Food, Interrupted

My culinary journey has been fraught with tensions: past versus present, food as energy versus food as experience / event, food as fun versus the denial of this pleasure, food as an adrenaline rush versus food as a harmful.  Obviously a bit grandiose of a statement but nonetheless accurately captures this important part of my being.

Having a mother who worked as a professor of nutrition in a field that began in 1872 as the Department of Domestic Science at a Midwestern university, later as a consultant to several restaurants and finishing up as a counselor at a clinic helping folks dealing with eating disorders; food would always be of interest and complicated in my life.  One of my earliest food memories (probably 7 or 8 years old) is of my mom and her University mentor, this great German lady, incredibly petite (think Linda Hunt or a less creepy Zelda Rubenstein from Poltergeist) would convene at our home around December 20^th and they would cook for 24 to 48 hours straight – not exaggerating.  From scratch they made pastries, breads, cookies, rolls, and what seemed infinite other baked goods – all out this tiny kitchen (in comparison to today’s standards).  Some of the finished goods were made for various churches and charities, much shared with friends and neighbors – there was not a counter, table, shelf, dresser on the first floor of our house that was not covered by a plate of finished product.  The smells were heavenly of course, but what I remember most is watching them work, curious about the mixing, the folds of dough, the whole preparation.   

My next  food memory is several years later when I joined my mom in the kitchen as her apprentice for the first time as she taught me how to make fried rice (I still have not found a better version than moms fried rice).  First, of course, was how to properly cook rice.   Next was firing up our electric wok, cutting the vegetables, getting the eggs ready, cook a little bacon and work it all together in the wok and damn it if I had not made my first anything (beyond a bowl of cereal or toast).  I was intrigued by the process and I liked sharing the end product with the rest of the family (and basking in a bit of positive familial support no doubt).  The rest of my teenage years I often returned to the kitchen to help and eventually cook meals for the family, I especially became quite adept at working a grill – pork ribs, a variety of steaks, chicken, pork chops, kabobs, fish, you name it, I grilled it as teenager ( a cliché, I know).  But also began to work with pasta, a few basic sauces, stir fry, various incarnations of potatoes, stayed away from desserts initially.  Now the first tension is that my father is a product of the depression and an American culture at-large that was strictly meat and potatoes.    He ate the same dinner meal each weekday until he left for college – budgets were tight.  But food was experienced as a regimen, as a fuel for the next thing.  So not a lot of adventure on our family menu, my mom did go to great lengths to introduce as many vegetables to my brothers and me, but the politics of patriarchy, well you know what happened.  She would sneak by a few things and my father’s palette has grown a bit over the years, but fairly straightforward food, cooked fresh, cooked well, but simple and similar.

But, one of the great things about growing up in a college town is the diversity of the population.  I had friends from around the world, friends that had traveled the world as well as a bunch of extended family scattered around various Chicago communities.  So I was introduced to things like spaetzle, falafel, pierogi, kreplach, burekas, cioppino, duck and liver pate, escargot, ribollita, sushi, various smoked fish (my best sampling of memory I could muster) – maybe not earth shattering today, but fairly adventurous for a teenager in the corn fields in the eighties.  This cooking at home and these culinary adventures only intensified my interest.  So after an ill-fated year of college, I found myself working in a bakery (a future post skimmed over in this sentence).

Five days a week, sometimes six – up at 4:15 a.m., in the kitchen no later than 5.  I would ride my bike most days, the quiet calm of the early morning before the madness and timing and concentration of the ktichen (I know, hard to believe, Thesaurus but I did actually ride my bike with some regularity once).  The first days were insane, after a week working alongside the outgoing baker (Mr. Jinks – real last name); I was left to my own devices.  I should have been done by Noon at the latest, I was there until 3, 4 5 p.m., staggered home covered in flour and sweat, slept and repeat.  But thankfully I was a fast learner and I soon found the baker’s rhythm: croissants folded and in the proof box first, sourdoughs and assorted breads next, a double order of the Silver Palates amazing raspberry muffins, these spicy pepper bread rolls that our sandwich maker turned into the most amazing roast beef sandwich I have ever had – again, not hyperbole.  Then a pan of chocolate / cream cheese brownies (claim to fame, I once made these brownies for then First Lady, Hilary Clinton), finished off with an assortment of, again, one of the best semi-sweet chocolate cookies I have ever had as well as peanut butter, oatmeal, ...  Thankfully I worked at one of the few high end delis / restaurant stores in town, so I was exposed to a world-wide cornucopia of ingredients and my bosses rarely cut corners on the ingredients (one of the keys to restaurant success, be smart with food costs but don’t be cheap).  For two years I followed this schedule, and as a young man I could go to bed at midnight, get four hours of sleep and easily make it through the day.  I found peace in the process and the concentration of baking; I was satisfied when I punched out at the end of my day – I had produced an impressive array of food stuff that many people enjoyed.  Two years of this schedule was great fun and fun learning about food and its preparation.  But the morning was beginning to take its toll.  So, a friend working as a teacher’s aide at a children’s home and I moved to the night shift of the cooking world as line cooks at a local steak house. 

