The Kitchen Counter Cooking School (44 page)

She had signed up as a client with Beve, the nutritionist. Her counter was lined with brand-new bottles of vitamins she'd been assigned to take after Beve had Terri's medical doctor run various tests. Like most people who live above the thirty-seventh parallel, Terri was wildly deficient in vitamin D; the sun is too weak most of the year for most people to produce it naturally. She had shifted to eating shredded wheat for breakfast to up her fiber intake and relied on scrambled eggs at lunch to help increase her protein.

On my first visit, she had made whole wheat pasta with a bit of olive oil. She'd advanced to adding the fresh tomato sauce from class, something she made at least twice a week. “I'll be honest. I don't mind eating the same thing all the time. I kind of like routines,” she said. “It's also something that I don't really have to plan for. I always keep whole wheat pasta, tomatoes, and garlic around.”

Terri was the only one who didn't chop an onion as demonstrated in class. Instead, she cut off the ends, quartered them and dropped them into a food processor, and gave them a quick whirl. “I know, I know, I'm cheating,” she apologized. “I find myself reverting back to old habits.”

Well, not all of them. Terri used to eat fast food for dinner up to four times a week; now it was down to less than once every couple of weeks. She had cut back on another indulgence, regular visits to Starbucks for breakfast or lunch, although that had as much to do with money as with nutrition.

Of all the people in the study, self-employed Terri had the most enduring sense of “time poverty.” I heard a lot about “time” in the first round of visits with the volunteers. In the second round, the issue was noticeably less significant. When I later reviewed the videos, Terri mentioned the word
time
on twenty-two occasions in both her first and second kitchen visits. Like the White Rabbit, she seemed invariably late and rushed, even as she mentioned that her tour business more or less ground to a halt during the off-season.

“I'm glad to know about how to cut up a chicken, although I don't think I will do it myself,” she said. “It was just a little too . . .” She struggled for a word. “I guess that I'm just squeamish, and it doesn't help that I am not that crazy about chicken in the first place.”

Of all the classes, she liked the meat class with Robin best; it involved cutting up red meat and pork, but that bothered her less. “Learning to make rubs was helpful because pork chops are one of my standards, although I haven't made a rub yet. I liked the soup class and I plan to try that one day. The vinaigrette lesson was useful in terms of thinking about flavor combinations, but I don't make salads at home, I only eat them when I go out. As you can see, I don't keep a lot of food in my fridge, so leftovers aren't that big of a deal for me.”

But she explained that this didn't mean that for her the project wasn't successful.

“It did help me to realize that I should think more about what I eat, but not necessarily worry about what I cook.” Terri had slashed her fast-food runs from twenty to two per month. By doing so, she had eliminated 195,000 mostly empty calories in the course of a year, the equivalent of 550 hours on a treadmill. She explained that while some people can change their habits overnight, she learned while overcoming alcoholism that time and routine are critical for her. “When I try to change everything at once, that never works. I feel like I have started to develop a foundation and I have to be happy with where I'm going.”

Given all that, so what if she used her food processor to cut onions to make something healthier at home? More power to her.

At Cheryl's, the Christmas tree fell down on her four-year-old son. He had pulled on an ornament, sending the tree straight down. He started wailing.

“Oh, no!” Lisa and I raced over to rescue him. As we righted the tree, Cheryl grabbed her son. She conducted a quick inventory for injury before clutching him to her chest tightly. Then she held him out at arm's length. “I told you to stop playing with the tree!” she rebuked. “I want you to sit on the couch and read your books while Mommy finishes her visit.” Her son grabbed two picture books off the coffee table and dutifully climbed up onto the brown leather sofa.

On our first visit, Cheryl had opened a can of organic soup for lunch. This time, she made a pot from scratch, a fragrant curryscented number with coconut milk and vegetables. “It's really easy,” she said. “I make one pot and then my son and I eat it for a couple of days for lunch. My husband's in construction, so he takes it in his thermos. I freeze the rest in small portions for lunches later.”

