Doing MORE in the Kitchen

Reflections on my journey with food, friends, Molly Baz, and the pressure to always get it right

My family didn’t eat meals together when I was growing up. When we did, it was usually either at a chain restaurant or because it was a holiday, sometimes both, accompanied by an explicit reason to sit down at a table. There was no allure to gathering for a meal for fear of complaints and accusations erupting. My siblings were rarely home at dinner time, as they were out with friends passing drinks and joints and hearty laughs between them. My parents were shut behind doors or on the couch hunched over tins and styrofoam in the evenings. I’m much younger than both of my siblings, so I spent many nights at home eating something stale and/or cheesy leftover from one of the two Tex Mex restaurants in my hometown. Sometimes my mother would roast a chicken we’d eat at all different times of the day, but the oven broke early on and was never replaced until I had moved out. All of this to say, I didn’t start gathering, truly gathering, with joy and intent and warmth over daily meals until I went to college. I loved the dining hall more than the average person for this very reason. There was never a shortage of people to share a meal with. The food, however, was not riveting. I still found meals themselves lackluster. I had also opened a box of struggle that first year of college with my relationship to food that would continue on through my entrance into womanhood (in all honesty, quite later than most women I know). Deprivation, restriction, haphazard indulgence, and shame were practices and emotions that lingered around my plate at the brink of my twenties. Although my relationship between my sense of self and food was morphing and becoming swollen with complexity, I had inadvertently unlocked a practical joy accessible to me every single day. Meeting up with friends in the dining hall and in later years having roommate dinners gathered around our shabby second hand table, gossiping on the kitchen floor, cooking together, compassionately doing someone’s dishes in the aftermath became daily ritual that brought me peace, even when I had none elsewhere. The laughs I shared with my roommates and friends sounded different sat at a table, my elbows propped up, my mouth full, dabbing my eyes with a crinkled napkin, surrounded by similar sounds of joy beaming off neighboring tables and their gathered groups. A small tear was sewn up in me as almost every meal I ate in that wobbly uncertain time was shared with friends.  

Simultaneously, as my reverence for mealtime and how I ate improved, the actual food I was eating changed too. When I moved into my first shoebox apartment with my best friends, we specifically bonded over meals. My best friend Katherine was our head chef, and I still admire all the ways she strives for more flavor, adventure, and boldness in the kitchen. We ate through her pastas, mousses, cloves upon cloves of garlic, an estimated 5,000 lemons in a two year period, shallots and onions, cheeses, rainbows of vegetables, soups, peppers, and a lot of wine. Katherine knows herself in the kitchen, and she didn’t just feed us, she nurtured us. She cooked, still cooks, with feeling. Looking back on that time, the muscles of our friendship were stretched and worked to the point of soreness, for many reasons, in which we did a lot of forgiving and lashing out and trying again in the morning.  Through those few early twenties years of swelling and shrinking, Katie continued cooking for me in the background by many acts of practical compassion, care, and attention. And it was always something truly, sincerely delicious. It sounds strange to say it now, but the more flavorful and bold the dishes she made were, the tighter I felt held. The tastes and smells that came from our kitchen in those years were full and rich; it viscerally made the company between us feel fuller and richer alongside. 

It has always felt like Katherine had this gene that I didn’t, that she just knew what she was doing and cooked with a very cool-girl kind of abandon. We all know those people. I had a hard time believing that I could be so effortless with a knife in my hand, standing over the stove, or that I’d ever even master a sexy three finger pinch of salt (low bar, I know). This sense of inadequacy rang through me when one time in college, a boy I liked very much came over and cooked my roommates and me dinner right before we all departed for the holidays. He brought ingredients to make some elaborate meal, as was his way, and Katie was his sous chef (she should have been the head chef, but that’s all I’ll say on that). I remember he asked me to chop up some jicama, a word I had never once heard in my life. Was this thing a vegetable? An alien potato? A turnip…? I didn’t even know what turnips looked like, let alone what this thing that may or may not even look like a turnip was. I felt stupid and small and closed minded, and I proceeded to act like I knew exactly how to interact with this, what I now know is a, vegetable. I ended up dicing it up wrong (…squares instead of strips, I think) and threw it in a searing skillet haphazardly. Apparently it was meant to be served cold? Or raw? I still don’t know what the case was…and in hindsight, I really don’t care either. All I felt in that moment in my little college apartment being corrected by a boy I wanted to impress, was that I was not a good cook and I didn’t have the intuition or knowledge he and Katie both seemed to possess. Whether it was a fire in me just starting to spark in those earlier days, one that consumed me with frustration and annoyance whenever I failed to master a skill, the youthful arrogance and shortsightedness of that young man I urged to like me back, or the limited experiences with food caused by a very unadventurous, picky-eating family, I just didn’t see myself ever learning to enjoy cooking after that.

