My Grown-Up House

Several weeks ago, I promised you pictures of my new house, and then I promptly disappeared. I’m sorry. I could blame school starting up again and days that start at 7am and finish at 9 or 10 at night, or I could say that I got a stomach flu last week and subsided entirely on rice and orange juice for three days, but that’s not really true, and I’m nothing if not honest (some say brutally so). The truth is that I haven’t been very inspired to blog as of late. Many of you know that I make a living writing, a double-edged sword if ever there was one, in that I love what I do and get to make money doing it, but I often leave little to no time or brain matter for the fun writing–the stuff that doesn’t pay but keeps the novelist in me alive.

Well, I’m out of my funk and back to tell you all about my new apartment, the place that made me so giddy from the moment we moved in that I thoroughly annoyed the Country Boy by exclaiming (several times a day), “Baby, look at our home!”

He really is a saint for putting up with me, but at the same time, it must be impossible for him to understand the feeling of being in a place that is à la fois fully mine and fully home. These two feelings, usually combined, have been assigned to different places over the past decade of my life, but not since I was a child have I been able to feel both ownership and that comfy, cozy feeling of home in the same location. From the minute I left home for boarding school, my dorm room was “mine,” and that in and of itself made it home-ish, but there was no comparison with the warm, yellow kitchen and hustle and bustle of my parents’ house on Long Island, the twin bed with the red comforter that had been home for me since I was seven. I loved my dorm rooms, loved decorating the walls with posters of Blink-182 and James Dean that my mother forbade on the carefully wallpapered walls of her house, but when the time came to pack up and go home at Christmas, Easter and summer break, there was no doubt that I was leaving school for home.

I’ve written before about my father’s disdain for “playing house,” the way that I attacked cooking with a passion the moment I had my own kitchen at 18. Any external observer could tell you that I was trying to create home, but mostly I just made a big mess and a lot of smoke. I leafed through cookbooks–Giada and Lidia Bastianich nearly exclusively–trying to recreate the kind of food that made my mother’s house feel like home, but instead of making her recipes for roast chicken and chicken parm, the actual classics of my childhood, I dug further back, to the food of my father’s family, and classic Italian-American and Sicilian recipes.

There were a lot of flops, like puttanesca sauce, which, after suffering through leftovers for nearly two weeks, I realized I didn’t like. There were the chocolate wheatberries from a Sicilian recipe website that made enough to feed hoardes and never cooked through entirely. I made all sorts of ragús and baked pastas, attempted bitter broccoli rape and sweet caponata, all in the name of trying to find food that made me feel at home. I spent a lot of money, and I never really got there.

Five years later, my kitchen approach hardly ever includes recipes, though I love browsing blogs and pretty cookbooks for inspiration. Put me in front of a stocked refrigerator, and I’ll come up with something, but hand me a recipe, and I’m almost always immediately bored. I should have known that home wasn’t the sort of place–or feeling–that could be created on the spot, but something that needed time to grow. It’s only now, after nearly ten different kitchens that were, at one time or another, at least partially mine, two furnished apartments with black leather couches, three uncomfortable beds and many, many rooms that I would have reorganized if I could, that I somehow stumbled into my own living room, ready for me as though it had been waiting all along for me to earn it.

Sausage and peppers is not something my mother made growing up, but I’m nearly certain it’s something my father ate as a child. I didn’t use a recipe for this one, just winged it based on descriptions–quite honestly–that came from the string of mafia movies and television shows I watched throughout freshman year of college, when I was trying to create the Italian-American childhood I never really had. Still, there’s something about peppers and onions melted together over the stovetop that is innately comforting, and you can never really go wrong with sausage. As they say in France, “Tout est bon dans le cochon,” everything is good in the pig.

I couldn’t agree more.

The Country Boy was raised on even less Italian-American food than I was; if I’m not mistaken, the only regular in his mother’s repertoire was lasagna. Still, even he agreed that the Italians had it right when they made up this simple dish. When I made it on one of our first nights here, Jean-Jacques Goldman on the stereo, I couldn’t help getting lost in the fantasy that maybe I was creating a new tradition, making a dish that would, someday, feel like the home I was trying to find in patched together recipes for my mother’s tomato sauce and Frank Sinatra crooning in the background.

Sausage and Peppers

1 tbsp. olive oil
2 red peppers
1 green pepper
2 red onions
salt and fresh black pepper to taste
1 tbsp. tomato paste (or 1/4 cup tomato sauce)

4 seasoned Italian sausages

Slice the bell peppers in half lengthwise and remove the seeds. Slice widthwise into thin strips. Slice the onion in half, then slice into thin half-moons.

Heat the oil over high heat in a large frying pan. Add the peppers and onions and a pinch of salt. Cook for about 5 minutes, stirring occasionally, until the edges of the peppers are slightly charred. Reduce the heat to medium-low and cover. Cook 20 minutes, or until tender, stirring occasionally.

Season with salt and pepper and add the tomato paste and 1/4 cup water. Stir to scrape up the brown bits on the bottom and form a sauce. Simmer uncovered while you prepare the sausages.

In a separate pan, fry the sausages over high heat to brown the exterior. Remove to the pan of peppers and onions and allow to finish cooking, if necessary (depending on the thickness of the sausages). Serve with lots of bread.