The Kitchen Counter Cooking School (42 page)

CHAPTER 14

 

Not long after the last class in early September, an acquaintance shared a most discouraging quote. Her grandfather used to say that he'd “rather try to change someone's religion than change the way they eat.”

“I'm only telling you this so you're not discouraged if your project didn't work,” she said. I may have defriended her on Facebook.

Although the signs had seemed encouraging over the summer, that conversation dogged me. What if I had spent all this time and effort—not to mention the work of everyone else—yet it had no impact? I waited until after Thanksgiving to follow up. As we had the first time, we'd audit their cabinets and ask them to prepare a meal that they ate regularly. I wanted the distance of time to see what, if anything, had stuck.

Six months after our first visit, a frigid November wind wailed outside as I stood in Sabra's warm kitchen with Lisa and Sabra's dad. He was just as curious as we were. Sabra had assembled a casserole in a new pan, one of many recent additions to her kitchen. “I got this idea from Stouffer's. It's a Cheddar and potato casserole with broccoli and bacon,” she said, sliding the prepared dish into oven. “I can make twelve servings of this for the same price as a couple of dinners, it tastes way, way better, and I know what's in it.”

I asked what her biggest takeaway was from the course. “Confidence,” she replied quickly. “I can look at any recipe and know that I can make it now. I never thought that before.” She picked up her chef's knife from the counter and handled it with reverence. “Learning knife skills changed everything. One reason I used to get intimidated by cooking was I'd see a bunch of stuff to cut up, but now I know that's not a big deal. I actually like that part.”

From the minute we arrived, Sabra seemed eager to show off her freezer. “You ready?” she asked. We all nodded. With a flourish, she flung it open. “Notice there are
no
frozen meals in here,” she said proudly. Two whole frozen turkeys took up the space once occupied by stacks of frozen dinners. “They're a Thanksgiving gift from my dad's business,” she explained. “I haven't made them yet because I don't have a pan big enough, but I've asked for one for Christmas,” she said, eyeing her dad sitting at the kitchen counter.

Rounding out the freezer were bags of tortellini, vegetables, and individual portions of various leftovers. “Those are lunch,” she explained. “Oh, look!” She grabbed a plastic bag and shook it. “Chicken bones! For stock! I made some, but I'm out.”

If the project had succeeded in nothing else, Sabra, the young woman who had served us frozen lasagna and White Trash Garlic Bread a mere six months ago, no longer wandered the frozen-foods aisle looking for dinner.

“While they're cheap, I just realized they aren't such a good deal after all,” she said. “I find that if I cook a couple of times a week, then there's always something my boyfriend and I can eat, which is cool. It's just like convenience food, except you make it.”

Avoiding frozen dinners wasn't the only shift in Sabra's habits. She found herself shopping more often, hitting a farm stand nearby for vegetables. Whenever she buys food, she always does so with at least two meals in mind. “I think we're spending about the same on groceries but less on food overall because we eat less takeout. We waste a lot less food, too.”

Sabra used to eat Hamburger Helper every other week. She admitted that she hadn't made it since July, about midway through the project. Her remaining box of the stuff had been banished to a high shelf to make way for new additions to her modest pantry. “It's funny, a lot of things expire that I never thought about, like oils, flour, and spices.” She had used up the rest of her expired flour, had replaced her dead spices, and now buys smaller doses of everything. “Now when I buy something like olive oil, I get the smaller size even though it's more expensive. But I know that it will stay good until I can use it all.”

“Oh, and check it out!” She reached into the dairy drawer of her fridge to retrieve a paper package. She unwrapped a bit to expose the tip of a hard wedge of Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese. She hadn't seemed that engaged in the tasting class, but she reported that it had had a powerful effect on her. “The tastings made me really think about what I buy. People can say you should go and spend the extra money and get real cheese, but until you taste it for yourself, it's almost impossible to know that it's worth it.”

Her fascination with McDonald's had subsided, too. “It's funny how if you eat well and then you go eat fast food, you can really feel it. It kind of sinks in my stomach, and I can hear my body saying
whoa whoa whoa,
what the . . . ? I don't want this.” She held her stomach and groaned.

That comment, it must be noted, came from the woman who equated love with McDonald's and who told me that if cooking dinner would take more than twenty minutes, she'd go out for fast food.

“Oh, yeah, I know I said that. But a big thing I got out of it was that cooking is worth my time,” she said. “Homemade stock is basically free and you can make so much stuff out of it. Although I cut myself twice in class when I first started learning to use a knife, it was so worth it,” she said with a laugh. “The chicken class was important because I was afraid of chicken, that whole salmonella thing. And I'm going to be honest, I was kind of freaked out by cutting up the whole chicken at first. But that made me rethink food in a lot of ways. You're right, it's easier to remember that it was once, well, a chicken.”

Yet for all these strides, some things she cannot let go of, White Trash Garlic Bread among them. “But that's more about the memory of that, since I ate it growing up with my mother. But I use the good cheese now, not the stuff from a can.”

The other untouchable? Gold 'n Soft. “I can't give that up because butter still tastes funny to me,” she admitted. “But I use less, probably because I use olive oil more now.”

In a way, Sabra was railroaded into this project by her stepmother, Lisa. I would not have faulted her if she had attended, feigned polite enthusiasm, and resumed her life in the fast-food lane. Instead, she embraced it and made extraordinary changes. Given all that, how could anyone deny her a few tastes of her childhood? I certainly could not.

