EAT, PLAY, LOVE, Part 2: Cake & Compleanni

The first thing I ever cooked for Patrick was a birthday cake. We'd only met a few weeks earlier, in the Trastevere neighborhood of Rome. My friend Elizabeth came to me one day in May '99 and said, "I met your future boyfriend today" (which still makes me chuckle) -- he owned the Lavarapido, where she'd gone to do her laundry because it was one of few places in the city with dryers. Patrick was the owner: an American, she'd said, my age, cute, and very nice. And then one lazy Sunday afternoon at Stardust, the bar that would become our second home in Rome, I showed up for brunch and there he was outside the bar, sitting on a bench against an ivy-covered stone wall. He was wearing a blue t-shirt: I remember because it matched his eyes. (Blue still makes me think of Patrick). He was cute, yes -- but more importantly, he was incredibly sweet, with an infectious, full-body laugh. We instantly hit it off over our capacity for snark and jokey, sarcastic comments made at the expense of our new mutual friend Martin, the American bartender at Stardust who served us our drinks and lots of conversation to go with them. It was all in good fun, and it didn't take us long to assemble the beginnings of what would become our group of expats and colorful Italians that eventually formed our famiglia romana -- our Roman family. 

And so I found myself baking Patrick a birthday cake on June 10th,1999. I'd found a shop down the street from my apartment off the Campo de' Fiori that sold some specialty items from the U.S., including Betty Crocker cake mix and Philadelphia cream cheese. I wanted to make a retro, all-American cake of the kind my mother made for my birthdays in grade school: chocolate cake with cream cheese icing. Martin was having a gathering at his place in honor of Patrick's 27th birthday. But sadly, by the time 9:00 rolled around and I arrived proudly with cake in hand, Patrick had gone home. Seems he'd had a little too much to drink and had to call it a night before the sun went down. I remember being disappointed -- but it was just like Patrick to pull out all the stops, as early as possible, and occasionally burn out before the party got started!

A few weeks later, I hosted my first real dinner party in Rome (shades of many future nights to come). I'd invited Martin and Elizabeth, my English friend Monica and my Italian friend Federico, and Patrick. This was the summer before I started culinary school, and so while I enjoyed cooking, I was by no means yet a professional. (I hadn't even figured out how to work the oven in my apartment. It gave off a terrible odor every time I turned it on, and I found out the night of my dinner party that I needed to manually light the pilot light...so I'd basically been gassing everything I'd baked!) Anyway, that evening, I served a salad and a pasta, and had made a flourless chocolate cake, from scratch, for dessert. I served it with fresh local strawberries from the nearby hill town of Nemi, and a sprinkling of powdered sugar. Or so I thought. I'd been running low on powdered sugar, so had picked up another pouch of it-- same brand, almost same packaging. After sprinkling a few slices of cake with the sugar I had on hand, I started on the new pouch. 

I served all the cake slices at one time, with a sweep of the wrist and a "buon appetito!" to all of my guests. We tasted the cake -- always a crowd-pleaser -- and everyone noted how delicious it was. But some guests said, "you know, this is interesting, it's really coming alive in my mouth." I thought it was a slightly strange descriptive for the dessert, but shrugged it off. And after a few more bites, Patrick said, "it's kind of like Pop Rocks. Don't get me wrong, it's tasty, but this cake is...frizzante," a word used to describe fizzy water, meaning sparkling or carbonated. At which point a light bulb went on in Martin's head, and he pulled me into the kitchen. "Show me the sugar you sprinkled on this cake," he said, and when I did, his eyebrows raised: "this is bicarbonato: it's baking soda!" We immediately broke out into hysterics, Martin falling against the kitchen door, hand covering his mouth, cackling. I was doubled over, holding my stomach in happy pain. "Why don't you sprinkle some baking soda on it?" became a running joke at my expense in Rome. And, I was 0 for 2 on cakes.

