STACKS OF FOOD COMFORTS
Ingenuity on Twitter for making hot meals in deep freeze warms writer
There’s a reason Houstonians did not readily adopt the name Winter Storm Uri for the week of deep-freeze tribulation we just endured. The cascade of difficulties as we watched our infrastructure dissolve seemed too vast, too mind-boggling for that official collection of three puny letters. Uri sounded too meek and mild for this cursed polar vortex, which afflicted our subtropical home with ice and snow and sleet and days of hard freeze, throwing the city — and our food systems — into disarray.
A Mount Everest of dirty dishes rises in my sink as I type, waiting for the return of more than a trickle of water. I’m afraid to do triage on my refrigerator and freezer, where spoiled and thawed items lurk in wait.
My breakfast this 28-degree morning? A sad piece of Mrs. Baird’s white bread I pried from its frozen and refrozen loaf, saved from a long-ago barbecue takeout for reasons I cannot explain. Perhaps I knew in my prepper heart its time would come.
I threw the slice in the toaster, which finally works again after days of power outage. And I managed to
burn it because I am still disoriented and wonky after a week spent just trying to keep warm and to keep feeding myself.
My jam went moldy while the refrigerator was offline, so I grabbed a bearshaped plastic bottle of honey and squeezed. Nothing. Squeezed again. Still nothing.
Finally a viscous stream of the stuff emerged, snaking down onto my toast like stretchy taffy. It was still too chilly in my barely insulated, drafty old house for honey to act normal.
My electric kettle worked again, for which I was pathetically grateful. Each day that passed, making the morning’s coffee — so automatic — had seemed more of a project. Thank goodness for my handcranked Spong grinder for the beans, and my gas stove (a balky old Viking I never truly appreciated until now) for boiling water for the pour-over pot.
When the boil-water order came down and I had to forswear my trusty Brita filter pitcher, I excavated a flat of bottled water I had bought for our last hurricane scare and heated that up for my coffee. I hated to imagine what folks with electric stoves were going through.
Coffee brewed, I stuck the milk carton out on the back steps so it wouldn’t go sour and pored through my Twitter feed — thank goodness I still had cell service in the early part of the week — to see how my fellow Houstonians were keeping themselves fueled without the luxuries of electricity and running water.
My friend Jay Rascoe resorted to grinding his coffee beans with a rolling pin. Out in Katy, Mike Kane — who lost power for more than 50 hours — had plugged his grinder into his truck’s electrical outlet, then rummaged to find a never-used French press still in its box.
Feeding ourselves seemed more important than ever, not just to keep up our spirits but to fuel our bodies with the warmth of calories burned — the value of food at its most basic.
All week long, I reveled in Texans’ kitchen hacks as they muddled through the disaster. My Twitter feed became my virtual hearth, radiating solidarity and inspiration; I warmed myself by its light in the candlelit dark of my kitchen, feasting upon the ingenuity of my fellow citizens.
While grilling dinner outdoors, former Houstonian Shannon Perdue (now an Austin product manager for an events company) put some rocks over the fire, transferred them to a pottery bowl and used it on the supper table as a Zenlike source of radiant heat.
Pure genius. As was the makeshift “stove” Austin actor Edward Gomez constructed for himself when he tired of eating bananas and peanut butter. A brace of tealights, some wellplaced bricks, a saucepan and voilà: Gomez had a safe countertop setup where he could cook bacon and eggs, which he tucked into a baguette with cheese and some leftover guacamole salsa.
Some resourceful souls with working fireplaces used them for cooking. In Garden Oaks, writer and website manager Jeff Balke prepared coffee and toast over the fire, and later parked a Dutch ovenful of stew over the flames. I looked at the photos he posted with envy. But then — wonder of wonders — I heard a shout at my front gate.
It was University of Houston historian Todd Romero, my former neighbor and home cook par excellence, with his son Alec. They had brought me some boeuf bourguignon and some knots of dried pappardelle to go with it. “Riches more precious than gold,” I gloated as I warmed up the food and boiled the noodles with bottled water.
The stew was just what I needed to bring me back to myself. I marveled over the rich slip and slice of the singed and braised beef chunks, the depth of red wine mingled with beef juices; the way the pearl onions and mushrooms and carrots soaked up the flavors. This was winter food, in the heart of the longest cold snap I had ever experience during my half century in Houston.
Suddenly I realized why “a hot meal” had become such a mantra on my Twitter feed, my chief connection to the outside world. We live in a climate where we are more often trying to cool down. Now warming up seemed crucial, lifegiving. A hot meal seemed more devoutly to be wished than a hot shower, even.
Houston startup strategist Lauren Mitchell spent Feb. 16 with her 3-monthold baby snugged tight against her body to keep her warm. But by evening, she rallied to make spaghetti — one of the most comforting meals ever — by candlelight for her family.
Over in the Heights, Mimi Swartz, the Texas Monthly writer, invited friends and neighbors who’d lost power to stay at her house, where a generator chugged away in the backyard. In return, they cooked for the group. Gumbo happened, as it tends to do in cold Southeast Texas conditions. “It all feels very Soviet,” Swartz said.
I was seized with a sudden urge to cook bacon. Lots and lots of bacon, to use up what might go south in my warming refrigerator. I wolfed an unaccustomed four slices, sizzling hot, and gave a couple to the dogs as a treat. Next day I cooked the final slices to eat with some huevos rancheros I threw together with the last eggs, a leftover tostada shell from the weekend and the dregs of some expiring red salsa.
It was glorious. Inspired by a Twitter friend — and the realization that clutching a ceramic cupful of hot tea was the warmest my hands had felt all week — I concocted an improvised hot toddy out of Jamaican dark rum, hot water, simple syrup, a jot of honey, some cinnamon and cloves. Finishing touch: some livening squirts of tart juice from a couple of calamansi, little calamondin oranges I plucked right off the potted tree I had dragged into my kitchen to keep it from freezing.
For the first time, sipping that heated balm and breathing in the spices, I regarded the impromptu greenhouse sprouting in my formerly spacious kitchen with fondness. We were going to get through this together. I could feel the rum warming my innards, taking the edge off the accumulated stress, melting the perpetual clench and huddle of my muscles.
I could see why some Houstonians stocked up on wine and liquor once the roads were safe to drive again. But I was content with that single hot toddy and an ad hoc margarita I mixed for myself on Thursday evening, when the end seemed in sight.
I had no limes, of course. So I picked every last calamansi from my poor tree, 29 of them in all, and squeezed each half to make almost-but-not-quite an ounce. I shook that with almost-but-not-quite-anounce of Herradura Silver, a half ounce of Cointreau and a clutch of ice cubes that had miraculously survived two days in a powerless freezer.
Nursing the cocktail, I wondered again what we would call this disaster — for it was a disaster — when we looked back. “Uri” clearly wouldn’t stick. It didn’t fit the multiday collection of disasters that had reared up like some shapeless ogre from a murky bayou, a portent of things to come.
Connected to the internet in fits and starts, checking in with friends, decently supplied, I had been one of the lucky ones. I knew it. I tasted the bitter tang of survivor’s guilt, as did the friend who had boiled water from her boyfriend’s swimming pool so they could wash dishes.
We’d live to fight again in this exhilarating, exasperating, multifaceted city we call home. But not everybody would. After a pandemic year and its attendant losses, that may be the bitterest pill of all.