Nora Ephron & linguine alla checca

Rugsėjis 03, 2015 m Daržovės, Makaronai,
Komentarai (1)

Prieš kokį porą-trejetą mėnesių (o gal ir dar seniau) aš ir mano viena komandos draugė Deb sėdėjom krantinėje prieš treniruotę ir kalbėjomės apie šį bei tą. Kalba netyčia pasisuko link neseniai peržiūrėtų filmų. Aš tada kaip tik buvau šviežiai N-tąjį kartą peržiūrėjusi “August: Osage County”, su Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts ir visa eile kitų ryškių žvaigždžių, tai naudodamasi proga aš Deb parekomendavau tą filmą. Dar lyg tarp kitko pridėjau, kad tas filmas, kaip nebūtų keista, yra tiesiog vos ne identiškas mano šeimos, kurioje aš užaugau, atspindys; su kai kuriais visiškai menkais nukrypimais: filme yra trys sesės, o pas mus buvo dvi; na dar alkholizmas mūsų šeimai nebuvo aktualus, ir kelios kitos detalės, kurios filmo esmės nekeičia. Bet visa kita pavaizduota tiksliai, net dialogai atkartoti vos ne pažodžiui, ir ta scena su žuvim (“Eat the Fish!”) tai, žinokit, toks jausmas, kad mūsų namuose Kaune nufilmuota.

Deb filmo buvo nemačiusi, bet prižadėjo kada prie progos pažiūrėti. Po poros dienų aš ją vėl sutikau; vėl sėdėjom ant prieplaukos, vėl laukėm, kada pagaliau mūsų amžinai visur vėluojanti komanda susisirinks į treniruotę. Deb man iškart pasigyrė, kad matė filmą, ir kad jis jai paliko itin gilų įspūdį. Įspūdis buvo toks gilus ne tiek dėl paties filmo, kiek dėl mano prieš tai nubrėžtų paralelių tarp mūsų šeimos gyvenimiškos realybės ir filme pavaizduotos fikcijos. Deb man tada tiesiai šviesiai prisipažino: “I would never tell, that your life has so many issues.” Aš jai tada atsakiau, kad tai, brangioji, tik grietinėlė. Giliau pasikasus aš jai galėčiau atkapstyti tokių “issues”, kurių į jokį filmą jokia cenzūra nepraleistų. Bet į detales tada mes nesigilinom. Tam tiesiog nebuvo laiko. Ir nuotaika buvo ne ta; Deb jau ir taip buvo pakankamai prislėgta po filmo; kam dar papildomai juodinti žmogui dieną su paistalais apie niekam neįdomų savo šešėlinį gyvenimą.

Tai va, po tokios įžangos noriu Jums parekomenduoti ne tik “August: Osage County” filmą, bet dar ir tris labai geras knygas; dviejų autorė yra Nora Ephron, o trečios – jos sesė Delia Ephron.

Apie Nora Ephron tikriausiai esate daug girdėję; tikriausiai matėte jos garsiuosius visaip nominuotus ir apdovanotus filmus: “When Harry Met Sally”, “Sleepless in Seattle”, “You’ve Got Mail”, “Heartburn”. Gal ir jos knygas esate skaitę. Aš iki šiolei knygų buvau neskaičiusi, bet filmus mačiau visus. O kai perskaičiau knygas, tai iškart peržiūrėjau visus filmus.

Delia Ephron irgi prisidėjo prie tų pačių Noros režisuotų filmų ir yra parašiusi kelias knygas; aš perskaičiau tik vieną, bet greitu laiku būtinai paieškosiu ir kitų Delia knygų.

