Love Me Tender(izer)

The hand-sewn apron, lovingly crafted for my mother who hates to cook, is a tidy combination of several realms of domesticity, and as such, it looks kind of funny hanging in my kitchen. This particular apron is made of material with little menorahs on it. My aunt made it for my mother one scraping-the-bottom-of-the-barrel gift season. I actually wore it recently, at home over Thanksgiving break while assessing the soup potential of the turkey carcass. I could tell that no one else had worn or washed the apron since early September because a pesto stain still covered the “Ch” in “Happy Chanukah.” I thought briefly about making that pesto again before coming back to school, because my parents’ Cuisinart makes food processing such a pleasure. We had no more farfalle, which is the best kind of pasta to hold the sauce, so I would have had to go to Shaw’s alone and then come back to our kitchen afterward to create my pesto dinner. I am still a bit afraid of a solitary grocery store outing. There was nothing very inspiring in our cabinets for me to cook, so I gave up.

There used to be fruit snacks in the cabinet, like Gushers, those capsules of wonderfully colored gooey chemicals that tasted sweet and for some reason were packaged and sold to parents of small children. Now that no one packs school lunches in my house anymore, the former snack cabinet is stacked high with cans of tomato paste, tuna fish, and other non-perishables. If my dad has been to the natural foods co-op recently, there may be a bag of “chunks of energy” that seem to be made entirely of congealed tofu and birdseed.

I am afraid of my kitchen still. It is not such a bad kitchen. It is functional. There is a nice island-counter top in the middle that collects things like junk mail and form letters from the Vermont Society of Bar Examiners and now, since it is holiday season, pictures of smiling children and beautifully groomed dogs whom no one has ever met. The linoleum floor is swept frequently and, like I said, the Cuisinart is first-rate. But for so long so much of the food in that kitchen was off-limits or bad or would lead to inevitable disappointment if I touched it. So it is a bit emotionally charged as rooms go.

But recently I was instructed or browbeaten, depending on how I feel like telling the story, into making “feeding myself” a priority.

I spent Easter weekend last year at my roommate’s house in Maine. It was the first time I celebrated Easter, but the whole risen-Christ thing wasn’t really a focus of the weekend. Good company and good food were the highlights. And I watched in amazement as her parents worked together—happily, beautifully together—to produce an incredible dinner and brunch the next morning. Perhaps this is a bit maudlin for homemade eggs benedict—but homemade eggs benedict! The kitchen was not a battleground, it was a workshop. Inspired by the utter perfection of observing this family in action (and enjoying the fruits of their labor) I started to think about maybe learning to cook.

It was easy to learn at first because I lived at home this summer and was cooking only for myself and my parents and sometimes my grandmother. And although they liberally offer criticism in every arena of my life, on this issue they were generally polite, sometimes effusively positive. When my attempted reduction sauce was reduced to a smoking black glob in the corner of the saucepan, my mother quietly turned on the fan over the stove and put more salt on her chicken.

Luckily, I live in DeWolfe this year and the learning continues. There is a picture on my desk of the Indian meal I made to celebrate my birthday this year and the table is full of food that I made. When I look at it I am sort of perplexed at how I got to this level of proficiency.

It seems like such a basic thing. Most people eat three meals a day. It’s a fairly regular activity. But actually preparing something for myself that involved heating an oven or transforming raw meat from salmonella-laden threat into gustatory delight seemed totally beyond my scope.

I hate the word “empower.” It can only be used in the passive really, as in ‘it was really empowering’ or ‘I was empowered.’ You can’t say ‘I empowered myself’ or ‘I empower you to be happy,’ and for such an active idea it is sort of ridiculous to only be able to express it in a passive way. But it fits nicely in this discussion. Cooking is empowering. Maybe not for everyone, but definitely for me. Kitchens were scary, are still sort of scary if I’m alone. I have a food phobia nurtured by a childhood, adolescence, teenagehood and late-teenagehood or whatever it is that I’m in now all filled with bouts of obsessive-compulsive overeating.

Cooking for other people is nice, especially now in school when a homemade meal is sort of a novelty. And of course it makes me happy to hear that my version of chicken satay passes muster with my Thai roommate. She did say it had a distinctive “Rachel style” to it, which, considering my lack of Asian ancestry, is sort of a confusing compliment. She ate it anyway, though, so I won’t dwell.

But the other people involved in the whole food preparation process actually don’t matter that much. I do not have a discerning palate or gourmet ambitions. It is just that for a very long time eating the right kind of food—or, more accurately, my failure to do so—has dominated my life. Every unbalanced meal was brazen rebellion. Every celery stick promised redemption. And my choices were all sort of haphazard, based on what I could rustle up or find or submit to, partially because of four-plus years of high school dining hall subsistence and partially because food preparation itself just seemed so awful.

It’s not like I’m a totally converted domestic. I can see how the drudgery of a daily obligation to put food on the table for a family would chip away at even the most Martha-esque culinary good cheer. But my experience in meal preparation so far, limited to my own whim and the cushion of a meal plan in times of laziness, is the most unpredictably good thing in my life right now. I don’t really know what that means, but every time I use the word parboil in a conversation (more frequently than one might guess) I am pleasantly surprised.

I can’t really explain why I like the process so much. It is definitely not just the fact that I can create a meal that is satisfying and healthy. Putting steaming bowls on a table, even a wobbly dorm-room coffee table, does make me a little bit proud. It’s the cooking part itself, however, that I like the most. For so long I have been taught to obsess over food, whether I am eating too much or the wrong kind, and this breeds an obsessive focus on food because it is forbidden in so many forms.

Mincing garlic focuses this attention. Blending pine nuts and basil into pesto, caramelizing onions, stirring chicken broth into risotto until precisely the correct amount of liquid has evaporated, sprinkling a touch more turmeric into a pot of chicken curry—these things are all food focuses, they nurture the part of my brain that inevitably wanders to the pantry. but they are productive and do not involve eating. I know this is sort of an alarming thing to say; however much olive oil I use in place of butter to create healthy meals, the root of my love of cooking is probably not so healthy itself.

My routine has changed for the better. Previously, boredom usually led to the hatching of elaborate plans to get food, generally chocolate or something, as soon as possible. This food-search generally had nothing to do with actual hunger and everything to do with deprivation, breaking rules, etc., etc.

Now, when I am bored and tend toward food thoughts, I wonder about squash soup or if baking whole-wheat foccacia crust would be a silly way to spend Saturday afternoon.

My grandmother’s refrigerator door is covered in yellowing clippings of particularly trite cartoons. I tease her about the prominent display place these somewhat witty drawings have next to the photographs of six-year-old me. I am never tempted toward newspaper clipping myself. There is one cartoon I tore out of the New Yorker and then promptly threw away because I hated it. I remember it anyway. There is a woman standing by the fridge with a carton of ice cream open in her hand. Her husband (or whoever is the balding man in her life) sticks his head around the corner. “I’m not eating, I’m self-medicating,” is the catchy punchline italicized at the bottom. Subtext: Hah. Silly woman. Clearly self-medication is pathetic rationalization. Eating won’t solve her problems. Hah. Women say the stupidest things to justify their total lack of self-control.

I don’t clip cartoons, but I am edging toward the road of recipe clipping. I already made salad dressing from a magazine. For now I’m okay though with my reading material. I am perusing the clearly airbrushed photos of bruschetta in a new cookbook that I was given for my birthday. It is one of two that I received. So this is my new self-medication. Dinner at my place?

Rachel E. Dry is a History and Literature concentrator in Quincy house. She loves nothing if not a good party mix.