On margaritas and mariachi
Eating out might be overrated
* if I could remove this post from my website I would. But it doesn’t look like this is an option with Substack. I wrote it, though, so maybe it’s better now if I add this apology here upfront, in case you are doing some back reading. I actually didn’t know anything about this day in history, but I felt free to use it as a gimmicky theme for a blog post the same way restaurants use it to slap a theme on to a menu and get more people in the door. This was just a clueless thing I did as a privileged white person in America, and for that I’m sorry.
“It’s Cinco de Mayo” I say to my spouse Janyce. “Do we have any tequila?”
Janyce is in the kitchen, opening up the door to the slim cabinet by the washer and dryer where we keep our bottles.
“I need to make a run to Liquor World, we’re out of everything. No tequila, no gin either,” she says.
“Let’s have a margarita” I say, “and I bet we have enough stuff in the fridge for a platter of nachos.”
It’s a Tuesday night and I’ve moved the work computers and papers off to the side, exposing a piece of our workspace and transforming it back into a dinner table. It’s starting to get dark now with just a red dot of sun setting in the back woods. The google home speaker is tuned to WGBH, and the soothing opening music of the program “In it together” is playing, as the velvety voice of the commentator starts to speak. It’s getting late for dinner. I remember having some fleeting thought at around 5pm about minestrone soup, only now I don’t feel like cooking anymore.
“Wait,” says Janyce, opening her eyes wide, “We still have leftover pork tenderloin. We can top the nachos with that.”
“Now you’re talking,” I say.
The other morning, I snapped a picture of her for Instagram as she entered the bedroom holding a manila folder. She was excited about dinner even before breakfast, flashing me a cut out magazine recipe we had made together some years prior for pork and prunes, one where she had annotated the details of how it tasted in ballpoint pen in the margins. I bought us a small pork tenderloin on my latest grocery run, when I saw that the Whole Foods meat counter was only a third stocked. Scantily arranged cuts of chicken and beef in a too big showcase looked strange to me. It was as if they were originally destined for a fancy restaurant, and possibly, by the time I was back shopping again, there might not be any meat left at all. I decided to get a smattering of everything— stew chunks, ground lamb, pork tenderloin, some flank steak— and figure out what to do with all of it when I got home.
“Do you want me to go now?” says Janyce, walking into the living room carrying one lime. “We’re going to need more limes, too.”
“Sure, I’ll pull together the nachos while you are out,” I say.
All day I’ve felt sloppy and glum, moping around the house bemoaning the loss of our restaurant date nights. I miss stopping after work and ordering juicy glasses of red wine at some trendy city bar. I miss wearing real clothing and being happy to see her again at the end of the workday, the two of us swapping daytime stories and discussing the virtues of meatballs and sauce, without the pasta, and how if we skip the bread basket, as we high five each other, that obviously means we’ll split a chocolate mousse for dessert. Now my workday and her workday are jumbled together, and the end of the office hours, no longer clearly drawn by our need to catch a train, can easily spill into the dinner hours. “I forgot, I promised I’d get one more thing done before the morning,” she said. “I will only be a little longer.”
Janyce has taken to standing at the dining table with her computer on a wicker filing box, talking out loud during a steady succession of meetings while I wander around the house with my own laptop and find cozy workspaces to break up the monotony. By noon, I usually bring us both a quick lunch of vegetables and grains I whipped up in a pan. Today it was a medley of chickpeas, zucchini, mushrooms, and brown rice doused with a hefty shake of Ras El Hanout from the spice cabinet and topped with a dollop of plain Greek yogurt. I ate mine at the table, listening in for a while to a process improvement discussion, while she ate hers standing up, a plate in one hand and the other holding a fork, her body leaning in toward the computer screen. “This is amazing,” she said, mouthing the words to me from across the table after taking a bite.
We’re some of the lucky ones. I take in this truth every time I read an Atlantic article, or I scan the New York Times latest headlines. Over the weekend, Janyce reacted in horror to a Sunday Boston Globe article of cars lined up for miles in New Jersey for a food pantry that ran out of food and had to send people away. It was buried in the middle of the paper and to her mind should have made the front page. Is this really our country? Our rich and bountiful country? It set off a conversation between us about whether it made sense to be making donations to our tony town’s food pantry alone or if we should split an even larger amount and give some to the Greater Boston Food Bank.
There are layers to the realities of privilege this pandemic is exposing. I feel it every time I enter my kitchen and scan the options we have, allowing me to transform the mundane routines of dinnertime into something special.
Janyce is back and she sets the bag on the counter, pulling out the various bottles and pile of limes, lining them up near the glasses and plate of coarse salt I have at the ready. I’m standing at the stove in front of a cookie sheet spreading cassava tortilla chips in a thin layer and tossing leftover shredded pork and jammy onion and prunes on top to melt with the salsa and cheese in the oven.
Together, we squeeze limes, shake the cocktail mixer, and test out the proportions in tiny sips from chilled glasses.
“Hey Google, play Mariachi music,” I say, as I switch on the tiny string of lights I pulled out of the top drawer of our buffet cabinet and arranged in the center of the table around the candles.
Janyce sits across from me smiling in the illuminated glow of our makeshift Mexican party, while stuffing a large triangle of pork nachos in her mouth and making an “mmm” sound.
“These are the best nachos I’ve ever had,” she says.
I hold up my glass in a toast, and scoop my own portion from the sheet pan with my free hand.
“Who needs a restaurant, anyway?” I say, taking a giant bite and smiling back, mumbling through a mouthful of sweet and cheesy crunch.
“Damn, these are good.”