Sunday. Every day. Though this was a Wednesday.

It was hot and dry outside. I popped in my earbuds and headed out for my daily 4-mile walk.

The lush green lawns of our Pacific Northwest neighborhood had become as beige as threshed wheatfields, and the edges of every colorful flower turned brown and crispy.

My attention was focused on and off of a podcast with men laughing about an Australian movie I’d never seen. A postal worker with a heavy mail bag smiled at me blankly. A younger woman got out of a dark brown Toyota hatchback wearing the exact shade of brown shirt, shorts, and boots as her car. I wondered if it was coincidental or if that shade of brown, that I associate with something else, was her very favorite color. Three kids were squealing with laughter on the jungle gym at the elementary school closed for summer break. Their mom or nanny stared at her phone on a nearby bench. The root collar of a large tree had buckled the pavement squares, and I tread gently so as not to catch the tip of my sneaker on the ridge of the concrete sidewalk. I felt the boredom and gratitude of my daily jaunt swell in equal measure.

There’s a long incline that begins the final quarter stretch of my walk. At the top of that hill is a neighborhood much nicer than mine. The lots and houses double in size and are set back from the street by two sets of stairs, each averaging 6 steps. The lawns of these homes are still vibrantly green, some with active landscapers blowing leaves and trimming hedges. I huffily crossed the street to get distance from the relentless sound and cloud of shrubbery detritus.

About a half block away, I heard a man’s voice from behind the door of one of these very nice homes.

“Stay! Don’t come ou… just stay. STAY there!”

There was a struggle with the door, a pushing/ pulling, and then his head appeared. White guy, brown hair, mid 30’s maybe. He was wrestling with something in his arms and fighting to open the door only as wide as necessary for him to get out while something else, I’m assuming a large dog, was trying to escape.

“Don’t come out! DON’T!” He yelled into the house, halfway out the door, but then his head spun quickly with paranoid wide eyes onto the street to see if anyone could see him. I slowed my pace and tucked behind a tree. I don’t think he saw me. My eyes did not blink as I watched.

He had something very heavy in his arms. Something unwieldy.

The door slammed shut behind him, and he once again searched right and left with desperately guilty eyes. The cumbersome load in his arms looked like it had been loosely wrapped in a light blue shirt or a thin towel. It seemed as big as a bundle of firewood, but more unbalanced, like a small limp child. He unsuccessfully tried to control it as he hugged with both arms. His center of gravity shifted as the man descended the first concrete staircase toward the street. 6 steps down, he almost lost his balance twice. At the first landing, I saw his eyes land on the black, blue, and green garbage cans lined up in front of the house.

What does this guy think he’s doing? Is he throwing away evidence? Is this a crime scene I’m witnessing? Should I have my phone out to take pictures?

He was shiny with sweat, as was I. He made it down the second set of stairs and wobblily walked to the stoop. He shifted the weight to throw open the plastic lid of the green bin, and the blue coverlet slid off, exposing his heavy cargo.

My cheeks puffed up, and I felt almost like I was going to cry or puke with the rush. And then I started laughing and couldn’t stop for a long time.

It was a zucchini! It was a gourd the size of a well-fed basset hound, probably something that was an average-sized zucchini just a day or two ago.

The sound of it hitting the bottom of the green bin was deep and echoey like the drums in a symphony playing rolling thunder. It was haunting and hilariously loud for the disposal of a single vegetable.

“We’ve all been there!” I said to the man, who looked mortified when he saw that I had witnessed him and then relieved that I was laughing.

“I don’t know how it got so big!” he said, still a bit guilty.

“I know, I know. It’s just how they are. They’re tasteless once they’re that size too. You did the right thing. Have a great August!” and off I went.

Looks like I’m not starting a crime scene blog any time soon.

But I do know what to do with the zucchini before it becomes a green zeppelin.

Blueberry Zucchini Cake with Lemon Buttercream Frosting

Makes a 9-inch double layer cake

Ingredients

• 2 cups zucchini, NOT peeled and shredded on the widest teeth of a box grater

• 2 cups sugar

• 3 eggs, whisked gently

• 1 cup vegetable (not olive) oil

• 1 tablespoon vanilla extract

• 2 teaspoons lemon juice

• 3 cups all-purpose flour

• 1 teaspoon salt

• 1 teaspoon baking powder

• ½ teaspoon baking soda

• 2 cups fresh blueberries (thawed if frozen)

1) Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

2) Butter or spray 2 9-inch cake pans.

3) In a medium bowl, mix zucchini with the sugar until the grated vegetable seems sandy and sweet.

4) Stir in the eggs, the oil, the vanilla, and the lemon juice until well incorporated, but not so much that it becomes mushy.

5) In a large bowl, mix the flour, salt, baking powder, and baking soda.

6) Into the large bowl, stir the ingredients of the medium bowl and mix well, scraping the bottom of the bowl to ensure no secret mounds of flour are hiding from the action.

7) Gently stir in the blueberries.

8) Pour evenly between the two buttered cake pans.

9) Bake for 40 minutes, rotating the pans quickly halfway through.

10) Let cool in pans for 20 minutes and then on a rack for an hour before frosting.

Lemon Buttercream Frosting

• 2 ¼ sticks (1 1/8 cup) of unsalted butter, room temperature

• 3 ½ cups confectioners’ sugar

• 2 tablespoons lemon juice

• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract (clear baking extract preferred)

• ½ teaspoon salt (or more if you prefer)

1) Mix butter in a Kitchen Aid mixer with a paddle for about 2 minutes. Add sugar and continue to beat with a paddle for another 5 minutes. The time will completely transform the frosting’s taste, texture and amount as more air is beaten into it.

2) Pause to add the lemon, vanilla, and salt and blend for another minute or two.

