Part 1: The Appetizer

Part 1: The Appetizer

Food has always been about passion more than mere sustenance for me. Growing up in a family that often ate past the confines of our bodies, I learned that food was about more than survival. The breakfast for dinner when my dad left town, the elaborate Chinese New Year meals, the fondue parties- my parents and older sister taught me that food was about repetition and practice.

To just eat something one was to ignore that way that it could become significant and grow. Because of this, even as I learn new ways to broil and spice and explore, I still dream of the creamed chipped beef dip that my godmother served up every Christmas Eve, flecked with artificial looking meat and impossibly salty when served on Fritos. Food is passionate and sensual and connective and a thousand other anthropomorphized ideas. Food is erotic to me because it can be like the bad one night stand that’s somehow still good, the long term lover who never failed you, or the spark of a new connection. It’s erotic because it is about so much more than the biological. It’s how we connect. Or at least, it always has been for me. Food for now will always be tied up in the person who taught me new ways to love it as I loved him.

Our third date, I met him at his house after the Chicago Women’s March flushed with hope and Chicago January weather. He laughed at my sign (‘FUCK YES I’M ‘LIKE OTHER GIRLS’) and told me to take off my layers and he would cook for me for the first time. With one broken finger, he served up roast chicken dripping in olive oil and soft, nutty garlic that he spread on toast for me. I bit down and savored him for the next ten months.

When I met him, he told me he liked to cook, and I acknowledged it lightly. Our first date was at my favorite Thai place, a college town institution covered in novelty license plates and always playing a Top 40 loop. I nervously ate my pad see ewe noodles so fast he offered me his, and I laughed at all his jokes. Later, after that first chicken, he built me eggs Benedict and ribs and perfectly rolled pasta, and I built him up in my head as the person meant for me.

We made spaghetti carbonara once in the tiny kitchen in my first apartment, where we rarely cooked, one two-square foot of counter space serving as a staging ground for eggs and bacon and pepper.  As the yolks turned to creamy sauce he hummed jazz with his hands on my hips and we danced on the dusty tiles. I fell in love. When we broke up, it was three days after he made me another roast chicken- our fourth together, the birds bookending our relationship tightly. He had spatchcocked it, which means to break its backbone and lay it flat against the searing hot pan so it crisps with its juice still inside. That was how I felt the day he left- like I was spatchcocked by loneliness, like I’d been split open and exposed and every part of me was plucked and raw and laying in hot oil. The leftovers stayed in my fridge for a month. They grew mold and I started cooking alone.

Without him, I started cooking the things he hated. Custard pies, sweet potato turnovers, pumpkin gnocchi hand mixed and rolled and fried in browned butter as I told my best friend “I just want him back”, kneading the dough in time to my desperation. I made the biscuit recipe from the cookbook he had bought me over and over, rolling and patting dough into folded pleats and watching them rise slowly in the oven, puffing into one another and crisping at the edges. One day, I spent three hours simmering Bolognese on the oven, watching carrot and celery and onion turn to paste and tomato turn into a memory of red flesh. “Cinnamon, soy sauce, and nutmeg,” I told a friend who asked how it could be so savory and still have that sweet bite. The sauce burbled in our old steel pot until 6:30. At 7, I went on a date with a boy who looked nothing like him, but I came home to his email pulsing in my inbox.

“I got an interview for the serving job,” he wrote, referring to Chicago’s top-ranked restaurant. “Thank you. I would never have applied if you hadn’t told me I could do it.”

He talked about food the way he wasn’t always able to talk about me, with love and care and attention to detail. I chose to believe that he loved me in his own way. I carry that with me like a grandma’s hard candy, crinkling in the dark and always there even when I don’t need it. But he didn’t want to eat me whole and never stop the way I did with him, or the way I thought I did. I think I was his roast chicken, in a lot of ways. Warm on a cold day, time-consuming but not hands on, juicy-thighed. But I was a classic- a formality- I was easy, and that gets boring. Man cannot spend a life on roast chicken alone.

The person we need to spend our lives with is our mother dish, our chipped beef dip, the thing we can always come home to. When I think about the person I want to spend the rest of my life with, I think about my sister’s fried egg sandwiches with siracha glaze, my father’s grilled cheeses (the best in the world), my grandmother’s meatloaf, the carnitas my mother made for my high school graduation. I think about the pad see ewe that I ate on our first date that has buoyed me through hangovers and finals. Eating comfort food for a first date should have been a sign. It should have served to warn me that this person would tear me open and leave me to replace my heart with macaroni and cheese and my lungs with buttercream frosting.

Every time I get out my cast iron, lay a pieced chicken skin up, and heat the stove, I will think of him and how he taught me to dance to Sexual Healing while the pasta boiled. When I spread roast garlic on toast, I remember how he laughed, high pitched then low while I was washing the dishes. He was always just out of my view, sweeping and scraping behind me, but I knew he was there. I cannot eat without thinking of him, but I am starting to pull away and see the food we once shared as a spread in a magazine instead of a personal tableau that I am missing out on. It is beautiful, but not so much when you try to recreate it at home. He sent me a text one rainy day in February, and I didn’t immediately open the bag of chocolate chips in my cupboard. I didn’t respond to tell him about the strawberry cake I had constructed the week before. I let it fester and rot like the half-cut peppers I wrap badly in my fridge, until one day they are gone, Tupperware and all.

Alton Brown’s 40-Clove Chicken

• 4 lbs whole chickens, cut into 8 pieces
• 1/2 cup olive oil
• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 10 sprigs fresh thyme
• 40 garlic cloves, peeled
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon black pepper

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Season chicken with salt and pepper. Toss with 2 tablespoons olive oil and brown on both sides in a wide fry pan or skillet over high heat.
2. Remove from heat, add oil, thyme, and garlic cloves. Cover and bake for 1 1/2 hours.
3. Remove chicken from the oven, let rest for 5 to 10 minutes.