Will Write for Food

I’ve always been a bit of a precocious child, to put it politely. A weird little kid, to put it less politely. But it also seems like much of me exists in contradictory states.

I was reading before I was really supposed to learn how, but I didn’t talk until I was over a year old. My mother jokingly says that it was because my sister, almost a full two years older, refused to let me get a word in edgewise. I wanted to be a princess but I hated the color pink (Mulan was my JAM.) I was gifted ed in school and completely lacking in common sense outside of it. A friend of my mother once told me I was an “old soul” which I’m pretty sure is just code for “you’re nine and you already look depressed.” For much of my formative years, much of my self-worth was derived from either being smarter than the average bear or being self-sufficient enough to not bother adults with my problems.

So if you will, imagine with me, for just a moment, just how weird I was as an eleven year old. No problem with snakes, conceptually, but the type to run and scream if a moth was within a few feet of me. Slightly taller than average, but scrawny as all hell.

I’ve always had something of a complicated relationship with food, just like pretty much everything else in my life. I’m nothing if not particular about what I eat. This is contradicted by exactly how much of it is utter garbage. I’ve eaten spam straight out of the can more than once in my life, and I will probably do it again. I finished “lunch” today at 3:30 pm, and it was just a bowl of rice with some butter in it. I’m a bit of a disaster when it comes to feeding myself.

I love waffles. Not quite as much as I love chocolate chip pancakes, but when you’ve got your mouth set for waffles? Nothing else will do. And one day, while my mother was at a church meeting, I decided the thing I wanted to eat most in the world was waffles. I knew my father (who was home at the time I believe) would be absolutely useless to me, this man once touched a hot burner on the stove because he didn’t know how else to check the temperature (despite the clearly marked light that says “HOT” being on.) So I was on my own. The obstacles: I had never made waffles before, I didn’t know how the waffle maker worked, I did not know the recipe for waffles or where to find it, I had never made a baked food like that on my own. Clearly, a challenge awaited me. But I was persistent and dumb and damn it all, I really wanted some waffles. So the battle commenced.

Step one. Find the waffle recipe. I was pretty sure I knew what cookbook it was in. The best (and only) hint I had was that I was pretty sure what the page was supposed to look like. So I thumbed through probably four cookbooks, looking less at the recipes and more at the font and typesetting before I found the right book. A Fannie Farmer cookbook, in case you’re curious.

Step two. Make the batter. I climbed cabinets, I stood on the counter. I got the ingredients together. Dry ingredients in one bowl, wet ingredients in the other, then mix.

Step three. Try to remember where on earth my mother left the waffle maker last. I went through all of the lower cabinets and eventually found the ancient slumbering beast. Impossible to clean black plastic and a long burned out indicator light. I remember it being about forty pounds, but it’s definitely more like five pounds.

Step four. Waffle time. By this point, my mother got home and laughed for approximately five minutes before asking if I would like help. But I’m in the thick of it now, there’s a decent chance I wouldn’t have accepted her help even if I’d desperately needed it. I did ask her if she would mind to heat up some syrup, please and thank you, and she did with minimal laughter.

I did end up needing help cleaning the waffle maker, because that monstrosity was not designed with cleaning in mind and I had even less of an idea what I was doing with that than I did when I was trying to cook.

Those were some of the most satisfying waffles I’ve ever eaten in my entire life. By all accounts, they shouldn’t have been tasty at all. They were more done on one side than the other, the batter was a little lumpy and I think I got too much of something in the mix, but they were some damn good waffles. Even though they were messy.

I’m sorry, I couldn’t not make that pun. I hope I got at least a brief exhale of air out of your nose from a few of you. Being trapped inside for two months is doing nothing good for my sense of humor. A few more weeks and I’ll be giggling at a picture of an ice cube that just says “suspicious” on it.

Anyways. We read the last half of Anthony Bourdain’s book this week and it grossed me out significantly less than the foreword did last week.

