Life From Scratch (16 page)
I flip to the recipe. It seems to be like a Spanish version of crème brulee. Thankfully, one that doesn’t require the little blowtorch. And one that I could actually follow. “Yeah, he’s just a friend.”
“I wasn’t accusing you of anything.”
I look up from the book. “No, no, I meant that I have this friend, and he’s from Spain, and I just wanted him to feel like he’s at home because he can’t get back very often, and he told me that this is his favorite—”
“Rach, you don’t have to justify it to me.
You’ve been divorced for a year.
You’re allowed to go on a date,” Miguel tells me.
“It’s only been nine months,” I say, not sure why I feel the need to correct him.
But it feels like under a year is different from over a year.
Or just a year.
A year.
My ex-anniversary is luckily a few days after my divorce date so I get all the mourning over with during one week of the year.
“Nine months, whatever.
All I’m saying is that I’m happy for you if this friend is more than just a friend.”
I shrug my shoulders and stand up.
“Thank you.
For helping me find the recipe.”
“No problem,” Miguel says.
“I’m here for all my Spanish-deficient friends.”
I don’t know why I feel so defensive with Miguel. I mean, I
do
want Gael to be more than a friend. And it’s not like I want to reiterate that I’m single so Miguel will ask me out. I can’t really explain my general unease of admitting that I’m dating someone to Miguel when I gleefully squeal about my upcoming date to Arianna.
At the checkout desk, I notice a pamphlet that has been discarded, probably originally picked up from the racks by the door.
Are you going through a divorce?
it asks in bold red letters.
¿Usted está pasando por un divorcio?
And what else can I do but see it as a sign because the answer is that, Yes, I guess I still am.
Regardless of in which language you ask the question.
I unload the groceries
I’ve purchased on the way home: a carton of milk, a bag of oranges, a steak I’ll make for dinner. I sift through the mail and set it back down on the counter unopened. I am feeling restless since I blew off Miguel. And thinking about Miguel makes me think about Adam, and the last thing I want to do is think about Adam. And yet, I can feel myself inching towards the computer to check if he’s on my site even as I am internally slapping myself into sense. It is like trying to convince yourself that your teeth aren’t sensitive when you’re craving a dish of ice cream.
I don’t care about Adam.
I don’t care about Adam.
I don’t care about Adam. But I just need to check.
I log into my Sitestalker account and blink at the screen.
The number is enormous—more enormous than possible even if someone was really excited about my recent discovery of stuffed, baked apples.
The visitors are nearing on one hundred thousand since
of the night before
.
I skip checking if Brockman and Young is on the list and head straight for the referrals to find the source for the tremendous traffic.
The list is a solid stream of traffic from the Bloscars site. I click on one, and in a separate window the Bloscar website opens up, slowly, as if millions of other people are nudging to get a view of the screen. It feels like the Louvre in front of the Mona Lisa. I read the congratulations post filling the front page. Best Blog, Best Literature Blog, Best Humor Blog.
Best Food Blog:
Smitten Kitchen
.
My heart sinks, not really understanding why there would be traffic coming from the site if I wasn’t the winner. I mean, who the hell wants to go over and check out the losers?
I keep scrolling down, and there, towards the bottom, is Best Diarist.
Which, as you’ve probably guessed, oh my freakin’ Lord, was
Life from Scratch
.
Well . . . I sort of didn't expect so many new visitors. I would have liked to have baked a cake for you all, except that I don’t really know how to bake a cake. Tidy up the typos. Scour out a few old sentences such as the one about dust on my nether regions. But you have found me straight from the figurative shower, answering the door in my bathrobe, so I guess there's nothing more to do except welcome you in and thank the Bloscar people for choosing this site as Best Diarist.
In all seriousness, I don't really know how I won. I mean, I know how I won—you guys picked me. But I had no clue that the Bloscar people were considering me for Best Diarist because, well, I’ve always thought of myself as a food blogger. Not that I expected to win in that category. So, what I’m trying to say (poorly) is that while I’m honored, I am also feeling like this is a big April Fool’s joke a few months early.
This has been a bit of a trippy evening. I have gotten requests for interviews and travel offers and about one hundred emails from PR people asking me to review their book, kitchen equipment, or food product (why yes, Tim's Turkey Jerky, I would love to taste your new smoky, low-fat alternative to traditional jerky.) All of this is a little new for me.
