So because of a quirk of staffing and scheduling I currently have Sunday nights off. A weekend night? In the restaurant industry?! Wild, I know. The brunch service is itself a weird one- quick and sticky (ha) with a smaller menu and a glut of bloody marys and mimosas. I honestly don’t know if cocktail names are supposed to be capitalized or not. One would honestly think that working it would be antithetical to a lot of things familiar to the nature of my work and to the reasons I got into wine and food in the first place. After closing Saturday dinner the last thing anyone would want to do is go in at ten in the morning (or earlier…). Yet now, especially with the time change, there’s something new to it.
I’m getting out of work when the sun’s still up.
That’s insane.
It also means that for the first time in a long time I’m able to go grocery shopping and cook dinner after work. At the end of a workweek, no less. Sometimes with tip money!
Stick around my work long enough and you’ll probably hear the story about how an original love of cooking is what got me into wine. It’s true, if oft repeated, that I took up the mantle of making dinner for my family through high school. The thing about that is that it meant cooking for a family. Big meals prepared relatively quickly and easily on a budget while also doing homework, acting, and running clubs. I loved it, but it was not quite what I mean here by cooking for myself.
I kept cooking in college, as much as I could with what tools were available (you can in fact make hollandaise in a microwave). Even then it was as often for myself and my girlfriend at the time as it was just for myself. I like to think it was one of the things she liked about it. It certainly was what I loved about her. I still chase simple chorizo and eggs from our time together, and it’s a fond a memory as it’s a flavor. That’s it, you know, that’s the whole shtick of why I work in restaurants. Food makes people happy, and it’s great.
And don’t get me wrong, I do love cooking for other people. I’m able to have friends over on nights they actually have off and cook for them. Carbonara and roasts and desserts and cocktails. It all feels so wonderful, and it’s restorative as anything. But I’m getting ahead of myself, and a little off track.
Leaving college, adulting on my own as it were (though living near aforementioned girlfriend) began a shift in how to view cooking, though. Meals no longer provided by college and groceries no longer at least in part funded by my parents left me with suddenly eight years of cooking experience and precious little in what it meant to cook for myself. Grocery stores are woefully underprepared for handling a solo cook at that- just ask anyone living by themselves how fast salad goes bad. What was more, though it was less severe at the vineyard, hours made thinking about how to schedule certain meals shift drastically. There was no logical way I was cooking full dinner dinners after returning home at two in the morning from a shift bartending a wedding reception.
It was then the bulk meal became a precious commodity- something that could fulfill all the pleasure of cooking but be blissfully easy to reheat in the wee hours blurring night and morning. These meals also were the kinds of things grocery stores really catered to. A four or six pack of chicken thighs were great for garlic clove chicken in cream sauce over greens (they still spoiled too fast but what can you do?), or chopped up into taco or quesadilla meat (all hail the quesadilla, that glorious paradigm of a midnight snack). Cheap meat thrown into stews with rice or egg noodles (egg noodles are seriously underrated). Fish on the days before trash pickup (the joys of the apartment trashcan)- although not reheatable perse it at least gives on the appearance of being healthy. Bonus points if it’s fish you caught (ah, the glory days of fly-fishing North Carolina). Breakfast sandwiches and oatmeal (both accompanied with an apple) as breakfast staples.
My diet’s changed relatively little since those days. I think some kind of codifying force decided that these were the things I liked and could manage. Culinary nostalgia is some of the most severe.
And these things are all well and good cooking as part of a daily routine or for food as fuel. This is naturally what got me cooking in the first place, the needs of feeding a family of which I was a member. But it’s not why I fell in love with cooking. There’s this creative side to it, something expressive and comforting both in (repetitive yeah) the act of creation (for who among us can doubt the limitless nature present in the moment of deciding what to make for dinner (or else move past the existential curse of having to ask it every day)) and in the routine. The little things, setting up the station to cook, the way so many meals begin the same (think of the Ghibli-esque charm of chopping vegetables, the heating of oil, the warmth of a preheating oven). Then the effort at personality, both in terms of expression and then in the actual meal itself. The one-offs. The personal meals without leftovers made purely because they taste good and offer some kind of comfort.
This week it was a steak bought with cash tips. That got seared in a pan and finished with some butter and rosemary (from my own plant!) I took some of those wilting salad greens and turned them into creamed greens, garlic and nutmeg and cream and all that goodness. As the steak rested I cooked off some mushrooms in the pan, finished with sherry and reduced to this nutty, slightly sweet glaze. All that with a bottle of Cahors.
When I sat down to dinner, there was still a little sunlight. My apartment was quiet as my neighbors got ready for their week (the restaurant schedule still holds some truth. Thank God tomorrow was Monday). I had only set off the smoke alarm twice (the joys of apartment cooking). Only one of my maxims failed: I couldn’t actually finish the whole thing. But I did finish season two of Succession. I cleaned up with the usual fun dancing playlists that help me get through dishes. Then I went to bed, early for a change, and comforted by something I’d done for myself.
Not bad for a bit of cooking.
