The Olive Oil Was Hers, the Confidence Was Mine

May twenty-eighth. Simone showed up with a small bottle of good olive oil, not the grocery store kind, the kind from the Saturday market stand where the person behind the table will explain the provenance if you give them any opening at all, and I realized about four minutes into the afternoon that this was the difference between us. She came with an ingredient. I came with a cutting board and the vague intention of being useful.

We had asparagus, snap peas, a lemon I'd bought three days ago with optimistic intentions, and approximately one and a half combined opinions about what to do with them. Simone had more than half. She also had the calm of someone who has failed at a recipe twice and arrived on the other side knowing which part of the failure was instructive. I have been thinking about that since March, her one-new-thing-per-week practice, the two failures mentioned without apology, and watching her pour olive oil into the skillet like it was a statement, I understood it a little better. The two failures were the lesson. The olive oil was the evidence.

the correction was incoming and I was already laughing

I made something that was mostly correct. Simone made something that was actually good. She said mine was fine, which I appreciated for its precision. The vegetables are on the counter in that photograph and I am looking at them with an expression that I can only describe as provisional. I think that is the most honest I have been in the kitchen in a long time, which is maybe what the one-new-thing practice is actually about, not the dish, not the olive oil, but the willingness to stand in front of something you haven't mastered yet and try anyway, in front of a witness, and not make it into a bigger deal than it is. Simone left at six. The pan took longer to clean than the meal took to eat. That seems right.