The first page or two of chapter 9 reminded me of when the whole Mad Cow thing was happening and my mother was convinced that we were all going to catch it from McDonalds or Taco Bell and thusly did not let me, my older sister, or my dad, eat beef for nearly two years. I still don’t eat beef (not for religious reasons or anything I just don’t really like it, I think it’s a texture thing), and I think that absence of it during my formative years is almost definitely why.

But now I have another reason not to eat beef! Hamburger meat is treated with ammonium and other cleaning products, which despite certain authorities might lead us to believe, aren’t supposed to go inside your body. So now once again I am horrified by the meat industry. I can’t really throw stones, though, because frankly I will eat hot dogs and occasionally fried spam if we’re out of other foods.

Bourdain did totally predict the rise of the bougie burger, somehow, and that’s wild. The adding of random fancy toppings to burgers never made sense to me. Bacon? Sure, its fried, that tracks. Fried egg? Little wilder but I’m still with you. Slices of avocado? You’ve lost me. Bourdain is so angry about hamburgers in chapter 9 I almost had to laugh.

I will admit, I didn’t get as far into this final half as I would have liked to, so I may just have to keep this book and not sell it back for the quarter Mizzou Bookstore will undoubtedly give me.

Yikes.

I know it’s ~fine dining~ but I really didn’t need to read a firsthand account of Bourdain eating a small endangered bird whole. None of it sounds appetizing. I cannot imagine it actually tasted good. It very nearly made me queasy. How is it enjoyable to eat literally burning hot meat and bones and organs??? I will never understand fine dining, apparently.

Once I got past that part though, I really enjoyed it. I’ve really only known about Bourdain from TV and the fact that he died, so it was interesting to get a look into the type of writer he was. I was not expecting nearly the level of sarcasm and biting wit we got. The line about transitioning from heroin to crack? Describing a girl he knew in college as “I think she let me fondle her tit once”? I laughed out loud. I admire writers with some degree of self-awareness, and it seems that Bourdain had it in spades, between his rolling sentences and the fact that he refers to his own memoir as “obnoxious but wildly successful.” Clearly, I need to go read Kitchen Confidential, because Bourdain’s gotten me invested in his life and career in only the foreword. Somehow, reading even just the first ten or fifteen pages of this book made Bourdain more of a real human person than almost any chef I’ve ever seen on TV.

And anyone who’ll roast Barney is a winner in my book, anyhow. It’s that deeply ingrained antipathy that all millennials seem to have for the big purple bastard, we want him dunked on, regularly, at the very least.

Honestly, right now, it feels more like summer than anything. My mom, an educational coach at the local elementary school, still has to be online and available at her regular time frame. My dad, retired and absolutely restless, still mows at the golf course three days a week just to get out of the house and not go absolutely insane. My Nana (Dad’s mom) lives with us, but mostly keeps to herself. I wake up too late to eat lunch like a person and instead just kind of snack until either my mother declares it a “Fend For Yourself Night” or smacks frozen meat onto a plate on the counter to thaw. Fend for Yourself is a double-edged sword. On one hand, I don’t have to eat the Chicken Fried Steak my dad loves and the rest of us merely tolerate. On the other hand, there’s like a 60% chance that I’ll be eating either rice or plain spaghetti for dinner, which isn’t great when it’s your only meal of the day.

Honestly, we’ve been fortunate. Nothing much has changed in our daily routine, except the three Zoom calls I have a week and the sporadic computer problems my mother faces (recently we covered copying and pasting, don’t laugh, she’s trying her best.) For some ungodly reason, my parents bought an entire half a cow’s worth of meat from a local butcher earlier in the winter, so at the very least, we’re good on that.

We do a lot of snacking throughout the day, or at least me and my dad do. Saltines, Goldfish, chips, nothing is safe. I’ve been on a garlic toast kick lately, which isn’t ideal, but what can you do? My mom is less of a disaster so she just drinks an entire pot of coffee every day.

