I worship everything that no one eats anymore: dairy, gluten, carbs, wheat, sugar, red wine. These are my best friends. I want to marry gluten, and the rest of these beauties can be my bridesmaids. Chips and salsa can walk me down the aisle. My favorite food is a toasted sandwich with mayo (Duke’s, of course) and fresh tomato slices and melted Swiss and ham and bread-and-butter pickles. I cannot live without pizza, nor would I want to. Deep red wine and bruschetta and salty aged Gouda is my Camelot. A juicy burger on a soft homemade bun with blue cheese and caramelized onions alongside crispy Parmesan fries is my life force.
Sure, I could just not eat those, but I want to is the thing. I love them. Spicy flavors and melted ooziness and crunchy browned things and rich, fragrant sauces make me supremely, delightfully, viscerally happy. I want to cook them, share them, eat them, talk about them, write about them, gush over them, read about them, go bananas over them. I have no qualms discussing a brilliant dinner I am eating the whole time I am eating it. This is how I weed out friend candidates—if they cannot continue to rhapsodize after the first course, if they are unwilling to share bites, like a terrorist, we have no future.
Somehow for me, cooking ends up being greater than the sum of its parts. Alone, prepping veggies sounds tedious, scouring recipes takes too much planning, cooking for an hour after a workday seems like punishment. But altogether, the alchemy of the smells and sounds, the music playing and glass of peppery Cabernet nearby, the physical rhythm of chopping, stirring, and searing after a day of thinking, sitting, and typing turns into my favorite section of the day, when work fades and the family starts to gather near the kitchen because sizzling garlic and onion is an irresistible temptress. Cooking dinner is a sacred gateway from work to rest, from seven separate lives to one shared table.
And for the record before we go on, dinner is absolutely my day’s last hurrah. My mom is still chewing her last bite as she starts cleaning the kitchen. I think she has gone to bed with a dirty kitchen never. I, on the other hand, have no problem leaving mine a war zone. As long as the food is put up (I am a leftover evangelist), I can plop right down on the couch for my end-of-the-day Netflix prize and leave the mess until dawn. It’s my last gasp, the cooking. With the fed bellies and happy eaters and kids retiring to homework, I discover I am D.O.N.E. Thank you, Austin! That’s my show! You’ve been amazing! Consequently, my tank drops from half full to terrifyingly empty in five minutes, making the Bedtime Hour treacherous for all parties involved.
Related: I feel like a Catholic at confession, and I’m not sure how to say this without alienating my tribe and showing my cards, but as it turns out, I am a Morning Mom. I actually feel embarrassed about this. Like my brand of sarcasm and melodrama requires crankiness in the a.m. It would be such good material. But nope. No, ma’ams. I am full of hope and promise in the morning. Good morning, lovies! Good morning, good morning, good mooooorning, it’s time to rise and shine! I am all cheek kisses and back rubs and gentle words and sunshine at dawn’s early light.
Brandon wakes up the kids like a drill sergeant at boot camp. Morning requires Discipline and No Whining and his little soldiers better hup to. He throws their lights on and refuses to coddle sleepy, warm teens and preteens. He is not having it. But I am having all of it. Your honor, I submit as evidence the fact that I still wake up all my children, though one of them is old enough to vote. Breakfast tacos, delicious smoothies, waffles and bacon, baked oatmeal; I cook breakfast every morning like an annoying Cream of Wheat ad. Here is some fresh salsa for your migas; here are sliced bananas for your pancakes. It is obnoxious. Does it help you still like me knowing that I have none of this energy past dinner and that I “pray with Remy” while she is in her bed and I am yelling a prayer to Christ our Lord from the living room?
For me, there is something deeply satisfying in feeding my people well. It helps that they mostly love yummy food and appreciate the work, but even then, it feels good, like I prioritized something important, something nourishing and healthy. Maybe it’s because I am not inherently nurturing; I lean no-nonsense. I don’t really coddle or fuss or hover or overprotect. I don’t like to play board games. I’m not sweet. I was always rubbish at Legos (“Mommy, all you build are towers”). I’m of the Buck Up, Buttercup crowd. So cooking real food with my hands that tastes good is my way of taking actual, physical care of my people. It is me saying: I love you, I care about you, I care for you. It is my offering.
We live in a small town adjacent to Austin, right off old-fashioned Main Street. It is as quaint and charming as you think, a movie set in real life. We walk to the little restaurants and coffee shop and library all the time, the train an ever-present soundtrack. At Cleveland’s, a restaurant in a 130-year-old building with original wide plank floors and a tin ceiling, I was swooning over their French fries, rustic and flavorful and irregular, when the waiter, not just a server but a foodie, said: “Just potato and knife. It’s enough.”
We’ve lost a little something in today’s microwave world, haven’t we? The best path to the perfect French fry has always been running a sharp knife through actual potatoes, dropping them in bubbling oil or baking in a searing oven, then sprinkling crunchy salt all over them while they are still hot. But somewhere along the way, potato and knife became processed, frozen fries—uniform, coated, tasteless, covered in ice shards. Food turned complicated and industrialized. It was once pretty basic: garden, tree, animal, plants. Now it is fat-free, high fructose corn syrup, flavor coated, dyed. It is prepackaged, quick and easy, freezer to table, no fuss.
And believe me, I understand the appeal of those words. If anything in my day can be quick and easy, I am here for it, and I’ll run through the Taco Bell drive-thru in a hot minute on days our family is the center attraction at the Freak Show Circus. However, we hand off much more than labor to the food industry, not the least of which is nutrition, but perhaps the greater loss is the beautiful farm-to-table system God devised down here. There is something noble about real food, the exchange between farmer and eater, the simple transformation of raw ingredients into breakfast, into dinner. There is also honor in the work, the cooking. It is old-fashioned, an homage to our mothers and grandmothers and all mothers and grandmothers in the history of time.