A Good Day for Dinner

By Kiley Bense

Maggie’s plate: chicken with creamy mushrooms and arugula salad. Photo: Kiley Bense.

On a good day for dinner, Maggie Klimentova, 23, gets off the subway at Grand Central Station around six p.m. She walks past the glowing clock in the hall’s center, through the MetLife building, and turns east, knee-high leather boots swatting the pavement. When she reaches 45th street, she goes into the Amish Market, grabbing a basket and heading for the produce section. She inspects the tomatoes, plucks a lemon from the pile, and fills a plastic bag with red onions. Then she leans toward the herbs, smelling the parsley before adding a bunch to the basket, her violet-patterned scarf and long blonde hair falling forward. Later, Maggie will forget the word for parsley. Because she was raised in a Russian-speaking household in suburban Westchester county New York, Maggie didn’t learn the English vocabulary of the kitchen until she was in college. “I’m used to talking about cooking in Russian,” she says.

Today is a good day for dinner because Maggie got off work on time. As a young paralegal in a law firm downtown, her work hours can be erratic and unpredictable. That means a lot of take out meals, purchased on Seamless and eaten at her desk. But tonight she plans to cook.

At the meat freezer, she hesitates, unsure of which chicken to choose. Maggie likes to buy organic meats if she can and budgets her grocery spending carefully, because she can’t afford all-organic all the time.

Maggie’s fridge, divided in half between her and her roommate. The top shelf is Maggie’s. Photo: Kiley Bense.

“It’s the one thing I miss about the suburbs,” Maggie says as a woman struggles to push down the narrow aisle, between her and a cart loaded with salad dressing bottles. “The supermarkets.”

At the check-out line down the stairs, where the walls are orange-yellow, she pulls out her wallet–faded and decorated with colorful owls–to pay the cashier for two packages of mushrooms, two packages of chicken, heavy cream, tomatoes, lemons, red onions, goat cheese, parsley and arugula. The total, $48.04, will cover a series of dinners, not just tonight’s. She will save some of the mushrooms, apportion the chicken, leave a tomato out of the salad. “It’s good to cook ahead,” she says. “Since I left work on time, I want to take advantage of that.” But even that plan doesn’t always pan out–too many late nights at work and the leftovers end up rotting in the refrigerator.

Maggie’s freezer, filled with Eggo waffles. Photo: Kiley Bense.

She walks the few blocks to her two-bedroom apartment, shared with a roommate– a bright place with a white kitchen, a map made up of butterflies pinned to the wall, and a freezer full of waffles. Like the character Leslie Knope on one of her favorite TV shows, the comedy “Parks and Recreation,” Maggie really likes waffles. She apologizes for the empty Fresh Direct boxes by the door.

Maggie learned to cook as a child, watching her dad. A favorite treat that her family makes at home is Russian dumplings, called pelmeni, usually filled with meat. A year and a half into her job, though, Maggie’s time for meals is limited, and she rarely has the hours needed to prepare complicated dishes. “If I’m feeling very adventurous,” she says. “I’ll make them.”

Most recipes that Maggie makes for weeknight dinners are simple and fast. A few, like a Russian pasta dish, are foods she often ate at home growing up (her dad is Russian and her mom is Ukrainian). The one she is preparing tonight is from the magazine Real Simple, which she appreciates for its easy recipes.

Chopping vegetables for the salad. Photo: Kiley Bense.

Maggie washes the mushrooms, seasons the chicken with salt and pepper on a purple cutting board, and heats olive oil in a skillet on the stove, complaining about the vagaries of gas heat. While the chicken cooks, she chops the mushrooms. Using a spatula and knife, she checks the chicken for doneness, and transfers the cutlets to a plate. Then she cooks the mushrooms and parsley, adds the heavy cream and goat cheese and stirs. The sauce simmers, and she quickly fixes a salad from the arugula, tomato, onion and lemon juice, dousing it in olive oil and salt and pepper.

As the clock inches toward eight, she sits down at the glass coffee table in the living room with a plate full of chicken and salad and a glass of pink lemonade.

See Maggie Klimentova’s recipe here.

The chicken and salad mid-preparation. Photo: Kiley Bense.

Kiley Bense