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smackenzieParrish lived in the Abbey, an old nunnery complex now converted into fancy clubs and shops and high-end condos. Lea had dragged Laurie into some of the boutiques, usually when she was looking for a girly present for her mom, but he'd never been in any of the condos. It occurred to him as he rode around that if he was more of a class warrior he might be impressed with himself for having netted a rich boy. But he was more or less class-blind - in the dark, without their clothes on, on their hands and knees or splayed on their backs, everyone was pretty much the same - and in fact his only thought as he found a place to park his bike was How much do city planners make? He hadn't thought the city paid its employees that well.
He jammed his riding gloves in his jacket pockets and tried not to cradle the bottle of wine too close to his body. He found the right door and buzzed Parrish's apartment and half wished it was a lunch date so he could get a better look at the place. The Abbey was one of those places his mom half-wished she could afford to live in. But Laurie's mom was more of a romantic than he was.
Parrish buzzed him in and he went inside and up to the apartment, which was open. Parrish stood in the doorway, wearing dark pants and a pale yellow shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and an apron. He was grinning.
"Come in," he said, gesturing Laurie inside.
"I've only ever been to the Abbey to shop," Laurie said. "Well, so my friend Lea could shop. She was at the Pig with me on Tuesday - you met her."
"I remember. Thanks for the wine." Parrish took the bottle and read over the label. "Oh, Red Hill, they make a really nice merlot. Should I open it now or do you want to wait for dinner?" Laurie shrugged and Parrish seemed to remember more of his manners, putting the bottle on a side table and gesturing for Laurie to take his jacket off. "Let me hang that up." Laurie shrugged out of it and handed it over, and Parrish hung it in the front closet. "Come all the way in. Welcome to Casa de Parrish."
Parrish picked the wine back up and led the way through the apartment and into the kitchen. It was a nice modern kitchen, sleek and shiny, with a blue enamel Mixmaster on the counter and a wood butcher block table like an island in the middle. Parrish had obviously started getting ready to make dinner - there were bowls and pots out on the counter, a bag of frozen peas, a bag of frozen shrimp, a bottle of olive oil, a box of rice, and a bottle of vermouth. Parrish put the wine in the fridge.
"Do you want something to drink?" he asked. "I have wine - " he grinned and Laurie grinned back " - beer, soda, sparkling water, iced tea, or I can make you a drink if you want something harder."
"Beer's fine," Laurie said, accepting a bottle of Harpoon from Parrish.
"Are you hungry? Or do you want the house tour first?"
"Uh... house tour." Laurie didn't usually go to someone's apartment and get a tour, but Parrish was clearly eager to show off his place. It reminded Laurie of the excitement he got showing off his bike to someone, or his guitars, or the way little kids wanted to show you all their action figures or comic books or video games, whatever they collected that they loved.
The apartment was fairly large and airy, considering only one person lived there and the building surrounding it was looming stone gothic. It had tall windows with pointed arches, wood beams in the vaulted ceilings of the living and dining rooms, a balcony, hardwood floors, craftsman furniture, black and white photos, mostly of buildings or landscapes and framed in simple metal or black frames. Laurie recognized one or two as Ansel Adams prints, because Lea's mom had gone through an obsessive Ansel Adams phase and even now bought one of the photographer's calendars each year.
The whole place was cozy and warm and lived-in, although it was much tidier than, say, Laurie's apartment, which was in a perpetual state of mess. It was also very clearly the apartment of a man of taste and money, or someone who had been brought up with money, because even Laurie could tell that some of the furniture was genuine antique instead of reproduction, and one of the lamps in the living room was real Tiffany, and some of those cameras sitting in the study were really old, and the leather-bound books? Probably dating back to when the Abbey was a nunnery and school, before the clubs and shops and condos and cute boys bearing cold beer in bottles.
And Parrish led him through the apartment like it was the most normal thing ever, like all these trappings of solid wealth meant nothing to him. He pointed out a Frank Lloyd Wright chair, which he admitted wasn't that comfortable, with the same enthusiasm that he used on a big shell with a painting of a beach and palm trees on it, which he got in the Bahamas for five bucks. Laurie was getting the feeling that Parrish liked what he liked, regardless of what label it carried or how much it cost.
One of the bathrooms had been converted into a darkroom - "I had to have all the plans finished before the condo board would let me do it," Parrish said, "and I had to already have a way to dispose of the chemicals. They needed to make sure it was properly ventilated and everything. I told you I was an amateur photographer, didn't I?"