When I first visited Trish, Mike filmed the proceedings. This time around, Lisa came along. Like me, she marveled at Trish's collection of immaculate white binders filled with recipes she'd been clipping for decades, each encased in its own plastic sheath.

She exuded a sense of calm on this visit. “So I don't think what I've bought or cooked has changed as much as something has changed in
me,
” she started. “I'm more relaxed and I'm not so hard on myself.”

She gave the recipes in the binders as an example. She pulled out one that said “appetizers” and started to flip through it. “I went to all this trouble to put these together, but then I really didn't make many of the recipes. I was so intimidated and worried that they wouldn't work out. So I used to just look at them. Now I'm actually
cooking
out of them. I make notes, and the ones that I don't like or don't work, I throw them away.”

“So did you keep recipes that didn't work out before?” I asked. She nodded. “Why?”

“I thought there couldn't be anything wrong with the recipe and so whatever went wrong was my fault,” she explained. This led her to a bigger realization. “I have this psychological thing that if I can do it then it must not be special or good. Plus, my mother didn't like to cook. She thought she was terrible at it and I absorbed that,” she said. “Now I think I may not be the greatest cook, but I know that I
can
do it. I am not afraid of it.”

Her mother was the one who owned the
I Hate to Cook Book,
a title that sold three million copies. The premise of the book was that women should get the whole cooking thing over with, thus avoiding any more drudgery in the kitchen than was absolutely necessary. This advice was couched in humorous terms by the author, Peg Bracken, who also advised women not to throw too much angst into meals either. Trish's mother managed to pass down the dislike of cooking, and not Bracken's ultimate message, which was that, in the end, cooking isn't that big of a deal. The irony was that of all the initial kitchen visits, Trish's ratatouille was probably the best food I ate, certainly the healthiest, and the only one made with whole foods. She slipped the binder back onto the shelf and we went into the kitchen.

She started to organize the makings of a vegetable and bean stew from
Feeding the Whole Family
by Cynthia Lair, which is, incidentally, one of my favorite cookbooks.

Trish set up her cutting board on the counter, carefully placing a wet paper towel underneath. She showed off her two new knives, a seven-inch chef's knife and a santoku, a Japanese-style design characterized by its curved spine and small indents in the blade. She set out her metal bowl for scraps. “There are little things, like using a bowl for scraps, that have made a big difference. My kitchen stays cleaner and I feel more organized.”

She cut an onion perfectly. “I had a big aha over the onion,” she said. “In the knife skills class, I thought, So that's the secret! She used to use a garlic press. “I stopped using that because now I like cutting, and that just dirties the garlic press.” She turned to a six-quart stainless steel pot—another recent purchase—and tossed the vegetables into hot oil.

“Oh, and the other thing, I made stock.” She opened the freezer and showed off a collection of carefully marked blue-lidded plastic containers. She pulled one out to show us.

“Wow, Trish, check you out!” I said.

She looked proud. After she tucked the container back in the freezer, she went to the stove and held up a small blue handmade glazed ceramic box with a lid. “I had wondered for years what to do with this. My son made it. Now I keep my coarse salt in it so I can pinch salt. That's another little thing. It seems silly, but trying to figure out a pinch with a shaker is hard!”

She ticked off items she'd tried since the summer. “I'm still terrible at cutting up chicken, but I love to do it.” She regretted leaving the meat class early. “I should have stayed. I would have liked to learn more about braising.” She had enjoyed learning to make the vinaigrette but rarely did it. “I don't know, buying it in the bottle is just so easy.”

Of the other classes, she used the soup class the most. “I now have a sense of how to make soup from just about anything, and we love soup.”

Once again, she set the table with beautiful dinnerware, a sculpted silver breadbasket in the center of the table, and immaculately ironed cloth napkins. The stew was light yet savory and brightened with the flavor of cilantro. It was the perfect lunch for a cold, rainy day. The timer dinged for the pear tart she had made for dessert. “When I made it the last time, I took it to my friend's house and she had a perfect silver oblong pan and it looked so pretty. Everyone said, ‘Wow, Trish, you're so good in the kitchen.'

“And this may seem silly, but it was a big moment for me. I was proud of something that I cooked.” Her eyes got a little misty at the memory. “No one expected that from me. I didn't expect it from myself. It is remarkable that at my age I can still change, and that I can still surprise myself.”

When I met Jodi, she had found herself suddenly a stay-at-home mother after being laid off from her high-tech job. She had gone back to work again that autumn, juggling her home life with a three-year-old and trying to keep up with expectations in her new job. When I learned that she had gone back to work, I worried that whatever momentum Jodi had gained in the project might have dissipated.

As soon as I walked into her kitchen, I realized I didn't need to worry. Jodi could barely contain her excitement when we arrived. It was as if she had a secret that she just couldn't wait to share. It was a remarkable shift from the air of defeat and tentativeness I had felt on the day that she made Japanese curry from a cube.

By contrast, she was smiling and relaxed as she told us she was planning to roast a chicken. She showed off the simple roasting pan that she had bought for twenty dollars at a restaurant supply store. “Oh, yeah, I do this all the time now,” she said about the chicken. “I've learned that as long as the chicken isn't too big, it takes right around an hour.” She has made a hobby of finding uses for the leftovers. “I made chicken Alfredo and it was
so
good,” she gushed. “I make the fresh tomato sauce so often that I think I'm going to have to take a break from it because my husband and son might be getting sick of it, but I still really like it.”