The Catskill Chronicle

By Jude Waterston

In my typical fashion, I hadn’t listened to the news or read the paper Friday morning, but I had put on The Weather Channel first thing in the morning as I do every day. Still, I didn’t pay the forecast much  mind and went to work without the feelings of apprehension and doom the rest of the city was apparently experiencing. Throughout the day, there was a steady flow of customers, an oddity for late August, at the 105-year-old homemade pasta shop in which I work. The store is usually dead in summer, as most of our clientele are away or don’t relish eating the likes of lasagna or meatballs and spaghetti in 94-degree heat. Talk of the impending Hurricane Irene was on everyone’s lips, so when I went home for lunch the first thing I did was turn the television on to the news.

An hour later I returned to the shop to inform my boss that the situation was sounding dire, at least from the Governor and Mayor Bloomberg’s offices. They had announced that mass transit would be shut down the following day, Saturday, starting at noon. My boss seemed mildly concerned, but as the supply of prepared foods dwindled rapidly and our inventory of ravioli, tortellini, and fresh pasta was depleted, he made the decision to open the following day for just a few short hours. That was my chance to ask if he’d mind if I skipped attending altogether, as I had been offered a ride upstate to my house in the Catskills at 8:00 the next morning and the store was due to close for a week’s vacation beginning Saturday night, through Labor Day.

My sister, Janet, had left Friday morning, a little after dawn, to fly to Virginia, of all places – an area of the country due to be hit by Irene even earlier than New York. Janet’s plan was to meet our cousin, Naomi and a car maven friend of hers, to hunt for a new car, as ours was on its last wheels. Aaron knew a chassis from a carburetor; and had been scouting out and pricing cars for Janet, whose only car preferences related to color, size of trunk, and number of doors.

Meanwhile, back in Manhattan, our friend Jane and I set off first thing Saturday morning for upstate New York. A flat tire on route 17 delayed our arrival by only an hour or so. Janet joined us in the late afternoon after driving more than four hours from Virginia to Queens, where she packed for our vacation and turned around and drove another three hours to get to our country house. Wisely, she had stopped on the road to pick up gallon jugs of spring water to augment our already ample house supply in anticipation of our losing electricity during the hurricane. On the advice of a friend who has been though many a blackout, I filled various sized Tupperware containers with water and placed them in the freezer to become blocks of ice that could easily be moved into the refrigerator to maintain the necessary chill to keep food from spoiling if we lost power.

We retired early, after removing every wind chime and bird feeder (of which we have many) from the property and laying the plant stands and lightweight pieces of furniture on the front porch on their sides and snuggly jammed against each other so they wouldn’t take flight from potential winds. Janet brought three flashlights up from the basement, so we would each be equipped.

I roused repeatedly during the night as torrential rains beat down, and the wind rose and violently bent the tree branches. We awoke to find the electricity was, indeed, out. The heavy rains had stopped for the most part, but the sky was as gray as slate, and it drizzled continually. Having the use of the gas stove-top, though not the oven which runs on electricity, I cooked us up some cheese omelets served with sliced tomatoes and semolina bread, which unfortunately, was eaten without the benefit of being toasted. Janet filled a boom box with batteries, so we could listen to news of the hurricane and calm our nerves with music, and we tried to occupy ourselves by variously knitting, sewing, reading, and playing word games. The existing light remained dismally gloomy.

Ironically, power returned in time for me to prepare lunch. We had penne alla carbonara, a rich pasta dish made with heavy cream, eggs, and crisped pancetta offset by a sprightly cucumber salad and accompanied by a fruity Sauvignon Blanc. Unfortunately, just in time for Janet to tackle the dishes, the electricity went out again. Washing the pots, glasses, and sticky plates using the bottled spring water as sparingly as possible was not much fun. Who knew how long this would last?

We commiserated with a few relatives and neighbors by cell phone (since our phone service had gone out two weeks prior while Verizon was on strike), and found that our experiences, depending on location, were quite varied. Luckily, no one had been forced to evacuate homes, and there was minimal water damage or basement flooding. My cousin, Marylin, and her husband, Sherm, who live in Marlboro, New Jersey had lost power for two days and were systematically eating their way through four half-gallon containers of soupy ice cream. When the skies cleared there in the late morning on Sunday, they grilled hamburgers for lunch.  Dessert was more ice cream. At least there were four different flavors from which to choose.

I wondered how others affected in varying degrees by the storm had coped with the situation. I knew some would have the foresight to prepare extensively, and others would wing it. Being food obsessed, I especially ruminated on meal preparation and how ingenious people might cope without power and with fridges and freezers of melting, thawing food. As luck would have it, the power returned for us around 4:00 Sunday afternoon, and I took the opportunity to e-mail a dozen or so people to ask them to relay their experiences. Then I baked a quiche.