"Yeah, at the Pig." Laurie sipped his beer and peered into the darkroom/bathroom. There were trays stacked next to the sink and a row of boxes with spouts on a shelf over them. "You said you were there to take pictures for a show someone wanted you to do."
"My friend Sativa. She has a very small gallery space on Childers Street and was planning to mount a show of local amateur photographers, but I don't know if she will after all. She's a little bit of a dilettante and kind of a flake." Laurie tried not to snerk into his beer. He had friends like that too.
They went back out to the living room and Laurie pointed to a group of portrait photos on one wall behind the couch and asked "Did you take those? Who are they?" All of them looked like formal portraits except one, which showed a man in waders standing in the middle of a creek and holding up a big fish hanging from a line. He was squinting into the camera but looked pleased with his catch.
"My parents, my sister, my grandmother." Parrish pointed to them in turn. The man with the fish turned out to be his dad. "My mother, when she learned how involved I was getting with the photography, wanted me to take a formal portrait of her. I think she'd rather have an artistic son than one who works for the city. City planning is too... gritty for her. She likes being able to point to pictures and say 'Isn't that nice? My son took that.'" He made a face and for a minute Laurie felt bad for him. Laurie's mom wasn't utterly thrilled that he made his living as a waiter, even though he was a waiter in a posh restaurant, and she wished he'd picked something a little more secure than rock music, but she was proud of him no matter what he did, as long as he loved it and worked hard. She'd had all kinds of expectations for him, he knew that, and he'd probably dashed every single one of them, but she almost never held it against him. He figured Parrish's mom had.
"My father thought the whole thing was silly," Parrish went on, "but he said if I really wanted a picture of him I could take one of him fishing. He fly fishes. He has this group of friends who go away on weekends and fish and drink beer and sit around in the sun and probably brag about their kids and complain about their wives." He looked at Laurie and smiled. "They clean their own fish and grill them, and the first thing my dad wants when he comes home is a glass of water and a bagel. My mom thinks he's insane. She doesn't understand it. I think in another life my dad was an outdoorsman - he's a banker and economist and he sits in an office all day and I think he enjoys it, at least as much as most people enjoy their jobs, but he's really happy when he's outside. He hates to ski but he likes snowmobiling and cross-country and snowshoeing. He fishes. I think he'd like to hunt, but I also think it's too barbaric for him. My parents are pretty genteel people."
"Mine aren't," Laurie said. He'd been looking at Parrish during the story of Parrish's parents, but now he studied the photos. "They're pretty middle-class. They're suburban folks, you know? Sometimes they'll come into the city for a show - my mom likes musicals - but they're pretty content where they are. Skiing is for rich people, hunting is what rednecks do. They wouldn't know where to go to fish."
"My dad goes to Maine." There was a brief silence, and Laurie turned from the photos on the wall to find Parrish watching him intently. "What about you, Laurie?"
"What about me?"
"Would you go fishing with me?"
"I think it would bore me stupid. You have to sit quiet in a boat until some fish is dumb enough to bite your hook." He shrugged, drained his beer. "I can think of better things to do with my time."
"I'm not a big fan of it either," Parrish said, grinning. Laurie noticed for the first time how you could just see the corners of Parrish's eyes crinkling behind his little wire-rim glasses. It was adorable. He smiled with his whole face. "That's the grand tour. I'm hungry now, how about you?"
"Starved." And not just for food.
They went back into the kitchen, Parrish explaining that he had to serve the risotto as soon as it was done, but he had to pretty much baby-sit it while it was cooking. He said it might be twenty minutes, but in the meantime he had cheese and crackers so they didn't perish from hunger, and would Laurie like something else to drink? Laurie said sure, another beer would be great, and was Parrish just trying to get him drunk so he could take advantage of him?
"You found me out," Parrish laughed, leaning in for a quick (and surprising) kiss before turning to his food.
Laurie leaned against the butcher block island and watched as Parrish turned on the burner under one of the pots, heated stock, heated up the peas and shrimp, fried onions and celery, added the rice, stirred, added vermouth, stirred some more, and poured stock over the whole thing, a ladle at a time. While he cooked he talked, telling Laurie how he learned to love risotto when he did a semester abroad in Italy his third year of college, how he fell in love in Florence and had his heart broken at the base of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, how his grandmother had taught him to make the biscuits that any southern cook worth his or her salt could do.