Nora ir Delia rašo apie gyvenimą su “issues”. Aš visiems nuoširdžiausiai rekomenduoju visas tris knygas; net ir tiems, kurių gyvenime viskas vyksta taip, kaip reikia, be “issues”, visuomet korektiškai, tvarkingai ir be komplikacijų, kurių šeimoje viskas gražiai nušlifuota iki blizgesio, ir dailu, ir miela, ir į jūsų dailaus gyvenimo idilę su karčiu pavydu žiūri visi tie, kuriems dėl nemokšiškumo, arba dėl reikiamų įgydžių neturėjimo, arba dėl kvailumo, arba šiaip, per skubėjimą, gyvenimas klostosti ne itin tiesia vaga. Jums aš rekomenduoju visas tris knygas kaip edukacinę priemonę, savišvietai. Kad sužinotumėt, kaip kartais gyvenime būna. O visiems kitiems, kurie ir ne itin korektiški, ir nenušlifuoti, aš rekomenduoju knygas kaip terapiją, kaip gerą dozę gydančio, sveiko požiūrio į realybę.

Kodėl aš nei iš šio nei iš to užvedžiau kalbą apie Nora Ephron? O todėl kad jos knyga “Heartburn” yra receptų knyga. Romanas su receptais. O receptai, kaip žinia, yra šio blogo arkliukas. Į komplektą dar Jums nutariau įmesti Delia memuarą “Sister, Mother, Husband, Dog”, nes jame be kita ko yra atskleidžiama, kad Heartburn yra visai ne romanas, o tiksli Nora Ephron autobiografija (štai ir išlindo yla iš maišo! Taip jau gyvenime būna: kai turi sesę, tai žmogus niekada nežinai, kas ir kada išlįs į dienos šviesą). Na o prie to paties aš dar įdedu trečią knygą, “I Feel Bad about My Neck”, nes tai yra absoliučiai tobula proza; šios knygos tiesiog negaliu nepaminėti.

Taigi, malonaus Jums skaitymo.

Aušra

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Nora Ephron | I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman

What I Wish I’d Known

People have only one way to be.

Buy, don’t rent.

Never marry a man you wouldn’t want to be divorced from.

Don’t cover a couch with anything that isn’t more or less beige.

Don’t buy anything that is 100 percent wool even if it seems to be very soft and not particularly itchy when you try it on in the store.

You can’t be friends with people who call after 11 p.m.

Block everyone on your instant mail.

The world’s greatest babysitter burns out after two and a half years.

You never know.

The last four years of psychoanalysis are a waste of money.

The plane is not going to crash.

Anything you think is wrong with your body at the age of thirty-five you will be nostalgic for at the age of forty- five.

At the age of fifty-five you will get a saggy roll just above your waist even if you are painfully thin.

This saggy roll just above your waist will be especially visible from the back and will force you to reevaluate half the clothes in your closet, especially the white shirts.

Write everything down.

Keep a journal.

Take more pictures.

The empty nest is underrated.

You can order more than one dessert.

You can’t own too many black turtleneck sweaters.

If the shoe doesn’t fit in the shoe store, it’s never going to fit.

When your children are teenagers, it’s important to have a dog so that someone in the house is happy to see you.

Back up your files.

Overinsure everything.

Whenever someone says the words “Our friendship is more important than this,” watch out, because it almost never is.

There’s no point in making piecrust from scratch.

The reason you’re waking up in the middle of the night is the second glass of wine.

The minute you decide to get divorced, go see a lawyer and file the papers.

Never let them know.

If only one third of your clothes are mistakes, you’re ahead of the game.

If friends ask you to be their child’s guardian in case they die in a plane crash, you can say no.

There are no secrets.

Every so often I read a book about age, and whoever’s writing it says it’s great to be old. It’s great to be wise and sage and mellow; it’s great to be at the point where you understand just what matters in life. I can’t stand people who say things like this. What can they be thinking? Don’t they have necks? Aren’t they tired of compensatory dressing? Don’t they mind that 90 percent of the clothes they might otherwise buy have to be eliminated simply because of the necklines? Don’t they feel sad about having to buy chokers? One of my biggest regrets – bigger even than not buying the apartment on East Seventy-fifth Street, bigger even than my worst romantic catastrophe – is that I didn’t spend my youth staring lovingly at my neck. It never crossed my mind to be grateful for it. It never crossed my mind that I would be nostalgic about a part of my body that I took completely for granted.