Fast-forward to the summer of 2003. It was the hottest summer anyone could remember, when people were literally dropping from the heat all over southern Europe. I was the executive chef of a place called Ristorante Cibus, in the same Trastevere neighborhood where we passed so many of our days and nights in Rome. Patrick and I had become pretty inseparable, and now I was working full-time in our "hood." He used to come visit me at the restaurant, passing through the air conditioned dining room back into the kitchen, where it was always 10 degrees hotter than anywhere else, with 8 burners, 2 ovens, and one huge hot water boiler for pasta -- all of which were constantly going during the 9-10 hours of our prep and dinner service. "Oh wow, it's hot in here!" is what he (and everyone) said upon entering the kitchen, as if it was some revelation to me, standing there melting! Sometimes Patrick would bring me an icy granita to help me cool off. Sometimes he'd show up when we were wrapping things up, after a night where I'd been sweating my butt off and he'd been cooling his off in a chair sipping Jack-and-Cokes next door. For his birthday that year, we decided that our group of friends would celebrate with a dinner at Cibus, and I would prepare a special menu for the group, as well as a very special gourmet birthday cake.

Patrick shared a birthday with our friend Caroline, and both were present to celebrate that summer. The meal itself consisted of what was surely a pasta dish and probably a beef fillet for the main course. I don't remember the details. But I definitely remember that I made a baked chocolate mousse cake with chocolate buttercream and ganache. And that cake? A winner! It was rich and chocolaty and light as air. It seemed the third time was a charm indeed.

This year on June 10th, I did not bake Patrick a birthday cake. I went out and bought the cream cheese and powdered sugar, got the hand mixer from a friend here in Rome, and tried to find chocolate cake mix -- just for old time's sake, and for our friend Caroline, who was back in Rome this year and spent her birthday with us, with our extended famiglia romana. But I couldn't bring myself to actually make the cake. Patrick would have been 39 years old on June 10th this year. Instead, he is forever 38 and 1/2. Patrick was born 3 months and 24 days before I was born, but now I'm older than he is, and I can't get my head around that concept.

This year on June 10th, instead of baking Patrick a birthday cake, we gathered our "Roman family" from near and far, to celebrate Patrick's life. Roman style.

We returned to Trastevere, our neighborhood full of wonderful memories. Stardust no longer exists, and though Patrick's laundromat is still there, sign and all, he sold it when he left Rome in '05 and it's now shuttered. But still, this will always be our neighborhood. So, we found a beautiful apartment around the corner from those spots. And we came together, from Rome, from all over Italy and Europe, from Malta, from the United States. We drank to Patrick's full life, we exchanged stories and memories, we saw videos and photos of those golden years in Rome that Patrick felt were some of the best of his life. We ate at one of our favorite neighborhood trattorias, we toasted to his life, we sang, we cried, but most of all we laughed, remembering Patrick's full-body guffaw and his capacity to laugh about everything, even in the face of tragedy. He was able to see the good in everyone and everything, which is what made Patrick so sweet, so refreshingly optimistic, and so beloved by so many.

In the whirlwind and haze of that Roman evening, which for me was surreal, I did notice something. Many people wore white, the complete opposite of the traditional black that signifies mourning, and a color that celebrates light and life. But more interesting still: even more people wore blue -- unwittingly, I think, but it was Patrick's color, and it was so fitting. He was the one thing so obviously missing from a birthday party he would have LOVED. But there we were, friends and family, gathered together to eat, drink, and celebrate the life of our lovely Patrick, dressed in colors of light and summer and Patrick's pool-blue eyes. He had, once again, pulled out all the stops and left the party early, way too early. But we celebrated on into the night, and to sunrise, in his honor.

Above, Patrick on his 30th Birthday in Rome (with a cake his Mom made and is presenting to him).

We love you, Patrick, and miss you terribly.

Auguri, auguri, auguri, from your Famiglia Romana...

