Cooking as Fast as I Can (27 page)

Jennifer retired from nannying and set about trying to get pregnant. It wasn't simply a matter of dusting off the ol' turkey baster. Her doctor put her on Clomid to induce ovulation every month, and also monitored her ovarian follicles with ultrasounds at regular intervals. The Clomid made her feel nauseated and pregnant without actually being pregnant. She decided she needed something to occupy her time and offer some distraction, so she applied to help with the grape harvest at Stag's Leap in nearby Napa, where she learned about winemaking, from picking grapes to corking the bottles. While she was spending her days learning how fermentation works, I was manically taking meetings, appearing at festivals, conferences, and events, and doing everything I could to launch my brand. After I gave notice at Postino, it didn't escape my notice for a single day that I had no steady work, and soon, a baby on the way.

After six or seven months Jennifer conceived, and gave birth to our first child on October 24, 2003, a beautiful boy we named Zoran. Jennifer took to motherhood easily. Maybe it was all those years working as a nanny, coupled with her calm temperament. Whatever physical traits the sperm dad's DNA contributed were not readily apparent at birth. Zoran was dark-eyed, with well-proportioned features and a mouth shaped just like Jen's.

Holding our baby in my arms for the first time, I was struck by the realization that it wasn't about me anymore, and that I was responsible for this helpless little being, a being who was
largely unknown, with whom I fell immediately in love, and for whom I would lay down my life.

Later that year, while on a book tour for
Cat Cora's Kitchen
, I received a call from Bruce Seidel, an executive producer at the Food Network. This was nothing out of the ordinary. They called me all the time for pie-in-the-sky shows that never panned out.

After identifying himself he asked, “So, do you want to be our first female Iron Chef?”

“Uh, yeah!” I said, after thinking carefully for a quarter of a second. I figured this was a preliminary chat, and I would be asked to come in and audition along with every other female they knew who'd ever donned chef's whites.

“Great. Your first battle is in two weeks.”

“You just want me to—”

“Two weeks,” he said.

Iron Chef
(
Ryo¯ri no Tetsujin
, translated literally as “Ironmen of Cooking”) was a hit show in Japan in the nineties. No mere televised timed cook-off between competing chefs,
Iron Chef
also had a fictional history. The story went like this: Takeshi Kaga, the so-called Chairman, dreamed of this competition, set in a kitchen stadium that was part of his castle. Chefs from around the globe would come to wage battle against the reigning Iron Chefs of his Gourmet Academy. When the Food Network picked up the show in 1999 and dubbed it into English it became a cult hit, a crazy, entertaining cross between high-octane cooking competition and a kung fu movie.

Inspired by the success of the dubbed original, UPN produced
Iron Chef USA
in
2001. Its two episodes were shot in the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas, with William Shatner cast in the role of the mad, visionary Chairman. The show flopped, due to any number of reasons: a loud, rambunctious Las Vegas audience who behaved as if they were watching a boxing match; commentators who made no effort to look knowledgeable about food cracking endless dumb jokes; the inability to translate the quirky tone of the original.

Undeterred by the failure of
Iron Chef USA
, in 2004 the Food Network produced a four-part miniseries,
Iron Chef America: Battle of the Masters,
introducing a new story line. The Chairman dispatched his “nephew” (martial arts actor Mark Dacascos) to continue the tradition in the United States, where he founded a new Gourmet Academy.

Battle of the Masters
, hosted by Alton Brown, with floor commentary by Kevin Brauch, was a hit, and the network then went on to order a full, season-long weekly series. The producers had managed to capture the perfect blend of camp and serious cooking. As in the original show, the contest between the challenger and the Iron Chef involved cooking five courses in an hour, each course featuring a “secret” ingredient revealed by the Chairman at the top of the show.

When I got the call there were only three American Iron Chefs: Bobby Flay, Mario Batali, and Masaharu Morimoto. I was fully aware I was their token female, but I was not about to pass this up. I knew the show had been a huge hit in Japan and featured intense cooking battles that verged on athletic competitions. It was wacky and cool, and I felt in my bones it was going to be big.

My first battle was against Alex Lee, executive chef at DANIEL, Daniel Boulud's flagship fine-dining establishment on the Upper East Side. I was so nervous I could feel
my heart beating in my ears, but my attitude was
Bring it on.
I'd brought Lorilynn along as my sous chef. Who knew better than Lorilynn how I worked?

Alex and I stood on either side of the secret ingredient “altar,” and when they hoisted up the cover, so much dry-ice fog poured out that for several long seconds I couldn't see anything. The ice was there for dramatic effect and also to help disguise some of the production necessities, like cables and lights. I batted away the fog and saw . . . potatoes. Mounds of russets and red potatoes, ruby crescent fingerlings, yellow Finns, and purple Peruvians. From the moment the ingredient was revealed until my sous chefs and I toasted with ouzo after we'd plated our five dishes, everything was a blur. Battle Potato was slightly more memorable because it was my first.

