Read Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant for Free Online

rice was basically the standard meal that vegetarians on campus were making. My friend Sarah, who lived in a co-op dorm where the students did the cooking (just think of the amount of beans they went through there), showed me the very clever and unbeatable trick of stirring shredded cheese into the hot rice just before it was served with the beans. I still use this trick to this day, even though it does make a bit of a mess for whoever washes the rice pot. The mess is worth it, though.
    By my senior year of college, I was cooking for myself, and black beans and rice was my favorite meal because it was fast, easy, cheap, and satisfying. I owned exactly one cookbook at that time, The Moosewood Cookbook, and it had a lot of credibility with me because it featured a knockout recipe called Brazilian Black Bean Soup.
    I also relied on black beans throughout graduate school. I think that it was then that I started sometimes serving the beans with cornbread instead of rice—pouring the hot beans over the cornbread. This way of using cornbread was clearly something that was part of my Missouri heritage. It also, I realized, made for a fantastically complete dinner because cornbread, when topped with apple butter or just butter and honey, was a superb dessert.
    Those were the early years of my black bean love. To be honest, a lot of the memories have faded somewhat, and many are gone completely. But all of the memories—the clear ones, the muddled ones, and the lost ones—are good. It was the courtship phase of my relationship with black beans. It was a golden time. It will dwell in my heart forever.

    In the late nineties, at the alarming age of twenty-five, I returned to teach English at my alma mater. When I got the job, I was living in Missouri, and the logistics of looking for an apartment in upstate New York were awkward. Just when it seemed as if I would have to fly out there just to find an apartment, the office of faculty housing called me and told me that they had one opening. But it was a very small apartment, they explained, and it shared some kind of common entrance hallway with another apartment. Sounded fine to me, and the price—about two hundred a month—was so insanely low I had to take it. Plus, it was just across the street from campus.
    My dad and I loaded his pickup truck and my car with my furniture and books and trekked east in late August. When we entered the new apartment, we liked the first room—a square little room that was about the size of a junior’s dorm room—and we wondered what the second room would be like. We opened the door to the second room only to discover that it wasn’t a second room. It was a closet. So the next day Dad headed home to Missouri with my sofa and a few other things still in the back of the pickup. They hadn’t fit in the apartment.
    That first semester of teaching, it quickly became clear that I didn’t fit into the system. A few years ago, I’d been a student here, and happily so. But now I was too old and too square to socialize with the students. (Plus, it was kinda against the rules.) Likewise, I was too young and not boring enough to socialize with the professors. In addition, walking around campus was like walking through a landscape filled with ghosts, because though the place was the same—there was the window of my freshman room, there was my old girlfriend’s apartment, there was the chair in the library I had fallen asleep in so many times—the people were different. All my friends were gone, excepting a couple of professors.
    So, outside of the classroom I spent my time alone. I would scurry home before dark. My apartment was cozy, that’s for sure. My mom had made curtains for the big bank of windows, and I would close the curtains, and turn on the radio to an AM station that played songs from fifty years earlier, and then I would start cooking dinner. I had no television. Cooking was my entertainment.
    The other thing about the apartment was that it