I was schooled by an endive

Earlier this year, I started out 2008 with a bang (or really a slow and potentially deadly leak) and almost inadvertently killed myself after braising an endive. It’s too bad really, because I’m afraid that the whole experience has put me off braised endives forever. I had decided that braising was the culinary skill I wanted to hone this winter during the eerie post-December months when there’s nothing to do but apply yourself to tasks with a vigor meant to desperately lift yourself out of a seasonal mood disorder.

For the past two years I tried to master the art of steamed puddings, simultaneously with hand quilting. Ack. Could I be any more Martha, people? The first winter, I bought a steamed pudding dish (a bowl with a nice little ridge that is super heatproof so you can tie a cover on top and drop the bowl into hot hot water to steam). That’s about as far as I got—I bought the bowl but then promptly misplaced it. After losing it, I became obsessed with the idea that my ex-boyfriend has maliciously lifted my pudding bowl and taken it with him when he packed up his stuff, and himself, and head off. I finally bought another pudding bowl the next winter, but by then, the stewing over the alleged bowl-lifting had ruined my not-yet hatched hobby. Plus, the whole idea of me, single white quarterlife spinster, huddled over the cooker with special cooking string and a hunk of suet, made me feel tired. Braising for one seemed much better—take something tough, and often cheap, and make it tender.

Months before, my father had let me borrow (or lift) a braising book. The recipes were overwhelming requiring a massive kitchen kit. I was ready to put it in a hard to reach place where I could admire its spine, thinking, hey, I may be a quarterlife spinster, but I have a whole book dedicated to braising. Then, yes friends, I realized that I may be a quarterlife spinster because I have a book on braising. So I decided not going to just look at the book, trying to decide what its place in my apartment meant about me as a person, globally speaking. I was going to use it, and I would start with one of the multiple suggestions for braising endives.

After a few tries, the way I have been making my braised endives is a loose loose interpretation of braise. I cut the endive in half lengthwise. I brown it in some fat after I’ve cooked up some bacon, cut in postage stamp sizes, and set the piggy crisps aside. Then I figure out whatever kind of liquid I feel like/have on-hand—chicken broth mostly, sometimes a little sherry, and some water—and cook it slowly over low heat until the leaves are delicious and mushy and not at all bitter and eely like endives are normally. In the meantime, I cook up some white, refined, bad ass/for you rice.

The irony of my endive trouble is that I have spent a few evenings cleaning up the meal, worrying about toxins—those used in the growing of the endive in a Holland greenhouse, not the gas used to heat up my skillet. The Whole Foods (yes, I’m bougie, wanna tussle?) only has a basket of endive, “conventionally” grown flown all the way here from Holland—or, the kind of vegetable that would make Michael Pollan tsk. I felt bad about the fossil fuels involved in my braised endive, but honestly, the pesticides that I imagined had been slowly cooked into the leaves, worried me more. I would soak the rice saucepan, and scrub the braisepan, and feel guilty.

On the night when the endive lost me as a customer, I was cooking up my meal of (singledom) champions and talking on the phone. The whole time I was thinking, this is fabulous—you’re well on your way with your seasonal disorder hobby. And you’re not making yourself cereal for dinner. And protein in your favorite form: bacon. Maybe partly due to my self-congratulatory state, after I had lifted the endive onto my plate, I left the stove on its low-so low to braise—level.

Despite my braising skills, I didn’t enjoy the dinner. I was nauseous—what a bummer! I tried to read but felt distracted. Spaced out, I watched tv instead. I shuffled off to sleep a little early. All the while natural gas was filling my studio apartment, where my bed is closer to the stove than most of your beds are to your toilets—or your freaking nightstands.

Early the next morning I answered the door to see a posse of gas-smelling neighbors from my hall and a security guard. A handful of them came into the apartment to check the stove—saw that it was still braising an imaginary endive into absolute oblivion—and barked orders at me to open the windows, the guard shouted something into the walkie talkie and then everybody left. I’m on the 36th floor, with complex “suicide-proof” windows, so opening the windows in my gas-induced haze was easier said than done.

Oh well, inadvertently almost killed myself. I guess I can check that off the bucket list. I don’t have that single-woman-living-alone-in-the-big-city scary thoughts thing about cats, piles of newspapers, and rows of sensible shoes—although I’m living in an apartment recently occupied by just such a lady. In the end, I’m choosing to focus on what my ever-optimistic slash cripplingly worried father said to me after I told him the story: well, at least you got to meet some of your neighbors, right? I’m going to be sure to give Harriet, the toothless lady living in the studio down the hall, my braising recipes—they’ll be perfect for current eating capabilities.