The Kitchen Counter Cooking School (8 page)

The freezer was equally stark; one of its few contents was a four-year-old turkey dinner. “That's from a Thanksgiving when I decided I couldn't deal with my family,” she said, then laughed nervously again. On Thanksgiving, she went to McDonald's. She looked a bit sad at the memory as she shut the door on the frozen-food tour.

Her shelves were nods to healthy eating and falls from grace of it. Next to the quinoa (unopened) there was a shelf-stable microwavable meatloaf dinner and cracked bulgur next to fried onions (“for green bean casserole,” she interjected).

For her meal, she boiled whole wheat pasta and tossed it with olive oil. “I would have no idea how to make pasta sauce,” she said, grinding sea salt onto her pasta. “I'm feeling kind of virtuous today because I'm not using Hamburger Helper or a jarred sauce.” She'd been relying on them less after she learned that she had high blood pressure. As she sat down with her pasta in a beige La-Z-Boy chair in her living room, she talked wistfully about the days when, as a newlywed, she tried her hand at cooking. She made holiday roasts and even hosted dinner parties.

“I lost interest in cooking after I stopped drinking,” she said honestly. “But I'm realizing now that by not cooking I'm hurting myself, probably more than I realize. I want to be excited by it again,” she said. “I don't want to be on a diet. I just want to change the way I eat. But I don't know where to start or how to sustain that, you know?”

Terri struck me as a tough case. For high blood pressure, the best step she could take would be to cook more often. The vast majority of average Americans' sodium intake—nearly 80 percent—comes from fast food or ultraprocessed fare. By comparison, only 5 percent of sodium comes from home cooking. She mentioned time as an issue, but then talked about a lot of trips to physically pick up food and eat out, time that she might use to make dinner instead. I feared that what she wanted wasn't cooking lessons, but a magic bullet.

In Tacoma, we met Donna, a shy, sweet-faced twenty-six-year-old newlywed who resided in a row of modest starter homes. Her hair reminded me of Shirley Temple's, dark and spiraling down just above her shoulders. In a tinny, little-girl voice she asked, “Do you want any iced tea? I have some in the garage.”

Donna was gosh-darned adorable. She and her husband had purchased the house two years earlier the week before they got married, a symbol of their mutual gung-ho commitment. Her pleasant kitchen looked as if it came directly out of a scene from
Mad Men,
replete with canary-colored retro appliances. The fridge sported an extra door, presumably child-sized, built into the front. “Isn't this weird? It's kind of a midget door or something. We want to redo it,” Donna trilled brightly. “But it's so darned expensive. Sure you don't want any tea?”

“Do you have any vodka?” I asked, only partly in jest.

Donna laughed. “Of course not, silly!”

Donna worked long hours in communications for an international aid organization that helps families in Africa. “We should have two people to do my job, but of course it's a nonprofit so they just work you to the bone. But it's very rewarding.”

When Donna and her husband married, they agreed that he would cook and do dishes and she would do all the laundry. “But now I realize that I can't rely on my husband to cook, or that what he makes will be healthy,” she said. “He goes back and forth about eating healthy, but when it comes down to it, he just eats what he wants. He says that he'll be more interested in it as I lose more weight, but right now he's not much of a good sport.”

Although Donna dutifully attended Weight Watchers for months, she'd lost only five of the fifty pounds she wanted to lose. She can cite the program's “points”
⁹
for anything. But she finds they're not helpful when eating out, and lately they've been eating out—a lot.

“My husband and I fight to the death about this. He doesn't eat all day or all afternoon. So he's supposed to be the cook in the family, but then by the time we're driving home together, he's starving. He stops and gets fast food or he wants to go out. Then he snacks all night. He thinks this is supposed to help him lose weight?”

She revealed that just before they got married two years ago, he'd lost ninety pounds. Since then, he'd gained it all back.

“I guess back then he had to find a girl to impress,” she said wryly. “One reason that I want to learn to cook is because I can cut down on calories all day, but I when I get home from work, it's like a freefor-all. I don't know how to cook; it's not my element, so I am kind of at the mercy of whatever he wants to do.”

