If it hadn’t been for Mark and Ben, I would never have learned how to make my own pesto.
And if it hadn’t been for Ben, I would never have mastered the art of making pesto in the blender.
Picture the crowded kitchen table in the tiny pocket of space in an apartment crammed full of the stuff of 11-year-old twins. Ben and I are dodging Lego figurines and other memorabilia displayed on the end tables, trying not to accidentally elbow anything breakable onto the floor. We’re chopping parsley and garlic into pieces that are small enough to be blended by the blender that I’m pretty sure was purchased in the ‘80s. Although it works better than any blender made during my lifetime, it also doesn’t have as many settings with helpful words like “CHOP” or “ICE CRUSH” next to the buttons, so I’m insisting we chop everything up first so we don’t accidentally break the oldest blender in Massachusetts.
Ben is grating the parmesan cheese while I walk the four steps over to the indoor kitchen garden and pick a number of leaves off the basil plant. If there’s one thing in this entire apartment that appears to be treated with an enormous amount of care, it’s the basil plant. Most apartments that contain 11-year-old boys have a fair amount of messy things and items not treated with particular care, but it seems as though everyone has a stake in keeping the basil plant alive so we can make pesto from it. So although there is a broken kitchen chair that someone wasn’t gentle enough with, the basil plant is healthier than any other basil plant I’ve ever seen.
Ben and I head over to the blender on its ledge by the coffee maker and the toaster and the dish drainer, carefully bringing our ingredients over on a cutting board. We take the extra virgin olive oil, and we carefully add everything into the blender and eyeball an appropriate amount of oil. It starts out as the amount called for in a Bobby Flay recipe, but soon, we just add it straight from the bottle because we know what pesto is supposed to look like at this stage. Ben pulses the blender, and when it looks almost done, we each get a spoon and taste.
If we haven’t remembered to add any salt up to this point, we usually add the salt, and sometimes more garlic or cheese if we decide it doesn’t taste enough like garlic or cheese.
Sometimes we also add some lemon juice to our pesto, but other times, we don’t.
This scene plays out more times than I could ever count. Pesto pizza is one of everyone’s favorite dinners, and pesto pasta is another smashing hit in our repertoire. Later we graduate to pesto on flat iron steak and pesto toasts on Trader Joe’s baguette, but that doesn’t happen until I learn how to cook red meat, the final frontier.
Eventually, we get a kitchen upgrade, and Ben is 14 years old now instead of 11. Ben works on homework or plays video games or does something on YouTube, and I am alone in the dream kitchen with the new blender that I personally picked out at Bed, Bath, and Beyond as a Channukah present for Ben.
I am better at eyeballing the amount of oil than I was when Ben and I started out on our pesto journey. I can actually eyeball all of the ingredients in proportion to each other now, and I have stopped measuring completely when making pesto. I’m nostalgic about the days when Ben was younger and would happily spend two hours with me cooking dinner and soaking up as many cooking tips as he could absorb in his sponge of a brain.
Mark would do that too, but the task of making pesto was always Ben’s task.
When I get to the point in whatever it is I’m cooking where everything is almost ready, there’s something on every burner, and whatever is in the oven is now done, and I’m going to burn something if I don’t miraculously sprout another pair of arms, that’s when I call Ben. He comes to our dream kitchen immediately and follows my instructions to make my multi-tasking more effective by an entire exponential factor now that I’ve doubled the sets of arms, in addition to the sets of eyes, that are finishing the cooking process. We juggle pans and pots and trays for a few minutes, and I thank him. He retreats for a few more minutes to do his thing while I tie up the loose ends of our feast.
Soon I call Mark because dinner is genuinely ready, and Mark agrees to set the table. He sets things down at random on the table and generally forgets something important, such as the glasses or the silverware, because no one taught Mark to set a table until I came around. And it turns out that if you never set a table until halfway through your middle school career, you never learn to set the table on auto-pilot, and it actually requires brain power.
Mark tries to leave the room, having completed his task, but I tell him it’s actually dinner time now. So I get everyone, which is sometimes just Ben, or sometimes also Arlene, to come to the table.
We sit down and take the time to enjoy the meal and each other’s conversation. Mark and Ben clear their dishes off the table, which is a habit they did not have when we started off on this adventure three years ago.
I clean up, and later, I called out my goodbyes to everyone and let myself out of the beautiful house with the dream kitchen.
But this weekend, it’s just me, and I’m making pesto in the kitchen of my childhood home to bring to a party at Jonathan’s childhood home. I’m looking forward to the party, and I’m grateful to Ben that he and I put so much energy into creating the perfect pesto that I can now make it on auto-pilot with complete confidence that my dish will be a hit at the party. But I also miss making pesto with Ben so much that I’m blinking back the tears of an earlier day when I had the privilege of making elaborate feasts every single week and the creative challenge of cooking the entire feast as egg-free, nut-free. I miss the feeling of joy and the sense of purpose that Mark and Ben brought me with every new week.
Some of my favorite days from the past four years have been spent in the kitchen with Mark and Ben. The joy I felt and the food we created, that will never lose its meaning.
So, as I contemplate the bit of leftover pesto in Tupperware in my fridge, I think I’ll take a cooking tip from Arlene, and I’ll boil some pasta to go with it later today.
