the stock pot

I made a big pot of Russian beef borscht yesterday morning, before cleaning up and running off to shoot a PSA. Yes, borscht. I had a pound of roasted beets left in the freezer from Thanksgiving and something needed to be done with them. After running around with Tommy downtown for most of Saturday, in and out of hardware and garden centers, peeking in windows at religious icons, rummaging through The Evolution Store, spilling some of my most closely guarded baggage over tea and meeting up with Tex at Grace Church, I was feeling downright gothic and Victorian so borscht seemed in order.

It felt good to cook again. I miss cooking and used to do it all the time. It’s funny how we’ll take the time to do something like make a home cooked meal for somebody else but so rarely put forth that effort towards ourselves. So I rinse and flour the beef and brown it, add the broth, the canned tomatoes, chop the cabbage and onion and garlic, carrots and celery, the dill for garnish, defrost and chop the beets, wash my beet-stained hands twice with toothpaste (hey, it even works), simmer and season. By the end of it, I find myself with a damned fine soup.

I turn off the heat, and I’ve got it cooling on the stove as I’m cleaning the kitchen, and I go to put the cookbook away. The cookbook in question happens to be The Joy of Cooking – what is considered by many to be a kitchen staple – and in removing my place holder, the pages fall towards the front and I see a note that was written in it for me. It was a gift, you see, as most of my cookbooks are (I have more than a few, so you could say I collect them). There is H’s handwriting, impossible to mistake, and it is dated Christmas 1997, which would have been our first Christmas together. He mentions something about wanting me to make him something on page ___, lower right hand corner. So I turn to the page and I’m like, he wanted me to make him glazed chicken with asparagus? That doesn’t sound right…and then I see it. Pigs in a Blanket. Of course. And suddenly I am in tears and pitched over my chef’s rack at the thought of tiny sausages wrapped in puff pastry.

I had been telling Tom over tea about some of the bad parts of my relationship with H, because Tom had asked and I guess I felt like talking. And things got dark with H. Hell, things had gotten real dark there at the end, but it was good till about year four. What followed was a two-year downward spiral, but I hadn’t told Tom what it was like at the beginning; I hadn’t told him that H and I had lots of fun together - that once things had been very, very good. That first Christmas he flew to Austin with a godawful case of the flu to meet my family, let me drag him all over the place and introduce him to everybody. He even swung on the swings with me on the bank of the Pedernales (Purty Alice?) river. Yes, things eventually got bad, but there in the beginning, Christmas 1997, things had been very good, and I made him Pigs in a Blanket because it made him happy.

H and I ended three years ago. I say that without regret because, by the time it finally ended, the whole painful mess that our relationship had morphed into was quite literally making me sick. I don't miss being with him but sometimes I miss the fun we had. And hey, every now and then, even Diana Prince gets lonely. I'm not a person who will take just anybody to fill the proverbial void, either - let's face it: I'm picky as hell - but I do miss having someone to cook for. I miss having someone who sometimes comes to the table with trepidation when I make something new and then comes away a convert. I miss putting my heart and soul into a big pot with a pinch of salt and a dash of oregano for somebody that I care for. But mostly I miss having someone that I care about love me back like that, the way that he used to, the way before he stopped.