Here you stand at the sink, washing your plate — the light slants harder than yesterday, you realize; back-to-school weather. Caruthers! The end of summer already, and you only just today managed to eat your first B.L.T. In a fit of tardy hustle, you dry your hands and order three dozen Ball jars online. Pull up in Dropbox your pickling recipe for green beans and your basil digestivo recipe, and print two copies, which spill onto the floor in the den. Upstairs, you hear the boys pounding on their mouse pads, still unshowered at 3 o’clock in the afternoon, and you yell up to them to get dressed. Time to move it or lose it, you think. New shoes, new backpacks and the major haul from the modest garden — tomatoes, chard, zucchini and beans. Time to start preserving in earnest to hold you over during the long months ahead. You scroll through your contacts to invite a lively, kindred group for the great day of epic canning, promising bottomless cold rosé and tomatoes on toast with mayo. Many hands make light work!
But then at dinner that night your 12-year-old announces he wants to run for student council and be president of his seventh-grade class, so that he can get curtains on the windows of the classroom doors to keep a school shooter from seeing in. “It doesn’t make any sense,” he complains. “They put us all in a corner on the rug, but he can just see in the window!”
The floor drops out. You plummet.
Your 14-year-old, however, a coolheaded mother of no one, who has recently in his own evolutionary schedule passed from his sarcastic period to his know-it-all one, gleefully protests: “That’s ridiculous! They’ll never give you the money for curtains, you idiot!”
The little one quickly answers, unfazed, but you notice his cuticles have dried blood where he’s been picking at them. “Then I’ll do it with paper and tape. I can do it on the cheap! I don’t need the money, just the authority to fix the problem.”
On the spot, you decide to fill the freezer with French fries — his favorite food — instead of those vegetables he doesn’t even like.
Mr. High School has definitive knowledge about fries as well. “Curly are the best, then shoestring, then crinkle cut.” Seventh-grade class-president-hopeful disagrees: “No. Totally no. The McDonald’s fry is the best cut, the perfect size.”
You allow for some debate here; it buys you time to recover, and for their apparent nonchalance over the fact of school-shooter drills to have some contagion on your own despair. You learn for the first time that your wife has done extensive research and testing of homemade fries over the past decade and has an almost cult devotion for the technique of the American chef J. Kenji López-Alt, along with a nearly three-page recipe she adapted from his that she can queue to the printer this very minute. “Very crunchy on the outside, fluffy interiors,” she says. “That’s what you want.”
You yourself don’t have a strong feeling about the actual fry — you buy grocery-store brands frequently — as long as the fat is clean and fresh and hot. But when they all start to opine on the burger that will accompany the fries — “double patty smashed all the way” — you muscle yourself back in the game, bluffing your good-natured bravado: “I’m telling you and all you other tinkering fools, I make the best burger in the entire city, and that is just an empirical, statistical, Google-able fact. But I’m with you on the fries — it’s quarter-inch cut all the way.”
This is all bluster, but you would otherwise just get in bed and stay there for four days if you let yourself brood any longer on your 12-year-old’s single-platform candidacy.
You cancel the Ball jars and order a chest freezer instead. You spend a whole weekend peeling, cutting, soaking, blanching, cooling, par-frying and then freezing a year’s worth of his favorite food on earth. From his first day of seventh grade until his first day of eighth, you can just pull out a bag and fry to order. Any night he feels like it. Any night they are all safely home, setting the table, debating relentlessly about open-carry laws, smash burgers, school budgets or whatever happened to Lil Tay. No amount of work is too much, you think, as you wipe down the stovetop, darkest night at the window, and one last B.L.T. before bed.
Recipe: French Fries
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