Cooking as Fast as I Can (23 page)

We drove up in the dark, and when we woke up it was snowing too hard to ski. Rather than sit in the condo and stare at each other, we went to the lodge. At 9:00 a.m. the bar opened. The snow came down thicker and faster, creating whiteout conditions, so there would be no skiing for the foreseeable future. As it was also my birthday, I saw no reason not to order myself a Corona Light. The lodge was more crowded than usual, given the bad weather, and I found a spot next to a two-top, where a couple was seated, a lanky blonde and her boyfriend or husband. Or so I presumed.

The heavy snow this late in the season gave the lodge a festive air. I wasn't the only one knocking back beers before lunch. The blonde asked where we were from, and we all got to chatting. We ordered another round. I was feeling pretty warm and friendly. Damn if that blonde wasn't just my type. She had bright brown eyes, an elegant nose, and a dazzling smile. She was feminine and very pretty, but also looked like a woman of substance, one who would give you a run for your money. Was she flirting with me? With her boyfriend or husband sitting right there?

Suddenly, he pushed back his chair back and excused himself.

“Is that your boyfriend or husband or whatever?” I blurted out.

“Not at all,” she said. “I don't date men.”

“Really? Neither do I. Are you seeing anyone?”

“Nope, completely single.”

Her name was Jennifer Johnson. She told me she worked as a nanny. Geoff, the man she was with, was her employer, along with his wife, Laura. They had one little girl. Then Geoff returned from the bathroom and looked from her to me and back. “Wow. You guys move fast.”

fifteen

A
fter that snowy, half-drunk morning at the ski lodge at Tahoe, Jennifer and I saw each other every day. We'd fallen in love at first sight, and she gave me things I hadn't even known I'd needed. On our first official date she took me to a toy store. “I can tell you're too serious and need to remember how to play,” she said. We adored one another, and that somehow gave us the magical powers to find time for each other even given our breakneck work schedules, her a full-time nanny, me at Postino from an hour before it opened to the day's last floor mop.

Born in Inglewood, southwest of Los Angeles, and raised in the Bay Area city of Fremont, Jennifer has always struck me as the consummate California girl. Her friends nicknamed her Tommy Girl, because she was a tomboy and was crazy for soccer. She played AYSO club soccer throughout high school, and after she graduated was pretty much done with school. She wasn't interested in academics, and after college she worked at Costco for a while before hooking up with a girl who had a young son. She hung out with the little boy and babysat him once in a while and discovered that she enjoyed it. Not long after that she started working as a nanny.

There's an old joke I'll
try to tell even though Jennifer will say I'm the world's worst joke teller.

What do lesbians call the second date?

Moving day.

About six months after we met (roughly a hundred years in lesbian time), Jennifer and I found ourselves a little one-bedroom apartment in Oakland on Vermont Street. She brought her shepherd mix, Sierra, and suddenly we were just like a lot of same-sex couples in the Bay Area, doting over our furry child. Jennifer was still working as a nanny for Laura and Geoff, and they traveled a lot. She was away as much as she was home, which meant she could handle my sometimes crazy hours.

One day Michael asked me whether I'd be interested in representing Postino at Taste of San Francisco, an annual charity event whose proceeds go toward ending childhood hunger in America. I said hell yes. Because that was the kind of happy I was then. I cannonballed into everything.

I was assigned a spot between two other chefs in the big exhibit hall. The place was crazy packed with chefs, some very famous, some up-and-coming, bartenders in dress shirts, sleeves rolled up, pouring signature cocktails, winemakers, bakers, and pastry chefs. I showed up in my whites, my hair pulled back into a sleek ponytail. I put some yellow tulips in a glass vase on my table to jazz up my station.

I don't recall what I was demonstrating that day, but I remember I thoroughly enjoyed myself. Postino had an open kitchen, and I'd grown accustomed to working in front of people, making conversation as I plated. I liked interacting with folks, and as the daughter of Spiro and Virginia Lee Cora
of Jackson, Mississippi, I was raised to be as polite and congenial as could be.

None of this was lost on Joey Altman, who passed the time by my table for a quarter of an hour. Joey Altman was another chef who had six things going at once, a handsome bro who looked like the president of the fraternity. He'd worked at Stars, a landmark restaurant in San Francisco back in the day, and opened Miss Pearl's Jam House, where he wowed the persnickety San Francisco crowd in the late eighties with his African- and Caribbean-inspired fare. He played in a blues-rock band with a bunch of other chefs, and hosted a local cooking show called
Bay Café
on KRON4, the NBC affiliate.

Not long after Taste of San Francisco I received a call in the kitchen at Postino.

“Hey, Joey Altman here. I was thinking you'd be good on the show; why don't you come on?”

“Great,” I said.