Frost cake, cut yourself a large slice, sit back, and bask in the joy of baking!

White matchbooks in all manner of disrepair were strewn throughout the kitchen of my childhood apartment. They were folded or unfolded, white as snow or stained with wear, strike strips virginal or wet and scraped beyond function, white-tipped matches lay parallel and uniform, waiting for their big moment to spark like dancers auditioning for a Broadway show.

The cautionary click click click of the open gas line didn’t exist when I was a kid. I would twist the oven dial to 350 and walk away to dump the box of Dunkin Hines brownie mix into my parents’ large wooden salad bowl. I’d climb onto the counter, searching for oil in a sticky upper cabinet, and suddenly remember that the oven needed to be lit. I’d quickly fish a matchbook off the counter, strike once or twice to ignite the tip, open the oven door, and throw the match at the hissing hole at the bottom of the cavity. BOOM! Every single time.

All the kids in my neighborhood had that eyebrow-erasing experience. It wasn’t deadly, it just smelled that way.

I was terrified but not subdued. The application of heat to transform the simplest powders and liquids into a sugary masterpiece was too extraordinary to renounce. I was hooked.

As a chef whose business revolves around cooking in strangers’ kitchens, the click click click of a client’s stovetop is a call to action. It’s thrilling. It’s titillating. It’s foreplay. No matches necessary for this show. When I hear the pwoof of the gas lighting, I know we’re in business.

The house was large and old, with sizeable acreage that I think included a horse-filled stable.

“Hi, I’m Alison, your chef.” I timidly announced to the woman who answered the door.

I was embarrassed by my small but bulging biceps, flexed from carrying bags of food and a William’s Sonoma showroom amount of equipment.

“Oh my!” She exclaimed, possibly impressed with either my muscles or my tenacity to carry so much at once. “It’s nice to meet you, Alison. Can I help?”

It’s much safer for me to schlep pots and pans to clients’ homes than to hope they have what I need. Also, I have a relationship with my equipment. Every single time I cook, it’s a new menu, new kitchen, new clients, and I’d be lost if I didn’t have my trusty tools with me. They’re like my family (even more dependable than my family sometimes), and I can always rely on how they respond to heat, fat, and time.

“No, thanks, I’ve got it,” I replied and followed her into the wide, open kitchen. Her family was mingling around the breakfast nook, and all rose to greet me.

I shook and nodded and grinned and then began to unload proteins and vegetables into the fridge, squirt bottles of sauces onto the counters, cutting boards and seasonings nearby, and sheet, fry, and sauté pans on the stovetop.

“Oh… you’ll be using the cooktop!” The daughter’s eyes grew to double their size, and she looked at her mother to communicate something silently.

Clients are always sheepish about their own kitchens. I get “Sorry, this is so old,” or “We tried to clean it,” or “Someday we’ll redo our kitchen” in well-adorned homes all the time, so I’m used to this kind of reaction when I unpack.

It was a gas 5-burner stovetop from the (I’m guessing) early 80’s.

The daughter continued, pointing to the low-mounted oven on the wall behind me, “The oven gets a lot hotter than it’s set to and will burn your eyebrows with the heat when you open the door.” Everyone in the room seemed to second that statement with a grunt or chuckle. “And the cooktop is kind of old.” The crowd went silent.

The dad stepped in, “She’ll be fine,” (not sure if he was referring to me or the cooktop as a “she” like a trusty, old schooner.) He leaned in and whispered, “The middle burner is the best one.” And then winked like we were old buddies.

“Oh, um, thanks. Don’t worry about a thing!”

The middle jet was a double-ring gas burner, obviously the workhorse of the 5, with a wider space between it and the other burners. I turned the knob and with a click click click pwoof it lit quickly. With a cocky grin, I put my hand up to ease their fears. “In my 30-plus years of cooking in people’s homes, I’ve had some rough situations. Your beautiful kitchen is going to make my job a piece of cake!” [Hold for laughter, because cake.] “Stay tuned for appetizers!”

I declared myself an early winner with a beaming smile and a flaming burner.

This was an 80^th birthday dinner celebration for 10, with apps for the adults while the girls played tag on the great green meadow beyond. It was a picture-perfect day with everyone grinning on the lanai, cocktails in hand, and peals of laughter from the kids.

I went into auto-mode, quietly setting up timelines and small workstations for each course. I put a small pot of the beef stock I had made for the final sauce on a back burner to reduce a little more.

My server arrived, and I talked her through the menu:

She made sure drinks were full, and we began to serve the appetizers.

They started with the artichoke tarte au Soliel, which is always an impressive work of art and flavor.

The oven did run hot, but not so hot that it burned anything, not even my eyebrows.

They moved on to the coconut shrimp with tamarind ginger dip. I could see smiles through the sliding glass door and turned back to the kitchen with one too.

I double checked the stock, which strangely hadn’t reduced at all, even though the burner was definitely on. I turned it up, and long, 3-inch yellow flames licked the sides of the small pot. “Hrm,” I felt my heart beat boom boom in my chest, as if my body knew something my head still hadn’t learned. It’s fine, I thought to myself. We still had a while before they came inside for the salad course.

I focused on setting up the risotto, one of the side dishes for the filet. Checking the clock, I was right on track. Oil, a little butter, onions, wine, arborio, and stock. It’s a slow, beautiful build of flavors and textures. Blistered cherry tomatoes, spring peas, lemon, and basil would join the party in a little while. Then handfuls of parm… but not yet. Soon, soon.

I set up the broccolini to roast in a shallow bath of oil, lemons, and olives, and the leek fritters, which I had fried earlier, to heat on a sheet pan. The tied tenderloin beef filets had been salted long ago and then sprinkled with a little brown sugar to help caramelize the sear.