Laurie listened, interested, until Parrish asked him to get the salad out of the fridge - it was in the salad spinner, it was hard to miss - and if he wanted tomatoes there was a little box of them over there, they were grape tomatoes, was that ok? There was some bleu cheese in the fridge too, would Laurie mind putting the salad together? The salad bowl was on the counter right there. Parrish pointed with his elbow.
Laurie dumped the lettuce out of the salad spinner, washed some grape tomatoes and added them, and crumbled bleu cheese over the top, while Parrish added the shrimp and peas to the rice. He stirred for another minute, then put a lid on the pot and came over to inspect the salad.
"Looks good," he said. "I wasn't sure if you'd want the cheese or not - not everyone likes bleu cheese."
"I like it," Laurie said. "I get to taste everything they make at the restaurant, so I can explain it to diners and I think because the chef is just that proud of himself, and I learned to like it. I like a lot of things I didn't think I'd ever want to eat."
"Oh?" There was a world of innuendo in that one word, and Laurie grinned.
"Yeah. I'll put just about anything in my mouth now."
"I hope so," Parrish said. He got out a bottle of vinegar and shook it and some olive oil in a cruet, then took that and the salad bowl out to the dining room, where two places were set across from each other at the end of the table. "Usually we'd eat in the breakfast nook," he explained, "but this felt kind of special to me. I just wanted it to be nice."
"It is so far." Laurie couldn't resist taking the lid off the risotto and peering in. It looked and smelled fantastic. Parrish came back, peered over his shoulder, then reached around and turned off the stove. He poured the risotto into a bowl, squeezed a lemon over it, sprinkled on some herbs, drizzled a little olive oil, and motioned for Laurie to go sit. Laurie went and sat.
Parrish brought out the risotto, then went back into the kitchen for the wine and a pitcher of water. He uncorked the sauvignon blanc, poured some for both of them, and sat. He picked up his glass. Laurie followed suit.
"A toast," Parrish said. "To the rice." He grinned.
"To the rice," Laurie repeated. "It smells great."
"Help yourself." Parrish sipped his wine and watched Laurie over the rim of his glass as Laurie helped himself to risotto and tried it. "Well?"
"Oh man, Parrish, this is fantastic. Any time you want to come cook for me you're more than welcome."
"I might take you up on that."
"I hope you do."
words: 2462
total words: 36,778
parrish's risotto made its first appearance on the naked chef. the recipe's in one of jamie oliver's cookbooks and i also found it here. the abbey where he lives belongs to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
cicirossi.
He jammed his riding gloves in his jacket pockets and tried not to cradle the bottle of wine too close to his body. He found the right door and buzzed Parrish's apartment and half wished it was a lunch date so he could get a better look at the place. The Abbey was one of those places his mom half-wished she could afford to live in. But Laurie's mom was more of a romantic than he was.
Parrish buzzed him in and he went inside and up to the apartment, which was open. Parrish stood in the doorway, wearing dark pants and a pale yellow shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and an apron. He was grinning.
"Come in," he said, gesturing Laurie inside.
"I've only ever been to the Abbey to shop," Laurie said. "Well, so my friend Lea could shop. She was at the Pig with me on Tuesday - you met her."
"I remember. Thanks for the wine." Parrish took the bottle and read over the label. "Oh, Red Hill, they make a really nice merlot. Should I open it now or do you want to wait for dinner?" Laurie shrugged and Parrish seemed to remember more of his manners, putting the bottle on a side table and gesturing for Laurie to take his jacket off. "Let me hang that up." Laurie shrugged out of it and handed it over, and Parrish hung it in the front closet. "Come all the way in. Welcome to Casa de Parrish."
Parrish picked the wine back up and led the way through the apartment and into the kitchen. It was a nice modern kitchen, sleek and shiny, with a blue enamel Mixmaster on the counter and a wood butcher block table like an island in the middle. Parrish had obviously started getting ready to make dinner - there were bowls and pots out on the counter, a bag of frozen peas, a bag of frozen shrimp, a bottle of olive oil, a box of rice, and a bottle of vermouth. Parrish put the wine in the fridge.
"Do you want something to drink?" he asked. "I have wine - " he grinned and Laurie grinned back " - beer, soda, sparkling water, iced tea, or I can make you a drink if you want something harder."
"Beer's fine," Laurie said, accepting a bottle of Harpoon from Parrish.
"Are you hungry? Or do you want the house tour first?"