Um, by which I mean that this whole thing has been really cool. So thank you—thank you for nominating me and voting for me and thank you to the Bloscar people for holding this contest and running it and (I'm getting all weepy now) thank you to Arianna for encouraging me to start this site and to my brother for always eating my creations and my sister for providing fodder for my anti-Park Slope posts and . . .
Deep breath.
Back tomorrow with more stories and recipes.
Chapter Seven
Cube the Potatoes
It’s not like I had been expecting to win best food blog, but I really couldn’t wrap my mind around the “Best Diarist” moniker.
That was the sort of prize reserved for bloggers such as
The Pioneer Woman
,
Dooce,
or
Amalah
.
It only took me a few seconds to catch up and within minutes, I was standing in front of the mirror, brushing my teeth, while saying, “Hi, my name is Rachel.
I’m a diarist.”
It had a nice ring to it.
Having never won an award—not even one of those bullshit “best attendance” awards in elementary school—I wasn’t sure what happened next. The prize turned out to be a check for fifty dollars, which seemed like a strange amount based on the scope of the award—several million people voted daily for a week, which must add up to some serious ad revenue on behalf of the site.
But the money didn’t really matter because there were also the emails from the contest heads wanting me to come out to the Sundance Film Festival the next month to collect my prize as part of “the concurrent and related Sundance Technological Conference.” Not that I had the money to fly out to
Utah
or book a hotel, but still, an invitation to the festival was something. Their friendly email warned me to come equipped with business cards because people were going to want to learn about my brand.
My brand? Business cards?
Had they missed the fact that I was between jobs? A cat woman without cats? A divorcee learning to cook at thirty-four?
Then there were the requests for interviews. I received a perky email from the technology editor of the
LA. Times
, one from the
Chicago
Tribune’s
food section, and another from the
Austin American-Statesman
. There were emails from the people at
Zagats
and
Chow
, which would have been cool ten months ago when I was the Carryout Queen, but now were just a tad confusing.
Gourmet
pitched an idea to have me as one of the judges for their Easter dinner contest, despite the fact that I’m Jewish. Though, the crème de la crème, at least in my mind, came from Jen Dellman, who writes for the
New York Times
magazine, who wanted to meet to brainstorm ideas about an article on rebuilding your life post-divorce.
My initial reaction was panic—what if someone I didn’t want to find me discovered my blog because it was featured in the
New York Times
magazine? And then I realized,
the only person who mattered had already found me.
So much for anonymity in a city of eight million people.
The email that mattered most was a simple, sweet note that came from a junior agent at a major
New York
literary agency three days after I won the award.
Hi, Rachel—
My name is Erika Ledbetter. I’m an agent at Rooks
LTD . I think your writing style is wonderful—brash, funny, unapologetic, and honest. The strength of your platform is how deeply you connect with readers. (I am actually the recipient of more than one email exchange with you, except it was under my anonymous blogging email address, Ms. Duncan-Hines.) I was wondering if you had ever thought about putting some of your experiences into a book; perhaps a hybrid cookbook/essay/advice manual. The Divorced Woman’s Guide on How to Cook Your Life from Scratch?
Please let me know if you’d be interested in speaking further about book proposals and literary representation.
Thanks,
Erika Ledbetter
Junior agent, Rooks
LTD
Rooks knows Books
And then I realize why people care if they win this contest. It isn’t about a fifty dollar check. It is about opportunity.
I quickly write back that I am indeed pulling a proposal together and would love to talk about representation despite the fact that the first part is a lie and the second part I want to tell her while groveling. I forward both emails over to Arianna. And then I grab my wallet, keys, and winter cap and walk over to Arianna’s with a small skip being added every few sidewalk slabs.
“Hello, hello, Mr. Beckett, hello,” I sing as she opens the door to her apartment, child in tow.
She raises her eyebrows at me, and I raise mine back at her. “Hello, Ms. Diarist. Ms. Bloscar-winning writer who is now getting emails from agents.”
“So you checked your email,” I say, taking Beckett out of her arms. He snuggles down against my fuzzy sweater and sucks his binky contently for a few moments before he switches to yanking my necklace forcefully.
“Are you going to do it? Write a book? I told you to write a book weeks ago.”
“I wrote that back because I didn’t want to miss the opportunity. Ari, I have no clue how to write a book proposal.”
“As of ten months ago, you also had no clue how to fry an egg. You’ll learn. You can go to the library and check out a book.” Arianna always has an answer to every question, and she states it in such a way that it sounds doable.