I needed to move the risotto onto another side burner because the arborio rice didn’t seem to be absorbing the chicken stock at all, but the other burners wouldn’t light. Click click click click click click click nothing. I shook my head and felt a little short of breath.

The stock on the back burner hadn’t reduced at all.

I put my trusty All-Clad pan onto the middle burner. It’s got to get raging hot before I set those filets in. It has to be screaming to make the Maillard process occur. Click click click pwoof thp.

What the fuck is thp!?!

I tried again, click click click pwoof thp.

The outer ring ate the flame as soon as something was on top of it. It put itself out. The inner burner had the heat of an aim and flame, so there was no heat coming out of the workhorse burner.

Click click click pwoof thp. I took the pan off the burner, and both the rings ignited, but when I put the pan on top: thp. I left the pan on that middle burner with whatever flame there was, hoping for the best.

Salad had to be dressed and plated. That was the next thing on the prep list in my head, which, for some reason, I couldn’t intervene with. I was a robot. I couldn’t stop and say firmly, “Alison, there’s something wrong with this stovetop. Find another way to cook the food.” I just kept moving forward like a goddamned AI chef.

Salad left the kitchen. It was beautiful. And I thought, everything is going to be fine.

Except that the risotto was a special kind of al dente that’s also called raw. I stirred and hoped. Every burner was on high, and nothing would cook.

My AI chef alter ego decided it was time to sear the steaks because that’s technically what time it was. I made a plan that could not be altered because I was no longer human, just in human form.

The steaks didn’t smoke, they didn’t sizzle, they didn’t make a sound. They just lay there, steaming. And I knew I had destroyed these beautiful filets in that lukewarm pan. I saw the grey instead of the brown. There would be no crust.

In a desperate moment, I shoved the pan into the oven, which I knew was very hot (and was what I should have done to get the pan hot first), but I couldn’t see it. I wasn’t aware enough to change my route.

I stirred that risotto while empty salad plates came back. I knew the table could wait a bit between courses, but not long. Come on, come on, come on, risotto. I took a bite. Almost. Come on, come on, come on.

Click click click pwoof thp.

I took the steaks out of the oven at the right temperature, removing the meat to another sheet pan and placing the pan on the cooktop to try to deglaze with the wine and stock. There would be no dancing bits reduced into glossy sauce on this day. Everything just lay there, wet and lifeless.

I cursed and sweated and lost feeling in most of my body. My server nervously ran in a circle around me, trying to help, but knew there was nothing anyone could do. “It’s going to be ok, Alison, they’re really happy out there.”

I plated the risotto, which, when I tasted again, seemed less crunchy, but still not the soft creamy forkful that it should be. I plated the broccolini and the fritters. The steaks were set onto each plate with a drip, not a drizzle of wet “sauce”. I desperately sprinkled some chopped parsley to hide the grey.

The plates left the kitchen, and I felt my emotions rise. No, no tears yet. I would not let that happen when there was still another course to go.

I turned the oven down a bit and gently placed the cobbler inside. I drowned my sponge in soap and slipped into a healing meditational dishwashing trance. I wiped down the counters and the soupy spaces between the burners. The feeling in my arms and head returned. I was still alive.

The plates came back empty, or with requests to pack up what was left for them to eat the following day.

We served the nectarine blackberry cobbler with ginger scone topping à la mode, and they squealed with joy. Honestly, there were cheers. I could hear them from the kitchen. I stood there listening to the joy, alone in shock.

I always say to my staff, “Serve a breathtaking dessert, leave them with a sparkling kitchen, and they’ll forget the rest!” I never knew how true that was until this fateful day.

So here is my recipe for nectarine and blackberry cobbler with candied ginger scone topping. May all your desserts be luscious and your burners hot!

Save the Day Nectarine and Blackberry Cobbler with Candied Ginger Scone Topping

Makes enough for 8

Ingredients for the cobbler

· 5 cups (this is an average of 8-10 nectarines, depending on how big they are) peeled and sliced nectarines

· ½ cup sugar

· 2 teaspoons cornstarch

· 1 teaspoon vanilla extract

· 1 teaspoon almond extract

· ½ teaspoon salt

· 1 pint blackberries

1. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.

2. Toss the nectarines with the sugar, cornstarch, vanilla and almond extracts, and salt.

3. Set in a 2-quart baking dish and bake for 15 minutes, while you make the topping…

Ingredients for the ginger scone topping:

• 2 ¼ cups all-purpose flour

• 1/3 cup sugar

• 1 tablespoon baking powder

• 1 teaspoon salt

• 1 teaspoon ground ginger

• 12 tablespoons chilled unsalted butter, cut into small pieces

• ¾ cup plus 2 tablespoons whipping cream

• 2/3 cup crystallized ginger, diced

1. Blend flour, sugar, baking powder, salt, and ground ginger in a large bowl.

2. Using your fingers, smush the butter into the flour mixture until the butter looks like coarse meal.

3. Make well in center; add 3/4 cup cream. Using a fork, stir until just moist. Mix in crystallized ginger. Adding a little flour to the bowl, knead gently for a few turns.

4. Once the nectarines have cooked for 15 minutes, stir the blackberries into the baking dish with the nectarines. Pat clumps of dough over (I pull pieces of dough that are an average of 2 inches around) the top of the baking dish to cover all the fruit.

5. Brush dough with the remaining 2 tablespoons of cream.

6. Bake for 30-35 minutes until the dough is puffy and golden brown.

I’ve been experiencing a profound bout of spiritual, professional, and constitutional dysphoria, and when this happens, cooking is my only way out.

Earlier that day, in a fit of spring-cleaning desk organization, I had unearthed a *superfun recipe booklet from a make-your-own-mozzarella-cheese kit I’d ordered years ago. *Superfun in that the informational content was printed in a bubble font with stars, hearts, and winged cartoon cows flying in the margins of each page. I remember the deep humiliation I felt as a 46-year-old chef when I could not, in fact, make cheese from this patronizingly fundamental kit.