Of course it’s true that now that I’m older, I’m wise and sage and mellow. And it’s also true that I honestly do understand just what matters in life. But guess what? It’s my neck.

Nora Ephron | Heartburn

Nothing like mashed potatoes when you're feeling blue. Nothing like getting into bed with a bowl of hot mashed potatoes already loaded with butter, and methodically adding a thin cold slice of butter to every forkful. The problem with mashed potatoes, though, is that they require almost as much hard work as crisp potatoes, and when you're feeling blue the last thing you feel like is hard work. Of course, you can always get someone to make the mashed potatoes for you, but let's face it: the reason you're blue is that there isn't anyone to make them for you. As a result, most people do not have nearly enough mashed potatoes in their lives, and when they do, it's almost always at the wrong time.

When I was in college, I had a list of what I wanted in a husband. A long list. I wanted a registered Democrat, a bridge player, a linguist with particular fluency in French, a subscriber to The New Republic, a tennis player. I wanted a man who wasn’t bald, who wasn’t fat, who wasn’t covered with too much body hair. I wanted a man with long legs and small ass and laugh wrinkles around the eyes. Then I grew up and settled for low-grade lunatic who kept hamsters. At first I thought he was charming and eccentric. And then I didn’t. Then I wanted to kill him. Every time he got on a plane I would imagine the plane crash, and the funeral, and what I would wear to the funeral and flirting at the funeral, and how soon I could start dating after the funeral.

Is this inevitable, this moment when everything leads to irritation, when you become furious that he smokes, or that he coughs in the morning, or that he sheds crumbs, or that he exaggerates, or that he drives like a maniac, or that he says “Between you and I”? You fall in love with someone and you say to yourself, oh, well, I never really cared about politics, bridge, French and tennis; and then you get married and it starts to drive you crazy that you’re married to someone who doesn’t even know who’s running for President. This is the moment when any therapist will tell you that your problem is fear of intimacy; that you’re connecting to your mother, or holding on to your father. But it seems to me that what’s happening is far more basic; it seems to me that it’s just about impossible to live with someone else.

This happened in thousands of households, with identical results: thousands of husbands agreed to clear the table and then looked around as if they deserved a medal. They cleared the table and then hoped they would never again be asked to do another thing. They cleared the table and hoped the whole thing would go away. And it did. The women’s movement went away, and so, in many cases, did their wives. Their wives went into the world, free at last, single again, and discovered the horrible truth: that they were sellers in a buyer’s market.

I’ve written about cooking and marriage dozens of times, and I’m very smart on the subject. I’m very smart about how complicated things get when food and love become hopelessly tangled. But I realized as I stood there doing my demonstration in the middle of the Macy’s housewares department that I had been as dopey about food and love as any old-fashioned Jewish mother. I loved to cook, so I cooked. And then the cooking became a way of saying I love you. And then the cooking became the easy way of saying I love you. And then the cooking became the only way of saying I love you. I was so busy perfecting the peach pie that I wasn’t paying attention. I had never even been able to imagine an alternative. Every so often I would look at my women friends who were happily married and didn’t cook, and I would always find myself wondering how they did it. Would anyone love me if I couldn’t cook? I always thought cooking was part of the package: Step right up, it’s Rachel Samstat, she’s bright, she’s funny, and she can cook!

Every so often I would fly to New York for one thing or another, and would go by to see Vera. I had really graduated from therapy by then, but I liked to stop in for an oil check from time to time. I would tell her I was okay, really I was, I was working hard, things were good with me and Mark, the baby was wonderful, and then after the session, I would walk into Balducci’s and there would be the arugula and radicchio and fresh basil and sorrel and sugar snap peas and six kinds of sprouts, and I would think to myself: Even the vegetables in New York are better. It’s not just the vegetables, of course. I look out the window and I see the lights and the skyline and the people on the street rushing around looking for action, love, and the world’s greatest chocolate chip cookie, and my heart does a little dance. The little dance my heart was doing as I looked out of the window of my father’s apartment was not exactly a polka, but at least I was where I wanted to be. If I couldn’t have Mark, I could finally be back making sorrel soup. Take 4 cups of washed sorrel and cut off the stems carefully. (If you don’t, the soup will be hairy, and no one will know it’s the sorrel’s hair and not the cook’s.) Sauté the sorrel in 4 tablespoons butter until wilted. Add 2 ½ quarts chicken stock and 4 chopped peeled potatoes. Cook 45 minutes until potatoes are tender. Puree in a blender and add salt, pepper and hot red pepper flakes. Chill and add more salt and the juice of 1 lemon and 1 cup heavy cream. Serve with lemon slices.

