How Steve Weinstein Turns a Queens Kitchen Into the Emotional Center of a Comic Novel
When the house goes to war, she sets the table. When the world goes strange, she checks the oven.
That is the quiet genius of Miriam Ballnick in Steve Weinstein’s comic novel Nuts To You, a story for anyone who suspects that the most important person in any tale is the one holding the ladle. Around her, a retired lawyer wages war on the garden, a scientist sets up shop in the basement, and two squirrels learn to read. Miriam takes it all in and asks whether anyone is hungry.
Weinstein could have made her a punchline. Instead, he makes her the anchor of the book, and he does it without ever letting her raise her voice.
A Menu for Every Emergency
When Dr. Radcliffe moves into the basement to hunt for a cure, Miriam does not ask about the science. She plans new menus. Her cooking, the narrator notes, is a giant leap from the sardine sandwiches the doctor is used to, and the doctor eats better than he has in years. This is Miriam’s rule of hospitality, and it applies equally to scientists, students, bartenders, and the squirrels in the yard. Anyone who visits her house will not go hungry, no matter how strange the circumstances.
Her timing can be hilarious. On the day of the great garden negotiation, with a peace treaty hanging in the balance, she casually announces that she has a lasagna in the oven. Smiley and Zina exchange a look. They have no idea what lasagna is, but if Miriam made it, it must be good. A few minutes later, while everyone else argues over visiting hours, she pushes for a resolution so that she can get back to her stove. It is a small comic detail that explains her priorities better than a page of description.
The Philosophy of the Ladle
Weinstein describes Miriam as a gentle lioness, harmless unless purposely agitated, and he gives her a philosophy to match. Food, the narrator explains, is her tool the way sarcasm is her husband’s, a way to stay on guard and to adapt to any hurdle that life throws her way. Asked how she does it, she answers, “Giving love and being positive is the best way to avoid the negative traps of life.” Then she adds, “Making a good meatloaf doesn’t hurt either. Meals are like serving love on a plate.”
It would be easy to laugh at that, and the book does laugh, but it also means it. Miriam’s calm is not an accident or a weakness. It is a strategy refined over decades of living with a man who treats every conversation as a cross-examination. She is happiest, the narrator confides, when talking about her two favorite subjects, her husband and her cooking, and the cooking takes a narrow lead.
The Titanic Test
Richard, who has read every personality theory in the psychology textbook, admits that his best lessons came from watching his mother. “Mom is the ultimate in calmness,” he says. “If she was on the Titanic, she’d be handing out menus instead of life jackets.” He learned to handle his father by studying how she did it, and he suspects she once ended a father-and-son standoff over baseball by threatening to stop cooking. In the Ballnick house, that is roughly the equivalent of calling in the army.
The narrator adds a note of pride. When a newcomer to the family offers to cook a surprise dinner once a week, Miriam agrees, but only under her close supervision. After all, it is still her kitchen, and she is not about to give it up so soon. The stove is her territory, and she defends it with the calm of a general who has never lost a battle.
Secrets, Martinis, and a Very Fast Meat Loaf
Miriam’s devotion to feeding her family leaves little time for close friendships, so when a visiting college reporter turns up with a martini mix, she opens the vault. “Just between us” is how she starts every confidence. She has not touched a martini in years, but she insists that the recorder be turned off, and the afternoon becomes a giggling, sentimental session of secrets. She reveals that she once nearly got engaged to a man who turned out to be a vegetarian. She could not spend her life with someone who refused her chicken. “What would I do with all my recipes?” she asks.
Then comes the confession that is pure Weinstein. Feeling sorry for a certain animal defender sitting in a correctional facility, Miriam has mailed him a meatloaf. Priority mail. When she hears that he spent a few days in the infirmary with what everyone assumes was a stomach virus, she worries aloud that it might have been her cooking. It is a woman whose love language is so strong it gets delivered to jail. Like any good meal, the story saves something special for the end, a twist that readers won’t see coming. Nuts To You has a place at the table for readers who want to meet the woman at the center of the kitchen.
A kitchen can hold a family together…
A ladle can outrank a lawyer…
A meatloaf can travel farther than anyone expects…
In Nuts To You, the strongest character in the house is the one who never stops cooking!
Author: Steve Weinstein. Book: Nuts To You. Published by Author Path Publishers.