Sitting at my half-clean desk, cheesy booklet in hand, I could still taste the decade-old disappointment of citric acid and rennet-blended white liquid, unwilling to curdle, thicken, or turn into anything other than hot fucking milk. You can hear… it’s still with me.

So, I set my sails to right this wrong, and unpasteurized, non-homogenized organic milk became my day’s priority.

My phone had lured me to a Washington State country store with promises of farm stand produce and unprocessed dairy products.

The store’s gambrel roof and large wooden bushels of vegetables gave me hope, but the farm-fresh produce, boasted about online, bore a striking resemblance to the tasteless veggies in my local Safeway. No way, they have Driscoll’s berries here! I’ve been looking for more plastic clamshells to throw into a landfill!

I think “Private Equity Farm-Fresh” should be a legally required market adjective.

I tossed some green items (sans Driscoll’s berries) into my cart to justify the schlep and located an unprocessed milk that would work perfectly.

The checkout guy was a skinny, slouching, older, grey-haired man who shot me an I’m on a sinking ship look as I wheeled toward him.

“Um, let me just double-check the price on your [clamshell of] basil.” It was $8.58 for a tiny package, which is robbery any way you chiffonade it.

He found that it was correctly priced and shrugged with his eyebrows and shoulders in a way that made me codependently tell him it was ok, even though it wasn’t. The vat-pasteurized, non-homogenized organic milk was $9 for a half-gallon. But… cheese. CHEESE. You can make it!

Cooking is incredibly personal to me. Not cheffing: cooking. It’s so intimate that I’m often afraid to talk about it for fear that my relationship with the food I cook will suffer. It’s not trivial or performative. It’s sacred. I feel the world disappear when I start to cook. I feel a better, truer person rise up. I’m the me-ist me I can be when I’m standing over a hot stove transforming elements into a completely new substance. I am Doctor Frankenstein! I am Prometheus!!! I am GOD ALMIGHTY!!!

Too much? I know. It’s heady. This is why I keep it to myself. It’s an addiction, and not one I’m looking to quit.

This mozzarella voyage felt like a spiritual completion, necessary to heal my feelings of 2026 compartmentalization of passion. I drove away from the farm stand, bubbling with the feeling of possibility.

Back at home, I cross-referenced the kit’s instructions with a few reliable online resources to make sure I was ready. I had citric acid, like any good chef does, which I would mix into the milk first, and a package of dried rennet tabs, which I bloomed in some water. I had a non-reactive pot on the stove, thermometer in hand, this that and the other thing, I was ready.

Heat slowly, not too hot, stir in, mix gently, now add this, stir for 25 seconds, lid on, now wait…

I sat in the living room looking to the sky, waiting for the shift to occur. The instructions said the curds would pull gently inward away from the whey at the sides of the pot. Timer BING!

The milk… this prized, pure, beautifully unhandled juice of cow… would not change into anything other than hot milk.

I gave it more time… a desperate addition of acid. Nothing. Nothing.

There’s this girl I know. She’s about 6, looks surprisingly familiar, and she always shows up when my life goes sideways. She cries big, wet tears, knows all the nastiest words, and stomps her feet so hard that the cupboards rattle. Francis knows her, not very well, luckily, but he’s met her a few times. He came out of his office to find me her wailing over the hot pot of defeat.

“It didn’t work at all!” I followed the directions exactly, and it still didn’t change!”

I frowned meanly at my consoling husband, who ducked back into his office. I wanted to be alone. I considered moving far away from everyone who knew me. I’d go to a small, expectationless, dairy-free island—Failurini!

But time, you know, time changes feelings. In minutes, my self-loathing downshifted into a workable offense as I cleaned the kitchen.

Popping out of his office, Francis said, “I think the issue is the kind of rennet you’re using!” My wonderful and terrified husband suddenly had a horse in the cheese race, even though he is a dairy-free dude. “I just watched a bunch of cheesemaking videos, and a lot of people say you have to use liquid animal rennet. Dried rennet isn’t strong enough to set the milk. They sell it at brewery-supply stores. I called one in Vancouver (Washington), and they’ve got some.”

He’s amazing.

With gas over $5/ gallon, I wasn’t going to drive back up to Washington, and ordered the rennet online.

The next morning, after the rennet arrived, I set out to our local Whole Foods to see if they had any unpasteurized milk. They had exactly the same brand as the farmstand! It was the only vat-pasteurized, non-homogenized milk I could find, so I spent a small fortune on 2 bottles, just in case something weird happened. I also picked up some fresh citric acid in case that was the problem. I watched the same videos Francis had, as well as a few others, and read online tips and FAQs.

I normally follow a half recipe, half intuition model for cooking, but this was no place for divination. With my laptop on my kitchen counter, I mirrored the cheesemaking video play-by-play. Now we’re adding the acid, now the heat, now the rennet, now the wait, now the lid.

Again, I sat in the living room, panting with anticipation, daydreaming about my teeth sinking into the soft, fresh cheese. Timer ding!

And…

N O T H I N G

I felt like the disappointment had liquified my bones. I transformed into a vat of emotionally bankrupt jelly on the couch. Even my inner 6-year-old was too overworked to tantrum for me.

Hours later, I used the rest of the milk to make homemade ricotta, which tasted like inertia, but curdled just fine.

So I have no recipe or story of victory through suffering in this month’s blog post. I do have some liquid animal rennet available for anyone interested. All I ask from you, my friends, is that if you have tips or a recipe for homemade mozzarella… keep it to yourself.

