NYC. Takeout Girl
My 20’s. I cook nothing.
I’m too busy living my life, dating people, working on Broadway as a dramaturg and in grad school at NYU.
How much of a non-cook am I? I am a 90’s version of Kendall Jenner cutting a cucumber.
Okay, not really. I have some basic cooking skills. I cooked while working at a home for mentally ill adults during college and cooking for the residents was part of the job. But it didn’t grab me, excite me, or feel like my kind of expression.
Instead, I wake up every morning and call the diner on the corner of 96th street and Columbus Circle. It goes like this:
Ring Ring
“Diner.”
“Hi Astro, it’s Kim.”
“….10 minutes”
Click.
Ten minutes later, a knock at the door: Dino, the delivery guy hands me a bag filled with three orders of white toast with butter, warm and wrapped in foil, and two large Diet Cokes with the proper amount of ice. I grunt something at him and close the door. My card is automatically charged, with a tip for Dino. It’s like having Apple Pay in the day of land lines.
If it was a particularly lovely day, I might actually venture out, perhaps to the bodega on 100th street for a BLT on white toast with mayo or a chopped cheese or one of those egg sandwiches where they fry the egg in bacon fat so it is nearly gross but not quite. At night, sushi takeout in front of the TV or chicken, rice and maduros from Malecon, or dinner with the Broadway work gang, Un Deux Trois, Joe Allens, Little Tokyo, Cafe Luxembourg, Carmine’s.
My kitchen is a storage unit. Half drunk bottles of wine. Hot sauce and ketchup sachets. I have pantry supplies I feel obligated to own, but rarely use and will never use. They are for show. to make me resemble a person I might be but am actually not.
The kitchen, for me, is a prison. A scolding parent keeping me hidden from the life I want to have. But I am above the domestic. Too free. Too beautiful. Too young.
The kitchen, despite its charms and promise, can’t hold me.
I won’t let it.
The Pile, 9/11
A different New York City. I’m cooking at the pile, for people searching for survivors that they will never find.
We, faceless anonymous lines of us, cut potatoes, chop onions, boil pasta, shred cheese, haul boxes. Dusty and beaten up first responders come in, robotically eat whatever we put in front of them, and go back at it. We cut more potatoes, make stews cut up chickens, organize donations, chop more onions.
Nothing I do requires any kind of culinary experience. It’s like we are moving slowly through dust and vaporized metal with metal pans of whatever. We are drones, worker bees. Sad, blasted robots. I don’t want to be there but I don’t know where to be, or how to be. I just move without thinking, as blackened, exhausted, choking heroes refuse to quit. We ask for news when they lumber in. There is no news.
This isn’t cooking exactly. It doesn’t feel like giving sustenance or nourishing someone. It feels futile and stupid. We are all searching for meaning and signs of life that aren’t there.
It feels like doing something to keep your heart from breaking.
Cooking can heal.
Cooking can’t heal this.
The Deflated Pavlova
I meet David, a comedy producer, at the Russian Vodka Room on 8th avenue. He and his colleagues are celebrating his upcoming show.
Our relationship happens in a blur. The weekend we fall in love, we stay inside my apartment all weekend without ever leaving. We make lavish breakfast sandwiches on good bread with melted cheeses and experimental mayo combinations and fistfuls of arugula.
Make love, eat, make love, eat.
New love brings a desire to establish ourselves as a couple and a big part of that feels like introducing each other to our friends, family and colleagues.
One evening, we invite his whole office - all of them Australian (including David) - for cocktails and dinner. We made clams casino and Lidia Bastianich’s braised oxtails in red wine, with mashed potatoes, a fresh herby salad, and a Nigella Lawson chocolate pavlova. The pav is an Australian-born desert that has a thick crusty baked meringue base, smothered in berries and thick mounds of cream.
I want it to be perfect for David’s friends.
“Come in the kitchen!” I hear David say. He is bringing the whole group into the kitchen.
“Kim made a pavlova for us!”
I want to evaporate. The whole dessert has collapsed in on itself into a muddy flat brownie-like slab. The Australians gather around the dense fudgy mess that is supposed to be dessert.
“Are pavs supposed to be chocolate?” someone asks.