She recently learned she's allergic to soy, and has long had an unusual reaction to raw vegetables. In the first cupboard, we hit abandoned cans of Slim-Fast. “Oh, right, I forgot about those,” she said sheepishly. “It's got soy in it, so it's going to have to go.”

From the next one, she pulled out boxes for a hamburger-based skillet casserole. “I grew up eating it, so I bought those when we were first married, but my husband hates it because he didn't grow up on it,” she said. “These might even be expired. I don't know, does Hamburger Helper have an expiration date?” She examined the box. “November 2008. Funny, I wonder what's in it that could expire?”

In the same cupboard she found dehydrated mashed potatoes, boxes of Jell-O, and a block of Velveeta cheese. “This I use for a dip when guests come over. You mix it with a can of chili.” She dug in and pulled out an assortment of spices, many of them duplicates. “Oh, we have three or four of the same kinds of spices. When we find a recipe we buy all the ingredients, not realizing that we already have the same herb or spice until we get home.”

On a higher shelf, she had multiple bags full of flour, sugar, and other baking goods. “I'd like to think that I do a lot of baking, but I don't. I think most of the stuff in this cupboard we haven't touched in more than a year.”

She moved on. Condensed soup, cans of black olives, kits to make Mexican food, tins of tuna, a jar of pineapple chunks. “We bought these for shish kebabs for camping,” she said. As she pulled out more cans, she made a discovery. “Here's the pineapple chunks from last year.” She found many cans of turkey chili. “We put them on Fritos or things like that for a snack.”

From another cupboard, she set out eight boxes of cornbread mix. “You just add water, it's easy.” I asked why she had so many boxes of the same items.

“We spend so much at this one warehouse store that they told us to upgrade to the business level because we would save money.” Another cupboard revealed cases of granola bars and microwavable brown rice, an echo to Dri's shopping habits. A low drawer had a cache of hundred-calorie snacks. She picked up a small puffy bag of Cheez-Its and handled it disdainfully. “Yeah, I was into these but they don't work for me. I'm kind of an addictive personality so I can't have just one. I can't think of anything else until I have another bag.” She dropped it back into the drawer and quickly slammed it shut.

Without a word, she moved on to the fridge. A gallon of some pink drink dominated the top shelf. “Yeah, my husband bought this. I didn't want to throw it away, so I've been drinking it.” She looked at the label. “I mean, this looks bad. I know anything that ends in -
ose
is probably bad, or if the additive has an
x
in it.” She put it back.

“This is why I want to be educated, so that I can make better decisions.” She bought books on nutrition, but rarely made it past the first couple of chapters. “I buy a lot of cookbooks but I never really use them.” She's made only one recipe from a book, a chicken dish from
Fresh Food Fast
by
Cooking Light
magazine. “I was disappointed that it was so bland. My chicken was too dry, and I don't know why.”

In the rest of the fridge, we found bricks of butter and a drawer devoted to an array of low-fat cheeses. A food chemist once described the process of making fat-free cheese as a complicated puzzle, one that typically required a lot of chemicals, gums, sugars, and added salt to solve. “Do you ever wonder what they do to make them low-fat?” I asked.

She cocked her head to one side. “No, I guess I've never thought about it.”

We moved on. There was a lot of packaged fruit, including some in small clear plastic containers. “Oh, yeah, I stopped eating the grapefruit since it doesn't expire until next year. That kind of scared me. Isn't fruit supposed to expire?”
¹⁰

When she opened a crisper drawer, a putrid, vinegar-like odor escaped. She'd purchased a dozen apples in bulk, and half of them sat rotting in the bin. “I totally forgot about those.” Polite Donna looked visibly mortified. “My husband thinks that if you can get it cheaper in bulk, you should buy it even if you throw half of it away.”

“But you look upset,” Lisa said, training the small video camera on her.