Then, in short, I grew up. Through a long series of events and changes, I stopped feeling so embarrassed about many things, my lack of skill in the kitchen a main one. I built peripheral confidence and assuredness in who I am that bled into the way I approached cooking specifically. I started to get much more comfortable in the kitchen. I inevitably spiraled down a quintessential Youtube vortex of approachable cooking videos, featuring chefs from Brad Leone and Matty Matheson to Claire Saffitz and Samin Nosrat. There’s no other way to put it: these chefs are just effortlessly cool people. All the chefs I watched on Youtube were sloppy, funny, light, and relatable. They made mistakes included in their videos, they experimented, went on journeys with their food, they changed the steps of a recipe as they cooked through it, plated their creations for a camera no different than they would at home with no audience. And, as a bonus, they dressed really well! I was pretty much all in. Cooking, then, became less about knowing all there is to know and proving it, and more about having fun, being compelled, getting curious, lowering the stakes, and serving friends.

Included high on the long list of these chefs I came to admire and follow closely was Molly Baz. Molly, if you’re unfamiliar, is a cook, author, recipe developer, video host, and former senior food editor. She is also a famed salt enthusiast (she inspired me to carry a tin of flaky Kosher salt on my person at all times) with an affinity for bright colors, weenie dogs, Caesar salad, pina coladas, and pool parties. I recently graduated with a Masters degree, and my aforementioned brilliant friend Katherine gifted me Molly Baz’s newest cook book “More is More” in congratulations. To no surprise, it’s a flashy book. Bright red and full of film photos of Molly’s loved ones gathered around full plates and glasses of wine, it’s really fun to look at and consequentially even more fun to cook from. The premise of the book is that we should be doing more to make our food yummier even when our tools are limited, beefing up our dishes with all the flavor we can possibly extract out of the ingredients, using all their parts from the rind to the flesh to the seeds. Molly, in a mindset reminiscent of Katie’s cooking to me, wants those who use this book to get to know themselves and confidently own their choices and risks in the kitchen. In the introduction, Molly writes,

“Handfuls, glugs, and pinches will be encouraged so you reach less for the tangled-up set of measuring spoons and connect more with the ones you’ve got attached to your body. To cook with a ‘more is more’ mentality is to identify what the right amount of any given ingredient means to you, and the only way to gain that self-assuredness is to cook more-and more- and then probably a little more.”

This “more is more” ideology resonates deeply with me. It’s not about proving your capability. It’s about defining what you like, what you want to taste, and unabashedly going for it with fervor. It also totally defies the fine-dining mentality that “less is more.” Like Molly, I am a tried and true maximalist. When I’m cooking, or doing much of anything for that matter, I do not feel like me when I stifle or get embarrassed of this part of myself. However, I’m also someone who does not easily loosen my grip on control; I love, to a fault, getting things right and being the most capable person in the room. I’ve found, though, that practicing leaving the measuring spoons and rigid recipe instructions behind, as Molly so encourages, has given me a giddy freedom to experiment and learn. Cooking is this safe and lighthearted way to get to make reparable mistakes, try brand new things for the first time, and experience daily doses of uninhibitedness, some lessons I could use more practice in learning. For all these reasons and more, I can honestly say that I really love food.

Growing up, none of the food I was exposed to had the kind of “more” Molly inspires with her cooking. It was a boring routine and a daily chore that I seldom looked forward to or had much control over. When I got older, I realized meals weren’t just a means of physical survival, but a communal practice that filled a void in me left by a lonely childhood. Even later, I associated cooking with total mastery and hitting the mark rather than experiencing joy or adventure; I accepted that it wasn’t something I would be good at so I gave up trying. Then, it became less scary and, simply put, quite cool. I just needed a direction and example of how and where to ask for it to truly be more. In all these waning phases and complexities for what I feel toward food, I have learned that cooking for, being fed, and eating with others is a beautiful, silly, nourishing practice. It is also a means to be nurtured, something to which I struggle against and admittedly am not yet a master. Food has become a conduit of being known and seeing others, sharing and taking part in pure, joyous connection to not only other people but to myself as well. I believe it’s a stunning way to be seen trying. Part of embracing this new relationship to food and the practice of cooking, I see now, is to simply do more.