Learning from Doris

Lesson #1:
Make a mess -- Every Tuesday night, Doris and Steven have a "family" dinner at their house. Family consists of anyone who is biologically or "logically" related to them -- friends, friends of friends, sons, daughters, spouses, etc. Meals are generally eclectic and filling. Conversation is always lively and the dogs (of which there can be anywhere from 1 to 4 present) offer unexpected entertainment -- accidentally (or not) falling into the pool, race-like chases around the garden, and games of catch on the porch.

Yesterday I went early because I wanted to learn how Doris made "things." By things I mean bread, pasta, salads, soups -- whatever the particulars are of that meal. Yesterdays particulars were bread, ravioli, and baked asparagus.

Doris has two pasta machines. Not the fancy electric kind, but two hand-held machines -- one she found at Goodwill. While it's missing some parts, it works just fine for basic pasta making. So I got a lesson.

And it was messy. Flour was all over the kitchen island workspace and all over the floor. The dogs -- our dog, Rubin and their huge dog, Ben -- licked the smatterings of flour and dough. Their muzzles turned white from their efforts.

"Oops," I confessed. "I'm making a mess."

"Don't worry about it," Doris replied in her best Rhode Island accent. "It's always like this. You should see the mess in Italian kitchens."

Doris' father was Italian. He spoke very little English though he could speak French fluently. His wife was French. She was a well-known and renowned drape-maker (is there a word for that?). She worked her fingers to the bone designing and sewing drapes as well as sending out her cadre of gay salesmen. Meanwhile her husband, Doris' father, stayed home and cooked amazing Italian meals. Doris speaks Italian and travels back to the old country once every few years and always returns with a new recipe lodged somewhere in her memory.

"Pasta making is messy," she laughed. "Get used to it!"

And so I did.

Lesson #2: Recipes don't matter -- I am a rule follower. I don't like to do the wrong thing. Recipes seem important to me. Too much salt and the whole thing can be ruined. Too much liquid and you have soup instead of chili. I cling to the recipes and then, if my dish doesn't turn out, I try to figure out what went wrong by re-examining the recipe.

"Put about a cup of flour on the island," Doris instructed, but as she did it I noticed it wasn't quite a cup. No exact measuring for her!

"Now make a well in the middle of the floor and crack an egg into it."

"Wait," I worried out loud, "Aren't you just supposed to use the egg yolk?"

"It doesn't matter." Doris slid the egg from its shell and then took the broken half of the shell and filled it with water. "You need to add water and about half a shell is perfect."

Then, just like they do on the Iron Chef, we pulled the flour into the egg and blended until we had a dough that held together, "not too dry, not too wet" as Doris explained.

I was nervous. I kept feeling her dough compared to mine. I mimicked her every movement hoping my dough would be exactly like hers.

"Is this okay?" I'd ask.

"Sure," Doris tossed back and then moved onto the next task.

Lesson #3: It's not about measurements. It's about textures.

Once the dough was mixed we cut off chunks and pressed them through the pasta maker.

"It will have a rough texture at first," Doris instructed, "and then, without much effort, the dough will be smooth and silky."

We ran the chunk of dough through again and again, and just as promised, the dough moved from a rough, lumpy chunk to a smooth, stretchy rectangle.

"Like this?" I kept asking.

"Yep, that's it!" We stacked the finished dough in geometric lumps on the counter.

"Now we must press it to the exact thickness we want." Doris skillfully adjusted the pasta maker, spinning the dial from 1 to 3 to 5 to 7 -- narrowing the width of the metal rollers. "7 looks too thin," she pronounced. "Let's stick with 6."

I rolled my first chunk of pasta through first 1, then 3, then 5, and finally 6. I had a long tongue-shaped swath of dough. From all the cooking shows I've been watching lately, I knew we had to hang the pasta to dry.

"We forgot to put out the drying rack," I announced.

"Oh just hang it over the chair," Doris replied. She took my finished dough and draped it over the back of the island stool. Soon we had 15 scarves of silky, thin dough hanging throughout the kitchen, the summer breeze through the back door swung them gently.

Lesson #4: If it doesn't work, just try something else.

"I've tried to use the ravioli maker," Doris informed me, "but I can't get it to work without Herculean efforts. So we'll just do it this way."

"This way" entailed laying the strips of dough on the counter, plopping the filling (cooked spinach and brie) in a Zen garden, linear pattern. We wet the edges with water from a finger bowl and then laid another strip on top.

"I have this ravioli cutter," Doris held up a metal stamp with triangular edges, "but it doesn't cut through enough so I just use a knife or a glass."

She demonstrated both methods -- one producing square ravioli, the other making half or full moons, depending on your preference.

Within the hour we had a huge tray of oddly shaped ravioli.

The kitchen was a disaster. Well, in my mother's sense of cleanliness, the room looked like a disaster to me. "Shall we clean up?" I asked invoking my mother's sense of tidiness.

"Oh no, we have more to do. We'll clean up later."

Lesson #5: Clean up once. No need to clean up again and again.

In the end, Steven, Doris' husband, returned from his errands and while Doris made braised vegetables, threw the bread into bake, roasted asparagus, and made a salad from the greens in her expansive garden, Steven cleaned off the surfaces and swept the floor.

Lesson #6: A faithful partner is essential to all cooking adventures.

The meal was wonderful, as usual. We ate fresh bread, big, meaty green olives, and cheese for appetizers. Then 9 of us -- family and friends -- sat around the enormous dining table and served up ravioli, vegetables, salad, asparagus, a lentil mush that was incredibly tasty, and stuffed ourselves silly not only with food, but with laughter. The dogs -- three for the night-- swirled around the table, nudging their noses into laps and finally settling on the floor by our chairs.

I'd made dessert earlier in the day -- an apple tart with enough butter to kill a cow and enough sugar to bury a pyramid. It was wonderfully rich with a dollop of fresh whipped cream.

Lesson #7: Never let the guests clean up.

I tried, but Doris shooed us out the door around 9 last night while she and Steven and their son rinsed the dishes and placed them in the dishwasher.

"No need to rinse the dishes," I heard Doris' voice echo out of the kitchen window as we got into the car. "The dishwasher will take care of all of that."

Food is both complicated and simple. When I examine the way I have always cooked -- cleaning up as I go along, following the recipe to the exact specifications, tossing out mistakes, making everything look exactly like it does in the recipe book, not allowing others to help lest I lose my place in the process -- I realize it is a complicated and lonely process. Cooking with Doris, while it produces complicated meals, felt much simpler -- communal, fun, random, stress and worry free.

We came home last night with one of Doris' pasta machines ("Practice," she told me, "Have fun with it. You can't go wrong!"), our empty tart dish (a cast iron skillet) and one very tired dog. I came home with many lessons, the biggest of which is how to relax.