Like most cooking shows at the time,
Bay Café
had a production budget of about forty-seven cents per episode. I was required to provide my own food.
Bay Café
was a “dump and stir” show, no theatrics, rival teams, or time clock. I demonstrated how to make pine-nut-crusted veal scaloppini with romesco sauce, crisp garlic, and basil, a favorite dish on the Postino menu.

Until now, I'd never had a burning desire to be a TV star. Truly I wasn't hyperaware of any food personalities other than Julia Child, who despite being older than God had just launched a new show on PBS,
Julia and Jacques Cooking at Home
with my other culinary heartthrob, Jacques Pépin. Julia always liked to say that she was first and foremost an educator, and I saw what she meant. She happened to be very entertaining, but her goal of appearing on television was not entertainment, but
to show people how to make great food in their own kitchens.

The task of making a dish in front of a camera turned out to be weirdly and deeply satisfying. The challenge of working with the food, describing what I was doing, and moving around the kitchen set in a way that was both natural and precise, all while striving to be entertaining, was exhilarating. I felt like a unicycle rider who's just discovered she has an aptitude for juggling a peach, a bowling pin, and a chain saw. The experience also conjured up the unalloyed joy I'd felt performing in the Follies in high school, when I'd felt the simple and all-consuming satisfaction of being fully engaged in a production.

When I finished the segment, Joey Altman told me my timing was impeccable. The cameraman said he couldn't believe I hadn't done this sort of thing before. I put some of their compliments down to the simple need to boost the confidence of the talent, but I felt confident enough to request a tape of the episode, which I then shot off to the Food Network, feeling giddy as I addressed the padded envelope and took it to the post office.

The Food Network was still finding its feet back in the late nineties. It had one hit show with Emeril Lagasse,
Emeril Live!
but was still unclear whether there was a big audience for cooking shows, aside from bleary-eyed mothers who'd just put their toddlers down for a nap. The network was scrambling to expand its audience, throwing pretty much every kind of food-related program they could think of against the wall to see if it would stick. There were shows profiling iconic restaurants around the nation and shows that took famous chefs (or, at that time, any chef they could get) to their homeland where they would cook the food they grew up on. There were food news shows and food game shows, and finally, a show starring
Mario Batali,
Molto Mario
. In 1999, only a few weeks before I met Jennifer,
East Meets West
, hosted by Ming Tsai, a Chinese American chef born in Newport Beach, California, won an Emmy, beating out both Martha Stewart and my beloved Julia Child.

The good news for me, an unknown chef from Northern California without my own restaurant, cookbook, or shtick (“Bam!”), was that my tape would not be tossed onto the pile with hundreds of others, waiting for a bleary-eyed unpaid intern to fast-forward through it. The network was actively seeking new talent, and two weeks later, I received a phone call from someone whose name I've clean forgotten, asking whether I wanted to fly to New York to be a guest on
In Food Today
, hosted by David Rosenthal, where “the world's top chefs stop by to share their secrets.”

My big draw, as far as I could tell, was being a Mississippi girl, because their earth-shattering idea was to have me demonstrate how to make chicken and dumplings and fried pickles. I assure you that at this juncture I was more than happy to be pigeonholed as a stereotypical southern cook. I was so tickled and grateful I thought my head would twirl off. I convinced the suits who managed Postino to give me a few days off to fly to New York. Wasn't this a fabulous new development for the restaurant? Having their executive chef appear on the Food Network? They were unmoved, but gave me the time off anyway.

I was well into my thirties now, grateful for all of the opportunities I'd had and proud of my accomplishments, but that mind-blowing experience of one thing effortlessly and obviously leading to another, a life free of the feeling of stuttering and false starts, had thus far eluded me.

That began to change. The morning after the
In Food Today
taping I flew home to Oakland. I walked in the front door and learned the Food Network had already called, asking if I'd agree to four appearances on
Ready . . . Set . . . Cook
. I had no idea what that was, but I couldn't wait to get back on the set.

Food Network had purchased the rights to a British competitive cooking show,
Ready . . . Steady . . . Cook
, where two teams, the Red Tomatoes and the Green Peppers, each comprising a chef and a member of the studio audience, compete to cook a meal in twenty minutes using the basic ingredients found in the average home kitchen. My opponent was Randall Andrews, billed as “Chef to the Stars.” If memory serves, he'd worked for Jack Nicholson.

This time, I didn't even make it to the airport before I received another request to audition. On the day of my last appearance, as I was heading toward the elevator, I was approached by a guy in a blue blazer who introduced himself as Bob Tuschman and handed me his card.

“I have a show I think you'd be perfect for. One of the hosts just left, and we'd love for you to come and try out.”

“Absolutely, I would love that. Should I be prepared to do anything special?” I imagined a dish starring okra in my near future.

“We don't care. Make a great peanut butter and jelly sandwich. We just want to see how you do on camera.”