“You don’t know how to live with people!” my sister says in a somewhat exasperated tone of voice. While most of the things that my sister says in an exasperated tone of voice get taken with a heaping tablespoon of salt, this time, I can’t help but wonder if she has a point.
I don’t know if this is how my other boarding school friends feel, but every time I come back home–to my parents’ house–I find myself grasping at straws to find some sense of normal to get me through. I used to try to bring my other homes home, to come back with pieces of Andover or Toronto or Paris to make myself feel better–wardrobe choices that made my mother cringe, daily habits that had no place in my childhood home, television shows that I had to watch at odd hours because of the time difference–but all I got was offhand comments from my siblings and my parents and, at any rate, it never felt real, not to me.
Normal, for me, comes and goes in little moments; sometimes, when talking with people who were raised here, like me, I feel a little taste of what it would have been like to have been raised at home, in New York City. One such moment came a few days ago, when talking with a friend of mine who is as familiar as I am with the Hampton Jitney.
“The most expensive hangover I’ve ever had,” he said, and we laughed, though the others surrounding us, picked out of my various lives, didn’t understand at all. And for some reason, that made the moment of comprehension all the more sweet.
This is it, I thought to myself. This is the sort of world I want to write. It’s a world where things only make sense to a select few, and you have the joy of being a part of that select few. It’s a world where inside jokes are more than just fleeting moments but whole days.
The only real example I have of that is my own life is my childhood on Long Island, the few months of normal where everything in our daily lives was a given–the beach, our friends, dinners on the shore or in the backyard, parents as ever-present lifeguards, neighbor’s backyards as familiar as our own, running down to the dock to jump into a boat and grab a fishing rod without worrying who either the boat or the rod belonged to. I miss it.
But normal changes: I was lucky enough to make it home before my brother left for college in Tennessee, but only by a few days. Now he’s gone, along with the rest of our summer crew, and I’ve found myself back in the house that I grew up with sans the people who grew up there with me. It’s strange–almost worse than being away. At least when you’re gone, you have the memory of what was. When you come back to find it’s no longer there, home becomes strange and foreign, and I become strange and foreign within it.
Summer food, for a time, was made up of variations on the same thing: steak and potatoes at my grandma’s, sushi at our favorite sushi bar, corn on the cob by the dozen, ice cream eaten as we strolled down Main Street in a brood. While we still have corn, the other things have slowly disappeared, and while I’m not turning down my new favorite summer tradition of apéro, there are some things I miss.
But there are some things I embrace, like Turkish salad, a chopped salad that we ate every Sunday in Paziols and that I’m sure I’ll be making for summers to come. Followed up with baklava, Turkish salad makes a perfect summer meal, on its own or accompanied with something… like endless corn, perhaps.
Turkish Salad
The key to this salad is chopping everything really finely. If you think it’s small enough, keep chopping.
1/2 head soft green lettuce
1 cucumber
3 tomatoes
1 red pepper
1 jalapeño pepper
3 oz. feta cheese
1 bunch parsley
10 black olives
juice of 1 lemon
1 tbsp. olive oil
Finely chop the lettuce, cucumber, peppers, tomatoes and parsley, keeping each ingredient separate.. Crumble the feta.
Layer the ingredients in a shallow dish, with the feta over the top. Scatter the olives over the feta, then season with the lemon juice and olive oil.
Baklava (adapted from Simply Recipes)
1 lb. pistachios
1 lb phyllo dough
1 cup of butter, melted
1/3 cup sugar
1 tbsp. ground cinnamon
1 pinch nutmeg
1 cup water
1 cup of sugar
1/2 cup of honey
2 tablespoons of lemon juice
1 tsp. cinnamon
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
Process the pistachios, sugar and spices in a food processor until fine.
Using a pastry brush, butter the pan. Open a pack of phyllo and cover it with a slightly damp cloth. Place one sheet of dough in the bottom of the pan, then brush the phyllo with butter. Continue until you have six layers of dough.
Sprinkle a layer of the nut mixture over the phyllo, then top with two more layers of phyllo sandwiched with butter, then another layer of nuts. Repeat until all the nuts have been used, then alternate phyllo and butter until the phyllo is all used, brushing the top of the baklava with butter.
Cut the baklava into squares with a sharp knife.
Bake for about 30 minutes, until golden on top. Meanwhile, make the syrup: combine the sugar, honey, lemon juice, cinnamon and water in a saucepan. Heat until the sugar is melted, then allow to cool.
When the baklava is removed from the oven, immediately spoon the cooled syrup evenly over the baklava. Cover and chill until ready to serve. Can be stored covered at room temperature for several days.