockers where we would change and head out to the cars that had been baking in the sun all day. We piled in–it didn’t matter who was riding with whom, because we were all going to the same place: Baby Moon.

Baby Moon is an Italian restaurant, the Italian-American comfort kind, filled with good food and huge portions and noise. It’s a Long Island institution, a restaurant that has remained through years of opening and closing, the only restaurant I can remember from my childhood that still exists, its sign proudly advertising its location along the Montauk Highway.

Baby Moon is famous for pizza, for massive dishes of pasta you could never finish on your own. In the winter, when we came out for the weekend, I would sometimes try to tackle a dish of spaghetti and meatballs or my favorite rigatoni Bolognese, but in the summer, after a day in the salt and the sand and the sun, all I wanted were light, clean, simple tastes of summer, and so I always ordered the same thing: grilled balsamic chicken served over salad with tomatoes and red peppers.

It came with a side of spaghetti with marinara sauce, which I always passed on to someone else: with a group that big, there’s always someone else to take the stuff you don’t want. Instead, I concentrated on my own plate, something so simple and so delicious. The simplicity made it, I knew it even then, before I knew how to talk about food or even what the differences in cooking styles were. I just knew that “grilled chicken” meant this charred, smoky flavor that I associated with summer, that the tomatoes were perfect and ripe and red, that the lemon and balsamic dressing was just tart enough for me to crave more.

I didn’t go home last summer: I went to Barcelona instead. I love European cities in the summer: there’s an almost repulsive smell of baking pavement and garbage and people that should turn me off, but it doesn’t… I crave it. But not nearly as much as I crave summer back home, summers of corn on the cob and Baby Moon, summers that make me ache, summers that, a part of me knows, are gone forever.

I’m still in Paris, and God only knows what this summer will bring. My birthday will be spent here in Paris, even though I thought I would be somewhere else by now, somewhere baking hot. My plans are up in the air, something that makes me uncomfortable and nervous for no reason. But I do know, for sure, that on August 10th, I will be headed home. Until then, I’ll content myself with making my own balsamic chicken salad, eating it in front of my own opened window, French doors leading out to our pseudo-balcony, and pretending, when the sun and breeze wake me in the morning, that I’m home again.

Balsamic Chicken with Arugula Salad

1 boneless, skinless chicken breast
1/4 cup plus 1 Tbsp. balsamic vinegar, separated
2 tsp. olive oil, separated
a few handfuls of baby arugula
1 endive, chopped
two tomatoes, sliced
jarred red peppers
1 quarter lemon
salt and pepper

Place the chicken breast in the 1/4 cup of balsamic vinegar in a shallow dish. Allow to marinate for 15 minutes, turning halfway through.

Rinse and prep the salad ingredients, salting the lettuce (this is the secret that makes restaurant salads taste so good). Heat a grill, grill pan, or frying pan over high heat. Brush the chicken breast with one teaspoon of the oil.

If grilling, grill the chicken breast until grilled through and charred. If using a grill pan or frying pan, cook the chicken breast over high heat, flipping after two minutes, so that both sides are charred and browned. Reduce the heat to low and cover, cooking until cooked through, about another minute or two. When the thickest part of the chicken breast feels slightly firm to the touch (like a well-done steak), it’s done.

Place the salad greens, tomatoes and peppers in a bowl. Dress with the remaining oil and vinegar, the lemon, and salt and pepper to taste.