hope in the kitchen

What to cook when the lights dim. [RECIPES]

On a recent call with my psychopharmacologist — the nice man who prescribes my Welbutrin every quarter — he asked me if it had started yet.

I was silent.

Well? he said.

While I was on a telehealth call with him, I was simultaneously and furtively trying to send a text response to my 89-year-old mother’s healthcare manager (the one who takes four days to call me back when it’s an emergency, and then when she does, insists that I’m the one who dropped the ball) about increasing my mother’s aide hours since she’s been falling. The cat was wrapping himself around my ankles, meowing at the top of his lungs because, being part Siamese, that’s what he does. I was also trying, on deadline, to update a multi-page spreadsheet for my (truly amazing) publicist in advance of the March publication of my next book; making sure that my mother’s bills were being paid on time; making sure that my recently retired primary care physician had forwarded my files to my new primary care physician (she hadn’t); and reminding my wife, whose office is at the other end of the house, to confirm her colonoscopy appointment.

WELL? he said, waiting.

I don’t know what you’re talking about— I said.

Your seasonal affective disorder — Has it started yet?

It’s a little hard to know, I told him.

Because it’s getting darker and chillier, you know — It’s always this time of year when you start to get depressed.

This was why I had gone on Welbutrin to begin with: it’s particularly effective for people like me who experience clinical depression when the season changes. Historically, sometime around the middle of October, my emotional metabolism begins to stagger and creak to a halt, as though I’m a bear going into hibernation. My father suffered from the same thing for most of his life.

Maybe it’s time to haul the light box up from the basement, he said, brightly.

Maybe it’s time for me to run over my iPhone, change my name, and leave the country, I said.

What —?

Nothing—

Call me if it gets bad, he said.

I ended the conversation before he could hear me snort.

To quote my grandmother, He should only know.

The fact is: he is partially right. This is the beginning of the ever-darkening, cozy time of year, which, for many of us, dovetails right into the maudlin and miserable time of year. Add to this a mountain of chronic eldercare stress and worry about impending fascism and all I really want to do is nothing. Or cry. Or cook. Which is probably why I often find myself getting sucked down the Instagram wormhole that is my personal comfortland: the English Country Kitchen, with its kitchen fireplace, and its ubiquitous cream Aga in front of which lies an inevitably snoring, gray-muzzled Labrador waiting for a chicken to magically tumble out of the roasting oven.

At this time of year, some people dream of grilling fresh fish over grape leaves on sunny Greek islands; I dream of standing in front of an Aga in a stone-floored kitchen somewhere in Devon, cooking straight through until April. (Some of you have asked me about this, so in another post, I will explain the whole English connection, which is very, very old.)

Nigella’s poached chicken with lardons and lentils

But, I do not live in Devon, or anywhere in England, and if I installed an Aga in my suburban Connecticut kitchen, it’d go straight through the floor to the basement. My twenty-year-old Viking — the one with the broken door and the wonky temperature gauge — will have to do for now. I’m finding hope in my kitchen (as I mostly do when things get complicated), and while I haven’t hauled up my f**king light box yet, or settled down on the couch with a bucket of emergency chocolate pudding, the act of cooking pulls me out of the place where I seem to find myself at this dimming time of year. The eldercare bureaucratic snafus that I deal with daily — often for hours at a time — don’t disappear but lessen, even if just for a little while. (Those snafus recently shifted from exhausting and troublesome to dangerous and deeply personal, when my mother’s healthcare manager intimated that I’m not doing enough for my mother, or that because I live in a one-story house — she actually Google-mapped it — it’d be a perfect place for her to move. This manager doesn’t much care about the words trauma, abuse, estrangement, or clinically-diagnosed C-PTSD. But whatever.)

Susan’s spicy pickled green tomatoes

So, in the kitchen. Cooking on my ancient stove, or on the grill, or in the pizza oven. Breaking a local egg into a hole carved out of the center of a slice of long-fermented sourdough, adding a little chopped Calabrian pepper, and toasting it in an olive oil-slicked cast iron pan. Making roast chicken stuffed with tarragon, or maybe tagliatelle with lemon and Parmigiana. My wife is feeling it too: I came home from eldercare duty in New York yesterday to find that Susan, during her lunch hour, had canned a few big jars of spicy pickled green tomatoes, which will be ready in three weeks. We have to stay home for Thanksgiving this year and neither of us has the energy for a big holiday dinner, so I’m busily reading recipes for something different since it will probably just be the two of us: maybe capon or pheasant, since small turkeys are hard to come by and the last time I stuffed, rolled, and roasted a turkey breast porchetta-style, the meat was so dry you could floss with it.

We had our first frost the other night and the afternoon light is starting to dim by four. Nigel Slater’s long-awaited A Thousand Feasts arrived as if on cue. By February, we’ll need some sun and warmth and, if the airline Gods make it possible, we’ll fly somewhere balmy, if only for a long weekend. But for now, here I am, surrounded by and cooking from my exploding-at-the-seams recipe book, various cookbooks and tear sheets, hoping to stave off the appearance of the lightbox in my office, where it will live until spring.

What do you cook when the days begin to darken?