I smiled. “Yes and no. Mostly I’ve been cleaning and getting my stuff put away. I did pick up a few things. Does it look better?”
“You bet!” she gushed. “Can you come over and work on my room?”
“Absolutely! Right after I get written permission from your father to spend the afternoon in your bedroom with you!”
Jeana blushed. “Let me think about that.”
I took our coats and hung them in the closet. “While you’re thinking about it, I need to start dinner.”
“You were serious about cooking!?”
“Very.”
“What can I do to help?” she asked.
I grabbed one of the bar stools I had bought and brought it into the kitchen. “You can sit up here and inspire me to greatness.”
Jeana giggled and climbed onto the stool and crossed her legs. “Inspire you?”
“You have no idea!” I opened the refrigerator and pulled out a bottle of white wine. I know it’s supposed to be cooled, not cold, but I figured Jeana wouldn’t know and I didn’t have a wine cooler available. “Wine?” I asked.
“You were serious about that, too?”
“Absolutely.” I pulled out a couple of small glasses from a cupboard, and fished a corkscrew out of a drawer. I didn’t have any stemware, but I was able to pick up a decent set of glassware and Corelleware dishes at Hutzlers using Mom’s 20 % employee discount. “I think you’ll like this. At least I hope you’ll like it. It’s a Pinot Grigio, sort of an Italian Chardonnay, not too dry.” I pulled the cork and poured her a small bit in her glass. “Try it.”
She looked a little dubious, but I don’t think Jeana had much experience with wine. She sipped it and looked at me in confusion. “What do you mean by dry?”
“Dry wines don’t have as much sugar in them as a sweet wine. That’s one of the big differences, dry versus sweet. Some wines are so sweet they only get served with dessert. Others can be so dry and tannic as to be tart. I would think with the last name Colosimo you’ve had wine before.” I opened the refrigerator and took out a one pound bag of shrimp.
“Some, but mostly red. Daddy likes Chianti.”
I dumped the shrimp into the sink and filled it with warm water, and then grabbed a plate and covered it with a paper towel. “Chianti is a dry red wine. It comes in several varieties, from plain Chianti, which is good and inexpensive, but can be a little rough, up through Chianti Classico and Chianti Riserva, which cost a bit more, but can be very smooth.” I started cleaning the shrimp of their shells and tails, and setting them on the paper towel.
Jeana watched me and sipped her wine. “How do you know so much about wine?”
I just smiled. Back in the day, Marilyn and I drank quite a bit of wine. Neither of us was a major beer drinker, but a glass or two of wine a night was very pleasant. She preferred sweeter wines than I, so it was always a trick to find something we both liked. “Every Tuesday night is spaghetti night, and Dad keeps a bottle of cheap Chianti in the basement refrigerator. You know, the type with the twine all wrapped around it that you find with a candle in the top at cheap Italian restaurants?” By Jeana’s smile I could tell she understood exactly what I meant. “Dad calls it Dago Red, and we have it every spaghetti night.”
“Don’t tell Daddy that, but it sounds awfully familiar,” she said with a grin.
We continued talking about wine, and also about family heritage, while I finished cleaning the shrimp. Jeana’s father was from a Sicilian family, while her mother was from a Milanese background, so they had quite a selection of Italian foods and wines to choose from. Once I was finished with the shrimp, I set that to the side, and drained the sink and dried my hands. I pulled out the pots and pans I would need, along with the spices, noodles, and minced clams. I set my recipe on the counter, where Jeana grabbed it and started reading.
“Are you sure I can’t help?” she asked.
“It looks more complicated than it actually is. I need to get everything going at once, because of the timing, but once I start cooking, we’ll probably be eating twenty minutes later. If you want to help, you can set the table,” I replied. I filled a large pot with water, to cook the noodles in, and pointed out where the dishes and silverware were.
Jeana quickly set the table and then came back over. “What next?”
I kissed her quickly. “Thank you. Okay, if you want to help, take the garlic bread out of the freezer and put it on this baking sheet.” Jeana popped over to the fridge and pulled out the foil wrapped garlic bread. It was a store prepared loaf, heat up and serve. She read the instructions on the wrapper carefully and opened the package up and spread the two halves of the loaf out on the baking sheet. I also had her preheat the oven.
Meanwhile, I prepared all the ingredients so that I just had to mix and cook them, measuring out my spices into a small cup, and opening up the can of minced clams. I did this all while the water for the noodles was heating. Meanwhile, we continued talking about cooking while we sipped our wine. Finally, as the water began to boil, I said, “Show time!”
Jeana hopped back up onto her bar stool and I went into action. I used to make this in an electric skillet, but it was just as easy on the gas range. First I started with some olive oil in a skillet which I heated up, which I used to cook up some garlic. Once that was ready, I tossed in the shrimp, and cooked them, not completely, but making sure they didn’t stick to the pan. Once they were cooked, I poured in some of Ernest and Julio’s white wine from the jug, which deglazed the pan. I know that they say they make no wine before its time (or was that some other winery?) but I generally only use it for cooking.
At this point I took a break and put the garlic bread in the oven to warm up, and threw the noodles into the boiling water. After a few minutes in the wine, I added the clam juice from the minced clams and some marinara sauce, and started making the broth, letting the shrimp absorb the flavors. Next, I added the clams themselves, and finished with butter and oregano. By the time I was done, the bread was ready to come out of the oven, and the noodles were ready to drain.
Jeana offered to help, so I let her take care of the bread, while I drained the noodles through a colander. The shrimp went into a big serving bowl, the noodles into another bowl, and the bread into a basket. Off we went to the table. Elapsed time, 23 minutes. Jeana swooned as soon as she took a bite of the scampi. “Oh my God, that’s amazing!”
I grinned. “You like it?” It really is a great recipe, and my wife and kids liked it as much as my family did.
“It’s too bad I can’t tell my parents. This is just delicious!” She stuffed another forkful in and blushed. “I feel like a piggy!”
I laughed. “Go ahead, tell them. Just tell them I cooked it, not that it was at my apartment.” I used some of the garlic bread to sop up the gravy.
“They’ll never believe me. My father can’t imagine a guy cooking. He’d have a heart attack if I told him you took home economics!”
We both laughed at that. In the future it would become common for boys to take home ec, but not in the Sixties and Seventies. In fact, it created a minor stir once. My son Parker was a notoriously quiet and even fellow. It was almost impossible to rile him up, to the point where occasionally a bully mistook him for being weak. Once, in the eleventh grade, at a band concert in the late spring, some loudmouth decided to push him around, and knock him into a wall. Parker was surprisingly agile and strong, and whipped around and punched the much larger kid in the nose, breaking it and spraying blood all over. There were plenty of witnesses, and even the principal told me later the kid had it coming, so Parker wasn’t in any trouble.
The funny part was that Parker’s quiet reputation was over, and he became known as ‘One Punch Buckman’ around town. The next weekend, at the school’s honor banquet, ‘One Punch’ took the top prize in Home Economics. All around the banquet room, fathers and friends were turning towards me and I could see their mouths moving, as if to say, ‘One Punch? Home Economics!?’, in disbelief.