amazing chocolate pudding

Hello there. Sorry for vanishing into the void, but I’m back. Sort of. August was a blend of crazy, busy, and sad. I won’t get into the sad, but there was a lot of travel between New York and Massachusetts and not of the happy variety either. Amidst the travel and gaining two additional roommate for a few weeks in August, I submitted the manuscript I co-wrote with Chef Forgione. The recipes alone were over four hundred pages. How I got it done, I’m not sure entirely, a lot of it had to do with a generous friend and her home office.

While it’s taken me three weeks to tell you about chocolate pudding, I hope you forgive me. I’ve been feeling a little stretched as of late, despite a relaxing week in Wellfleet where I diligently ate oysters and chased them down with beer. It feels like a far away memory now. I could, easily, have spent a whole month out on the Cape and hope to do so someday soon.

Most recently I had made chocolate pudding to justify my dessert-for-dinner excuse. I had a filled cavity from earlier that morning and could hardly open my mouth. Applesauce seemed too boring. And it was too warm to contemplate mashed potatoes. Rice pudding, delicious as it is, required chewing. Naturally, the next possible choice was chocolate pudding. Obviously, right? Right??

Everyone I know likes chocolate pudding. Even people who are ambivalent towards chocolate, like chocolate pudding. But here’s the rub: some of most of the recipes were far too rich and far too sweet for my palate. In doing a bit of research I found that many of the recipes use egg yolks, and while I’m all for yolky richness, I like my chocolate pudding to have singular, clean chocolate note. Less of a custard, more of a pudding, if you will.

Whenever I crave chocolate pudding, it’s impossible for me not to recall a certain disaster that once befell an apartment I was renting on the Upper East Side. Back then, I used to be a big fan of Swiss Miss chocolate pudding snacks, which I purchased weekly at my local Gristedes. At the time, I was working for a certain investment bank where my hours were long and my teammates were not very nice. When I had initially accepted the position, it was to do x, y, and z. I was, instead, relegated to the tasks no one wanted to do, and in the end just about everyone on the team came in at 9 and left at 5; whereas I had to be in at seven thirty in the morning and left well after nine o’clock at night. On most weekends I spend at least one day in the office. It was some time ago – I was very meek and didn’t know how to speak up for myself. Thankfully, I’ve become much better at this.

My apartment was a glorified studio marketed as a one bedroom with a living room no bigger than a closet (really it was non existent) and a kitchen with a sloping floor (so all my cakes baked lopsided). All its windows looked out to face other brick walls of the neighboring buildings. There were dozens of pigeons living in between the buildings and their creepy coos would wake me up in the morning and fill me with anxiety and dread.

My neighbors were a curious bunch. Down the hall from me, there was a psychic. When I got laid off from my job, I wanted to ask her why she couldn’t just warn me about it. Would have been a nice heads-up, but like an idiot, I showed up to work at six thirty in the morning, only to be told by HR at eight that they no longer needed me.

Upstairs, an apartment that seemed to mirror mine, housed a grandmother, a single mother, and her thirteen-year-old daughter who made out with boys at least five years her senior. Late one night when I returned home from work, I found them pressed against my door with his hand up her shirt. I made a coughing sound to alert them of my presence but they didn’t hear me, and it took a few more coughs to get them to come up for air.

One morning I found a passed-out, heavily tattooed girl dressed in all black, right outside my door as I was leaving to go to work. She seemed a little worse for wear and I had to call 911 for her. It turned out she had severe alcohol poisoning.

To sum up: the building was a veritable shithole, but in many ways it felt like the right of passage as a New Yorker. If you haven’t lived in a shitty New York apartment – well, you haven’t lived!

The single remarkable thing about my building is that it was home to a terrific omakase-only sushi restaurant, Sasabune. Once in awhile, I’d treat myself to their amazing chef’s selection sushi. A waitress would quietly appear with the latest offering and quietly instruct, “Soy sauce okay,” or more sternly, “No soy sauce!” on a particular cut and type of fish, and I diligently obeyed.

Back then, I was dating a guy who lived in Tribeca. My relationship with him (and what he wound up putting me through) is a book unto itself – seriously – so I’ll leave the story (stories?) for another day. I also had a college friend who had recently moved to London for work. In the interest of protecting names and identities, we’ll call that guy Ryan for the sake of this piece.