"Uh... house tour." Laurie didn't usually go to someone's apartment and get a tour, but Parrish was clearly eager to show off his place. It reminded Laurie of the excitement he got showing off his bike to someone, or his guitars, or the way little kids wanted to show you all their action figures or comic books or video games, whatever they collected that they loved.
The apartment was fairly large and airy, considering only one person lived there and the building surrounding it was looming stone gothic. It had tall windows with pointed arches, wood beams in the vaulted ceilings of the living and dining rooms, a balcony, hardwood floors, craftsman furniture, black and white photos, mostly of buildings or landscapes and framed in simple metal or black frames. Laurie recognized one or two as Ansel Adams prints, because Lea's mom had gone through an obsessive Ansel Adams phase and even now bought one of the photographer's calendars each year.
The whole place was cozy and warm and lived-in, although it was much tidier than, say, Laurie's apartment, which was in a perpetual state of mess. It was also very clearly the apartment of a man of taste and money, or someone who had been brought up with money, because even Laurie could tell that some of the furniture was genuine antique instead of reproduction, and one of the lamps in the living room was real Tiffany, and some of those cameras sitting in the study were really old, and the leather-bound books? Probably dating back to when the Abbey was a nunnery and school, before the clubs and shops and condos and cute boys bearing cold beer in bottles.
And Parrish led him through the apartment like it was the most normal thing ever, like all these trappings of solid wealth meant nothing to him. He pointed out a Frank Lloyd Wright chair, which he admitted wasn't that comfortable, with the same enthusiasm that he used on a big shell with a painting of a beach and palm trees on it, which he got in the Bahamas for five bucks. Laurie was getting the feeling that Parrish liked what he liked, regardless of what label it carried or how much it cost.
One of the bathrooms had been converted into a darkroom - "I had to have all the plans finished before the condo board would let me do it," Parrish said, "and I had to already have a way to dispose of the chemicals. They needed to make sure it was properly ventilated and everything. I told you I was an amateur photographer, didn't I?"
"Yeah, at the Pig." Laurie sipped his beer and peered into the darkroom/bathroom. There were trays stacked next to the sink and a row of boxes with spouts on a shelf over them. "You said you were there to take pictures for a show someone wanted you to do."
"My friend Sativa. She has a very small gallery space on Childers Street and was planning to mount a show of local amateur photographers, but I don't know if she will after all. She's a little bit of a dilettante and kind of a flake." Laurie tried not to snerk into his beer. He had friends like that too.
They went back out to the living room and Laurie pointed to a group of portrait photos on one wall behind the couch and asked "Did you take those? Who are they?" All of them looked like formal portraits except one, which showed a man in waders standing in the middle of a creek and holding up a big fish hanging from a line. He was squinting into the camera but looked pleased with his catch.
"My parents, my sister, my grandmother." Parrish pointed to them in turn. The man with the fish turned out to be his dad. "My mother, when she learned how involved I was getting with the photography, wanted me to take a formal portrait of her. I think she'd rather have an artistic son than one who works for the city. City planning is too... gritty for her. She likes being able to point to pictures and say 'Isn't that nice? My son took that.'" He made a face and for a minute Laurie felt bad for him. Laurie's mom wasn't utterly thrilled that he made his living as a waiter, even though he was a waiter in a posh restaurant, and she wished he'd picked something a little more secure than rock music, but she was proud of him no matter what he did, as long as he loved it and worked hard. She'd had all kinds of expectations for him, he knew that, and he'd probably dashed every single one of them, but she almost never held it against him. He figured Parrish's mom had.
"My father thought the whole thing was silly," Parrish went on, "but he said if I really wanted a picture of him I could take one of him fishing. He fly fishes. He has this group of friends who go away on weekends and fish and drink beer and sit around in the sun and probably brag about their kids and complain about their wives." He looked at Laurie and smiled. "They clean their own fish and grill them, and the first thing my dad wants when he comes home is a glass of water and a bagel. My mom thinks he's insane. She doesn't understand it. I think in another life my dad was an outdoorsman - he's a banker and economist and he sits in an office all day and I think he enjoys it, at least as much as most people enjoy their jobs, but he's really happy when he's outside. He hates to ski but he likes snowmobiling and cross-country and snowshoeing. He fishes. I think he'd like to hunt, but I also think it's too barbaric for him. My parents are pretty genteel people."