“I don't have an opinion on it,” she replied. But then the color rose in her cheeks. She continued with the fridge tour. We discussed expired condiments and a rainbow of diet sodas. Then she discovered two browning heads of lettuce in another drawer. She clenched her jaw. She picked one up and examined it, not unlike Hamlet contemplating Yorick's skull.

“You know, I grew up not having much food in our house,” she said, talking more to the head of lettuce than to us. “We went to a lot of food banks as a kid. For me to throw away food, that's kind of sacrilegious. And, well, I work with starving kids in Africa.” Her voice ratcheted up an octave. She dropped the lettuce back into the bin. “So, yeah, it does bug me that we're throwing food away as if it's not important. That we're wasting anything.”

Lisa and I looked at each other. We'd tapped something deep. “You know, Donna, earlier you said that you didn't have an opinion,” I said gently.

She started to drum her fingers against the door, avoiding our gaze. “Apparently, I do have an opinion.” She banged the door shut. She paused and purposefully slowed her breathing. Then she opened the freezer door.

Big bags of frozen fried snacks dominated the freezer. Among them was a family-sized bag of Any'tizers, differently shaped and stuffed fried chicken products from Tyson. “Those are my husband's.” I asked Donna how many they normally eat at once. “Oh, he'll make half the package for us to eat as a snack after dinner while we watch television.” That's six servings, or 1,280 calories and 66 grams of fat.

She moved quickly on to the many bags of frozen vegetables, but they never used them because they didn't cook with vegetables. “I know that I don't get enough fruit and vegetables in my diet. I don't know how to make them taste good.”

Part of the appeal of frozen vegetables is that they come precut. “My husband makes fun of me when I cut things. Whenever I cook, I screw everything up and then I lose my courage.” Her brother used to tease her if she helped in the kitchen. “He'd say, ‘Oh, you're not going to cook, are you? You're going to do it wrong and we're all going to die.' It wasn't actually all that funny.”

She went quiet for a bit, organizing the elements of the meal she planned to cook. When she spoke, it was almost as if she were simply saying her thoughts aloud. “I think it could be fun to cook. When I watch people cook, I get inspired. When I do it myself, I just get really freaked out. I panic. I don't want to cook for anyone. I used to lack confidence in everything in my life, and now I think I have confidence about everything else except cooking.”

For her meal, she decided on “El Paso Casserole,” a menu staple she learned from her mother that featured canned tomato soup, canned turkey chili, canned cream-style corn, and shredded Cheddar cheese. As she used the can opener to open the chili, I noticed her hands shaking. Sweet Donna. This must have been so hard for her, to have not one but two people come into her kitchen, ask nosy questions, and film her while asking about the one thing she felt she didn't do well.

“Hey, I screw things up and I went to culinary school,” I said, approaching her. I gave her a quick hug around the shoulder. “I burned toast this morning. I overcooked a steak the other night. I mean, it happens. Even Julia Child screwed up sauces and dropped potatoes, right on TV.”

She smiled at me thankfully and offered a polite laugh, but then went quiet as she started to brown a pound of hamburger. I decided to shift the conversation to how she would remodel her kitchen. Her mood lightened. As she topped the layered casserole with Cheddar cheese, she offered some final thoughts.

“I have friends who say, ‘Oh, cooking is so easy, let me show you.' But to me, it's so intimidating. My friend comes over, and she's an amazing cook, she makes it all look so fun. But when she comes over and wants me to cook, I say, Let's go out. I'm too self-conscious.”

She thinks some of it stemmed from growing up in a household where cooking was looked on as a chore rather than a rewarding act of creation and sharing. “We go to my in-laws' house and you can tell that the women in his family love to cook. Everything my mother-in-law makes is wonderful and tastes great. But at my house, my mom and my grandmother, they don't really cook. Everything is very bland and heavy. Kind of unhealthy and artificial.” She looked down at the dish she had just put together. “Well, just like this casserole.” She shoved it into her canary-colored retro wall oven.

“More than anything, I wish that cooking could become natural to me. I've come to realize that it's important for me to find options around food that I don't feel I have right now. If I'm going to eat right, I have to finally learn to do it myself.”