Girls’ Weekend (plus Rennie)

I suppose when you get to be a woman of a certain age, you become impossible to photograph and by that, I mean that the minute the camera comes out, you make self-deprecating remarks about your so-called double chins, or your hair that day, or you just sort of slink out of the frame altogether. This past weekend, I had the enormous pleasure of hanging out with a group of women who are my mom’s age and well, you might notice that my photographs are cropped a certain way and focus on objects more than faces. That’s because they wanted it that way. And never mind that I can only hope to look as good as they all do when I am their age; I try to respect the wishes of others, especially when I am their guest.

I had to haul some tail to get from Knoxville to Indianapolis on Friday but the deadline was well worth the rush: there was a gathering of women to work on a cookbook they are putting together to benefit a local nonprofit group on the island where I used to live, which is how we all met. So, my friend, Harriet, told me to try to get to her place on the 20th, if I could, because then I’d be there for this epic event.

That was all she had to say. I was *so* there.

It was a beautiful drive on the back roads of Kentucky but I didn’t even pull over to take pictures, because I had gotten a late start breaking camp, so after more than 10 hours of hard driving, Rennie and I finally got to town just as it was starting to get dark. We were invited to stay in the house with everyone else but I thought he would probably rather stay in Roxanne, because I was worried that a house full of women might overwhelm him, so I parked in the driveway and plugged in to the house power. As it turns out, he would have been more than fine inside, as all four women fell rather in love with him and one or the other was petting him at least once an hour. He got called “her” a lot but that’s what you get when you crash a total girls’ weekend.

This cookbook is quite the production, by the way. When it gets published later this year, it will be a collection of about 200 recipes in both Spanish and English, and the cover will feature art by local painter Jessie Zimmerman. Called Cocina Isleña: Recipes from the Kitchens of Isla Mujeres, this particular compilation will be the second edition. The original publication came out 10 years ago to benefit the Red Cross and it has not been updated since, though coincidentally, an entirely different island cookbook has just come out to benefit the English school on the island.

In theory, Cocina Isleña will represent how people on the island eat but whether it will be a totally accurate picture is perhaps debatable. When committee member Caroline first started asking islanders for recipes, she said, “I got 35 drink recipes and I said, ‘Guys, … cool on the drinks.’ So then the next 35 recipes were all appetizers, which tells you how much we cook down there.”

But she finally started getting more substantial recipes, too, some of them from popular restaurants around town, such as Olivia. Then committee members Patsi and Jackie actually made most of the submissions to ensure that measurements and directions check out okay and judging from this past weekend’s line-up of dishes, most of them from the cookbook, their quality control has paid off.

“They’re a hoot,” said Harriet, who marveled that they had time to do so many test kitchens during the past year. “I mean, I couldn’t believe Jackie on Saturday, with all the stuff going on, wants to make this whole thing with roasted poblanos.”

While two of the gals, Patsi and Caroline, drove in from other parts of Indiana, Jackie had flown in from New Jersey and had no car, so during preparations for a party that Harriet was throwing that night to introduce her Indianapolis girlfriends to her Isla ones, Jackie had asked Harriet to take her to the store to buy ingredients for brunch on Sunday. This then involved roasting poblano peppers to make a green sauce, which the next morning, she drizzled on a hollowed-out bread roll, after filling it with a poached egg. It was spectacular and not just because it tasted so good, but because she had done it in the middle of a small degree of madness— making this dip and that spread, defrosting shrimp, and giving the place a festive flair with a few Mexican-themed decorations.

No one quite knows when the cookbook will be released, as the committee is still editing, but everyone is hoping that it will be before the end of the year, since that would allow them to market it during the holidays, as well as the island’s busy season, which starts in December. It will be printed in both the States and Cancun, so as to accommodate both markets, but all the proceeds from all the sales will go to the local chapter of PEACE, which Harriet describes as “an island United Way,” meaning that it serves as a clearinghouse for all the different causes on the island.

On Sunday afternoon, long after the party dishes had been cleaned up from the night before and we were still digesting Jackie’s poached egg brioche from that morning, they were all sitting around the table, their four laptops converged for an editing session.

“Wanna get rid of that water?” Jackie asked of a recipe she had pulled up on her screen. “It doesn’t seem like you need it.”

“Well, I don’t think so, either,” said Patsi, “because who wants to mess around with rice?”

“And then— right!”

“Okay, let’s get rid of the water.”

“Let’s do that, and then take out the rice,” said Jackie, adding: “And then if she questions it— she won’t even remember.”

A few minutes passed and then: “Oh, this is the one I wanna get rid of. I don’t like this one.”

“What one?” asked Harriet.

“I wanna get rid of No. 14,” said Jackie.

“I’m on it right now,” said Harriet.

“Oh. I don’t like it.”

“You’re changing it? The Salsa Chicken?”

“I’m deleting it. I’m getting rid of it.”

“Ooo. We’re deleting No. 14.”

“Yeah, I don’t like it.”

“What category is that?” asked Caroline.

“R14, Salsa Chicken.”

“Well, whose is it?” asked Patsi.

“Mine,” said Jackie.

The whole work session was like that as they worked independently in silence for a few minutes before inevitably breaking into a discussion to solve this query or that: capitalize the P in portabello mushroom? add a trademark symbol (dubbed an “R ball”) to Tabasco sauce? Things occasionally meandered for an anecdote here or there about this person or that who had submitted a recipe, but above all, everyone remained on task, calm and upbeat, patient and complimentary, just enjoying each other’s company and trying to finish this beast of a project they took on last year.

“What will I have to look forward to after this?” Harriet asked everyone, when the day was waning and we were getting ready to break for drinks with the neighbors, and then dinner in the city. “I have been so looking forward to you guys coming.”

And I could understand exactly what she meant.