"Mine aren't," Laurie said. He'd been looking at Parrish during the story of Parrish's parents, but now he studied the photos. "They're pretty middle-class. They're suburban folks, you know? Sometimes they'll come into the city for a show - my mom likes musicals - but they're pretty content where they are. Skiing is for rich people, hunting is what rednecks do. They wouldn't know where to go to fish."
"My dad goes to Maine." There was a brief silence, and Laurie turned from the photos on the wall to find Parrish watching him intently. "What about you, Laurie?"
"What about me?"
"Would you go fishing with me?"
"I think it would bore me stupid. You have to sit quiet in a boat until some fish is dumb enough to bite your hook." He shrugged, drained his beer. "I can think of better things to do with my time."
"I'm not a big fan of it either," Parrish said, grinning. Laurie noticed for the first time how you could just see the corners of Parrish's eyes crinkling behind his little wire-rim glasses. It was adorable. He smiled with his whole face. "That's the grand tour. I'm hungry now, how about you?"
"Starved." And not just for food.
They went back into the kitchen, Parrish explaining that he had to serve the risotto as soon as it was done, but he had to pretty much baby-sit it while it was cooking. He said it might be twenty minutes, but in the meantime he had cheese and crackers so they didn't perish from hunger, and would Laurie like something else to drink? Laurie said sure, another beer would be great, and was Parrish just trying to get him drunk so he could take advantage of him?
"You found me out," Parrish laughed, leaning in for a quick (and surprising) kiss before turning to his food.
Laurie leaned against the butcher block island and watched as Parrish turned on the burner under one of the pots, heated stock, heated up the peas and shrimp, fried onions and celery, added the rice, stirred, added vermouth, stirred some more, and poured stock over the whole thing, a ladle at a time. While he cooked he talked, telling Laurie how he learned to love risotto when he did a semester abroad in Italy his third year of college, how he fell in love in Florence and had his heart broken at the base of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, how his grandmother had taught him to make the biscuits that any southern cook worth his or her salt could do.
Laurie listened, interested, until Parrish asked him to get the salad out of the fridge - it was in the salad spinner, it was hard to miss - and if he wanted tomatoes there was a little box of them over there, they were grape tomatoes, was that ok? There was some bleu cheese in the fridge too, would Laurie mind putting the salad together? The salad bowl was on the counter right there. Parrish pointed with his elbow.
Laurie dumped the lettuce out of the salad spinner, washed some grape tomatoes and added them, and crumbled bleu cheese over the top, while Parrish added the shrimp and peas to the rice. He stirred for another minute, then put a lid on the pot and came over to inspect the salad.
"Looks good," he said. "I wasn't sure if you'd want the cheese or not - not everyone likes bleu cheese."
"I like it," Laurie said. "I get to taste everything they make at the restaurant, so I can explain it to diners and I think because the chef is just that proud of himself, and I learned to like it. I like a lot of things I didn't think I'd ever want to eat."
"Oh?" There was a world of innuendo in that one word, and Laurie grinned.
"Yeah. I'll put just about anything in my mouth now."
"I hope so," Parrish said. He got out a bottle of vinegar and shook it and some olive oil in a cruet, then took that and the salad bowl out to the dining room, where two places were set across from each other at the end of the table. "Usually we'd eat in the breakfast nook," he explained, "but this felt kind of special to me. I just wanted it to be nice."
"It is so far." Laurie couldn't resist taking the lid off the risotto and peering in. It looked and smelled fantastic. Parrish came back, peered over his shoulder, then reached around and turned off the stove. He poured the risotto into a bowl, squeezed a lemon over it, sprinkled on some herbs, drizzled a little olive oil, and motioned for Laurie to go sit. Laurie went and sat.
Parrish brought out the risotto, then went back into the kitchen for the wine and a pitcher of water. He uncorked the sauvignon blanc, poured some for both of them, and sat. He picked up his glass. Laurie followed suit.
"A toast," Parrish said. "To the rice." He grinned.
"To the rice," Laurie repeated. "It smells great."
"Help yourself." Parrish sipped his wine and watched Laurie over the rim of his glass as Laurie helped himself to risotto and tried it. "Well?"
"Oh man, Parrish, this is fantastic. Any time you want to come cook for me you're more than welcome."
"I might take you up on that."
"I hope you do."
words: 2462
total words: 36,778
parrish's risotto made its first appearance on the naked chef. the recipe's in one of jamie oliver's cookbooks and i also found it here. the abbey where he lives belongs to
cicirossi.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2003-11-20 06:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-11-20 06:11 pm (UTC)