EAT, PLAY, LOVE: Patrick, Food, and Rome -- Part 1

In May 2005, I sat down in my living room in Largo Arenula and wrote the following:

I just said goodbye to my best friend in the piazza beneath my house... "So many years, huh? So many years," he'd said. Six years of friendship in a foreign country can seem like a lifetime. And seeing that time together end can seem the end of a life, too. Well, at least the end of an era.

My friend Patrick had just left for the airport, to fly to the U.S., and to leave our adopted city of Rome, for good. I was reeling. Our friendship wasn't over, of course, but our time in Rome together was. We'd experienced so much, jam-packed into those six years, so many amazing memories. And since we were living in Italy, and I'm a chef -- well, many of those memories revolved around food. 

Below: Patrick in front of his Trastevere apartment

It must be explained that left to his own devices, Patrick would have subsisted on a diet of fish sticks and toast, with the occasional PB and J or tuna fish sandwich thrown in for good measure. This is not because he was a difficult eater -- if placed in front of him, he would eat most anything, including healthy greens, salads, vegetables, meats, fish, and the numerous delicious pastas we were fortunate enough to be surrounded by in Rome. But Patrick did not prepare this fare for himself. His tiny kitchen corner in his Trastevere apartment didn't really allow for the preparation of anything beyond the super-simple. So I took it upon myself to feed Patrick when I could, with labor-intensive, sophisticated meals at my dinner parties, and, more frequently, with simple home-cooked meals I'd make for us at my apartment. Patrick would buzz the citofono downstairs between 4 and 4:30 p.m., on average, four days a week. I'd pick up the hand-held receiver to hear his cocktail hour credo: "It's 5 o'clock somewhere!" He'd climb the five long flights of stairs in the name of shared aperitivi (he kept a bottle of Jack Daniels stored in my liquor cabinet for convenience) and if we didn't go out after, he'd often stay for dinner and a movie. "Dumb and Dumber" and "Fargo" were our favorites. Each time he'd stay over for a meal he'd make me imitate the line from Fargo: "Daaaaad? Ya stayin' for supperrrrr?!" in a strong North Dakota accent. He laughed hysterically every time -- even this past December, over the phone, when I indulged his request for me to "Say the line! Say it!"

There was one year in Rome when we watched what was basically the Italian version of American Idol, "Operazione Trionfo" every Wednesday night. Patrick would come over an hour before it came on, for some pre-show libations. I'd make dinner. We'd discuss who we surmised wouldn't make the cut that week. Martin often joined as well. Our friends called us idiots, but they were missing out on cheesy Italian entertainment! One week, Patrick had decided he wanted to cook dinner for meinstead of the other way around. His dish of choice? Something he called his Mom's Special Fried Chicken -- that is, chicken drumsticks shaken in a bag with seasoned bread crumbs, then fried in a pan, until, a few minutes before the chicken was done, he dumped a cup of water into the pan. We'd debated about this for months on end: how could "fried chicken" remain fried if you then doused it with water? Wouldn't it just become soggy fried chicken? I never understood what made him wax poetic about this dish. And the irony, as it turned out, was that I had a terrible stomach flu the night he endeavored to recreate this dish at my apartment. I never got to try it. I was on saltines and San Pellegrino.

I always enjoyed pushing Patrick to his culinary limits. Our friend Anna, owner of our second-home bar, Stardust, would order crates of fresh oysters from Normandy around the holidays. One cold December night, Patrick and I were having drinks in the dimly-lit bar after dinner. Anna asked me if I knew how to shuck oysters -- and since I will happily suffer shucking for a taste of pure deliciousness, she told me to step behind the bar and prepare 6 or 8 oysters for us. Patrick got nervous. First because we were discussing ostriche (oh-stree-kay), the Italian word for oyster, which he assumed meant "ostrich." Once we cleared that up, he remained nervous because he'd never tried a raw oyster before. I brought over a plate of them with lemon wedges and some Tabasco sauce for the first-timer. By then, the entire bar had overheard our conversation, and everyone was rallying behind Patrick to slurp the briny bivalve from its shell. The next 20 seconds were hilarious, for the range of expressions that came across his face, and the trouble he had choking the thing down. Once he did, the bar erupted in cheers, as Patrick laughed, sheepishly proclaiming "mai piu'!" (never again!).