Last night, we had a roast. I don’t know what kind of roast, because I’m a little gremlin and I don’t really like beef. We don’t get too adventurous with food, my dad and I are both, unfortunately, kind of picky eaters. My father, who once touched a hot burner with his bare palm because he didn’t wait for me to tell him that the red light means its hot, doesn’t even attempt to help with dinner, which is probably for the best. He sits in the living room, watching TV that nobody else cares about (If I have to watch one more semi-quirky white couple redecorate a room with shiplap I am going to come unglued). My mom moves around the kitchen about fifteen times in as many minutes. I ping around, mostly trying and succeeding to stay out of her way, trying to come up with a story or anecdote I haven’t shared yet (it’s getting difficult) and setting the table. That too depends on what we’re eating, for example, we had some corn on the cob with our meal, so my dad needed his fake butter.

My Nana will appear, without fail, about four or five minutes before dinner is done. I don’t know how she does it, but it’s impressive. She’ll kind of just hover in the dining room by her chair until it’s actually time to eat.

The meal itself is uneventful, usually beef of some variety, typically with mashed potatoes and gravy as a side. Something very 1950’s sitcom America. My Nana will recount either something she saw on Facebook recently, a plotline or character from a reality TV show none of the rest of us watch, or share a story she’s almost definitely told before (we try not to hold it against her, she is 86 after all.) Then dinner ends, Dad cleans up only his place and abandons the rest to us. My Nana will help us for a while until she too retreats, and I’ll help my mom clear the table at least. Then Mom scrubs some pans and we chatter inanely about whatever’s going on (If I’m being completely honest, it’s mostly just me kvetching about classes). Then dinner is over, until my dad is hungry again in a few hours and will just eat pretzels out of the loudest bag on the face of the earth.

To continue on the grand tradition of me not knowing things that I probably should, I learned about queer influence on cooking. Specifically, how like three gay writers really helped shape the entire food culture of the states. Eighteenth verse same as the first, say it with me y’all, “It’s not anything I’ve ever really thought about.” I grew up in the Bible Belt in a town of 7000 people where the nearest movie theater was 45 minutes away: we didn’t really have openly queer people just roaming the streets, and certainly not running what I would be hesitant to call restaurants (Mcdonalds, Sonic, two or three mom and pop breakfast joints). There was pretty much about four queer kids in the high school that flocked to the Harry Potter club like tiny rainbow moths to a lamp, and none of them were particularly adept cooks.

My up-close experience with aspiring chefs comes entirely from the one time in High School I took a home economics class and it was like… 90% homemaker FFA girls and about 10% awkward kids that just needed something to fill their schedules (and then, about a week into the semester, I could see the light die behind their eyes. They made some mistakes.) As far as I know/remember, it was heterosexuals as far as they eye could see.

I do feel that about the whole ‘not wanting to be called a gay chef is like not wanting to be called a female author’. Cause like, I’m just an author. I just write things. But I also do things differently from male authors (based on experience with some… interesting classmates) in the way I structure things or how I choose and design my main character.

I don’t know, y’all. My brain’s halfway down the imaginary hole I’m digging in my backyard and I think this is just as good as it’s gonna get today.

Again, no deeper significance, cha’girl just a lil bit salty today.

Revising is the worst. Take it from someone who’s written too many plays and other assorted works of fiction. It sucks.

The Great British Bake Off is a fantastic choice for someone trying to chill out and keep themselves from punting a manuscript out a window. I’ve made use of it myself a number of times. It’s nothing like American reality tv, especially not a show like Chopped. It’s cheerfully colorful, gentle, and interspersed with two comedians cracking light jokes and cheering up the bakers, and the occasional b-roll shot of a lamb or a duck or something. Nobody is screaming around at each other, nobody’s fighting over utensils or having useless love quadrangles or whatever, everyone’s just making cute little cakes and pies and complementing each other. It’s fun to see how people use different spices and whatnot in their baking. The drama lies entirely in skill. Do those flavors actually work together? Will they have enough time to get this meringue done? Can the baker pull off this ambitious bake?

Writing is like baking. Things get messy, you may end up scrapping the whole thing if you screw it up badly enough. You may end up with egg in your hair and flour under your nails and chocolate smeared halfway down your chin, but all the reader sees is the finished product. It takes one to know one, and before you do something like it, you may never actually have any idea how much work goes into making it. If you’ve never made sushi, you don’t know how much of a pain in the butt rolling it up can be. If you’ve never written something for publishing, you don’t really know how grueling the editing process can be.

