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December 10, 2005
Why I Am Moving In With Ray Kurzweil
Now don't get worried... I'm not leaving MR, and I can assure you that Ray is not leaving the beautiful woman he's been married to for thirty years. But since he likes my food so much and I love having an appreciative audience for my cooking, we've decided that it only makes sense for me to move into the bedroom recently vacated by his daughter who is off at college and cook all his meals. MR is coming too... he can use the room that was Ray's son's as his office, working happily on his book while Ray is working on his next bestseller, and we can all eat CR meals together! It won't be a problem at all when his family comes home for holidays, since we'll go spend holidays with our birth parents. We may not be related to the Kurzweils, but we sure do eat like them!
As you may have guessed by now, the luncheon went really well. Which is not to say that there weren't little hitches. For example, I headed out from our hotel in a cab at 8 am to hit the Whole Foods and pick up all our groceries for the luncheon, plus a few additions to the Three Hundred Member Dinner. I did my shopping and had plenty of time left over to enjoy a cup of coffee while waiting for Ray's head of business development, Celia, to come pick me up at 9:45 am.
9:45 came. And went. I stared at everyone walking in, wondering if they might be Celia. I even asked a few people if they were looking for me. I have great radar for nurses after all these years of meeting nurses I don't know in diners up and down the east coast, but every woman who walked in looked professional and together, so I had no idea who Celia might be. At about five after ten, my cell rings. It's another of Ray's staff, Nanda, calling to wonder where I am. It gradually dawns on all of us that I am at the wrong Whole Foods!!! Apparently, there are two in the town where Ray lives! Celia finds out where I am and arrives with her chariot to rescue me.
Then we get to the house and of course I am a bit nervous, about to meet the man who is directly responsible for my happy CR life. The first thing he says to me after exchanging some initial pleasantries is, "You don't look like a CR person."
Hmmm, think I. I think that's a compliment. I decide to translate it as, "You don't look like a skinny freak!" MR later confirms that that's exactly what it means. I am pleased. I annouce that there used to be forty pounds more of me.
Ray's house is gorgeous, yet comfortable. The kitchen is great, and I found everything I needed, including two casserole dishes that worked just fine for the frittattas. I unloaded the veggies, stuck the oils in the fridge, and set about making the tattas, since they need an hour to bake.
I began to pour the organic eggwhites into the casserole dishes, and I quickly realized that something was wrong. The eggwhites weren't white -- they were yellow! And the wrong texture! I began to panic. Quick: I thought. Calm. Everything will be okay. No one will die if the food goes wrong, somehow we will solve this problem.
"Celia," I say, "There's a problem."
I check my pulse and though my heart is racing, it's clearly still beating.
"These aren't eggwhites. They're eggs, in a carton. I can't pump everyone full of saturated fat."
Once again, Celia saves the day. She runs to the Whole Foods and purchases four cartons of actual eggwhites. That will teach me to shop for eggwhites without my reading glasses...
Celia returns, we assemble the food, with generous help from Ray's assistant Anya, and all is going well. Ray re-appears from his office as I am assembling the mountains of salad greens and stirring up the vinegarettes. The frittattas are in the oven, baking at 300, and the auction winners begin to arrive.
The auction winners were tons of fun: smart, cute, and they laughed at my jokes. We took the tour of Ray's house, with all the amazing art works, including those by his very talented daughter. We saw the office where Ray writes, including hundreds of cat figurines of which I was most envious. Then we returned to the dining room, and I went in to check on the frittattas.
Which were cold. Like totally cold. Lying in the oven, uncooked. OOOPS! I had turned on the lower oven, thinking I had turned on the upper oven. I moved the frittattas and started to figure out what to do. First, I would go ahead and serve the salad. A huge plate of dino kale, red kale, mustard greens, arugula, and sungold tomatoes. Two vinegarettes: fire roasted tomato vinegarette, and hazelnut nutmeg vinegarette. Here are the recipies for both:
Fire Roasted Tomato Balsamic:
2/3 small can crushed fire roasted tomatoes, Muir Glen Organic brand
1/3 cup balsamic vinegar
3 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
Mix, stir, serve. This is kinda thick, and clings to salad. It was the favorite of the auction winners.
