The Kitchen Counter Cooking School (9 page)

Cooking seemed like a minefield to Donna, in terms of both her own relationship to food and the power struggle she felt in her relationship with her husband. He could cook, she couldn't, and that unfortunate balance led her to a place where she felt uncomfortable and out of control in the heart of her own home. She described it as “his kitchen” and commented that she didn't even know where to find some utensils and pans. She worked fifty-hour weeks trying to help feed kids in Africa, and her husband's buying decisions meant that she ended up wasting a lot of food. Yet she had clearly hit a point in her young life where she realized that she needed to make a change. Of all the people I visited, I felt that Donna had both the most to gain and potentially the most to lose.

“I'm sorry, it's going to be so hot!” Andra apologized repeatedly as she walked us up the stairs to her apartment. Edging toward the nineties, it was unseasonably hot for early June. “I have no AC, so I hope you don't mind, but it's just too hot to wear a bra.”

The life of Andra, a forty-three-year-old paralegal, had clearly taken some curious turns. Raised in an affluent family, she lived in what she called “a sort of a slum,” a complex of low-slung apartments that offered subsidized housing adjacent to the airport. In the wake of the economic meltdown of 2008, her firm slashed both her hourly rate and her hours during a major round of cost cutting. On a good week she took home $180 after taxes. For the past four months she'd been using food stamps for the first time in her life, a fact she kept secret from her colleagues and from her parents living nearby in an upscale suburb. “They have a personal chef now,” she said, an edge of what could have been either jealously or dismay in her voice. She hadn't seen them in three weeks, not since she sold her ten-year-old Honda Civic to keep up with her rent and cover her daily living expenses.

Large furniture overwhelmed the small apartment. A curious collection of knickknacks gave the impression that she had moved here from much larger quarters, and that perhaps not all of her decor originated from the same place. Expensive handmade Venetian masks hung on one wall, while pink-cheeked sweet Hummel characters and Franklin Mint–style woodland critters cluttered shelves not far from items emblazoned with Harley-Davidson logos. Crescent moons and astrological symbols decorated everything from pillows to a faux wall tapestry, and an inflatable celestial globe hovered in the corner of her dining room. On her coffee table, there was an inexpensive plaster cast of a bald eagle clutching a struggling fish in its claws. The beaded curtain separating the living room and kitchen somehow did not seem out of place.

Andra apologized for not having much on hand. “It's the end of the month, and my food stamps don't kick in until the first.” She had visited the food bank in the past week, where they had given her a package of frozen boneless chicken thighs. “I'm really not sure what to do with those,” she said, thumping the hard pack with her wrists.

In stark contrast to Jodi, she had absolutely nothing in most of her cupboards. In one, she had just four items—a bottle of dried Italian herbs, a small jar of mustard, a bottle of Wesson oil, and half a package of dried egg noodles. In another, she had just two cans, cream of celery soup and beef ravioli in sauce, both marked with bright orange “Damaged—Half Off!” stickers. Equally lacking, her fridge had only a few items, mostly condiments and a head of iceberg lettuce. For dinner, she planned to make the only other item in her freezer: miniature frozen pizzas that she had purchased at a supermarket outlet store. “They have good deals there, but it's sort of a long time to get there by bus,” she said.

As she placed the hard disks on a cookie sheet, Andra said that she believed people can eat well inexpensively but she hadn't yet figured out how. “I used to have enough money that I never had to think about what to eat. That's changed dramatically. My options are much more limited. It's especially true now that I don't have a car. There's nothing near here in terms of food shopping, really.”

She evaded questions about her past, but alluded to having lived a much different lifestyle not that long ago. “I used to have money, but no time. Now I have time, but no money. When you have the funds, it's a lot easier if you don't know how to cook. You can go out to dinner, or you can get good takeout. But when you're strapped for cash like me, you end up eating Domino's pizza or stuff like that. It's cheaper to eat badly, or at least it seems that way, especially if you're a poor cook like me.”

Most people don't realize that the average food stamp recipient receives about a dollar per meal, roughly twenty-seven dollars per week. Andra's assessment of her situation struck me as accurate. Knowing how to cook does stretch food dollars. For the price of pizza delivery (at least ten dollars), it's possible to make a whole roasted chicken with mashed potatoes and a side of vegetables. But it requires access to a grocery store, plus enough knowledge to improvise dishes, take advantage of sales, and avoid wasting leftovers.

The speed with which Andra's lifestyle had collapsed was striking. Economists say that many Americans are only two paychecks away from being homeless. Andra had a roof over her head, but little more. She was willing to do what it took to weather the economic storm and hope for a better horizon.

By the time we met the final two volunteers, strong themes had come through. Most volunteers were terrified of raw chicken and bemoaned their inability to make palatable vegetables. Bulk shopping and overzealous trips to the produce section or farmers' markets led to a lot of wasted food when combined with a lack of insight or inspiration for what to do with leftovers.

Cheryl, thirty-two, was the mother of a four-year-old boy and an infant son. She lived in an upscale home on the edge of a bay with commanding water and mountain views in a town well north of Seattle. Cheryl was a quiet, rail-thin woman with large, expressive brown eyes who hailed from a remote town in Canada. She focused on buying organic food and made a point to drive forty-five minutes to a local co-op.

Yet on the day we met her, she made herself a can of soup in her large, well-appointed kitchen with wide granite countertops and stainless steel appliances. When I asked if she'd ever tried to make soup, she smirked. “No. Well, okay, once, but it didn't go well so I never tried it again.”