“Who thought of that?”
“My merengue fell,” I explain sadly, wanting to crawl under the cabinets and die.
It’s a fuck-all disaster.
But then something lovely happens. Because of the time difference, it is morning in Australia and everyone calls their mums. I talk to all of these amazing cooks in Sydney, Melbourne, and Queensland. We discuss oven heating temps and cream of tartar and swap fallen meringue stories. I talk to David’s mum that night too, for the first time, and fall in love with her, too.
Some of these mothers are gone now, including my mother-in-law. I learn that there is no shame in cooking badly. Sometimes it still yields beautiful results.
The End of Restaurants. Or, you know, Parenting.
We have our girls, Lucy and Edie, one right after the other. Two kids under two.
David and I pride ourselves, as a newly married couple, on being “the same.” We tell ourselves: “Nothing will change.” We absolutely mean it. We are assholes. We take the girls wherever we go, whatever we do.
We think we can just keep doing this. This is stupid.
We go out to dinner with two sleeping kids, thinking they will sleep through the meal.
“Nothing is going to change,” we told each other. We are the same people. Parenthood cannot change us.
Again, stupid assholes.
Between the appetizers and the mains, Lucy gets herself out of the double stroller without us seeing and toddles off into the kitchen. The chef comes out with Lucy in her arms. The whole restaurant gets quiet. And judgemental. People shake their heads disapprovingly.
We are served a does of reality. We will not get through this parenting thing unscathed.
We know the only way we can eat well and see other humans again and have actual adult conversation is if we start cooking for ourselves and invite people to join. All of a sudden the kitchen, which seemed so good at holding me back, is now pure liberation.
We start “Kitchen Suppers,” a term coined by Australian chef Bill Granger.
The anti-dinner party.
Kitchen suppers happen on a Thursday. The weekend nights carry too much expectation and pressure. And the meal happens at the kitchen table, not in the dining room. The idea is simple food, like Granger’s Baked Italian Sausages with Potatoes and Rosemary, a one-pot affair that is made especially unctuous with chunky ciabatta bread chunks soaking up all the sausage fats and goodness.
Guests bring wine. The kids play at our feet. No one shakes their head at us. Conversation and community happen every week while not having to get a sitter or extricate ourselves from the death grip of tiny children with separation anxiety.
The kitchen and I become hesitant friends.
The Rise and Fall of the Sport Cook
New York Times food writer and cookbook author, Melissa Clark, once coined the term “sport cook.” Think: a cook who cooks to learn, conquer a dish, a technique, a cuisine, just to be able to produce their own restaurant-quality meals at home.
I become one when we move to Harlem and live across the hall from Chinese chef and cookbook author, Kian Lam Kho. Kian and his husband invite us to his famous 10 course meals. My kids grow up eating whole fried snapper and bao buns filled with red cooked pork belly and sampling urchin and sea slug. On vacation together, Kian butchers a shark that has been hit by a boat propeller. He cooks it over fire on the beach and we eat it while the sun sets over the water.
Kian brings me to Chinatown and teaches me how and where to shop. I start cooking Chinese dishes, learning techniques like velveting, stir-frying and steaming.
I make cooking my passion and hobby. The kitchen gives me fun and meaning and challenge. And maybe a little escape from the drudgery of making quesadillas and pasta with butter all the live long day.
My Kitchen
We move to Vegas. David is producing a show there. Before we even unpack the Pod in the driveway, we throw a pig roast for over 100 people who work on David’s show.
Ten years in, we are good at parties now.
I shop, prep, cook. I stay in the kitchen and sip my tequila. My dearest friends talk to me over my shoulder as I stir and steam. My walls have lists on them where I make last minute notes on how to plate dishes coming out. David handles dirty dishes, straightens up, sets the music, and the tone for the house. It’s a dance. Sometimes David upsets the dance by wanting to install shelves two hours before people arrive, but it’s still a dance. We get through it.
This is how we meet Las Vegas. Dinner parties.
We make friends. We know people. People know us. Vegas is a big sprawling desert city but at its sweet sweet heart, it is a small town. The kind of place where every party you throw, you end up inviting one person who had an affair with this other person, who you also invited, and now everyone’s smushed up together and pissed. Still, I’m happy to live here.