I reviewed restaurants for various guidebooks in Rome, and so frequently, I'd take friends along to help me "judge" a meal. Patrick was happy to accompany me on numerous occasions, the most memorable of which was our outing to Checchino, an old, elegant restaurant in the Testaccio neighborhood that's been around since 1887. Checchino is famous for perfecting the Roman cooking of the "quinto quarto" -- basically, it's the cheaper cuts of meat and organs and everything that makes up offal (and to Patrick's palate, AWFUL). We ordered some classic Roman pasta dishes, but I insisted that we also order a few of the more 'adventurous' dishes. Patrick was not a fan of liver, lungs, brain, or anything else that I made him try that afternoon, though we did have a fun time misbehaving in the starched-linen elegance of the restaurant. The topper was a bollito misto, traditional more of northern Italy but served here as a plate of mixed boiled animal parts with a piquant green sauce.

Now, I've had great versions of this dish. This was not one of them. The meat pieces were mostly gelatinous and jiggled when Patrick shook the plate. What didn't shake was overcooked and in the grayish-taupe color family. Present in the collection of meat-ish products were brain, tripe, and various sections of a cow's and pig's face. Patrick and I were only able to make a dent in the dish by coercion to eat specific parts: P: "I dare you to eat that gray slice of meat". D: "Only if you eat that jiggly piece of cartilage." P: "No way! Only if you eat that squiggly thing too." D: "Can I dump green sauce on it?" P: "Yeah, okay." D: "Deal." We laughed our way through lunch, and washed everything down with some crisp white wine. And chalked it up to another interesting Italian food experience.

Riding home on the back of Patrick's scooter, zipping along the Tiber River on a sunny afternoon, belly full: it was the height of contentment. It was another perfect moment in Rome, one of countless wonderful memories I have with Patrick.

I miss him every single day.

To Be Continued...

Valentine's Day: Cooking with Love, and for Patrick

I am a chef by profession. Despite my experience cooking for various celebrities and ambassadors, tourists and strangers, and the hours spent sweating in top restaurant kitchens, at the end of the day, I am a cook -- not a chef -- at heart. I like to define myself not so much by my professional culinary ventures, but by what I cook for those I love. It is this that measures not just skill and talent and speed, but what comes from your heart, as I believe all good cooking should.

I wrote this almost six years ago when I was living in Rome, and I still feel the same way. For me, cooking is an expression of love. It's something to be shared among friends, family, and loved ones. Cliché as it may sound, it's about more than filling stomachs, it's about feeding souls. When you're lucky enough not to worry where your next meal will come from, cooking is about pleasure: flavor and memory and sensation and smell and yes, hunger -- but in a good way. It's the ultimate sensory experience. I always say, cooking and eating are the only activities for which you utilize all five of your senses...other than sex, of course. So for me, Valentine's Day is as much about food as anything. 

This Valentine's Day, I'm reflecting on cooking for loved ones, and one loved one in particular. This past Christmas Eve, my dear friend Patrick passed away suddenly. We'd been friends since we met in Rome in 1999, and he was one of my favorite people on the planet. In a terrible twist of irony, I was a week away from seeing him. I was supposed to be his New Year's "date" and spend five days in Las Vegas with him and his Mother, his Stepfather Gary, and his 2 little boys, Sebastian and Elliott.