Ryan worked (and to the best of my knowledge still works) for a Fancy Wall Street firm. It became very clear to me that once Ryan had moved to London and found himself new, fancy London friends, he had little use for his old friends in New York. Their purpose, as it would seem, would be to provide free room and board when Ryan came through town. Through some years and antics, I had had enough, and cut off all contact. I stopped answering emails and calls inquiring about the latest visit and if my apartment was available for a particular week. It wasn’t. I was living in it.

But before our friendship dissolved, while in college and for a few years afterward, Ryan and I used to host Thanksgiving feasts for all our friends (and their friends) who would find themselves stranded for the holiday. Big dinner parties full of food, drink, and merriment. We’d start cooking a few days before and it would all culminate on that last Thursday in November.

Anyway, Thanksgiving. Ryan. London. That year he was back from London for the holiday with his then-girlfriend (we’ll call her Anna for this piece) – a grand-niece of a veeeery famous English writer whose life ended very sadly. Ryan had asked if he and Anna could stay at my apartment for the week, and if I could stay at my boyfriend’s place. I agreed on one condition: that my apartment was to be left in a pristine state and the linens were dropped off at the cleaner’s across the street.

We were planning to cook Thanksgiving dinner at our friend’s office kitchen, a special loft which came with a chef’s kitchen, two ovens, and a collection of well-honed German knives. We were expecting thirty-five people for dinner that night, so I brined two large turkeys to roast. The dinner went off without a hitch and as they say “a good time was had by all.”

But for the rest of the week, Ryan had no time to hang out and catch up – he had too many other friends to see in the city, he said. On the day he was supposed fly back to London, I arranged to meet him around the corner from my apartment for a quick drink before he and Anna headed out to the airport.

When I walked up to my building, I was nearly run over. By Ryan.

“I’m running late,” he informed me, “I forgot but promised to see a friend before I fly out. I mixed up my days, stupid jetlag. Oh, and Anna and I didn’t have time to clean up the place but here’s twenty bucks for laundry and a cleaning lady.”

And with that, he shoved the bill in my hand and dove into a cab. Still holding the crumpled up bill in my hand, I headed upstairs.

When I unlocked the door and walked into my tiny apartment, I gasped. At the entrance to the bedroom, the sheets were all crumpled up in a pile on the floor. Scattered around were a handful of condom wrappers. I was so disgusted that I darted out of the bedroom and back into the kitchen. There, right by the fridge, stuck to the floor, were a couple of Swiss Miss chocolate pudding covers. The floor was sticky with dried up chocolate pudding.

Twenty dollars were barely going to cover laundry never mind hiring a cleaning service to scour the place. That night, while muttering curses under my breath, I scrubbed the walls and the floor wearing elbow high rubber gloves. I went to the supermarket and bought some more pudding snacks. And when my apartment was finally back to the state I deemed acceptable, I went to my tiny living room, turned on the television, and ate my chocolate pudding on the couch.

A few weeks later, while reading a then-new food blog that I loved, The Wednesday Chef**, I found a recipe for what seemed like the most amazing chocolate pudding. It had no eggs, no cream, and it sounded delicious. I made it a week later, and it’s been my go-to recipe ever since. So I suppose that the story, despite the condom wrappers and the disgusting sheets, has its silver lining. It, sort of, led me to this pudding.

As for those crumpled up sheets, I threw them out – they were beyond repair.

**I’ll be back (hopefully tomorrow) with a recipe from Luisa’s upcoming food memoir, My Berlin Kitchen!

Extra! Extra! My friend Elinor Lipman has recently released a fantastic, hysterical book of political tweets, Tweet Land of Liberty! Perfect gift for your friends who watch MSNBC like it’s crack and are living and breathing election season news. Hopefully (gulp!) it’s not just yours truly! The book, regardless of your political affiliation, is really funny and witty. Last year, Lipman vowed to write 1 political tweet poem per day and has kept to her pledge, taking only Yom Kippur off (more than understandable)! And here are some of her best poem tweets. Now, if that’s not taking Twitter’s medium to a new artform, I don’t know what is!