Cooking as Fast as I Can (24 page)

The Melting Pot
was Food Network's catchall ethnic cuisine show. Five sets of chefs rotated through, demonstrating their favorite dishes from Africa and the Caribbean, Eastern Europe, India, the Mediterranean, and Latin America. Upon closer inspection of my résumé, the executives had discovered my roots were as Greek as they were southern and paired me
with Rocco DiSpirito, an Italian American, to represent Mediterranean cuisine.

I auditioned in New York and was at Postino when I got the call. I immediately phoned Jennifer. “You aren't going to believe this! I got it! I got it!” I was hyperventilating, the walls of my little office off the kitchen were spinning. I jumped up and down and shrieked and Jennifer jumped up and down and shrieked on the other end of the line, both of us behaving like middle schoolers who'd just found out they'd made the cheerleading team.

My cohost, Rocco DiSpirito, was everywhere in 2000. A few years earlier he'd opened Union Pacific in Gramercy Park, about which restaurant critic Ruth Reichl swooned in
The New York Times
, “Even in New York, where bright young chefs are a dime a dozen, his cooking stands out.” He was also coming off of a bunch of best new chef nods from
Food & Wine
,
Gourmet
, and the James Beard Foundation, and he was more than ready for his star to affix itself firmly in the culinary heavens. As far as show business goes, he had it all: looks, personality, and ambition.

Pilar Sanchez, the show's original cohost, left after the first season, opening the door for me to take her spot on the rickety set off the FDR Highway, bantering with Rocco while whipping up souvlaki,
loukoumathes
(fritters with honey and cinnamon), chicken soup with
trahana
(homemade pasta),
hilopites
(egg pasta with fava bean, feta, and mint stuffing),
keftedes
(Greek meatballs), and for the Mediterranean dessert show,
galaktoboureko,
a simple custard pie.

I was proud of my ability to catch on quickly to the demands of demonstration cooking on television. I privately thought that my background as an all-star softball player, drill team member, and Gayfer Girl had laid the foundation for my
easy success. Aside from finally coming into my own as a chef, I was small, nimble, and a quick study.

But next to Rocco, I was as green as could be. I aimed to be as natural as possible, but soon discovered there's
natural
, and then there's
TV natural
. Rocco already understood that the sweet spot for a television chef was the place where serious cooking met absorbing entertainment. He had a dialogue coach and an assistant who counted his lines to make sure that he had the lion's share during any particular show. He liked everything to be scripted, which made me nervous. My ability to wing it was my strong suit and I couldn't imagine saying, “Wow! Look at those gorgeous eggplants, Rocco!” with anything resembling a straight face.

I had nothing but fond feelings for Rocco. He was warm and liked to laugh. He was generous with his advice. After a shoot we'd go down to Blue Ribbon on Sullivan Street and drink martinis. He'd worry like an Italian mother about whether I'd gotten myself a Hollywood agent yet, or when I was going to open my own restaurant.

“You got to learn to schmooooooze, Cat!” he'd say, then laugh.

He was accurate on that point. My life was going to work and coming home in the dark, flying to New York on the red-eye for a solid week of shooting two shows a day, then back on the red-eye in order to open Postino in the morning. In my copious free time, I was trying to make a life with my girlfriend. My hour hanging out with Rocco at Blue Ribbon
was
my schmoozing.

sixteen

B
y now the suits at the Food Network had a sense of who I was, that I wasn't just some girl from Mississippi shilling panfried chicken and cornpone but had been raised from the cradle with world-class Greek cuisine that was as exciting as it was healthy.

They signed me up for an episode of
My Country, My Kitchen
, where “top chefs journeyed to their homeland to reveal the flavors, foods, and cultural inspirations that influenced their cooking.” Rocco DiSpirito signed on for Italy. Rick Bayless was dispatched to Mexico. Sam Choy did Hawaii. I, of course, went to Skopelos, to film Aunt Demetra and Uncle Yiorgios's annual Greek Easter feast. I'd never filmed on location, and somehow it didn't occur to me that this would be radically different from doing dump and stir in front of three cameras on the Food Network set.

My Greek relatives were overjoyed at the prospect of a visit, especially since my dad was coming along to translate. It had been ten years since Hannah and I had showed up hungry on their doorstep. We had been wayward girls, young and clueless. Even though my Greek was no better now than it was then, I wanted Aunt Demetra to see how I'd turned out, eager to tell her—or have my dad tell her—that I hoped to be able to learn how to cook as well as she did.

