when you want, where you want.
Henry Alford Must Be Supervised While Snacking
Photo-Illustration: Maanvi Kapur
Henry Alford is known to turn his obsessions into writing. His most recent book, I Dream of Joni: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell in 53 Snapshots, a kind of biography of Mitchell told through Alford’s essays, reflects what he calls a “not quite lifelong but longtime” preoccupation with the musician. The New Yorker contributor also wrote a book on dancing several years ago, and his weekly postmodern classes remain a fixture in his schedule: “my version of a midlife crisis.” He attributes his “obnoxiously healthy” lifestyle to “equal parts me trying to save the world and neurotic weight management,” but still found time to make “last meal on Earth”–worthy bagel sandwiches and indulge in a multistage snacking bender during a notable stretch last December, right before he took off on a long holiday trip.
Sunday, December 1
In its ideal form, a sesame-seed bagel is so thoroughly and luxuriously encrusted with its namesake seeds that cream cheese or butter is rendered unnecessary: The encrustation is dormant tahini. I find this kind of dormancy in the offerings of Apollo Bagels, whose outpost near my boyfriend’s and my apartment in the West Village, alas, has irritatingly long, Shakespeare in the Park–caliber wait times. So I buy these leathery little sourdough beauties in bulk and then freeze them. Thus, most of my mornings start with an act of defrosting — which, metaphor wise, I kind of love.
Sunday is dance day: I’ll dance for either two hours (one class) or three hours (two classes). Today is only a one-class day, but nevertheless I feel wholly entitled to a kind of midmorning bridge meal: I toast a Trader Joe’s flour tortilla on my gas top stove, then hit it with Gruyère, sour cream, and roasted-pepper salsa before running it under the broiler and sprinkling it with a Trader Joe’s Brussels sprouts and cabbage mix called Cruciferous Crunch, which sounds like plant blight. I eat this gooey concoction in one of my most hallowed locations of fine dining: over the kitchen sink.
After two hours of sweaty boogying and thrashing to world music and the occasional rock classic, I go with three of my dance pals to the nearby Kubeh, the Middle Eastern restaurant on Sixth Avenue at Tenth Street. I have the Breakfast Bowl (freekeh, butternut squash, avocado, and a poached egg) and eat half of my friend Mel’s malawach (a Yemeni crêpe filled with egg and tomato). Sitting in a restaurant is a comparatively glamorous post-dance situation for me: Every other Sunday, I go to a second class, in Soho, which will find me, after the first class, either stopping at Joe’s Pizza for a slice, or buying sushi from Citarella and eating it on the hoof as I scurry southward. In either scenario, after eating, I’ll engage in breath management by neurotically brushing my teeth on the sidewalk and then spitting into a sewer opening. They say that Margot Fonteyn gave her dance partner Rudolf Nureyev class, while Nureyev gave Fonteyn sex appeal, which is essentially the dynamic between me and the New York City sewer system.
Back at home, I make dinner: broccoli Thai curry with a chickpea and carrot salad. My boyfriend, Greg, is the ideal person to cook for: never picky and very appreciative. I cook all of our dinners, but I don’t have to vet them. We’re in agreement on various libtard culinary standards — we’re mostly pescatarian at home; we’ve switched to oat milk; we both love bitter greens, teriyaki sweet potatoes, and any meal that has the good sense to wear a parka of melted cheese.
After dinner I ingest a half-sativa-half-indica edible and then Greg gives me a massage on our purple shag carpet while we listen to Al Green: As Wordsworth put it, very heaven. At 7:30 I make, as I do five or so nights a week, a fruit salad. This is the only part of my diet that reads “gay” to me — I can get very gay with fruit. I’ll turn a pear into 65 absolutely adorable batons; I’ll suprême a grapefruit until it looks naked and afraid.
Tonight I macerate blackberries with the back of a spoon and Microplane some lemon zest on them; then, I pull out my mandoline and chiffonade a banana. I slice some fresh mango on top of the blackberries and banana, organizing and adjudicating all these items like I’m drafting the Treaty of Versailles. Then I take the mango pit and, very carefully lest it torpedo across the room as it has done more times than I like to admit, rotate the seed in my firmly clenched fist, spackling the assembled fruits with a delicious if slightly off-putting mango ooze. I should probably mention here that mangos figured in one of my all-time culinary peaks: I once served my upside-down mango cake to food luminary Pete Wells, an old friend of Greg’s, and he professed to like it. So I suppose I’ve established a mango gauntlet for myself. Code name: Chutney.
In between the first and second episodes of the Ted Danson sitcom A Man on the Inside that Greg and I watch while lying in bed, we each eat a Greek-yogurt popsicle. Tonight’s flavor: chocolate-chip cookie dough. At 9:45, I eat three handfuls of mixed nuts. It is my firm belief that I will die while lying in bed eating nuts. The horror is particularly acute if I am eating any of what I think of as the luxury nuts: More than once I have visualized a thick coating of cashews and macadamias constricting around my heart like an ever-shrinking Kevlar vest.
Monday, December 2
On the mornings that I don’t defrost a bagel, I usually eat the previous night’s leftovers at my desk while reading the news on my computer. Hello, chickpea-and-carrot salad, mightn’t you be improved by a tablespoon of tahini? Desktop eating is not something I’m proud of, but I once read that Joan Didion used to eat tuna salad at her desk, which consoles me. We tell ourselves [tuna] in order to [tuna].