Hazelnut Nutmeg Vinegarette:
Hazelnut oil
Balsamic vinegar
Nutmeg
Adjust the amounts to however much you want -- 4:1 vinegar to oil. Add nutmeg to taste.
"This is a big plate of greens," said Ray.
"I doubt that you're a stranger to big plates of greens," said I.
The winners were surprised at the amount of food, and I think they understood that they wouldn't be allowed to leave until they consumed every last nutrient filled leaf. We served cups of Tzao organic green tea, which was excellent, along with filtered water.
I hopefully approached the oven to see if the frittattas, which were now in an actual hot oven, were making progress.
Pretty runny.
"Celia, we need to figure out a frittatta-cook dance," said I.
We thought about what to do, and decided to serve the baked apples as a little intermezzo dish while we waited for the main course to cook. Apples baked in cinnamon and Grains of Desire, a peppercorn mix that I bought at A Southern Season in North Carolina: peppercorns with nutmeg, cinnamon, cardamom, grains of paradise, and cloves. I added hazelnut oil upon putting it on the plate, a half teaspoon per guest, and served them, with some explanation about the unusual order of courses.
The guests loved the apples. One of them asked how much more food there would be. Apparently, fearing that the CR friendly lunch would be "either very little food, bad, or a tiny pill on the plate," he had eaten a large breakfast at his hotel. I warned him that there was much food to come.
I went back to check on the frittattas. Not cooked.
I refilled the guests' green teas. I began to pray to the god of cooking things. I considered pulling a fire alarm to create a distraction.
Celia and I cleared the guests' plates, and collected their frittatta plates. By this time there was enough cooked frittatta to carve out safe pieces. The frittattas looked pretty: red pepper and arugula for one, broccoli for the other. They were a little dryer and less fluffy than usual, since they cooked for a shorter time on higher heat. But they went over fine, and we progressed to the dessert.
Celia cut the two Sherm's Binging Brownies and one Megamuffin that MR had donated to the cause into nine cute cubes each, and we toasted them in the toaster oven. We served them on a tray, and they went like hotcakes. The crowd appreciated the 10% of the RDA of everything per 100 calories figure, and they loved the desserts.
Ray talked with us about technology, nutrition, inventing, and all sorts of things. I missed quite a bit of the conversation running back and forth to the kitchen, but I definitely enjoyed being in the company of such brilliant people. Ray's dining room was a beautiful setting, with a view of the lake and amazing art worked in with a history of family pictures.
After lunch, I took my lunch time supplements and got Ray's dish full of supplements. I thought, not for the first time, of how well he would fit in with me and MR at our house. Eggwhites, raw veggies, green tea, supplements.
Ray is actually much easier to cook for than MR. He doesn't weigh and measure all his food, so I was able to throw together lunch in no time flat. I could probably cook a Kurzweil meal in about fifteen minutes. It made me think about how very much my perspective has changed since I started cooking for MR every day. Carefully measuring every morsel and not just controlling calories, but macronutrient ratios, is easy for me now, but it took some work to get used to and it makes regular healthy cooking seem like a vacation.
Finally it was time to go, and the winners and I spent the car ride back to MIT discussing our fascinating meal with Ray Kurzweil. We all felt like we had had a priceless experience. Being in the company of someone who has blazed so many trails could seem intimidating, but Ray was so friendly and gracious that we all felt at ease almost immediately.
And he liked the food. That's what really matters.
Posted by april at December 10, 2005 10:35 AM
Comments
I am so jealous. I would have killed to have been there.
Posted by: Kip Werking at December 11, 2005 8:55 PM
I wonder which brand of green tea ray kurzweil drinks. April, can you comment on this? I'd *love* to know.
I'm sure he's done his research or has heard enough from his peers about teas, and has fairly good reasons in backing up his choice. It might just be a matter of flavor, but I also think he might have some strong insight on what other factors he took into consideration...
Posted by: krystian at February 19, 2008 1:50 PM