I think that at some point in your life as a creator, everyone’s been that self-deprecating kid who’s got their work close to their chest. I’ve been there, it took a creative writing course with a prof who may be legitimately off his rocker to shake that loose (and it still hits me from time to time.) We all just need to be a little more willing to put ourselves out there. Our puddings may slump or our sentences may fall flat, but there’s no way of knowing how it’ll taste until we try it ourselves.

This title has no deeper significance, our water heater just went out and I’m angry about it.

For reading response 7, we read four different articles, but I’m cold and tired so I’m just gonna talk about the one I found the most interesting: The Art of Food Plating.

The inventive and aesthetically pleasing ways people have managed to develop to plate food, frankly, boggles my gourd. I will readily admit that most of my experience with haute cuisine comes from Netflix baking shows, and the nicest restaurant in my hometown still puts ruffles of parsley on a garnish on their plates, but in the growing world of food photography, these still stick out. They look almost too pretty to eat, which, in real life, would probably fill me with some sort of impotent rage, but through the medium of photography, these plates become miniature works of art.

I’m a fan of the zen arrangements, there’s something reassuring about the simplicity. It’s not a tower of meat, it’s just a food, with some sauce in a nice shape, on a plate. I’m a simple girl with simple needs, if I see a plate with eighty-five garnishes and some neon blue sauce, I’m not going to want to pick through the leaves to figure out what it’s actually supposed to be. Some of these look more like avant-garde flower arrangements than a food you can actually consume. (I do also rather like the geometric ones, there’s something very appealing about simple shapes.)

I have never once in my entire career of making food for myself to eat considered plating it nicely. Most of the time, “making food” is me making mac and cheese out of a box and just dumping in into a bowl so I can eat it while I rewatch a John Mulaney special. Maybe I need to be doing more?

I have yet to hear any complaints from me though…

To make these butter cookies, before we start mixing, you’re going to want to make sure you have a cookie press, and if you don’t… good luck? You can shape the dough by hand, but each batch makes 3 dozen cookies, so reader beware.

For a single batch (the furthest left measurements), one that makes 3 dozen cookies, here’s what you do:

1. Creme 1/2 cup of butter.
2. Gradually add 1/2 cups of granulated white sugar.
3. Add one egg and 1/2 teaspoons of vanilla extract. Beat mixture well.
4. Add 1 2/3 cups of all-purpose flour and 1/2 teaspoons of salt. Mix thoroughly until texture is consistent all the way through.
5. If dough seems overly soft, wrap in plastic and place in refrigerator for 5-10 minutes.
6. Place dough in cookie press and create cookies of any desired shape on a baking sheet.
7. OPTIONAL: Decorate the uncooked cookies with sprinkles for an extra festive splash of color.
8. Bake cookies at 400 degrees Fahrenheit for 8-10 minutes (or until golden brown.)

Allow me to set the scene. It’s Christmas, well, early December, in Southwest Missouri, and the year is irrelevant. It’s a whopping 30 degrees outside, but that’s okay, because you’ve been inside baking all day, and the kitchen, at least, gets warm. You’ve been alternating between watching your father use swear words you’ve never heard while he tries to put lights on the tree in the corner of the living room and “helping” your mother decorate cookies by adding sprinkles and eating the ones that come out of the oven deformed or overly done. There’s colorful sugar sprinkles on the dining room floor, but you don’t notice them until you step on them, barefoot, and they stab you in the toes. Your mother keeps telling you to put on socks, but you insist that socks are for squares, and really, your feet aren’t cold, it’s fine, chill out. You’ll freeze most of this triple batch of Butter Cookies, because if you don’t, your dad will eat all of them before the 25th without even thinking about it. Your mom presses a finger to her lips as she snatches a single broken flower-shaped cookie and pops it into her mouth. You do the same, and she smiles with her eyes as the oven shrieks at you to take out this particular round of trees.