I have a PT session at two — did I mention that I’m 62 and sometimes dance for three hours at a crack? — so I’m looking for a light lunch. I make a salad with, uh, tuna, dried cranberries, shaved fennel, and avocado. I brush my teeth before my appointment, swallowing half of the sudsy byproduct so as to render my breath less walrus-y. I’ve sometimes wondered if years of swallowing a little toothpaste backwash any time I eat garlic, raw onion, fish, or eggs before socializing has left its mark on my insides; someday a dentist will tell me, “Your uvula is a breath mint.” After PT I defrost a bagel because I deserve something pillowy and delightful after all that exertion.
For dinner I make a favorite meal of ours: salmon fillets with skin that I make very crispy in a skillet; tzatziki; farro with dried cranberries and fresh dill; a big pile of garlicky sautéed spinach. About a third of the dinners I make are one-pot wonders, so it feels good to sometimes make an “adult” meal with a few working parts. I’m always fighting against the image I have of two middle-aged men living together: cereal for dinner and elasticized waistbands.
The rest of the evening is remarkably similar to the previous night, but we swap out chocolate-chip cookie dough popsicles for chocolate fudge, and 2024 Ted Danson for 2006 Denzel Washington and Val Kilmer (the thriller Déjà Vu, which is being featured on the Criterion Channel). Just before getting ready for bed, I open a plastic container of cashews and start to clutch a handful of salty goodness, but then think about the Kevlar vest and withdraw my hand.
Tuesday, December 3
On Tuesday morning I swim at NYU, then I go home and defrost. Lunch is a Sad Desk Salad — very similar to yesterday’s, but with chickpeas instead of tuna. Midafternoon, I have another stovetop tortilla. Henrycita.
At 6:45 I meet my friend Hannah Reimann at the East Village restaurant Pangea to see the great 84-year-old character actor Austin Pendleton do his cabaret act. Hannah studied with Austin, and I once interviewed him for The New Yorker, but really we’re here because in February Hannah will perform a bunch of Joni Mitchell songs at Pangea in honor of my upcoming book, so we’re casing the joint. I order a negroni and a bowl of Bolognese; when Austin and his collaborator Barbara Bleier’s act starts, I consider getting a glass of white wine, too, but I can’t figure out how to flag the waiter without being rude to the performers, so I chug my water instead. Austin and Barbara’s roster of show tunes has me misting up repeatedly; I find the elderly hugely poignant.
That night at 1:17, unable to sleep (liquor: why?), I eat a bowl of Shredded Wheat in oat milk that I plump up with almonds, raisins, and an un-chiffonaded banana. Sometimes, while pouring cereal into a bowl in the wee hours, as I do not infrequently , I will sing the chorus of the Bee Gees classic “Night Fever,” but change the lyrics to “night eater.” Tonight, I am reminded of the time that the three Bee Gees, asked to collaborate on a song with Barbra Streisand, expressed interest in the project but asked for three-quarters of the royalties, whereupon Barbra allegedly spat back, “How much for just one?” Eating alone in my pajamas after midnight can make me feel like one solitary Bee Gee. And, sadly, not Barry.
Wednesday, December 4
This is one of those infrequent nights when Greg will be out of the house — a copy editor of books by day, tonight he’ll be volunteering at the Dream House, a sound-and-light installation in Tribeca. I know I need to go slow food wise: When unsupervised in the confines of my home, I can be a menace to snack foods.
I skip breakfast but at 11 a.m. eat the best thing I’ll eat during these four days: a toasted sesame bagel with watercress, avocado, smoked salmon, and, in a bold departure from my previous statements, mayo. The crunch of the bagel with the fat of the avocado and the salty slap of the salmon: We’re in death-row territory here. I once watched a documentary about the last-meal requests of people on death row and learned that, hilariously, some prisoners request low-calorie salad dressing. Over the years, I have thought about this fact almost as much as I have thought about the Joni Mitchell lyric, “He saw my complications / And mirrored me back simplified.” I’m fascinated by the things that I almost understand.
Greg leaves around six for the Dream House and I launch, as expected, into a veritable Oresteia cycle of snacking. It starts with a goodwill effort (broccoli sautéed with garlic and then heaped with Parmesan) before devolving, as I watch three episodes of Chopped and the film noir Laura, into two huge bowls of salted popcorn, a Greek-yogurt popsicle, 12 thin slices of Monterey Jack and a thick blob of Taleggio, a bowl of Shredded Wheat with raisins, two carrots, two frozen homemade brownies from the freezer, a stovetop tortilla with Gruyère, and seven spoonfuls of a chocolate-hazelnut spread Greg’s stepmother gave us two months ago but which I have slyly managed to hide from Greg’s view by positioning it behind a large container of yogurt.
The fact that my night of rogue eating includes carrots and Shredded Wheat is telltale. I’m a 1930s hobo who thinks heaven is a place where cigarette butts grow on trees.
Thursday, December 5
Many themes are reasserted: defrosting at breakfast, chickpea salad for lunch, a healthy dinner (kale-and-white-bean stew), a fussy fruit salad, Greek-yogurt popsicles. We watch the Humphrey Bogart movie High Sierra; every time I see a correctional facility depicted onscreen I’m glad I read Mary Roach’s book about the alimentary canal, Gulp, because now I know that another word for rectum is “prison wallet.”
After the movie, Greg starts playing with our cat, so I procure a small bowl of cashews, which I eat while lying in bed and staring at the Criterion Channel’s landing page. Strangely, I do not die.
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