Please Make Yourself Extremely Comfortable. Please.

I've been fully aware for quite some time the role that cooking plays in my life. I guess I'm most aware when some one else in the house decides that it's their night to cook. Around 4:30 in the afternoon, when prep would usually begin, I pace nervously, I get extremely cranky some might even say "cross", I fidget, I curse... you get the picture. Then, when I eat the dinner that usually Nicole has prepared, I'm in ghastly awe of what a great chef she is. I think, "Who am I kidding? Slaving day after day when she can whip something like this out going from zero to sixty?"

The next day, when I have regained the reins in the kitchen, I will ridiculously put a little more oomph in my usual menu trying desperately and sadly to "one up" and regain an imagined lost territory with some culinary testosterone. I attempt to mask it all in good humor, jolly good fun. But I feel the others in the house seeing through me like cheap muslin. I feel their pity. It is palpable. Palatable but palpable pity.

I cook to assuage. I cook to impress. I cook to satisfy. I cook to occupy. I cook out of curiosity. I cook to seduce. I cook to comfort. Yes, I cook to and for comfort.

Thursday morning we had the saddest news. Paul, Nicole's father, has cancer. He has had a series of tests for the last several months that have all come back negative where cancer was concerned and Thursday morning was going for surgery for a different procedure that the doctors were sure was the issue. When they opened him up they discovered to their shock, that he had cancer.

Because he had been tested so many times already and the tests had all come back negative, I confess to not being too concerned about the procedure that he was going to have Thursday morning. So when the terrible call came from my mother in law Angela letting me know the situation and asking me to tell Nicole who was in the car driving Duncan home from school, well, I wasn't ready. But like all of the great events in life, none of us is ever really ready. Not really. It just suddenly, always suddenly becomes time.

It isn't necessary for me to go into any of the details of our grief that day in this particular forum, other than to note that all comfort that day was derived through necessary occupations. Every duty that normally would be one of the daily drudgery of child rearing was now a gift, now was a blissful momentary occupation that removed one temporarily from active grief. Every diaper, every tissue, every wipe, every explanation to Duncan was a visceral, fierce blessing.

At one point as we were in the eye of the storm, Carrie, who had run home from school the second she heard the news, suggested that tonight was a night for Chinese food. In the moment I agreed. About an hour later though, I knew I had to roast a chicken. I knew it for entirely selfish reasons.

When I was doing Sunday in the Park with George on the old Broadway, I would regularly bring in culinary delights that I had whipped up in the kitchen in Jersey.

"You're so generous!" Dressing room mates would say, slurping down chicken legs or chocolate chip cookies.

"Ha!" I would think. "They fell for it! Now they like me, and now they think I'm a good cook! I win! MWA HA HA HA HA HA!"

I did it for very selfish, self serving, self loving, egotistical, narcissistic reasons.

I needed to roast this chicken selfishly, right now, to feel better. To do something. And then to eat it with my family and have it provide momentary, blissful, albeit fleeting, comfort.

 I have gradually evolved through many roast chicken recipes over the years (Whole pierced lemon in the cavity/butter under the skin with paprika/sitting upright in one of those chicken roasters looking so very civilized in the oven) - this is my current favorite. Juicy and very, very flavorful.

ROASTED MUSTARD TARRAGON CHICKEN (Adapted from Gourmet)

1 chicken 3 1/2 lbs. or larger
salt and pepper
1 bunch tarragon
Dijon Mustard

Preheat oven to 425ºF with rack in the middle
Rub salt and pepper inside cavity of chicken. Stuff bunch of tarragon in the cavity. Truss the chicken and slather mustard all over. Roast until instant read thermometer inserted into fleshy part of the thigh reads 160ºF. For me it was about an hour and 10 minutes.

BEETS AND ONIONS

3 large beets
two or 3 medium onions
2 Tbs. butter
salt and pepper
lemon juice

Boil beets in salted water. Peel two or three onions and boil them in a separate pot in salted water until they star fall apart. Drain the beets reserving 1/2 cup of beet juice. Drain onions and combine with beets, beet juice, butter, salt and pepper to taste and several dashes of lemon juice.

MASHED POTATOES

Listen, all I did was cut up the potatoes with the skin on, boiled them in salted water and then mashed them with 1/2 stick butter and salt. I have fancier mashed potatoes methods, but they are for another day. Duncan went on and on about how delicious these were, so I'm good.