It was the beginning of 2017, and I had moved my business, my dog, and myself to Portland 11 months earlier. I was still finding my sea legs and needed a lifeboat… or at least a dramamine.

Kara, the producer of KATU’s show, Afternoon Live, found my catering website through an online search. She loved the pictures of my food and my many great reviews and thought I might be a perfect guest for the new show.

Truthfully, “guest star appearance” is my ego talking. Mid-day chat shows have always aired cooking segments featuring local chefs as filler between their more important guest interviews. Cooking on live television was certainly not on my 2017 bingo card, which was heavily stamped with my failed attempts at finding catering jobs. I had been a professional actress years before I was a chef, but performing on stage required a much different skillset than appearing on live tv. There would be no deep exploration into my character’s history/ personality/ motivations. This would just be me being me… a far more challenging role than I had ever played before.

I was told to arrive at 1:30 on the day of my episode, and get ready to be on the air at 2:02 for a 6-minute time slot. I could cook whatever I wanted as long as it was straightforward. That’s vague, right? I figured out by process of elimination that there would be no script, no rehearsal, no hair and make-up trailer, and… no pay.

Kara sent me a video of a chef making a marinara on the show as a guide to what I should expect.

Suddenly, my memory time machine sent me back to days when I was a kid at home sick. Feverish and sniffly, I slurped ginger ale from a sippy cup and drowsily watched afternoon talk shows.

What I distinctly remember is my ASMR Autonomy Sensory Meridian Response experience with this type of show, or, since this wasn’t specifically sound-induced, I’ll use the more appropriate acronym AIHO Attention Induced Head Orgasm. That was the cognitively relaxed sensation, often felt as tingles running down my spine, that occurred when I watched the beautiful aproned ladies cook on the show’s kitchen set. They laughed as they tossed premeasured ingredients from many small bowls into two bigger bowls. One lady stirred it quickly, citing the teaspoon or cup count, and then mixed the wet ingredients into the dry ones. Then she scraped the batter into a cake pan, placed it into the oven, and instantly removed a perfectly baked cake from that very same oven! 1-2-3 done! There was something toe curling about the premeditation, organization, and cleanliness of the operation, followed by the guaranteed success through the magic of television!

When I was a kid, every adventure in the kitchen resulted in the explosion of ingredients into every nook and cranny in our New York apartment.
“Why does my wine glass taste like baking soda?” is the kind of question my parents would ask after I baked something. And, “Did any flour make it into the cookies, or is it all on the floor?”

But in those televised cooking segments, nary a flake of salt was misplaced.

I am realizing right this minute that my whole life as a chef has been a pursuit of recreating that AIHO-organized kitchen feeling. I’ve never wanted to work in or run a big, chaotic restaurant. The kind of small party event catering that I specialize in is entirely dependent on being so organized that I make a perfectly prepared meal appear like magic in an unfamiliar home. There’s no destruction of kitchens, no hours of tedious labor. I do that all in a rental kitchen before I arrive on site. My margin for error is nil because I have prepped it so perfectly.

So, while I had very little guidance from the show on what to do, I was 100% prepared. I had been a freelance private chef and small party caterer in random kitchens for over 20 years.

I memorized my recipe and recited it over and over in the shower that morning. Then, once more as I got dressed. My hands shook, and my breath grew short as I drove to the show with bags full of ingredients and equipment.

The entrance to the studio building felt like a corporate office with glossy framed photos of local news hosts on the walls. I was led to the back of the studio, which had an echoey, cold cinderblock feeling; the air tasted like lint swept into a pile but not yet dust-panned away. I was told to set up on one of the three rolling counter set pieces. Ramekins on the right, I decided. No, Cuisinart on the right, ramekins in the middle, finished product on the left. I made it up as I went, hands still shaking, breath short, heart beating out of my chef jacket. Kara, the producer, introduced herself. I was mic’d, rolled out, and I met Tra’Renee Chambers, who was the host at the time.

Then we were live.

I don’t really remember what happened. I know I forgot words like “stir” and “shrimp”---you know, the true show-off-your-fancy-vocabulary words--- but Tra (pronounced “Tray”) revived every millisecond I murdered, so I did not look as ridiculous as I felt.

When my 6 minutes were over, I was flying! It was easy. It felt natural and delightfully terrifying. Later that day, Kara emailed and said I was fantastic, and they’d love to have me back the following month. That began my monthly run.

This March, the producer emailed, “I’m confirming your segment this Tuesday, and also, I’m not sure if you’ve heard, but we made an announcement on the show a couple of days ago…”

Afternoon Live has been canceled.

To say I feel devastated is much more dramatic than is appropriate. It’s interesting to take stock in the time you’ve spent doing something for almost a decade – especially when it’s only 6 minutes a month. Of course, I spend much more than 6 minutes working on the recipe, the pictures, the story, my hair, my weight, my words, and not having lipstick on my teeth (which has happened at least once). I have grown with my years on the air, learning that the consequences of my little screw-ups are all in my head.

I think the trick to success in life is making it look easy, much more than knowing how to do everything. That’s the true magic of television I guess. It’s all a facade.

It’s been a wonderful ride, and I am beyond grateful to everyone at Afternoon Live.

Here are clips from my very first and very last episode, as well as the recipes. Just click on the pics to watch me!

Shrimp Skewers

with Red Pepper Rouille

Ingredients

• 1 red bell pepper

• 1 large egg yolk

• 2 garlic cloves, peeled and finely chopped

• ½ teaspoon salt

• 1/8 teaspoon saffron threads

• 1 teaspoon sweet paprika

• 1/2 teaspoon spicy paprika, to taste

• 2 teaspoons red wine vinegar

• 1/2 cup extra-virgin olive oil

• 24 raw shrimp, peeled and deveined

• 1 lemon, cut in half

• Salt and pepper, to taste

To roast, seed, and peel the red bell pepper:

1. Place the pepper directly on the burner of a gas stove. The pepper will pop and burn, but that’s good– that’s what you want. After about 5 minutes, the bottom side will be charred completely. Turn the pepper with tongs to start charring the rest of the pepper. When the pepper is black and charred completely, place the pepper into a bowl and cover with plastic wrap. This will create steam that will help loosen the charred skin from the pepper.

