ON EMPTY CALORIES: The effects of cooking comfort food, thousands of miles away from where you feel comfortable.
Q: I am living on my own for the first time in forever. What the hell am I supposed to eat?
A: Well, tonight I had “Eggs in Purgatory.” Read whatever you want into that.
Look, you can eat take-out every night until you die of hypertension, but you and I both know: food’s value always extends far past nutritional and deep into the emotional. And right now the preparation and consumption of food is hands-down the most emotionally confusing act I regularly engage in. So maybe I’m not the best person to ask this question. Maybe I never was.
I learned to cook at a fairly early age. Not “my-parents-own-a-Cantonese-restaurant” early, but close. At 11, already bored with the narrow array of cookies that served as our month’s worth of Christmas desserts, I begged my mom to put me in charge of that part of our holiday dinner. And she—a notorious non-baker, the type of woman who would buy half-price pumpkin pies from Safeway on Black Friday, freeze them, then thaw them out on Christmas Eve and not even so much as try to hide the fact that they were resting in disposable aluminum pie plates—happily abdicated this responsibility. Only to watch in horror as I, only recently certified to make instant oatmeal without burning myself, picked the most complex dessert from Bon Appetit’s Christmas issue.
Three layers! Two different ganaches! Hand-painted holly leaves of dark chocolate and butterscotch! That torte was the last year she helped. From then on, I was on my own.
Baking melted into cooking once I hit adolescence, and realized that the girls I liked were equally as impressed by shrimp-and-goat-cheese stuffed Poblano peppers as they were acoustic guitar chord progressions. (My awkward fingers were never going to understand guitar chord progressions.) In college I hosted Easter dinners for the kids who couldn’t make it home; once I left school anyone passing through was an excuse to cook.
The crafting of food took on even greater significance when I met my wife, Heidi. Thirty-three and divorced at the time, I’d regressed to eating burritos from brown paper bags and speed-dialing Thai takeout; but because we were dating long-distance, every visit southward to see her in Phoenix was an opportunity to awe her with my culinary prowess. When she came to Portland I wanted to run her through a progressive buffet of the tastiest places in the city as a way to woo her north to my stomping grounds; when I was on her turf I wanted her to know that I would be able to keep her and the kids well fed every night we stayed at home.
My plan worked to perfection.
For most of our years together in Portland we split the cooking duties. The kids had their favorites, many of which resided in their mother’s dog-eared, hand-written binder, so force-fed with loose printouts and recipes written on the backs of envelopes and Trader Joe’s receipts that any time I was asked to find something in it, I gave up and handed it to the nearest kid. In that binder resides the recipe for cinnamon rolls and biscochitos, posole and strogonoff; recipes that to this day I dare not touch. On taco nights, or quesadilla nights, or Frito pie nights, I played sous-chef. Or—more likely—barkeep.
But the rest of the cookbook shelf belongs to me, and relentlessly I have encroached upon her turf as the resident chef in the family. It started when I won the kids over with baked ziti and steak teriyaki. But the kitchen shift became permanent when, about five years into our marriage and six months into her new job, Heidi crossed her arms over a haphazardly scribbled grocery list and confided in me: “You know what I hate almost as much as meal planning? Cooking.”
Hate was a word she passionately discouraged, but it wasn’t hard to see how she’d gotten there. Every night at dinner we would wait for the two remaining teenagers to come home from rowing practice. They’d burst through the door, cold, wet and weary; dump their duffels somewhere between the doorway and the dining room table, slump into their assigned seats, then wait for the plates to arrive. There was no offer to set the table, not even so much as a washing of hands. She would try to time it perfectly, so that the food came out hot but they didn’t have to wait for it to be served. And it would never be right, and the meal was never just what they wanted, or the chicken was bumpy, and their thanks when they remembered or were goaded to utter them sounded like muffled minor-key trumpets. On the nights when she tried to spice things up with a new recipe she braced for and was predictably met with open hostility from at least one of the children being served a hot, home-cooked meal. Adolescence needs an outlet for all of its hormone-soaked hostility. Their mother was the safest target they knew, the one who would absorb punch after punch and keep bouncing right back up off the rug and returning, defenseless, for a reconciling hug, and so she was that outlet. And food—the high-effort, multi-sensory show of unabashed affection that it can be, and in fact is for people like Heidi and I—was the easiest and most obvious trigger into that place of anger. I don’t think they consciously knew that they were hurting her. But after so many versions of the same basic argument (you never make anything good / I ask you every week for ideas and you just shrug your shoulders / well, we didn’t want THIS…) it was clear that dinners had become Pavlovian. The food was served. And immediately the shrill rings of discontent would commence.
It took me too long to catch on. Rather, I never really caught on at all; not until You know what I hate more than meal planning? But it changed that night. I plucked the pen from her hand, wrote the rest of the week’s meals out, and officially claimed the duties as head chef. I would take the heat for any and all food that was served, and Heidi—already doing nearly everything else for our family—could finally get out of the kitchen. From that point forward almost every breakfast, lunch or dinner that Heidi and I and the two girls ate—a total of about 60 meals a week—came from these two hands.