We watched her efficiently chop an onion, carrots, and celery for her soup. Baby Liam scooted around the kitchen floor at her feet. She had recently had all her kitchen knives sharpened. “It makes a huge difference having a super sharp knife. I can cruise through chopping.” She tossed the vegetables into her pot and started to simmer them.

Her husband hunts and brings home a motley assortment of game. She used to struggle about how to prepare it. “I used to think, What do I do with a pheasant?” she said. “Then I learned to braise! Now a lot of my cooking is braising, braising, braising. I have to say that my braised pheasant is a big hit.”

She picked up Liam, who had grown noticeably bigger, and balanced him heavily on her slight hip. “The class definitely changed some fundamental basics about how I cook,” she said. “I make more sauces, soups, and meals from scratch. I am more confident in the kitchen because I just have more faith in my skills. I think the class not only helped me learn new things but also taught me not to be afraid of cooking and trying new things on my own.”

Cheryl had been fairly label conscious and the class had just made her even more so. “For instance, I rarely buy bread.” She opened her fridge to reveal two containers of bread dough, one white and one whole wheat. “My husband is the official baker in the family. He experiments with all kinds of versions. You know, I've gotten to the point that I just want to know what's in everything that I feed my family now.”

Shannon is endlessly up for a challenge. “It's funny, I made some applesauce. I had all these apples,” she said, holding her arms out wide to indicate a massive crate of apples. “Weirdly, it was really fun. I was totally cruising through chopping them.” She smiled broadly. “My hand was a little sore after doing it, but I totally dug the Zen of getting into it.”

By this point, the volunteers had some consensus on the efficacy of classes. Knife skills, the chicken class, stock, soup, no-knead bread, and learning to cook fish in parchment came out as strong themes. Shannon was no different. But I was interested in her takeaways. She was the mother of two young children and someone who carefully watched her food budget.

Some things she'd been less hip to. “I've made my own stock and I really like it, but sometimes I just can't get there,” she said. “It's hard to compare my own stock against supermarket stock because it's just so different. But if I buy it, I totally check the sodium. I get it as close to unsalted as I can. I found a brand that has only three grams of sodium that I like.”

One class that she doesn't remember fondly was the tasting class. In retrospect, eager to offer a lot of options, I may have presented
too
many and pushed a couple of volunteers into sensory exhaustion. Nine types of salt were probably six too many. “I remember leaving that class feeling that I had been physically beaten.” She liked the later classes in which we did a single tasting at the beginning of class. “Don't get me wrong, I liked comparing tastes of things that I actually cook with, such as pasta and canned tomatoes and chicken stock. It was just too much at one time.” Even so, she was the first student to announce she had tossed her iodized salt. She had seen a notice online for the comparative beef tasting at a Red Velvet Dinner. “That's something I'd be interested in, the whole grass-fed versus corn-fed, or the taste of organic chickens versus the kind from the meat department.”

As far as the fish class, the emphasis on hitting a separate store didn't factor into the complexities of being a mother and a cook. “While I'd love to go to a fish market, the reality is that at the end of the day I have only so many trips in me. I've got to guide a baby and a young child and sometimes it's all I can do to just get milk. So I buy fish from the higher-end supermarket where I know they have good fish and I buy some of my other stuff there, too. Honestly, the reason why I like the parchment is because it always turns out. I can prep it in advance while they're napping and there are no dishes.”

Who could argue with Shannon? She had the information and weighed her options based on a frank and realistic set of expectations for her life right now. For instance, nurturing a pot of stock for hours wasn't a priority, but she didn't want to add the liquid equivalent of a salt lick to her food. So her decision to seek out unsalted chicken stock seemed like a completely reasonable solution. I'm sure the list went on.

That has not kept her from exploring new culinary territory, in part based on the confidence and information she gained from the classes. “I've always been kind of scared of my Crock-Pot. I don't really understand it,” she said. But she had dragged it out of a closet and dropped a couple of lamb shanks into it recently. “When I came back in the meat was separated from the bones and I thought, Yes, that's right, that's what Robin said was supposed to happen. It tasted really awesome.”