2. When the pepper is cool, run it under water to remove the charred skin. Cut it in half and remove the seeds.

3. Slice it into strips for the rouille.

To make the rouille:

1. Place the egg yolk in the bowl of a food processor. Add the garlic, salt, saffron, sweet paprika, spicy paprika, and red wine vinegar. Pulse for a second to mix.

2. Turn the food processor on and slowly begin to drizzle the oil in. When all the oil has been incorporated, add the sliced peppers.

3. Run a spatula around the inside of the processor bowl to make sure all the spices are blended in. Let the food processor run for 1-2 minutes. Season to taste.

4. Pour into a small serving bowl.

To make the shrimp:

1. Turn the broiler in the oven on. Cover a sheet pan with aluminum foil.

2. Place the shrimp in a bowl and marinate with 2 tablespoons of aioli. (Can marinate for a few minutes or a few hours refrigerated.)

3. Place the shrimp on a foil-lined sheet pan and drizzle with juice from the lemon. Lightly season with salt and pepper.

4. Broil for 3-4 minutes, or until the shrimp is opaque throughout.

5. Skewer each shrimp and serve with rouille for dipping.

Chocolate Cherry Biscotti

Ingredients

• 2 ½ Cups All-purpose flour

• 1 teaspoon baking powder

• ½ teaspoon salt

• 1 ½ cups sugar

• ½ Cup (1 Stick) unsalted butter, room temperature

• 2 eggs

• 1 teaspoon almond extract

• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract

• 1 cup dark chocolate, chopped into chunks from a chocolate bar (I like at least 60% cacao)

• 1/2 cup chopped dried cherries

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper or a Silpat mat.

2. Combine flour, baking powder, and salt in a medium bowl.

3. Using a wooden spoon or a standing mixer, beat sugar, butter, eggs, and extracts until well blended.

4. Mix in the flour mixture, the chocolate, and the dried cherries.

5. Using floured hands, separate into two flat logs, 7 inches wide by 10 inches long. Transfer logs onto a baking sheet.

6. Bake until golden brown, about 30 minutes.

7. Cool logs on a rack for 5 minutes, maintaining oven temperature.

8. Using a large knife, cut logs into diagonal slices about 3/4 inch wide. Arrange slices on a sheet pan and bake for 7 minutes.

9. Turn biscotti over and bake another 5 minutes. The trick here is to not overbake the biscotti as they can become very hard to bite and challenging to chew.

The uniformed man, wearing a chauffeur’s cap with a leathery brim, extended his hand to assist with my exit from the cab.

“Oh, thanks. It’s cool. I got it.” I said, immediately followed by a shameful head shake at my Upper West Side nonchalance.

There was nothing casual about this 5^th Avenue address. It bled old money.

“I’ve got some bags in the trunk, but I can get ‘em.”

“No, ma’am, we’ll take care of that for you,” and he started unpacking my catering bags full of food, platters, and equipment onto a bellhop cart that had magically appeared on the sidewalk.

The echoey marble floors and ornate corniced molding of this building’s lobby did not remind me of the peeling, striped, beige wallpaper in the lobby of the building where I grew up. Nor did the helpful welcome desk attendant remind me of the superintendent of my building, whose response to most requests was, “It’s not my job”.

“I’m here to see Mrs. Pinklebottom. Oh, wait, actually I’m meeting Mr. Kanderpants upstairs first.” (names have been changed)

I had not technically been in communication with Mrs. Pinklebottom, the hostess of the party I was about to cater, but rather, her private assistant, Jerry Kanderpants. He had set the guest count, arrival time, and menu. I think he found me through an online search. He said that his boss has never hired the same caterer twice.

“Yes, ma’am, one second,” the man raised his handset and punched a small black button on the shiny console of apartment numbers and correlating nubs. I was led into a small, tapestried elevator with a metal gate that was slid closed by another charming steward. My bags were mysteriously waiting for me when I arrived at the penthouse apartment.

My imposter syndrome always screams the loudest when I am standing in front of my client’s door. As my knuckles raise to knock or my index finger extends to the bell, I can only see my faults.

On this day, a butler opened the door with a snicker, and I felt my panic confirmed.

“Hello, I’m Alison. I’m the chef for tonight’s event.” My fear had pitched my voice so high that I sounded like a little girl.

“Hmmm, yes,” his voice was low and nasal, which I interpreted as judgment, correctly, I think. “The kitchen is through here.”

I peeked over his shoulder into the stately living room overlooking Central Park. From this top floor, you could see clear across to the West Side, and I paused for a millisecond to appreciate my hometown.

I was quickly whisked away from the view into a series of back hallways leading to the kitchen. This large room had been renovated with a nod to historical accuracy. It was not grey and smooth like so many kitchens I have cooked in. The wall paint was Swiss Coffee colored, thick, and textured from decades of coats upon coats. There was a Viking stove and a modern dishwasher, but the subway tile was authentic and pristine, as was the cabinetry.

Jerry Kanderpants, the assistant, appeared through another hallway.

“Alison? I’m Jerry. It’s lovely to finally meet you in person.” He was thin and wore tailored slacks and a flattering blue designer sweater, which I bet he had in every color. His mannerisms were a combination of systematically formal and can-you-believe-this-life eyeroll, which he shifted between without warning, making me constantly uncertain of where I stood with him. “We have guests in an hour and a half,” he said sharply, followed by a frown.

