WV Culinary Team: Soup for a snow day -- or any day

The airline offered to rebook. A friend sent a screenshot of the forecast — the kind of snow map that turns the whole Northeast white.

We went anyway.

The West Virginia International Yeager Airport in Charleston has a twice-a-week direct flight to Newark, New Jersey, with one departure time. It feels like a small miracle every time I book it.

We landed in time for brunch.

Our favorite spot in Brooklyn — oysters, dirty rice with soft-cooked eggs, a mushroom frittata with crème fraîche. We studied the menu for dessert. The house-made madeleines were right there. We were already full. We ordered the French toast instead, split three ways. Caramelized bananas. Chantilly cream.

We are gluttons. We know it.

On the way to the subway, we stopped for Linzer cookies. I can't pass them in a New York bakery window. That's a story for another time.

Our son Henry works at NR, a ramen and cocktail bar in Manhattan. He has rehearsals with a contemporary dance company on weekends, tutors math students on the side. The New York artist life, assembled piece by piece.

That night, at dinner at NR, the manager took good care of us. Henry is part of the family, he said. We sat at the marble-topped bar while plates arrived. Kobe beef ramen with bone marrow. Deviled eggs with sea urchin and caviar. Pork bao buns. Karaage fried chicken. The kind of meal that makes you quiet.

By then, it was already snowing.

The bridges first, then the streets. The mayor closed the roads to non-essential traffic at 8 p.m., the bridges at 9 p.m. Our 20-minute cab ride to Brooklyn stretched to 40, the driver navigating around stalled cars and lines of garbage trucks fitted with snowplows. The snow was coming down sideways under the streetlights. My husband Johnsey, distracted by all of it, left his phone in the cab.

We did not go back for it.

Somewhere between the oysters and the closed bridges, Henry and I texted links to cake recipes. This is what we do when we know we're going to be stuck somewhere. We planned to bake. My phone buzzed. An upside-down chocolate blackberry cake. A raspberry Selma cake with layers of jam and whipped cream between brioche.

We were going to do everything. Cards. Laundry. Clean the apartment. Bake. Bake. Bake.

The next morning, Henry called his neighborhood market to ask whether it was open. It was. We walked a few blocks in the streets — the sidewalks were buried, but the streets were empty. No traffic. No horns. Just snow and the occasional person doing the same thing we were, walking where the cars usually go.

We filled a cart with essentials. I slipped in a few things when no one was looking. Chocolate cake mix. Frozen blackberries. Two dark chocolate bars. Pistachios. Quality olive oil for the orange citrus cake we were absolutely going to make.

Henry caught me.

"What are those for?"

"You," I said.

Back at the apartment — a converted warehouse — a refrigerator from the 1970s stands near the front door, as if it has never quite made it to the kitchen. The kitchen itself is a narrow galley: dome shop lights hung on extension cords, pipes along the ceiling, a hot water tank wedged in next to the sink. It smelled like coffee grounds and garlic and something burned in a cast-iron skillet someone had left for later.

We started to take stock.

A colander? No. A vegetable peeler? He uses the back of a knife. Four bowls for the soup? He had what he described as an approximation of four soup-adjacent containers.

No, Mom. This is just how I live.

Johnsey looked around the kitchen and quietly made some decisions. Wine glasses, because everyone needs stemware. A colander. A vegetable peeler. A paper towel holder. All of it shipped directly to Henry.

We started the soup. We couldn't find fire-roasted tomatoes at the market, so we roasted our own: a can of whole tomatoes spread on a sheet pan, into the oven. We waited. We got impatient. We turned on the broiler.

We ended up with charred tomatoes, which is not the same thing, but is not nothing, either.

Henry had freekeh — cracked, nutty, a grain I'd never cooked with before. It went into the pot with black-eyed peas, a good amount of garlic, the slightly-too-charred tomatoes, carrots and celery. While it simmered, we toasted sourdough in the skillet, drizzled it with olive oil. I rubbed a cut garlic clove straight across the warm bread. Henry prefers to mince his, sauté it, drizzle it on after. That's too fussy for just a few pieces, I said. But not as good, he said. We laughed.

After the soup was done, we peeled satsumas and ate them standing in the kitchen. The olive oil cake felt like too much. We were done pulling out pots and pans.

The satsumas were perfect.

Henry's dance class was canceled. The museums closed. Even NR closed, which almost never happens. Henry lent me his sherpa slippers — Johnsey had bought them on a trip the previous January, which tells you everything about Johnsey. We played Spite and Malice with his Andy Warhol decks around the coffee table in Henry's bedroom. A full wall of windows faced out over the neighborhood. The sky and the street were the same white. To one side, a fortune cookie factory, silent, no smoke coming from the stacks. We bundled under blankets. The heat in the apartment would only take things so far before it started losing ground, so you aimed for almost warm and called it good.

We never made the cake. By the time we'd made the soup and played cards, the afternoon was gone. We had not baked a single thing. We had not needed to.

The movie theater a block away posted they were open: hot toddys, popcorn, table service. We put on our coats.

The next day, the city was bright and loud. The sidewalks and roads were cleared, snow drifts pushed to the side like little walls throughout the city. Just in time for us to make our flight home. After breakfast in a nearby Taiwanese-American café and a stop in an Italian bakery for one more Linzer cookies, of course. This time filled with passion fruit.

I imagine the cake mix is still in Henry's pantry. The frozen blackberries in his freezer. The good olive oil. One of the chocolate bars is definitely open. I bought the treats for a night when he wants to make a thing — the upside-down blackberry cake, or something he invents himself. Pistachios on the counter for whenever.

The soup was really good. Dark and smoky, exactly right for that kitchen and that day. The charred tomatoes gave it something the roasted ones wouldn't have.

What I'll remember is this: that for a few days, in a blizzard, in a kitchen with no colander, our kid was doing just fine.