In June, Shannon noted that she felt uncomfortable cooking without a recipe. So it was a surprise when she shared the provenance of her lunch. “I had a lamb ragout in a restaurant when we were on vacation,” she started. “It was so yummy! Oh, my God, it was so good! So then I wondered how I could re-create it. I looked online and found some recipes for ragout, but they all used ground lamb, which wasn't what they used. But I realized, Oh, that's just a braise. So I got a lamb shoulder and I cut it up into pieces and braised it. For the polenta, I made it from cornmeal and threw some cheese into it to make it gooey and yummy and it all worked.”

Her family approved. “We were like, ‘Oh, yum!' The funny thing about that story is that before class, I just don't think I would have ever thought to tackle something like that. Now, I can. I feel like I deserve a pat on the back for that one.”

At that moment, I realized that not only had Shannon passed Cooking Basics 101 with flying colors, she was probably ready for a 301 class.

Due to moving schedules and life in general, it took us months to catch up with Genevieve. She had been living with three roommates in a comfortable rental house when we met her, but she had since moved into a new condo with her boyfriend, John. The sleek kitchen boasted dark cherrywood cabinets, gray slate floor tile, a black man-made quartz countertop, and stainless steel appliances. “It's funny, part of what we liked about this place was the cabinets, but it turns out some are super shallow.” She demonstrated by showing that a canister she uses for tea barely fits inside. “Oh, well, they look nice.”

The shallow cabinets included a healthy roundup: wheat pasta, cans of tomatoes, artichokes, and olives, brown rice, and a collection of oils and vinegars. “It turns out that I really like vinegar,” she said. “I was kind of surprised. Now I'm all over them. My latest favorite is tarragon. It is super tasty.”

In her fridge was a spectrum of colored vegetables, a wrapped packet of fish, some greens, organic milk, white wine, prepackaged Jell-O pudding, and leftover butternut squash soup from the weekend. She kept cilantro in a small glass of water like flowers, as Thierry had suggested. In her cheese drawer was a wedge of real Parmigiano-Reggiano. Among the items she kept in her freezer were frozen strawberries, pot stickers, and a couple of frozen pizzas, plus some butter because she doesn't use it often.

“One thing that's I've changed is my buying habits. I don't buy premade packages of stuff, like those frozen pasta dinners with the sauce. I used to get those a lot. But now I realize that it's no comparison to what I can make fresh, plus the list of ingredients kind of turned me off. I find it hard to order pasta in a restaurant. I think, Twenty dollars? I could totally make this for three.”

She and John hit a farm stand a couple of times a week rather than stocking up at the grocery store and sought out a stand-alone butcher and fishmonger. “I rely less on getting my food from one place.” Shopping together, they both try to rotate the goods in their fridge to avoid food waste. “A couple of times a week I do a sweep of the fridge for what needs to be used. Whether it's leftover chicken or vegetables or herbs, I'll just chop them up and add them to a salad and then make vinaigrette. Sometimes that's dinner.”

On her counter rests a small bowl filled with avocados and tomatoes. Beve, the nutritionist, had made a comment that everyone could eat more avocados, a source of healthy fat. So Gen had learned to make guacamole. John chimed in. “I have to say, her guac is great.”

During our first visit, Gen combined a bag of prepared cabbage slaw with a jar of teriyaki sauce. On the follow-up visit, she made wild-caught Alaskan salmon cooked in parchment paper and roasted asparagus. “I make this pretty often. I've even taught the paper trick to a couple of people. I remember when you asked how many portions a big chicken breast made, and then you weighed it and it was more than a pound, so it was really four servings. I use that as a reason to buy better meat or fish but eat less of it.”

She reminded me of something that I'd said offhand in class. “You said, ‘No one is going to make you pack your knives and go home if a dish doesn't turn out.' I think about that a lot. That kind of attitude makes me more confident, and that's why I enjoy it more. It allows me to try things without getting worked up about it.” A week ago, she had been sautéing a piece of fish and decided to make a sauce with diced apple, rosemary, and white wine. “I thought, What the heck? I'll give that a try. You know what? It was really good.”