Not About Food, Today.

Today I gave away the dress that I bought for my second-cousin’s wedding, my senior year of high school.  It was a black and hot pink pique shift, sort of mod, but also sort of classic.  I felt like a million bucks in that dress, so I wore it on dates and to Important Lunches and to other weddings and maybe even to work, for almost 10 years.  It hasn’t fit since law school, and so it was time. Goodbye, old friend.

And then I added a long wheat-colored sundress to the giveaway pile, a maxi-dress before we know what a maxi-dress was.  An old boyfriend bought it for me in Sausalito, and every time I wore it, I felt sort of artsy-fabulous.

Next up?  The classic black suit I wore to my second interview at Finnegan, where I practiced law a lifetime ago.  In my 3-inch pumps, suit, and pearls, I felt like an Amazon Katherine Hepburn.  I peppered the interview with sassy comments and knew that the job was mine.  I’m considering folding a note into the pocket of the pants to alert the next owner of the suit’s good karma.

It was about here, in my closet purge, that my eyes watered up.  A tear trickled out as I folded the sparkly top I bought for a dinner to celebrate the sale of Peter’s first company.   The perfect black tee shirt, that I wore with long-gone jeans on our first date.  A few threadbare flannel shirts lingering from the Stowe era.

I don’t attach a lot of emotion to material things.   I have a rich library of memories in my mind, and I don’t feel like I need souvenirs to access them.  One of the recurring fights in my marriage is about Peter’s pack-rat habits.   Why does he need a giant yellow plastic Fred Flintstone head filled with dried-out markers?  Or nasty yellowing tee-shirts from some late 90s trade show?  I don’t understand, but I’ve mellowed my stance over the years in the name of marital harmony.

But today’s closet cleaning really caught me off guard.  I feel like I closed the door on a big part of my life:  the twenty-something single girl, the ass-kicking lawyer.  I haven’t been that girl for a number of years, but somehow I still had all of her clothes.  I had a grand time living that chapter, and the finality of giving away this stuff was emotional in way that I never anticipated.

I was also caught off guard by the fact that I still had all of these clothes.  I mean, I knew I had them, but I never made the connection that I had no use for them anymore until today.  It is not about the fact that they don’t fit, which they don’t, but about the fact that I am living a different life now.

I kept a few things that are uncharacteristically sentimental for me.  The kimono-style robe I bought myself in San Fransisco, that represents an awkward teen realizing that she could be a beautiful woman.  A spectacular red cocktail dress with memories.  And the blue top I wore out on the date with Peter when it became clear to me that he was the one for me.

I am 36 years old.    And I’ve been living a most interesting life.   It is an act of faith to believe that what is to come is as fun as what has been…but I’m working to make it so.  And to make sure that I have something to wear.

Baking for Bucks

I had to be honest with myself.  At 36, married, and still rocking my post-baby paunch (um, that baby would be 3 now), I was unlikely to command a record-breaking sum at my friend Courtney’s Date Auction Fundraiser.  But what I lack in the dreamgirl department these days, I make up for in the plying-with-butter-and-chocolate realm.  So I donated 3 months of decadent brownies, one delivery per month, as a door prize.

And, riding a wave of “my food is worth lots of money” confidence, I donated 3 months of seasonal fruit pies to another auction, where hopefully locavores with money will bid fast and furiously for flaky crust heaped with shiny fresh berries, bourbon-drenched peaches, or sweet fall apples.

Cooking for cash is a little different, I find, than making dinner for the family, or hosting a party for friends.  I feel a lot of pressure to make things perfect when people have paid, even just as a donation or a door fee.  After years of classes, catering, and even just gifting food to friends, I’ve learned that first, yeah, I am a pretty darn good cook.  But second, packaging is everything.  A paper plate of brownies covered in Saran wrap is rarely going to arouse the same mouth watering anticipation as oversized brownies individually wrapped in parchment and arranged in a pretty box.   Places like Marshalls or Tuesday Morning often have ceramic dishes for a couple of bucks that make a casserole delivered to new parents feel a lot more special, even if it is just chicken and pasta.

So I’m off to shop for ways to make my offerings say “Hey!  Thanks for supporting causes I care about!”   It is just one of many great things about food:  you can make it speak for you.

Shall we begin?

Welcome to the soft opening of L&O.  No pictures, no recipes, just some thoughts about food and probably a little too much information about how I come to be typing this entry.  Not very sexy, but neither Rome nor SmittenKitchen were built in a day.

When I was an eighth grader at R.J. Grey Junior High, I won the home ec award.  And was mortified.

Loving food, and being good at its preparation, was downright embarrassing to my 13-year-old American female self.  Food was the path to fat, and being fat was to be avoided at all costs.  Plus, food was domestic and bodily, not worldly and intellectual, as I sought to be.   As I continued to grow and mature, my conflicted relationship with food continued to be…conflicted.  I hosted multi-course dinner parties as a teenager, with pretty sophisticated food, and took great pride in my cooking skills.  But at the same time, I was reticent to really commit; I didn’t really like to talk food with people, and I often claimed not to eat what I cooked.  Which was a lie.

Off I went to college, where I found myself making (bad) homemade bread and staying in to watch the newly-hatched Food Network.  Emeril, on that black-and-white studio kitchen with a half-moon over his shoulder, already irritating me with his bizzarre malapropisms, but opening my mind to cooking with pork fat and love.  Caprial’s Kitchen, on PBS, I believe, through which Caprial Pence vastly improved my knife skills and introduced me to pacific northwest cuisine.  But still, food remained a guilty pleasure, not something to talk about in polite company, and certainly not with boys.  I was that girl, ordering a salad on a first date.

I indulged in a blissfully misspent early twenties, bouncing from coast to coast, and spending my meager food pennies on the ingredients for curried lentil soup and pasta puttanesca rather than ramen.   Learning about the warmth of bringing friends together for a homecooked meal.  I absolutely realized that food was my calling, yet I vacillated, resisting the call.  I applied to professional cooking school programs then talked myself out of enrolling, worried that life in a kitchen would expose my unseemly food obsession.  As if I were still fooling anyone at all.

Next came a safe move, to law school, followed by a half-decade of keeping the same nights-and-weekends hours as a chef.  The pay was better, but the passion wasn’t there.  And then came kids.  And cancer. And realization that a life without passion is not much of a life at all.

And as I traveled my own path, our culture was undergoing its own food evolution.   After eating to live for so long, having reduced meal prep to grab-nuke-eat for almost two generations, America began living to eat.  Led by Saint Alice and her merry band of California cuisine pioneers in the 70’s, and egged on by Food Network, by food bloggers, by the rise in artisanally-produced everything, the rebirth of farmer’s markets…food is cool, now.   Lucky me!  Just as I am steeling myself to reject what I perceived as a culturally constructed bias against food as the subject of discourse, food becomes the subject of discourse.  And I can just hop on the bandwagon.

So here we are.  Love & Onions is the on-line hub for this next chapter in my life, in which I cook and write and blog and teach and proudly feed the people I love.  Pull up a chair, please, and grab a fork.