How to Make a Dish

Dinner is ready, even if nothing else is

M’s homemade tahina (with homemade label)

First it was fresh tahina, with sesame seeds he bought from a small spice shop in Chinatown and roasted himself. Then our son M moved on to tabouleh bright with fresh mint and parsley and green as a new idea. Then hummus completely from scratch, dry chickpeas soaked overnight to loosen the skins, peeled and pureed with tahina, lemon juice, and garlic. (We ended up with 3 lbs of hummus, but it was so delicious that we went through it in less than a week.) Then bánh cuốn, the super delicious Vietnamese crepes rolled and filled with pork and mushrooms. He even made nước chấm or Vietnamese fish sauce, with a few more bird’s-eye chilis than usual because he likes it when food makes his forehead sweat. He brought a plate of freshly made bánh cuốn topped with sprouts and his nước chấm to his Vietnamese mother, who took it in both hands and proceeded to eat with her eyes closed and not a word said until she had finished it all. These successes encouraged him on to his biggest project yet — Thai green curry with the paste made by hand with a mortar and pestle that he brought home from Hong Kong market on a Citibike.

The green curry took him longer than he expected, but — despite his frustration at not being able to find kaffir lime leaves or Thai basil — the bowl of soup he put in the table’s center smelled and tasted as good as any that we’d ever had. We spooned the rice and curry into our mouths and alternated between shaking and nodding our heads.

M is 20 years old and on a break from college. He’s at a difficult moment when many of his friends are still on semester schedules and making what appears to him to be progress while he stays with us trying to figure out what’s next for him. M is also actually a performing musician in New York, a line of work that doesn’t seem to have a clear beginning let alone an end. He’s good and has had remarkable success so far, he and his band lighting up some iconic stages in NYC and recording and releasing great songs on their own. But he feels in between so many things with few signs of progress in sight.

I remember the feeling, and I’m sure that you do too. In my case it was the dissertation phase of my humanities PhD, which is like hiking to the ocean and then setting out on it in a small boat with no one tracking your progress, and you must determine your position according to constellations that require fashioning your own tools to read. Turns out it’s often easier not to row or rig up a sail, too, given the need to make money and the difficulty of knitting new knowledge from journal articles and thick old books with spines that are still intact. During that lonely time I often found myself happy with the dishes or the dinners, so pleased to have projects with beginnings, middles, and ends you could point to or hand in bowls or on plates to loved ones.

My guess is that M’s recent dishes have been giving him this sort of comfort, reminders that he can accomplish things. Even here, of coures he finishes in his own way: He could take more shortcuts to his dishes, but he says he wants to understand the conjuring trick of flavors and the cultures in which they sit. Not everything is a song, not even for a musician, but he knows and respects compositions and how good ones can make you feel.

I’m happy to participate in his attempts to make this sort of sense of being stuck in-between, to tie some knots in the ribbon of his timeline so that he can hold on a little better. I hope that M will soon come to see that his ribbon stretches out so wonderfully far ahead of him and, more importantly, that whatever we may accomplish, each of us always remain unfinished.

In the meantime, I will take, with both hands, any bowl or plate M gives me. Sit with me, my son. It’s so delicious. Tell me all about how you made it.

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