The final volunteer, Genevieve, was a pretty twenty-five-year-old brunette who lived with three roommates in a spacious house in the city. Among them was John, who had become her boyfriend. She made one of the few dishes she knew, a combination of store-bought Asian slaw combined with a bottle of teriyaki sauce. Gen wanted to learn to cook in advance of a big life transition—she and John were planning to move into a place of their own. “I have friends who cook. It's like they belong to a sorority and I somehow never got asked to pledge, and now they seem to be guarding their secrets, you know?”

Both Cheryl and Gen came from homes in which their mothers cooked, yet neither learned much before leaving home. “It's so easy not to cook,” Cheryl said. “You can always pull out a frozen pizza. But I don't want to do that. I want to feel like I'm nourishing my family, not just giving them food to subsist on.”

Gen echoed her comments. “I guess I never felt compelled to learn because it feels like you could go your whole life without learning to cook. But as I've gotten older, I've just started to realize that seems like the least healthy way to go through life. I want to be able to control what I'm eating. You really just don't know what's in stuff anymore.”

The goal for both of them, and for all the volunteers, was something that felt remarkably elusive. Cheryl articulated it well. “I want to be one of those people who can open up the fridge, look inside it, and come up with a meal. I simply cannot do that now. It's like some kind of magic to be able to do that.”

 

I thought about what I had learned in the course of the week. It wasn't what I had anticipated, although, admittedly, I hadn't been sure what to expect. But I could not have predicted the residue and damage that a lack of cooking skills had on people's daily lives. Among the boxes and cans, I found a larger story of perceived failure that left them struggling with guilt, frustration, and a stinging lack of confidence.

The themes that I found in these kitchens were echoed in the others we visited. The women were so different in terms of age, background, and socioeconomic status, but they struggled with similar issues. A lot of them struggled with their weight. Lack of planning led them to rely on processed food or to stop for fast food. Some purchased too much and the wasted food made them feel bad. All of them talked about their mother, spouse, or grandmother and their ability or inability to cook, and how it impacted them as adults. None of them could hold a knife properly; then neither did I before culinary school.

From the moment I learned of Sabra's devotion to margarine, I worried that I'd gotten myself into something far too complicated. In Donna's home, meals were an emotional riptide that represented more than brown lettuce, but involed morals, money, and worldview. Jodi struggled with how to balance her fears of succumbing to Asian wife stereotypes and trying to feed her son something other than chicken nuggets. Andra represented those most affected by the economic breakdown in 2008, her comfortable life turned upside down by an unexpected downsizing that shifted her from a comfortable living to food stamps within less than six months through no apparent fault of her own. For all her good intentions, Dri ultimately lived on massive portions of starch while her greens suffered a slow death in her fridge.

I had started this on a whim, and it wasn't until I actually visited them that I realized how much courage it took all these women to allow a stranger into their homes, to poke and pry and play voyeur, then to sit in judgment of one the most intimate human acts. If you don't think of eating as intimate, think of those quiet moments you've stood alone in a kitchen, the wedge of light leaking from an open refrigerator door, seeking to satisfy a craving.

Consider a doughnut. Everyone knows that doughnuts aren't good for you. They're sugar and white flour fried in fat and traditionally topped with more sugar. But it's hard to deny the lure of the delicate aroma of a warm doughnut and the guilty pleasure of sinking your teeth into the mushy, powerful sweetness of a freshly glazed bear claw. Moments later, you feel the sugar rush, subconsciously knowing that it's too strong to last and that it's only a matter of time before the inevitable crash. How many of us have had relationships like that? The tug of something forbidden and giving in only to experience joy, disappointment, and, ultimately, regret.

As I looked over my notes and started to review the video of those visits, I wondered what my cupboards would reveal.

Unable to sleep, I slipped out of bed at two A.M. and conducted an inventory of my own kitchen. I found boxes of partially used pasta, mostly whole wheat. Three bags of white sugar. Really? Stacks of canned tomatoes, artichokes, olives, imported tuna, and locally packed clams hid two expired cans of foie gras and pâté from France. Damn, how did I forget they were there? Plastic bags with various grains I'd experimented with once or twice that Mike didn't like, so they remained untouched. Half jars of protein-shake mix from an ambitious gym period. A messy drawer crammed with tired spices, some labeled in foreign languages. In the cupboard, dying vinegars, Wondra gravy thickener, green peppercorns, a box of Krusteaz crust mix, and a couple of boxes of macaroni and cheese.

Condiments dominated the fridge, a curious collection that ranged from Baconnaise to fish sauce to four varieties of mustard. Two small takeout boxes of Thai food sat on the middle shelf next to plastic containers filled with duck fat, bacon fat, and expired yogurt. Despite efforts to diligently use produce, I found a moist green bag of what had been organic mesclun salad, and next to it, decomposing zucchini, and a handful of molding limes lurking in the crisper drawer under fresh bundles of Swiss chard. Tucked in the back was an abandoned year-old bag of decaf coffee bought after a fertility specialist suggested that I give up caffeine. In the freezer, bones for chicken stock mingled next to vodka-spiked ice pops, a bag of white pork fat (a gift from Lisa), ready-to-cook chicken dumplings from a place in Chinatown, half-used bags of spinach, frozen blueberries from two summers ago, and the remnants of an undated batch of chocolate chip cookie dough.

I was in a battle with myself. It seemed that I had as much to learn as any of the people I'd just visited.

CHAPTER 4