“Fantastic!” I replied with a big, cheery grin. I’ve dealt with this kind of pre-party frown many times. The doubt that clients have for me in that hour before the party starts lingers like toxic smog in the kitchen, but my imposter syndrome was gone by this point. My confidence rose like a big fan blowing the space clear. My voice dropped to a serious business tone, “My staff will be here in half an hour. We’ll be ready to go when everyone arrives.

“Okay…” he sang with a challenge and exited the kitchen.

Oven on, cold food in fridge, parchment on sheet pans, platters unwrapped, squeeze-bottled sauces lined up, flower adornments onto serving platters, cocktail napkins fanned, reference menu out, staff arrived.

What happened next is hard for me to describe because I sank into myself. I fell into the autopilot mode of someone who is so well-versed in the dance that she no longer thinks of the steps. It’s the same every time, though the menu and venue are different.

This was a whirlwind of smells, and tastes, and colors, laughter and cursing, frustration and relief. My team moved as one in the kitchen and individually on the party floor.

“They love the food!” exclaimed one server.

“Sure do,” said another.

We wiped down platters as they returned to the kitchen empty, and then reloaded for another pass. Again and again and again until the very last guests had gone. Dishes were washed and dried, counters scrubbed, floors swept.

When she appeared in the doorway, it was as if the Queen of England had arrived. All the clocks stopped. This was my first time meeting her. She was tiny and ancient, with shiny pearls and tight grey curls.

“Ahem,” she paused for effect, and my crew and I quickly stood at attention.

She walked through the room, inspecting counters and cabinets. Then the fridge. Then the oven. We’d cleaned it all thoroughly. I felt confident.

“Hello, Alison, nice to meet you. Your food was excellent, except for the mini cheeseburgers, which I did not enjoy.” She paused for effect. My stomach sank. “A true lady would never open her mouth that wide.”

She turned on her heel and exited the kitchen.

We were never asked to return.

I’ve had a lot of feedback over the years, but I’ve never had it specifically refer to how wide a lady will open her mouth.

I think of her all the time. Her unhappy husband, too. Ha.

In my defense, mini cheeseburgers are the last thing I would have put on this menu. I wouldn’t serve sliders to the Queen either. Not only do they require a certain willingness to open your mouth, but they’re too casual for this old-money crowd. I bet that Jerry Kanderpants chose them to make the caterer look bad so he could look great in a party planning power grab.

I should also say that a few months later, when I catered Frank Bruni’s book party, Danny Meyer came back into the kitchen specifically to tell me my mini cheeseburgers were outstanding.

But there’s always room for improvement; it’s a work in progress. My job is bigger than creating great-tasting food. For example, I choose a shrimp size that is filling and doesn’t need to be double-dipped. I cut down the amount of chopped spinach in my spanakopita because so many guests wound up with it in their teeth at parties. I pipe a single round of frosting onto my cupcakes so that you get frosting and cake in every bite, never one without the other. I pay attention.

I recently had a client request an appetizer menu with no dips. She wanted everything to be grab-and-go. No problem, I said and got to work on a few incredible one-bite bites.

Here is my favorite:

Roast Vegetable Stuffed Polenta Cakes

Makes about 20 rounds

Ingredients

• 5 garlic cloves, minced

• ½ red onion, chopped into ¼ inch pieces

• 1 red bell pepper, chopped into ¼ inch pieces

• 1 portobello mushroom, chopped into ½ inch pieces

• 2 Tomatoes, sliced into rounds

• Olive oil

• Salt and pepper

• A splash of balsamic vinegar

• 1/2 cup of polenta

• 2 teaspoons of salt, divided

• 1 tablespoon of olive oil

• 3 tablespoons of Parmesan cheese

• 10 basil leaves

1. Preheat the oven to 425 degrees.

2. On a parchment-covered sheet pan, place the chopped red onion in one corner and the chopped bell pepper in the other corner. Sprinkle each vegetable with a quarter of the minced garlic and toss with a big glug of olive oil, salt, and pepper. Roast in the oven for 15 minutes.

3. Add the chopped portobello (which doesn’t need to roast as long) and toss it with olive oil, garlic, salt, pepper, and a splash of balsamic. Lay the tomato slices next to the mushrooms and sprinkle with the remaining garlic, olive oil, salt, and pepper.

4. Return the pan to the oven and roast for another 25 minutes.

5. Bring 1 1/2 cups of water with 1/2 teaspoon of salt to a boil. Whisk in 1/2 cup of polenta and cook on a medium heat for 5 minutes, stirring occasionally to make sure it doesn’t stick to the bottom of the pot. After 5 minutes, take the pot off the heat, stir in 1 tablespoon of olive oil, another teaspoon of salt, and cover. Let it sit for 2 minutes.

6. Chiffonade the basil. Stir the vegetables, basil, and the parmesan into the cooked polenta and then spread the polenta onto a greased sheet pan, forming a 3/4 inch thick slab of polenta.

7. Let cool for 2 hours.

8. When ready to serve, turn on your broiler. Cut the polenta into bite-sized pieces (I use a round cookie cutter). Spray the bottom of a sheet pan with cooking oil and place the polenta pieces on it. Spray the polenta bites too, and place them in the broiler. Broil for 3 minutes a side and then serve hot or at room temperature.

And here I am making these on KATU’s show Afternoon Live:

And if you’re looking for a fantastic caterer, check me out!

My phone buzzed with a text. It was my mom.

“Rene passed away today.”

I sank onto the couch.

This was a family friend; someone I’d known my whole life; one of my parent’s best friends. He’d been sick, so it wasn’t a surprise, but it was an epic loss.

