After September 11th, I volunteered to cook meals for the relief effort at the World Trade Center. My mother and I went to what was the new Bouley space (next to the Bouley Bakery – before he opened his very impressive emporium to food downtown!) prepared to help out. I had always loved cooking and I had spent the past two years working two nights a week at Tocqueville restaurant in union square, doing whatever was asked of me to learn all there was to learn about cooking professionally. I took the meat out of lobsters, I butchered all kinds of animals, I washed all kinds of vegetables, cut things up, peeled things, smelled, tasted, felt and got yelled at…a lot! It was something that just came naturally to me and yet something I wasn’t quite ready to leave my very stable boring technology job for. September 11th had a tremendous effect on me personally. I was planning to attend Culinary school that month and I never went.
I had a good job which I sort of fell into although it was never my passion. I had a part time cooking gig which fulfilled every passion I had and more. I was also a writer. Writing was more of a hobby than anything else until I transferred from technology to news at Bloomberg. But in September of 2001, my book was put on hold. I stopped writing and I stopped cooking. A lot of the book had to do with a proposed peace between Israel and the Palestinians. For a little while, I stopped writing completely not thinking there was a peace. Two years later I started writing again. The book is finished now and sits in the hand of one literary agent. I recently met a man, from Pakistan, a cab driver actually who made me believe there was a peace, if the people doing the fighting have a leader, from their own country who can represent them. This is what I am writing about and his belief is central to the characters in my novel.
Anyway, back to the chicken. There was a lot going on in all of our lives and they were all changed forever that day. Its funny, when I started this post I was planning to blog on chicken, but I find myself looking inward and its always more than chicken, isn’t it.
Although I had been accepted to the Culinary Institute in Hyde Park, New York, I never enrolled in September of 2001 as I had planned. Shortly before September 11th, I was mugged in the restaurant I was working in. It was my birthday a few weeks before and I was taking my mom to eat at the restaurant where I was working. I had some leftover birthday money and the money I was planning to spend on dinner in my wallet which I stowed under a bucket in the bathroom like always since I didn’t have a locker at the restaurant. I usually put my clothes on top of it and hung the rest on a hanging rack in the staff bathroom. Maybe I had $100 in my wallet. I was working in this restaurant 12 hours a week for free after I had put in 10 hour days in finance. I did decently financially during my day job, but not great. I was still young and building that career as well. But, the money was a target. It wasn’t about the money, it never is. But I didn’t feel safe in the restaurant or in that world in general. Culinary school just didn’t seem to be the right choice at the time. I continued working and built my career. I moved to another town outside New York and became a professional news writer. One step closer to my passions fulfilled. I learned a great deal about the pharmaceutical industry and biotechnology and though that it was the single greatest thing available to us as humans.
I spent several years studying biotechnology as a journalist, an economist, a student of business and also of public health. I spent two years in and out of research laboratories something aside from cooking, I dreamed my whole life of doing, at leading medical technology firms. I was in my dream career, studying my dream subject, life couldn’t be more perfect. I was convinced stents and coils were the answer…then I started to investigate biotechnology’s role in food. Nearly 6 years later, I am astonished at what “science” has done to our food system. There are those that call me a maniacal hippie for eating the way I do and I respect them the same. There are others who see me as a visionary. I appreciate their admiration. I just see myself as a girl who loves food and the taste of whole, fresh, untouched, unaltered, non-scientific food. And I enjoy cooking it even more.
Back to the chicken, on that day in November of 2001, I cooked meals for the firemen with my mom, at Bouley, under the supervision of Bouley chefs. How cool is that. If you are at all like me and food is not only something you like, but something you equate with breathing, you could imagine the experience. So my mom was upstairs chopping vegetables and making vegetable dishes and I was downstairs in the basement with a team of about 8 people. And before us, in the middle of the steel table lay, nearly 800 chickens. We were each given a set of boning knives and 10 minutes of instruction. In 30 seconds, a chicken can be boned, given the separation at the appropriate joints and attention to detail. I was not certain, I’d be able to do it in 30 seconds, but after about 800, I think I got it down to a minute, maybe 45 seconds. I wasn’t really keeping track.
More than 8 years later, I can still butcher a chicken. I can do a lot of things. I hang around chefs, I continue to take classes in culinary schools and I hope one day I’ll win a James Beard scholarship to attend culinary school in 4-6 months. I love cooking. I love cooking for others and myself.
One of my female friends said she’d never cook for anyone who didn’t have a penis and that included herself. I respect her choices, but I could never understand it. I couldn’t imagine doing anything else to relax. Also, I want to feel closer to the food I prepare and understand what goes into it.
I’ve been watching a series of movies on food production, processing and the origin of our foods. I haven’t shopped in supermarkets since 1999 when I moved 2 blocks from the Union Square farmers market. Granted grocery shopping for me is a little bit of an obsession and I’d never expect people to go through the lengths I go…but I have started buying pastured chicken and butchering it myself. Today, I got a whole bird. They removed the feathers and the head as well as the innards (like intestine and heart – I’m not quite ready to work with that yet – but I imagine I could make something interesting eventually), but pretty much everything else is there: neck, gizzard, liver, feet…yes feet! I did a post eariler on feet, go look for it…they make an excellent soup. This chicken ate nothing but grass, bugs, dirt and other things chicken are supposed to eat. The chicken’s skin is white, not yellow. Its flesh paler than the flesh I’ve seen on supermarket chicken, its fat, white and slightly yellow tinged. It has no smell.
Half of it now is simmering in wine, the other half in water making a stock. The last time I roasted it whole, but this time, I wanted to butcher it myself and make coq a vin. I was inspired by the Julia Child movie. Though, I’m no stranger to “Mastering the art of French Cooking”. My copy, in the mother’s house, is well worn, wine, butter and flour stained and you can still smell the years of dishes cooked from it on its pages. I first cracked that book open when I was 11. I’m surprised my mother let me use the stove unsupervised let alone cook what I did.
I operate a private chef business now, cooking in people’s homes: organic farm fresh meals for the week. I have all kinds of programs that are based on nourishing the body, feeding the soul and balancing the system. It is my belief that through fresh, whole food we will reach our comfortable natural weight. I don’t believe in dieting, but eating a certain way, forever. That is not to say that I don’t eat out on occassion and eat sweets on occasion. I do, but I miss my food when I do.
I just finished a sampling of the coq a vin complete with multi-colored organic carrots and potatoes: deep red, white, gold, orange and even purple – each with its own unique taste and lusciousness. The dish as a whole was as delicious as I had anticipated, if not better. The sauce complete with the bacon drippings from flying pig farm (pigs that have seen the outdoors and whose white fat is also as pure as its diet. The bird deliciously moist and tasting like the purity of its diet. I put the rest away to marinate for the evening. I look forward to my next taste tomorrow.