Our friends and neighbors of fifteen years, Marci and Smitty, who have been here for us in spades whenever these two city girls have had a country emergency, felt the storm “was a breeze” because there was enough time to prepare for it, and they’re old hands at such challenges. Marci “made sure there was water enough to drink, cook with, wash dishes, and to flush toilets.” And she “bought large bags of ice and made plenty more; put clip-on LED lights on each lampshade in the bedroom; and fully charged the cell phone and camera batteries.” As for food and drink preparation, she reported, “The day before the storm was to arrive, I made a few things that would have required electricity: 1) ground my whole coffee beans and pulled out the cotton coffee sock I bought in Costa Rica in order to drip coffee;

2) put a 4 ½ pound pork Boston butt roast in the Crock-Pot with seasonings and a little liquid, then cooked it for 8 hours on low so we would have pulled pork sandwiches available. I also made a fresh, tangy coleslaw to put on top of the sandwiches; 3) picked basil from the garden and made a load of pesto, and cooked 2 12-ounce packages of tri-color bow-tie pasta to mix with the pesto.” She concluded, “That’s about it… I mean, I did buy loads more food at the grocery store that morning, but who didn’t?!”

Who didn’t, apparently, was Carol, the editor of the Catskill Chronicle who was only out of power for six hours and “prepared by buying a hero the night before.” She gave serious thought, as well, to opening a can of pork and beans, using her manual can opener, naturally.

My brother, who lives in a suburb of Philly, “prepared by bringing the propane camp stove in from the storage shed, so we could still cook if the power went out.” Having odd food predilections, he mentioned having “plenty of Southern-style smothered red cabbage in the freezer, along with about 20 pounds of roasted veggies Sammy [his six-year-old grandson] helped me make the week before using daikon radish, little Brussels sprouts, small red taters, carrots, red bell peppers, and fennel all smothered with his favorite herbs that he cut from Wendy’s garden and roasted at 500 degrees until just short of crisp/tender. Yum!” Buzz also had the foresight to make batches of hummus and taramosalata (whipped cod roe dip) Friday night.

As I said, not the usual person’s menu.

Friend Matthew wrote “We made the poor decision of leaving Cochecton to go back to Westchester where we discovered there was no electric, no cable and no Internet.” His partner, Jerry, added that Cochecton had not lost power at all, so they returned to their country house with thawing meat in tow. “We had a lot of beef in the freezer since we had purchased a part of a cow, so after cooking off as much as possible…all I can say is the dogs are going to be eating very well.” Their two massive basset hounds, Moshe and Bruno have been licking their chops for days, I hear.

My cousin Naomi, in Fairfield County, Virginia, wrote, “I’d like to say that I cooked up all sorts of things, but I had decided way ahead of time that there wasn’t any point in getting as hyped up as the news people thought we should be. We made sure we had enough batteries, and I did cook a pork loin with raspberry and balsamic vinegar sauce knowing that this would be enough for us to have dinner for a few nights.” Happily, she didn’t loose power or experience flooding. And she would’ve liked to have forwarded the recipe for pork loin, she wrote, but no longer had it because she’d prepared the loin months earlier at Let’s Dish, a company that provides cooking sessions in which one assembles family-sized meals to lug home and throw in the freezer for future dining.

Tess wrote from Hortonville, New York, “I have a gas stove so we have an easier time than some. Can’t go wrong with a gas stove in the country. If we lose power in the evenings, I cook by lantern light. I don’t like to grill in the rain, but at least you could eat. And we always have meatballs or something precooked in our freezer that can be thawed. I always have things like cans of chili, tuna, soups, PBJ for sandwiches, and four 2-½ gallon containers of water (one for each person). Plus we fill big cooking pots and the bathtub with water so we can flush. Water is the key.”

My friend, Barbara, out in Sparta, New Jersey, suffered the longest loss of power of anyone I queried. Her whimsical response regarding her cooking set-up, made me laugh out loud. “I have been making coffee and tea in my fondue pot with sterno under it. Then I make toast in a frying pan placed over the sterno. I could cook a hamburger or eggs or anything that fits in the pot.” Ingenious, Barb!

As Barbara’s saga continued, she borrowed a huge cooler from her son and kept her fridge food there. “Also, the garden is producing tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, radishes and broccoli,” she wrote, “So there are tons of salad goodies. One night eight of the neighbors got together and had food delivered from an Italian deli and we feasted on pasta, sausage and meatballs. The camaraderie was great! Of course bottles of wine came out and we had a ball. So we all help each other as best we can.”

The storm was not the most fortuitous beginning to a week’s vacation, but I know we were luckier than many and, really, in the end, were just mildly inconvenienced. I do hope that more of you, than not, had similarly non-catastrophic experiences. Good night Irene.

Penne (or Spaghetti) alla Carbonara

Serves 4 – 6

This is adapted from the River Café cookbook after a bit of experimentation with the quantities of various ingredients. In America this dish is most often made with spaghetti, but penne is traditional in Italy.

8 ounces pancetta (or slab bacon), cut into matchsticks

1 tablespoon olive oil

Freshly ground black pepper

5 eggs, at room temperature

½ cup heavy cream, at room temperature

Sea salt

1 ¼ cups Parmigiano-Reggiano

1 pound penne rigate (or spaghetti)

In a large pan sauté the pancetta in the olive oil slowly, so that it releases its own fat before becoming crisp. Add some black pepper and remove from heat. In a medium bowl, beat the eggs with the cream and season with salt and pepper. Add half the cheese. Meanwhile, cook the penne in a generous amount of boiling salted water until al dente. Reserve a ¼ cup of the cooking water before draining well. Combine the pasta immediately with the pancetta, and then pour in the cream mixture. Add the ¼ cup of cooking water and stir to coat each pasta piece; the heat from the pasta will cook the egg slightly. Finally, add the remaining cheese and serve.