Cooking as Fast as I Can (28 page)

In season three I lost to Walter Scheib, who'd been the White House chef for the past eleven years. I couldn't compete with his sheer expertise. Every day he was making dishes most of us hadn't given a thought to since culinary school. High-end, highly technical dishes for the likes of Nelson Mandela and Václav Havel, and every other dignitary and ruler of the free world. He simply executed better than I did. There was nothing for it.

Bobby, Mario, and Morimoto all ran busy New York restaurants. When the honchos at Food Network would summon them to the studios in Chelsea to film, they'd round up
their sous chefs and head on over. Sure, they'd have to create a menu on the fly, but otherwise it was pretty much like an average day in their own restaurants, only with cameramen and dry ice.

It wasn't like I could just go out and buy myself a restaurant as if it were an SUV. Opening a restaurant requires a lot of thought and consideration and financial backing. My time was consumed by flying back and forth across the country for
Iron Chef
, and also guest-starring spots on other Food Network shows.
Cat Cora's Kitchen
was published in 2004, and I was traveling to promote that. I'd started getting endorsement offers for commercials, and spokesperson jobs for big companies like Johnson & Johnson, Sears, Hunt's, Pillsbury, and Kraft. I scored a lucrative gig selling garbage disposals for InSinkErator, which would be the biggest paycheck I had ever seen. My life was busy. My life was fast. I was cooking a lot, but it was on the road: charity events, festivals, food shows.

To open a restaurant requires building a business plan, pondering your concept, finding and courting investors. The logical place for me to open a restaurant would have been somewhere in the Bay Area, Oakland perhaps, or in Napa or Yountville. But I wasn't home long enough to even unpack my bags. I lived in Fairfield with Jennifer and my infant son, Zoran, but in 2005, the year I became an Iron Chef, I simply wasn't settled enough. Timing is everything in life, and this just wasn't the right time.

Because I didn't have my own restaurant, I had to assemble different teams of sous chefs for each battle. It was like going into the NBA finals with a pickup team. I'd try to use my old friend Lorilynn as much as possible, but she couldn't always drop everything and come to New York. I think I
won as often as I did because of the generosity of Morimoto, whose own flagship restaurant was within walking distance of the studio. He invited my fledgling team and me to practice cooking together in the mornings before his own chefs arrived for service.

Molecular gastronomy was all the rage in the mid-aughts. Transparent ravioli. Mango foam. Greek salad granita. All the cool kids were turning anything they could into a powder, gel, or jelly. I called Wylie Dufrense, a pioneer in molecular gastronomy and chef-owner of wd~50, one of those places where during dinner service most days you'd see town cars and stretch limos double-parked in front, and he agreed to give me some lessons. The judges were wowed when you put something in front of them that involved, say, liquid nitrogen, and I knew I needed it in my arsenal. It was time well spent: my truffle foam consistently drew raves.

I'm constantly reminded that I am the first
female
Iron Chef. How extraordinary it was made to seem, that I, a mere woman, had made it into Kitchen Stadium! If I ever battled another woman—and I did on five occasions—the script called for mentioning our gender every fifteen seconds if possible.

It's ladies' night! Have at it, sister! Let's see who emerges victorious in this all-female food fight!
On Battle Ricotta, I cooked against Julietta Bellesterous, chef-owner of Crema, and it was apparently necessary to seat three female judges. “Now for some real entertainment,” quipped Alton Brown after we'd finished our dishes. “Me and three women eat some cheese!”

Early in my tenure I'd brought on Elizabeth Falkner as one of my sous chefs, and she was invited on to challenge me the next season. They billed it as a girl fight, my sous chef coming
back, gunning for me, going against her mentor. They couldn't get enough of the “catfight” jokes.

I was immune to the trash talking, but what got to me if I let it was the reality beneath the spectacle: there was only room for one female Iron Chef, and if another woman beat me, the odds were good she would replace me. After I lost a battle I could be a pain in the ass. I would demand an explanation of the scoring. I was more emotional. I had more at stake.

The male Iron Chefs' (how ridiculous that sounds) battles had a sporting feeling about them. Oh sure, they cooked their asses off. I'm not suggesting Bobby didn't take it seriously or that Mario didn't want to win, just that nothing but their egos was at stake. They weren't battling for their livelihoods.

In the culinary world women are more welcome now than they were in Julia's day—almost no one took Julia seriously as a “real” chef—but what remains unchanged is the way we are, at all times, in a position of having to prove ourselves. We're constantly being pointed out as some adorable or charming anomaly.

My battles with other females were actual battles. After I beat Elizabeth Falkner, I came upon her in her dressing room sobbing. Alex Guarnaschelli, chef de cuisine at New York's Butter (who in 2012 would go on to win
The Next Iron Chef
on her second try), was so nervous during Battle Farmer's Market she misheard the instructions and failed to use all the required ingredients.

Mary Dumont, my competitor in Battle Milk and Cream, confessed that for weeks before our showdown she'd had my picture as her laptop wallpaper, and every time she passed it during the day she would stop and say, “I'm taking you
down
.”

