How I Became a Cook

I grew up in a household very similar to many urban people in my generation. My mom was a child of the ’50s, and my grandmother wholeheartedly embraced the wave of convenience foods that flooded the market to feed her family of nine. For my mom and her siblings, that meant lots of bland-tasting and low-quality dinners. My mom has bad memories of mashed potatoes from the box, mushy frozen Brussels sprouts, and watery tomato soup.

This resulted in my mom not being very interested in and often stressed out about food. She didn’t like to cook, was grouchy when she went grocery shopping, and basically considered food to be an unfortunate necessity of raising children.

As it often works in family life, all of these attitudes and feelings were internalized by me. I arrived in San Francisco after college for my first experience living truly on my own, and I had no idea how to cook anything besides pasta. (In fact, I have no memory of what I ate during my four years of college. Could I have really eaten pasta every night of the week?)

So imagine my surprise when my roommate, Kathryn, made hummus from scratch and my other roommate, Jenny, used the Moosewood Cookbook to create an Indonesian dish called Gado Gado. What??!! How did these people know how to do this? Cooking was a complete and utter mystery to me.

Over the next several years, I slowly experimented with recipes scribbled down by friends. I shyly shopped at the farmers market, trying to identify all of the strange vegetables I’d never seen before. I even bought my first cookbook, the original Moosewood with the brown cover, because one of my friends would often make delicious dinners from it. I was gradually unraveling the mystery that was cooking.

That learning curve was immediately put into fast forward when I moved to a farm in rural Missouri when I was 26. I discovered stress-inducing facts like: the whole farm ate together in a cooperative kitchen…which was vegan…and had a cooking rotation which I would be quickly worked into. And to top it all off, everything had to be made from scratch and in the summer we cooked for up to 40 people on an outdoor wood-fired stove. Yikes!

Luckily, if you were a new cook you got paired with a more experienced person who was the head cook for your shift. Because of the rotation, I cooked with someone new every time and had a crash course in many different styles, dishes and kitchen techniques. I took a lot of direction that summer, learning how to make biscuits, buns and pizza dough from scratch, concocted simple salad dressings, and figured out how to identify vegetables I had never seen let alone eaten before.

By that first winter, I was initiated into the ranks of head cooks. I was now an accomplished enough cook to be on my own in the slow winter months and to be paired with new cooks once the busy summer season began.

During my second year as a cook at the farm, I started to scour the cookbooks for new recipes and moved into more complicated terrain like making soymilk and tofu from soybeans, creating vegan desserts, and teaching other interns the ropes of cooking for a crowd.

I always tell people that living at that farm (dancingrabbit.org) for one-and-a-half years was like going to a very intense school, where you learned things that would affect your life for many years into the future. Learning to cook was definitely one of those things. I can look at the way I cook today and the very important role food plays in my life and see the thin thread that connects all the way back to my days in Missouri.

I learned to love food there. Not only was I learning how to cook for myself and others, but it’s also where my love of gardening took root and started to grow into the passion it is today. Those months were often overwhelming and sometimes scary, but also so full of laughter and joy and such intense learning that I now see how it truly shot my life down an entirely new and unexpected path.

Fourteen years later, I can stand here and say that I’m a great cook. Cooking and food are now woven into the fabric of my life in such a way that it seems they have always been here. It’s so easy to take it all for granted, until I close my eyes and imagine myself back in front of the wood stove in the outdoor kitchen, trying to figure out the best way to chop a kohlrabi. I’ve come so, so far, and for that, I’m grateful.