My family had agreed to be filmed and knew we were bringing a film crew with us, but when we showed up with dozens of equipment boxes, lights, reflectors, tape recorders, and cameras, they looked horrified. Their son, my cousin Yanni, was a budding attorney and insisted on going over the fine print on the release forms, as if we slick Americans with our shot list and inflexible schedule were trying to pull a fast one. This entailed a solid two hours of discussion-slash-argument in Greek between my dad, Yanni, and my uncle, who as the man of the family was entitled to get into the act as well.

A proper Easter feast demands the roasting of a goat over a spit, and the Karagiozos fire pit has occupied the same spot since the Stone Age. Maybe earlier. We were getting ready to go to Easter church service when the director pulled me aside and said they would need to move the fire pit. Apparently the location of the pit and the backdrop against which the goat would turn wasn't aesthetically pleasing, or the lighting was wrong, or something, and the director asked Uncle Yiorgios if perhaps he could redig the pit somewhere more photogenic. My dad had to translate the request three times to Uncle Yiorgios, because he could not believe the request. What lunatic would ask such a thing? It was impossible.

We stood around in our finery as another two-hour discussion-slash-argument ensued, my dad translating between the director and the Greeks. You could tell whatever thrill my dad had enjoyed from being the translator had run its course. I'm sure he wished he taken the time to teach me Greek when I was a kid and he'd had the chance.

In the end the crew made do with the existing pit, we ate Aunt Demetra's delicious spread, drank some ouzo, and danced for hours beneath the Aegean stars.

This happened many times during our visit: the crew would
complain about something, my family would be mystified, and Dad would be required to step in and break the news that their lifelong traditions did not possess the necessary TVQ. As often as not my family refused to budge, but at five o'clock Greek coffees were offered, then wine and ouzo and many Greek cookies, and finally a decision would be reached and we would do the shoot.

For most of the trip I felt conflicted and agitated. I knew enough about TV production to understand the crew's point of view, but started losing my patience when they would grouse about how late the Greeks ate, or how their towels were thin. They stayed next door, in tourist apartments owned by my aunt. I worried that she would find their petty complaints insulting. I also lost sleep wondering whether in my haste to share my Greek family's culture with the American television-watching public, we were in fact taking advantage of my family's great generosity, but in the end everyone was more or less happy. I was grateful for a once-in-a-lifetime experience to spend Greek Easter with the Karagiozos family, and that year
My Country, My Kitchen
went on to win a James Beard award.

One day the phone rang and it was an editor from the
Contra Costa Times
, the local East Bay newspaper. She said she'd seen me on
The Melting Pot
and was thrilled to discover that I was local. Would I like to write a column for them? Why yes, I most certainly would, even though I would have to cut into my already precious sleep to do it.

The column was called Cooking from the Hip, and it was so popular the editor hatched another idea: an occasional feature called Chef's Surprise, where I would show up at someone's house with a photographer and an assistant and prepare
dinner for the entire family using only the ingredients on hand. The name of the winner was drawn from the hundreds who responded to the paper's call for lucky winners, by which I mean guinea pigs for what at the time was a kooky experiment.

Most people never knew what they had in their pantry. I found it gratifying to show them what they could do with a little creativity and one hour. That was the limit: one hour. On the spot, I improvised ways to cook beans, rice, tomatoes, and more dried herbs than they knew what to do with. My secret weapon was pasta. Even the barest cupboard always seemed to have a box of spaghetti tossed in the back.

Once the winner was an elderly woman who possessed an equally elderly oven that hadn't been cleaned in the last century. I breathed a sigh of relief when I opened her fridge and saw a whole fryer chicken. Not ideal for roasting, but it would certainly do. I slathered it with olive oil and squeezed a lemon over it, then rubbed on cracked black pepper and some herbs. I slid the chicken into that old oven and may have regaled folks a bit with the story of how, when I decided to learn how to cook back in Jackson when I was still living with my parents, roast chicken was the first dish I perfected.

Suddenly, it sounded as if firecrackers were going off. I bent down to peer into the filmy oven window, only to see the chicken and the crud coating the bottom of the oven burst into flames. Luckily my hostess had a little red fire extinguisher stuck in a bracket on the wall. I grabbed it and threw open the oven door. Smoke and flames roared out. I leaned back and doused the chicken and the inside of the oven and stove top.