It became a source of great pride to me. To a stepfather still unsure of his footing with ¾ of his kids, this new official capacity presented an opportunity to prove that I was invested; though I certainly never would’ve told them that. I cooked family favorites, then sought adjacencies that would keep them happy while keeping me from growing bored with the same 10 meals. Pinterest became my own personal version of the binder. I knew we were getting somewhere when E started messaging me things she wanted me to make. And when, the weekend I cooked waffles for “Easy Like Sunday Morning” Breakfast, she put in an early request for buttermilk pancakes the following week.
The meal train chugged on like this for about a year and a half. I shifted my work schedule so that I could get home early enough to have dinner on the table when rowing let out. The lunches progressed from ham and cheese sandwiches to antipasti plates. By the time school let out in June of 2019 I was essentially operating a restaurant whose only patrons were the people who slept either above or below the kitchen.
Then I moved to New York.
You’d think I got the better deal out of that. After all, Heidi went from chief taste-tester to responsible for the feeding of our remaining family literally overnight. Here on the East Coast I’ve cut my number of patrons by more than half, down to just myself and sometimes B, an enthusiastic omnivore who is rarely around to chow down at the same time I make it and—I’m coming to believe—was eating popcorn for ⅔ of his meals at the time we started living together. The bar was low. He had no plates, two spoons and a fork, and in the beginning we ate whatever I had managed to make in the lone skillet off of the two plastic cutting boards he’d picked up somewhere between moving out of our house and arriving here, at our shared apartment. The first night I made rigatoni with tuna, fennel and Kalamata olives, and by the end we’d both given up and were eating straight out of the pot. This should not be a difficult standard to hit.
But she has donned the apron with honor and grace, while I’m the one who’s struggled.
Things have improved at least functionally: we have a full set of cookware, six dishes, six bowls, a full complement of mugs and enough spatulas to, more or less, scrape any sauce free of its hiding spot. The spice rack is more than just two kinds of salt and a five-year-old jar of chili powder. But a very demoralizing reality remains as long as I am here and the rest of the family is in Portland. For almost a decade I have cooked to connect to the people who matter the most to me. Today I do the same, but under far different conditions. I am three time zones and 2,893 miles away from my wife and most of my kids, the people I most enjoy cooking for. And so, in lieu of cooking for them, I cook to remind myself of them. I cook to remind myself of home. Which makes sense and does tend to settle me down a bit.
Until I go and try to eat the thing that I’ve cooked.
Because eating the thing that I’ve cooked reminds me in no uncertain terms that I am not at home. I keep cooking comfort foods, but their effect is the opposite. I am sitting alone at a cheap Ikea table that’s barging its way into my tiny living area, eating a meal that I’m meant to have made and be eating with my family. That realization is the opposite of comfort. So: discomfort food.
It makes me blindingly sad. Sliced-red-onions sad. And yet I cannot stop trying to find some secret recipe that will fix things. This week it’s Eggs in Purgatory, Chicken Shawarma, Chicken Teriyaki, and homemade Pesto Pasta. None of which have rewired my tastebuds in any substantial way.
There’s always a lot left over these days. For starters, there’s my vanishing appetite. But on top of that, I am accustomed to making food for a crew. When Heidi and I first started there were five hearty eaters and then, when P came along and got four serviceable teeth, six. We doubled every recipe out of habit and necessity, and during rowing season sometimes that wasn’t even enough. Scaling down from the full-sized dinner party that was our family to its current state, I’ve found that habit hard to break; and though I know better these days, I’m certainly not about to start halving meals. So B and I always have leftovers; they’re even sadder than the first heating. Tonight an extra mini-ciabatta loaf and four eggs, poached in a latex-paint-thick spicy tomato sauce, will go into a Tupperware and then into the fridge. I’ve never had the opportunity—let alone the inclination—to reheat eggs before. I wonder if my workmates will silently curse my name when I overdo it with the breakroom microwave. I hope it doesn’t come to that.
(One thing that brings me no small measure of satisfaction is knowing that I’ll wake up in the morning, zombie-shuffle my way into the kitchen, and inevitably find a wooden spoon teetering on the cutting board indicating that B has used it to shovel at least half of the leftovers into his face in the dark of night.)
So, to (finally) answer your question: I really don’t know what the hell you’re supposed to eat. If this were purely a matter of nutritional sustenance there would be an easy answer, and it would be constructed in the shape of a pyramid. But I guess I’ve been trying to say that at least for me it’s become more complicated than that. That bringing a random assortment of ingredients together into something fragrant and warm and delicious should be comforting, and yet I’m at a point in my life where I find that to be impossible. That I wish I could take a pill that would give me all the nutrition I need to survive, then another to make me forget that I need to eat. That over the course of several years food has come to mean family, and their absence is felt in every bite.
What I’m trying to say is that I have eaten all the food I need.
And also that I am absolutely starving.
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