Read Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant for Free Online Page B

local landscape that reminded me of the Midwest—and cooking dinner for myself every night.
    In the middle of the summer, my friend Laura visited me. She and I had been best friends in college, and for two years of graduate school we were a couple, and now we were just friends again. We spent part of our visit walking around campus and revisiting our haunts and talking about our friends. And that was good, being with someone who remembered the same ghosts that I did, someone who reminded me that they weren’t ghosts at all, of course, but real people who had simply scattered—mostly to Manhattan and Brooklyn.
    Then, later in the day, back at my house, I asked Laura what she wanted me to cook for dinner. She had lived with me for two years, after all, and knew the kinds of things I was best at cooking. And she said, without a moment’s hesitation, “Beans and cornbread.”
    Black Beans for One
    Is it soup or just beans? Neither and both, I suppose. Serve it hot, over split cornbread or with rice. For extra goodness, stir shredded cheese into the hot rice before serving.
    MAKES TWO SERVINGS (tonight’s dinner and tomorrow’s lunch)

    1 tablespoon olive oil
    1 small onion, chopped
    1 clove garlic, minced
    115-ounce can black beans
    Salt and freshly ground black pepper

    In a medium saucepan, heat the olive oil over medium heat, then add the onion and garlic. Cook them, stirring frequently, until they’ve started to brown. Add the beans and their liquid, stir, and lower the heat.
    Simmer the beans, partially covered, stirring occasionally, until the liquid thickens a bit and is smooth—about 20 minutes. Add salt and pepper to taste. At this point, the beans can be served immediately or removed from the heat, covered, and kept warm for up to 15 minutes.

Single Cuisine
AMANDA HESSER
    T ad had gone to Vermont for an annual golf outing. He and a dozen friends play thirty-six holes a day, eat too much beef teriyaki at a bad restaurant called “Vinny’s” and go to bed at nine. Not my idea of a good time, but he likes it.
    Our apartment seemed hollow without him. Already I had grown used to seeing him reading at our dining room table when I came in from work. I had come to love when our hands bumped reaching for the toothpaste at the same time, and the sound—clink!—of him setting a pan of milk on the stove for our morning coffee.
    One day while he was away I was working at home and was having a difficult time focusing. The restaurant that I had reviewed had changed its menu just before publication and I was struggling to get another story to unleash itself onto the page. For hours, I clicked back and forth between e-mails and a blank screen.
    For a change of pace I went out on our deck to water the flowers. I heard rustling below, where our garbage cans are kept. Our garbage had recently been ransacked and our bank information had been used in a scam. So I leaned over the railing to take a look. A man was lifting a bag of our garbage from the can.
    “Hey you!” I shouted. “Hey, you! I see you picking our garbage!!”
    The man turned and looked up at me. “What’s that, m’am?” he said.
    “I said , I caught you picking our garbage. Now get out!!”
    “Oh, miss. Are you the new tenant, Ms. Amanda?”
    “Yes,” I said, warily. I now noticed that he was neatly dressed in jeans and a fitted polo shirt. “Why?”
    “Oh, hello. I’m Gilbert,” he said with a French Caribbean lilt. “Welcome to the neighborhood!”
    Gilbert, I knew, was the man who has taken care of our building for years. But we hadn’t yet met.
    “Thank you. Nice to meet you,” I said, and slunk inside.
    Thoroughly humiliated, I definitely could not write. So I did the only thing I knew would relax me: I went grocery shopping. I walked slowly through the aisles of our local gourmet store, Garden of Eden, taking in bottle after bottle of olive oil, the neatly stacked tins of anchovies and sardines, and the display of cheeses. I picked up