Chaos did not even begin to describe it. I threw some ouzo into a pan and nearly singed off an eyebrow. One of Alex Lee's ovens went down and he ran over to ask whether he could borrow mine. Then one of my ovens malfunctioned and I ran from my kitchen around the cameraman to use Lee's one working oven, now empty, the metal tray burning my hand through the dishcloth. Someone yelled the time. The fog swirling around my ankles was distracting and crazy-making. Suddenly the plating began. I plated the duck, but I despised it. The sauce I'd made for it looked as if it had been spooned on by a prison cook. It needed something. To be drizzled with a squirt bottle? Maybe puddled, then “smeared” with the back of spoon? Maybe I should slice the duck and fan it out, rather than just plunk it down at six o'clock on the plate? Maybe I should use some micro greens or corn shoots for more color?

With no time left, I started again, slicing, smearing, and opting for both the greens and the corn shoots. I didn't love it,
but I knew it was good. When we were done, I poured shots of ouzo for my team and we toasted and drank up.
Opa!

I won by one measly point, and damn if it didn't feel good.

I didn't always win, obviously. My next battle was against “rock 'n' roll chef” Kerry Simon, a fellow CIA grad, who had his own place in Vegas and sported a snarly hairdo that wouldn't look out of place in a heavy metal band. Bill Murray was in the audience that day. He knew Kerry from a pizza place they had both worked at in suburban Chicago.

The secret ingredient was actually only semisecret. A few days ahead of filming, the producer would give us a short list. It might be lamb, octopus, butter, or peas. This was helpful, obviously, but we still needed to conceive of five dishes for three or four potential ingredients. My strategy was to choose a cuisine, so that when the ingredient was revealed my team would immediately have a general idea of our direction.

When the ingredient was apples, for example, I knew that every dish would be prepared in the manner of Asian/French cuisine. If the ingredient was oysters, we would go French/Cajun. I would instruct my sous chefs on the pairings in advance. By selecting the type of cuisine ahead of time, the cooking options would be automatically limited, and also create cohesion in the menu. This relieved my sous chefs and me of wasting precious time trying to figure out whether the dishes “clashed” with one another, and also we'd know right out of the gate the flavor profiles we'd be creating. Deciding the style before the secret ingredient was revealed saved a lot of time, and allowed us to focus.

That day, in my battle against Kerry Simon, the secret ingredient was hamburger, and our strategy was global street food. I rarely paid attention to what was going on in the other kitchen—there truly wasn't
time to focus on anything but the task in front of you—but I saw that Kerry had taken that tack as well. After filming began, no one was supposed to leave the set, but at some point in the proceedings Bill Murray slipped out for a walk. Twenty minutes later he returned with a handful of plastic packets of ketchup and mustard, walked right onto the set and into Kerry's kitchen, and slipped them to Kerry.

I lost by 0.1 percent, the slimmest margin in
Iron Chef
history. Was the perfect, charming detail of Bill Murray delivering condiments the reason behind Kerry's one-tenth of a percent win? I'm saying yes. There were no hard feelings in any case. Kerry is a great guy and, well, Bill Murray is the man. It was an honor, no matter what went down.

Battle Clam, against Sam Choy. I beat him by almost ten points. In fairness, I think he shot himself in the foot with his clam flan. I learned from his mistake: never mix fish with anything sweet. It was simply too nasty.

Battle Ostrich, against Walter Royal. He beat me by eight. Ostrich is a protein I find so revolting and despise so hardily that the moment the ingredient was revealed I should have just downed my ouzo and shaken the hand of my competitor. And don't get me started on ostrich
eggs
.

All along the way there were missteps, some more entertaining than others. Stoves failed, fires started, some chefs cut themselves so badly the on-set medic was called in. In one battle, Bobby Flay almost electrocuted himself. Once one of my sous chefs turned on the blender without putting on the lid and the avocado puree spewed all over the counters, the floor, his face.

Battle Pork, against LA chef Neal Fraser, was a calamitous episode. It should have been called Battle Five Hundred Pounds of Pig. The secret ingredient lid ascended into the rafters, the fog rolled away, and there was an entire hog, nose to tail.

The production schedule was brutal. They often shot all twenty-six episodes in just three weeks, which meant shooting two or three episodes a day. This particular episode began filming around six or seven o'clock. I knew how to break down an animal, and a pig would take at least an hour. When they realized they hadn't removed the spine, they had to stop filming and wheel the pig back down to the butcher. We didn't get started until 9:00 p.m.

Everyone was exhausted. This was
entertainment,
not the Red Cross airlifting rice into Burundi. No one was going to suffer if we bagged it for the night, and yet we had a schedule to keep. We were cranky and miffed, and one of my sous chefs accidentally turned the oven up to five hundred degrees and burned the pork skewers. It was too late by the time I discovered it and I had to go with it. I got good and spanked by the judges and I completely deserved it.