I was looking forward to this time with him so much that it's beyond something I can express in words. I was excited to get some good, quality time with the boys, excited to see his Mom again (she'd lived in Florence while we all lived in Rome) and to meet Gary, excited for our famous Dana-Patrick heart-to-hearts, and for our imitations and goofy accents and belly laughs, and to just hang out again with no particular agenda, like we'd done in Rome countless times over the years. And, I was really looking forward to cooking for him, and particularly for Sebbi and Elliott. When I last saw Sebbi, he was too young to have his teeth yet, and the boys had been living in Sweden with their mother until Patrick brought them back to America in 2008. They'd been living on the other side of the country from me, and though we often tried to plan visits to see each other, daily life had always seemed to get in the way. Until this year. We were going to kick off 2011 on the right foot. "I can't wait to cook you guys some good Italian food, you need my help!" I'd told Patrick on the phone back in November. He'd joked about his "master cheffing skills" as he simultaneously prepared dinner for the boys -- peanut butter sandwiches, mac and cheese. Patrick's own diet also tended towards the simple kids' menu fare he served the boys. 

I thought about all the wonderful Roman meals we'd enjoyed -- pasta all'amatriciana, Roman broccoli cooked down to a velvety mush with garlic, olive oil, and peperoncino...thin-crust pizzas and juicy beef tagliata on a bed of arugula with balsamic. I wanted the boys to taste this. For Patrick and me, it would be taste memory. For Sebby and Elliott, it would be cultivating tastes. But I didn't get that chance.

Instead, I flew out to Vegas 3 days earlier than originally planned, for Patrick's funeral. It's still surreal, even as I write this. I don't actually believe he's gone. It seems impossible. But I was there, I attended the service, I saw his family and friends, and made some new ones. We wept, we drank, we talked. And eventually, I got to cook. The day after the funeral, Barb and Gary were hosting everyone at their home. When I arrived there with my friend Gareth, the house smelled delicious. James Taylor was cooing from the speakers (Patrick's favorite -- and mine, too. I've cooked countless meals along with "Sweet Baby" James). I wanted to do something to help the family, wanted to make myself useful in some small way. So I relieved Barb of her kitchen duties, and turned the bubbling broth on the stove into a soup. It was a simple job, really: picking turkey meat off of the carcass, chopping parsley and garlic, menial tasks. But that's what I wanted, to go through the motions and occupy my time. I cooked for Patrick's family and friends, and for me, too. His sister Andrea came and put her arm around me as I worked. "You're doing what you do best. It feels comforting, doesn't it?" It did, and it didn't. The last thing I wanted to be doing was cooking under those circumstances...but under those circumstances, the only thing for me to do was to cook. Patrick's niece Sophie was my sous-chef. She'd decided over the course of those few days that she wanted to be a caterer. Strange timing for a 10 year-old to choose a career path, perhaps, but I can tell that she has what it takes, beyond already formidable knife skills: she likes to feed souls, too. Barb said that day, "Having you and Gareth and Erica in my kitchen again, it seemed like Florence -- almost normal." Almost. The one thing that was missing, so sorely, unfairly missing, was Patrick. What a presence. He always lit up the room.

Once all the family had arrived at Barb's house, we ladled out the cream of turkey soup and passed around the garlic bread. All the adults and Barb's 10 grandchildren slurped the soup happily, and I loved seeing them enjoying it, loved hearing the clink-clink of their spoons hitting the bottom of their cups. When he was done, Sebastian, Patrick's older boy, came running up to me and smiled and proclaimed, "You make the best soup in the whole world!" There was no higher praise imaginable. It broke my heart. In that moment, he was a 7-year-old version of his father. There too, no higher praise.

Patrick is gone much too soon, but he packed a huge amount of life into his 38 years. He lived all over the world, and he often said many of his happiest moments were with us in Rome. Patrick truly enjoyed to eat, drink, and be merry, something he cultivated to perfection in the aria and among the cobblestones of the Eternal City. He was an honest, caring man -- absolutely one of the good ones -- with a huge heart, which, as it turned out, was also a weak one. For better or worse, the words "heart" and "Patrick" will forever be linked in my mind.

I wish everyone much love, and time to spend with those you care about this San Valentino, and hope that you can all share some delicious food with loved ones. I'll be blogging about food-related Patrick stories now and throughout the year -- there are so many! This is a piccolo valentino to you, Patrick. I love you and miss you so much. We all do.