For as long as I can remember, we’ve had butter cookies at Christmas. For me, they go hand in hand with other holiday classics from my house (many of which don’t really have proper names so much as descriptors) like Those Little Chocolate Cookies, Peanut Butter Sandwiches (which are not exactly what they sound like, I promise), Almond Bark Pretzels, and sometimes, Sugar Cookies. They’re a staple of the holidays, just like the movie A Christmas Story and my father kvetching about how the rest of us are decorating the tree. It just doesn’t feel like Christmas without them.

As far as I and my mother know, this comes from her mother’s side of the family, which means this may very well be from the old country. Googling butter cookie recipes doesn’t bring up anything quite like this particular recipe, so I’m inclined to believe it actually did come from my grandmother’s family, and not some long-defunct cookbook.

If I were being strictly truthful with how this recipe actually goes, I would have included a few more extraneous steps, like “Forget to preheat the oven and curse, briefly, under your breath” and “Put the shaper disc in the cookie press the wrong way around, remove and flip, realize it was the right way around the first time, and change it back” and “Insistently attempt to decorate the camel cookies, despite knowledge that sprinkles can and will simply roll off of them and onto the floor, like they have every year previous.” But these aren’t actually helpful, just a sort of short catalogue of how we manage to mess up, once a year, year after year.

My mother initially did not want me to take a picture of her recipe card for this because she thinks having the measurements for a double and triple batch off to the side makes a recipe card “messy” and “hard to read.” I told her that the extra scribbles add to the charm, which may or may not be true, but I mostly didn’t want to have to attach a screenshot of a text onto this.

Ah, finally, we arrive at the thing my mother keeps asking me if this class is about: restaurant reviews. (Additional side note, I’m quite proud of myself for spelling “Restaurant” right on my first go.) Going out to eat with a tiny notepad and scaring the staff with how much you’re writing down.

I have to say, I think I personally would go for the coverage angle, rather than the review angle, because as a visual studies student, I’ve got a lot of love to give when it comes to visual presentation of things (food, table settings, decor, etc.) and I feel like just reviewing a dish would leave me with too much left to say. Also because I have a limited palate and I would probably get embarrassed if I just reviewed the same rotating cast of eight dishes everywhere I went.

I had no idea that professional reviewers eat at the same place more than once in order to form their Professional Reviewer Opinion about it, which I guess makes sense, because I think we’ve all gotten a dish somewhere that’s normally great but one time it comes out and it’s just… not good. Going multiple times on multiple days would eliminate that random chance of just getting a meal that’s not right.

I also didn’t realize that if you get a meal for free and you say in your blog that you like it, that by US law you have to disclose it, which, again, makes sense, but is an absolutely buckwild thing to just stumble across in a footnote.

Also, how often is “stalking by chef for a bad review” a problem?? I’m suddenly paralyzed with fear as I think of every time I’ve lampooned my local Burger King on Discord.

Not to show my hand too much, but I have very little experience with cooking. Sure, yes, I can follow a recipe and have it turn out well, but you give me ingredients and ask me to just… make something? I’m at a loss. My single semester of high school home ec class did not teach us to improvise, it taught us the parts of a knife and why to leave the labels on your eye droppers, especially the ones with bleach in them. It’s a long story.

Creating a recipe seems like a frankly insane amount of trial and error and research, the sort of thing that would leave me tearing my hair out at the root. I am way too big of a lazy perfectionist to suffer through that much work for that little payoff. Unsurprisingly, everyone’s got their own approaches to it.

One of my friends from school actually created her own recipe, a banana-mint cookie bar with cream cheese frosting. It sounds awful, and I won’t lie to you, I was very skeptical the first time he gave me one (this friend has a history of eating straight condiments, among other things, for some context), but somehow she got the proportions just right that none of it’s overpowering and it’s just good. I shudder to think how long it took to figure out the measurements.

It makes sense to only change one ingredient at a time, really. It’s like going back to middle school science classes, when the teachers thought they had to reintroduce the scientific method every few months. You hypothesize, create a recipe, and tweak one variable at a time until it goes right. Then you write it down, because in the words of the great Adam Savage, “The only difference between science and screwing around is writing it down.”