Cold Comforts

Yesterday was a startling reminder of what autumn has in store for us in NY—cool, windy, damp, with unidentifiable allergens flying around. If you’re a freelancer like me, it was a perfect day not to leave the house. I intended to do my first “deep clean” of my new apartment and tackle a pile of freelancery work that has piled up, but some mosquitoes, as shocked by the cold as I was, ate me the night before and I ended up taking a few Benadryl at 4 AM. I pulled myself from the Whitney YouTube vortex* I've been stuck in for about two weeks to make lunch and make my bed; otherwise, it was a slow-moving day.

Living alone, you really stretch the limits of your personal sloth. You tolerate all kinds of things that you’d never tolerate in anyone else, such as: pants everywhere, dirty dishes on the floor next to the bed, dirty dishes basically everywhere, piles of crumpled up receipts and pocket change on most surfaces, a bathrobe lying suggestively by the front door, and willfully living out of a shaving kit in your own private bathroom for approximately 1.5 months. I used to think that if a room didn’t keep itself clean, something must be wrong with the way the furniture is set up and where the clothes hampers and trash cans are placed. I’m coming to realize that I’ve never had a room keep itself clean. What has kept rooms clean for me has been the judgment of the people I lived with and, more often, earning the license to judge by occasionally maintaining a holier-than-thou cleaning regimen.

Every time I move, I have grand interior design aspirations. Something I have long fantasized about is using big furniture to create “walls” or “rooms”—like, putting the sofa in the middle of the room so that behind it is a new, separate "space." In this new place I have both a sofa that facilitates a "hallway" and a bookshelf cordoning off the studio into a "living room" and a "bedroom," which was a thrill for me to pull off. But it’s also really disappointing that when my interior design fantasies are finally realized, it basically looks like just my old stuff in a new room.

We had a girls’ night last night—Izzy and Jenn came over, and we talked about heavy shit. (We missed you a lot, Kathryn.) It was going to be just drinks, but because of the weather and what should have been plenty of extra time on my hands, I made soup:

Cheap, Easy Potato Soup: In a soup pot, cook 1 pound leeks, cleaned and thinly sliced up, in 2 T butter + 2 T olive oil over medium heat until just softened, 4-5 minutes; sprinkle with 1/2 t salt. Add 4 cloves minced garlic and 2 pounds peeled, thinly sliced Yukon Gold potatoes, tossing with the leeks, for about 2 minutes. Cover with chicken or vegetable stock by an inch. Bring to a boil, and then simmer until potatoes are soft. Then mush everything up with a potato masher or an immersion blender. Add more butter, salt, and/or white pepper. It’s best served at about 10 degrees cooler than “hot,” and I even like it at room temp. I think that if you cool it, and stir in cream or sour cream or crème fraishe, you can call it vichyssoise.

While waiting for Izzy and Jenn, I regarded my cluttered up “dining room” that comfortably seats only two people, and wondered where we would eat. Then I remembered the big coffee cups I used to have. They had a 14- or 16-ounce capacity—I hated them because my coffee would always get cold before I could finish it. The only reason I’d kept them around was because when my mom and I were packing me up for college nine years ago, she insisted that I take them. I pointed out that I had already packed coffee cups, the regularly sized ones. “No,” she said, “I think you are going to want these big ones to eat soup out of, you know, on a cold night?” She demonstrated with an imaginary big coffee cup and a spoon. I had never seen my mom eat soup out of a coffee cup before, but I decided against challenging whatever inexplicable nostalgic value it had for her. Over the past nine years, I’ve kept packing them up when I move. I even acquired four new ones in a cheap plateware set, never ever using them for the purpose of soup. They were always a thorn in my side by taking up precious cupboard space. Finally, a few months ago, I gave them away.

Enter last night: cold weather, hot soup, corner sofa spots in my "living room" because the "dining room" is too small. Soup in big coffee cups would have been perfect! Oh well. In the end, as has always been the case, bowls did the job just fine.