And if it hadn’t been for Ben, I would never have mastered the art of making pesto in the blender.
Picture the crowded kitchen table in the tiny pocket of space in an apartment crammed full of the stuff of 11-year-old twins. Ben and I are dodging Lego figurines and other memorabilia displayed on the end tables, trying not to accidentally elbow anything breakable onto the floor. We’re chopping parsley and garlic into pieces that are small enough to be blended by the blender that I’m pretty sure was purchased in the ‘80s. Although it works better than any blender made during my lifetime, it also doesn’t have as many settings with helpful words like “CHOP” or “ICE CRUSH” next to the buttons, so I’m insisting we chop everything up first so we don’t accidentally break the oldest blender in Massachusetts.
Ben is grating the parmesan cheese while I walk the four steps over to the indoor kitchen garden and pick a number of leaves off the basil plant. If there’s one thing in this entire apartment that appears to be treated with an enormous amount of care, it’s the basil plant. Most apartments that contain 11-year-old boys have a fair amount of messy things and items not treated with particular care, but it seems as though everyone has a stake in keeping the basil plant alive so we can make pesto from it. So although there is a broken kitchen chair that someone wasn’t gentle enough with, the basil plant is healthier than any other basil plant I’ve ever seen.
Ben and I head over to the blender on its ledge by the coffee maker and the toaster and the dish drainer, carefully bringing our ingredients over on a cutting board. We take the extra virgin olive oil, and we carefully add everything into the blender and eyeball an appropriate amount of oil. It starts out as the amount called for in a Bobby Flay recipe, but soon, we just add it straight from the bottle because we know what pesto is supposed to look like at this stage. Ben pulses the blender, and when it looks almost done, we each get a spoon and taste.
If we haven’t remembered to add any salt up to this point, we usually add the salt, and sometimes more garlic or cheese if we decide it doesn’t taste enough like garlic or cheese.
Sometimes we also add some lemon juice to our pesto, but other times, we don’t.
This scene plays out more times than I could ever count. Pesto pizza is one of everyone’s favorite dinners, and pesto pasta is another smashing hit in our repertoire. Later we graduate to pesto on flat iron steak and pesto toasts on Trader Joe’s baguette, but that doesn’t happen until I learn how to cook red meat, the final frontier.
Eventually, we get a kitchen upgrade, and Ben is 14 years old now instead of 11. Ben works on homework or plays video games or does something on YouTube, and I am alone in the dream kitchen with the new blender that I personally picked out at Bed, Bath, and Beyond as a Channukah present for Ben.
I am better at eyeballing the amount of oil than I was when Ben and I started out on our pesto journey. I can actually eyeball all of the ingredients in proportion to each other now, and I have stopped measuring completely when making pesto. I’m nostalgic about the days when Ben was younger and would happily spend two hours with me cooking dinner and soaking up as many cooking tips as he could absorb in his sponge of a brain.
Mark would do that too, but the task of making pesto was always Ben’s task.
When I get to the point in whatever it is I’m cooking where everything is almost ready, there’s something on every burner, and whatever is in the oven is now done, and I’m going to burn something if I don’t miraculously sprout another pair of arms, that’s when I call Ben. He comes to our dream kitchen immediately and follows my instructions to make my multi-tasking more effective by an entire exponential factor now that I’ve doubled the sets of arms, in addition to the sets of eyes, that are finishing the cooking process. We juggle pans and pots and trays for a few minutes, and I thank him. He retreats for a few more minutes to do his thing while I tie up the loose ends of our feast.
Soon I call Mark because dinner is genuinely ready, and Mark agrees to set the table. He sets things down at random on the table and generally forgets something important, such as the glasses or the silverware, because no one taught Mark to set a table until I came around. And it turns out that if you never set a table until halfway through your middle school career, you never learn to set the table on auto-pilot, and it actually requires brain power.
Mark tries to leave the room, having completed his task, but I tell him it’s actually dinner time now. So I get everyone, which is sometimes just Ben, or sometimes also Arlene, to come to the table.
We sit down and take the time to enjoy the meal and each other’s conversation. Mark and Ben clear their dishes off the table, which is a habit they did not have when we started off on this adventure three years ago.
I clean up, and later, I called out my goodbyes to everyone and let myself out of the beautiful house with the dream kitchen.
But this weekend, it’s just me, and I’m making pesto in the kitchen of my childhood home to bring to a party at Jonathan’s childhood home. I’m looking forward to the party, and I’m grateful to Ben that he and I put so much energy into creating the perfect pesto that I can now make it on auto-pilot with complete confidence that my dish will be a hit at the party. But I also miss making pesto with Ben so much that I’m blinking back the tears of an earlier day when I had the privilege of making elaborate feasts every single week and the creative challenge of cooking the entire feast as egg-free, nut-free. I miss the feeling of joy and the sense of purpose that Mark and Ben brought me with every new week.
Some of my favorite days from the past four years have been spent in the kitchen with Mark and Ben. The joy I felt and the food we created, that will never lose its meaning.
So, as I contemplate the bit of leftover pesto in Tupperware in my fridge, I think I’ll take a cooking tip from Arlene, and I’ll boil some pasta to go with it later today.