This experience was awful for the reason mentioned above, cheap ingredients bought by a cheap owner.  His au jous was made from a powder for fucks sake; I once saw him take clearly past their prime steaks and marinate them in a cheap teriyaki sauce and took a couple bucks off the menu price.  The only fond memory of this place was an amazing weekend where the boss left the kitchen, after acknowledging that he only got in our way, and turned it over to my compatriot and I and we cranked through the mad rush of mom’s weekend and graduation – we served nearly 250 people over three nights and we rocked them all – we made the au jous from scratch this weekend.  On Monday, our boss gave us each a $10 bonus, we quit at the end of the week.  While of course petty and wrong, my friend and I each took a case of his best beer before we left.

My cooking career continued at a Greek restaurant in Indianapolis, another steak house and ended with a two year run at a fine dining American restaurant.  This was the rush of a real restaurant.  The chaos, the concentration, the fights, the hatred for the front of the house, the caffeine and nicotine – it is most certainly an adrenaline high that when the world finally slows down at the end of the night, you exist in that interesting state of exhaustion, concentration – sort of floating outside yourself.  I started as the garde manger chef, a fancy way of saying I chopped, cut, peeled, diced, skinned and all other prep needs for the line cooks, plus made all the salads on the menu.  This was soon followed by the appetizer station, next the grills (fire and plancha) and finally an occasional night at the sauté station.  Here I learned a bit about butchering, making soups from scratch, and added béchamel, veloute, espagnole, hollandaise, carbonara, pesto sauces to my knowledge base – another wonderful learning experience.  Plus, restaurant folks are goofy, odd, funny, often creative outside the kitchen, usually lovers of music, usually abusing one substance or more, usually have had sex with multiple members of the restaurant’s staff, smart, quick tempered, as previously mentioned filled with hatred for the ungrateful wait staff.  Many great nights at that place, many exhausting nights as well.  Unbeknownst to me, I was living with an undiagnosed and quite severe sleep disorder (and had been since birth – another post, long overdue as it has been the subtext of several posts already).   I could not physically and mentally keep up the schedule any more, I was a walking zombie kept awake by prescribed stimulants, and a choice had to be made.  I was ready to give college another try and that decision ended my official working life in the food business.  I have catered a handful of events for friends and for pay (a wedding brunch, a couple of bridal showers, a graduation party), plus I cook for my students at least once each semester, while nerve-wracking in the moment, I would find joy in these moments, sometimes relief that I made it through the meal, usually nostalgic for what was once every day.

Sadly though, the end of my life in the kitchen would soon extend itself to my home as well.  I simply stopped cooking, slowly over the next decade the skills diminished a bit, the curiosity waned, the practice became less and less.  I occasionally cooked for girlfriends, family and friends, made a dish for Thanksgiving, made the whole Christmas dinner / or brunch more than once, but in the day-to-day of life, I hid behind the excuse “cooking for one sucks, it is boring, a waste of time.”  In retrospect, it was this course of action that was a result of a skewed self identity that I embraced, where self-punishment, denying the things I loved, valued, appreciated, enjoyed for long periods of life was the rule of the day (I had done this with other passions: music, basketball, friends, writing).  I embraced the negative as my identity and thus I came to believe I was not worthy of such pleasures.  There were bits and spurts of course, travels to Mexico, Costa Rica, Europe, San Francisco, Denver, New York, Chicago have all provided momentary relief from this mindset and I would indulge this love.  Fortunately, one of my oldest friends became my replacement at the bakery, and after years of anger, frustration and confusion, he found a passion in food.  This led to working at multiple restaurants in the Midwest before attending CIA in Poughkeepsie, had an amazing two visits there.  And now his career has taken him to NYC, LA, San Francisco, Chicago, Atlanta, Las Vegas, Bali and now Thailand – and other than the last two spots, he has provided wonderful culinary tours in all of these cities.

It certainly does not help that there are massive industries in place, and are hard to avoid, that process, fatten, mash, meld, congeal, and turn far too many foods into something they never should be and turned the cooking process into set the microwave, push go, return in 90 to 120 seconds, and done.   Thankfully the foodie movement that existed in small pockets across the country for decades has moved more into the mainstream, reaching more and more places and rejecting those massive industries, forcing some to change both the products used and how those products should be prepare and creating a space for those that believe food is more than thawing out and nuking.  The artisan cheese movements, organic gardening, local food stores and co-ops and such are collectively creating a new market, a new environment for food.  I live in a town that hosts three difference farmer’s markets, the one in my town is quite impressive. 

But I got lazy, buried my interest.  Thankfully buried does not mean killed off, it is still there, it still matters.  I am finding my way back to it, this love, this interest.  I will keep you posted – happy cooking, happy eating.