Delia Ephron | Sister, Mother, Husband, Dog

I do feel that I have to do everything quickly. I hate to waste a day. ... What I feel now, and I feel much more strongly certainly since Nora's death, is that all we really have is process. How did the work go today? How did the writing go? How did the lunch go with your best friend that you usually love to spend hours talking to? Did you wring every ounce of fun and intimacy out of it? ... When you walked down the street did you notice things? Did you have a good time? Was it crisp out? Was it hot out? What I think happened to me is that I got very focused on the day and making the day matter.

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Linguine Alla Checca

Recipe Source: Nora Ephron | Heartburn

“It’s a hot pasta with a cold tomato basil sauce, and it’s so light and delicate that it’s almost like eating a salad. It has to be made in the summer, when tomatoes are fresh. Drop 5 large tomatoes into boiling water for one full minute. Peel and seed and chop. Put into a large bowl with ½ cup olive oil, a garlic clove sliced in two, 1 cup chopped fresh basil leaves, salt and hot red pepper flakes. Let it sit for a couple of hours, then remove the garlic. Boil one pound of linguine, drain and toss with the cold tomato mixture. Serve immediately.”

Linguine all checca

Recepto šaltinis: Nora Ephron | Heartburn

Į verdantį vandenį įmesti 5 didelius pomidorus; virti 1 minutę. Pomidorus išgriebti, nulupti, išimti sėklas, supjaustyti kąsnio dydžio gabalėliais ir sudėti į dubenį. Apšlakstyti alyvuogių aliejumi, įberti druskos, džiovintų paprikų dribsnių, 1 stiklinę šviežių bazilikų lapelių, supjaustytų plonomis juostelėmis. Česnako skiltelę perspausti pusiau ir įmesti į dubenį su pomidorais. Viską gerai išmaišyti ir dėti porai valandų į šaldytuvą. Po poros valandų iš pomidorų mišinio išimti česnaką.

Išvirti maždaug 450 g linguine, al dente. Makaronus nukošti, išversti į didelį dubenį. Ant makaronų supilti šaltą pomidorų mišinį. Viską gerai išmaišyti ir tuojau pat tiekti į stalą.

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knygos, makaronai, pomidorai,

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Palikite komentarą

AudreRugsėjis 9 2015, 10:42 AM Labai sudomino ir filmai ir knygos (o patiekalą pagaminau iš karto - jis tikrai puikus ir nereikalaujantis daug laiko ir pastangų). Žiauriai aktuali tema ,,kas mums nutinka laikui bėgant...". Žodis SENĖJIMAS darosi tiesiog nepadorus. Mane ištiko didžiulis šokas, kai sulaukus keturiasdešimties ėmė ,,braškėti" sveikata. ...Taigi aš viską dariau TEISINGAI: maitinausi ir gyvenau sveikai, neturėjau žalingų įpročių ir t.t. ir pan.... ir (mano giliu, tiesiog iki kaulų smegenų įkaltu įsitikinimu) turėjau likti jauna amžinai ;DDD Na, gal tik dailiai nubalusiais plaukais ir simpatiškomis juoko raukšlelėmis aplink akis padabinta... Ech, Šventas Naivume... Ir man dabar labai įdomu, kaip kitos Damos su ,,visu šituo" tvarkosi...

AusraRugsėjis 9 2015, 10:48 AM

Audre, aciu Jums uz pakomentavima; ir dar labai smagu, kad isbandet recepta; jeigu paskaitysit knygas, tai man labai rupes isgirsti atsiliepimus;