We settle in. Open our home to foster kids. Two of them end up staying, Raffi and Desi. They bring our kid total to four. We add chickens and turkeys.
Am I a fucking homesteader now?
No. Just “the cooker” as Desi says.
I can’t imagine how this could ever change. Isn’t this how life will go until we die?
But, of course, everything always changes.
The Meth Lunches
The pandemic wallops us all.
We open a food pantry in my front yard. My cookbook group, Please Send Noodles starts cooking monthly dinner give-aways. Think: Pulled pork with arroz negro, jicama slaw, and warm tortillas, or garlicky chicken thighs with lemon-anchovy sauce, herby parmesan potatoes, and haricot verts and grilled lemon. There is a Hawaiian plate lunch of chicken tonkatsu over rice, macaroni salad, and some sticky sweet and sour sauce in accompanying cups. And brisket slow-roasted in lemongrass, coconut milk, and tomatoes with coconut rice with a crisp broccoli salad.
I cannot for the life of me fathom the depthless poverty that we allow in this country. It fucking alters me. Because it’s in my face. It is unmissable. And it opens all these questions for me about what we tolerate and what we don’t.
One day I walk into my house and find a homeless dude named Stefran hanging out in the kitchen with David and eating goat cheese scrambled eggs. I know that everything has changed.
I write a book about poverty and during the writing of the book, I realize that I’ve changed my relationship to the kitchen again. That nothing is static. I no longer crave a dinner party or a big sport cook. I have nothing to prove. Menopause fucking teaches me that. This is it. I’m no longer becoming. I am. This is my life.
This suits me.
My kitchen faces outward now. It is a bridge to the community. A way to interact with other people. To serve and be served. The food is never just the food. It’s what the food extracts from hearts and minds, the good stuff and the rotten. The innate complexity, the way things are never black and white, but distorted and ephemeral and always on the move.
Epilogue
I am writing this in case NYC Takeout Girl is allowed to see how her life will change in the decades to come. This is what she will see:
My cooking is less about feeding people, but setting people up to feed themselves. The teens pile into the kitchen to feed themselves at all hours of the night.
I make tubs of roasted tomatoes and garlic for the kids to spread on a baguette with globs of goat cheese in the Night Kitchen. Or I make a chicken and vegetable curry and leave tubs alongside tubs of basmati rice, so they can make a quick meal. I leave boiled potatoes, cheese and eggs from my chickens so anyone can make Spanish tortillas. Inside the fridge are containers of chopped herbs or diced spring onions. Sometimes I leave congee there and litter the fridge with little containers of things they can put on top, cut up and fried Chinese sausage, crispy fried shallots, pork floss. Sometimes it’s dashi, diced scallions and tofu chunks so they can assemble miso soup. I leave the oils and sauces on the butcher block, as if I forgot to put them away, so they can choose add-ins for themselves.
When Edie’s friends come over, I stash containers of salmon poke for them. Or I make a sushi bake and stick it in the fridge snack drawer for them to find. Like scattered bread crumbs, I leave sushi burritos, lasagna or curried vegetable sambusas in my wake, only to find the next morning that nothing remains, but a trail of crumbs.
More than being the head of the kitchen, I want the kids to find their own way there. I look forward to seeing what they did there while I slept. It is a connection I hoard because I know our time living together is fleeting.
I look forward to my youngest kids getting old enough to take their own place in our kitchen. I love watching them try new foods because they see the teens doing it and when teens do things, that makes everything cooler. Raffi and Desi will be cooks and eaters too.
I look forward to seeing how the kitchen will change again for me. And for all of us.
Because, of course, it will.
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ENDNOTES: I’m back! Been writing essays for publication around the book and just didn’t have the bandwidth for pushing out essays here too. But I’m back on the horse. Thank you for waiting me out.
And as always, thanks for reading. xo
“My kitchen faces outward now.” Love this so much. As a 30 year old mom to 2 young kids I’m reading this with so much nodding and still so much MORE hope and excitement for what’s to come and the ways that I will change and settle more into who I am. My relationship to the kitchen, the relationship to the kitchen I help others foster...beautiful stuff. Thank you. 🎉
I love this essay so much!