In that battle, I busted out a menu that I remain proud of to this day:

Bacalao Soup with Milk and Garlic Cod

Cardamom Milk with Duck Prosciutto Salad, Taro Chips, and Date Quenelle

Spiny Lobster in Saffron-Vanilla Bean Milk, steamed in Fata Paper

Couchon de Lait with Pork and Queso Fresca Ravioli

Milk and Cookies with Bourbon Spiked Milk and Trio of Homemade Cookies Deconstructed: Oreo, Nutter Butter, and Fig Newton

I also threw in a delicious beverage for good measure: Dreamsicle Snow Cone with a Grape Anise Flavor Squirt.

I won 51–46.

Off camera, my sense of alienation mounted. I never forgot Rocco's directive from my first days on
The Melting Pot
, that I had to learn how to schmooze. The part he neglected to mention—or most likely didn't even know to mention, being a handsome white guy—is that schmoozing isn't like pole vaulting. You can't do it alone. And the environment you're in has to be conducive to schmoozing.

How many times did I attend a get-acquainted gathering only to find that my fellow chefs, as well as the executives at the network or production company, already knew one another? At one cocktail party to kick off something or other, I arrived at the restaurant to find my costars were already broing it up, buying one another drinks and calling each other
and our bosses by their last names. Had they already grabbed a few beers before the event? Caught a play-off game or gotten a poker game going? Whatever it was, I wasn't invited, and typical for the token female: you're invited but not included.

My relationships with women in power were also complex. They fell all over the guys. Isn't he adorable/charming/funny/oh so cute? The camaraderie they shared with the guys was based on mild flirtation and flattery. In particular there was a woman high up on the food chain at Food Network who was gay, but never took to me. I knew she would go out with some of the other talent, but never with me. Maybe I was too out and that made it awkward for her? I never expected anything special because I'm gay, but I could have used some support from someone who knew what it was like to be gay and struggle.

Every time I started taking something like
Iron Chef
too seriously, something would remind me of the true scale of things, of what really mattered. In August 2005, Hurricane Katrina decimated not just New Orleans and Mississippi. The storm made landfall in Buras, Louisiana, and then turned and headed north at the mouth of the Pearl River. For seventeen hours hurricane winds pummeled the coast, spawning eleven tornados and a twenty-eight-foot storm surge and fifty-five-foot sea waves. Every Mississippi coastal town was flooded by at least 90 percent, and every county was declared a disaster area. Jackson is in the central part of the state, and while it suffered eighty-five-mile-an-hour winds—which caused a lot of tree damage, downed power lines, and tore off roofs—my family escaped harm, as did the house on Swan Lake Drive.

Mississippi is the poorest state in the nation. One bright, moneymaking spot had been the Gulf Coast, with its resorts
and floating casinos. It suffered near-total obliteration within a seventy-seven-mile-wide swath. Gulfport, gone. Biloxi, gone. My heart, broken.

Ten months earlier, the catastrophic Indian Ocean tsunami had struck. I couldn't stop thinking about how in a matter of minutes people who didn't have a lot to start with lost everything. In response to this disaster, I'd founded Chefs for Humanity, an organization devoted to addressing world hunger. As chefs, our lives are devoted to making great food and feeding people well. Shouldn't part of that work also include providing food for people who don't have enough, or anything, to eat? My parents had always viewed Thanksgiving as an opportunity to feed neighbors, friends, and acquaintances in need. I could hardly stand by and do nothing.

Part of CFH's mission includes emergency relief, and after Katrina I rallied some chef friends and we headed to the Gulf Coast. Fellow southerner Tyler Florence heeded the call, as did Ming Tsai.

Few flights were coming in and out of Jackson; roads were washed out or closed due to downed power lines. We flew in to Jackson and drove to Gulfport. Because we partnered with law enforcement there, we were allowed past the roadblocks.

In Gulfport the tidal surge penetrated a full half mile inland from the beach. Everything behind the surge line was smashed or wiped away. At the surge line mountains of debris formed the highest elevation in town, perhaps in the entire state. Trees pulled up by their roots, splintered wood, broken windows, entire roofs, chunks of pavement, and dozens of cars, which looked like shiny toys dropped from the sky by the hand of God. Local officers couldn't even recognize the streets because nothing was left but rubble.

The Red Cross found an elementary school cafeteria we
could use to cook for local citizens as well as the emergency relief teams and law enforcement. Our kitchen hummed 24/7, producing three thousand to five thousand meals a day. We tapped local chefs to be our sous chefs, and rounded up every other person who could scramble an egg.

The food came from the refrigerators and walk-ins of local restaurants around the area. The structures had been obliterated, but somehow many kitchens escaped. The owners hired refrigerator trucks and brought their food to us. Gulfport had been a resort town and we had everything: lobsters, crab, expensive cuts of beef, burger, pizza dough, pounds of shredded cheese and tomatoes, bushels of lettuce wilting in the heat. We had literally tons of food. The challenge was figuring out how to use it efficiently, to create nourishing, comforting dishes for exhausted, traumatized people.