I stared at the coffee table in front of me, with randomly strewn stolen drink coasters from bars I’d never return to, the TV remote on its side, a black ballpoint pen and cap-- close but parted, and a carpet of comingling cat/dog hair only offensively visible from the angle I had sunk to.

“Oh my god,” I said with a gasp to no one, feeling my whole life could be judged by the state of this coffee table.

I marched to the underbelly of the kitchen sink and retrieved a soft rag and lemon-scented polish. On a mission now, I scoured and buffed the wood until it shone pristine and uncorrupted. I racked and tapped the coasters together like playing cards, lined the remote up perfectly with the side of the table, and reunited the pen with its cap.

“There,” I thought. “That’s better.” As if death could be buffed away with a lemon-scented oil if you just pushed hard enough.

The ballpoint pen suddenly burned in my hand, and I listened.

An idea. A big one.

I would write a note to Judith, Rene’s widow, also a very long-time family friend. I would let her know how deeply moved I was by Rene’s life and his passing. I like to write, and this could be my moment to express how impacted I have been by another person. I felt inspired and determined to say more clearly than anyone else how affected I was by the loss. Brilliant words would appear, I was certain. Impactful, important, unique words. Words that would impress. Words that would be so moving that Judith would run into her town’s square waving my perfectly calligraphed condolence card, weeping and yelling, “Alison’s is the best! Alison has summed up life and death better than anyone ever could! She is the one who understands! This is the card to end all cards!!!”

Heart racing, I grabbed a notebook from my desk and uncapped the pen.

I inhaled and exhaled. I balled my fists and then stretched my fingers wide. Ok, ok. Here we go. Ok. Ok.

The words that showed up made me embarrassed.

“Magical” “Smiles” “Heartbreak”

C’mon, c’mon, Alison. Do better. I tapped my pen on the page.

My vocabulary flatlined.

I could access memories of Rene from when I was a kid in New York, or my family staying with his in LA when I was in high school, or when I catered a reading Rene did years ago on the Upper West Side. But these snapshots felt more like proof of having known him rather than truly understanding his impact... because I didn’t really know him as a person at all. My words created an image or an appreciation, not a deep comprehension.

Then I remembered the cookies I’d made the day before, and it seemed important to eat one or two, so I did that. You know, to help with the writing. And then I thought I should take a bigger break and turned on the tv. I pulled some woolly socks onto my freezing feet and checked my phone for email and news and social media and the weather. This task had become too challenging, so I soothed it with sugars for all my senses.

When I tried again, I failed. And then again later, nothing.

I felt regretful that I couldn’t connect with my mission, but even more ashamed that I felt competitive with the rest of the world to construct the BEST sentiment.

It’s like that huge birthday card sent around an office for everyone to write in.

“I’m going to write the funniest or most meaningful thing,” you think to yourself, but by the time the card gets to you, your mind has gone blank, and you just write “Happy birthday!” in blue marker drooping sideways because you write Happy too big and there’s no more room on the card.

It’s exactly like that, but with death... so not a thing like that, actually.

I typed onto my phone, “Please tell Judith how sorry I am,” and hung my head in shame.

Rene passed away years ago, but the condolence card, or lack thereof, memory resurged when I found out that my ex-boyfriend Shannon MacGregor died in a car accident two weeks ago.

I was speechless. Dumbfounded. It felt important to me to share how deep an impact he had on me, but I lost the ability once again. I became jealous and competitive with mutual friends who wrote beautiful tributes to Shannon on social media, and furious with myself for the pressure I’d invented to summarize a friend with the most perfect adjectives. The pressure that has led to paralysis time and time again.

Finally, I see what a narcissistic asshat I’d become with the challenge of writing it the best over just writing it. Oh, right, it’s not about me at all.

So, I’ll say this about Shannon simply…when love came and captured us, it was deep and true and unique, and when it left, it was painful and necessary. His fearless approach to life was spectacular, sensational, terrifying, beautiful, and all his own. I am different because I knew him. I am a better person because of what he taught me.

And that doesn’t even scratch the surface.

I’m sorry for all the losses I haven’t properly condolenced (yes, I know that’s not a word). I will try harder, but it might just be beyond my reach. Please know I love you.

[And thanks specifically to Judith, who somehow in the years since Rene passed (even without a condolence card) has become a friend with whom I communicate frequently and whose writing (Diary of Olding on Substack) I admire and eat up with a big spoon (and HUGE congrats on the book!!!)]

Here are the writer’s break cookies that I ate that day. When I’m in for a long respite, I put ice cream between two cookies, and eventually, all the best words shake loose. And check out the link to me making these on Afternoon Live, below the recipe, where a few things go awry, and we have so much fun!

Snickerdoodle Ice Cream Sandwiches

Snickerdoodle Ice Cream Sandwiches

Makes about 4 dozen

• 2 sticks (16 tablespoons) unsalted butter, at room temperature

• 1 ½ cups granulated sugar

• 2 eggs

• 2 teaspoons vanilla

• 2 ½ cups all-purpose flour

• 2 teaspoons cream of tartar

• 1 teaspoon baking soda

• 1/2 teaspoon kosher salt

• 3 tablespoons sugar

• 3 tablespoons cinnamon

• Kosher salt, for sprinkling

• Ice cream, softened

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

2. Cream the butter with the sugar until fluffy. Add the eggs, one at a time and then the vanilla and continue to cream until very light and fluffy.

3. In another bowl, combine the flour, cream of tartar, baking soda, and salt.

4. Slowly add the dry ingredients into the butter mixture, stirring by hand or with the paddle attachment on a stand mixer until the ingredients are well combined.

5. In a small bowl, combine the sugar and cinnamon.

6. Using a cookie scoop or a tablespoon, form 1 ½ inch balls of cookie dough. Roll the cookie balls in the sugar cinnamon mixture and set onto parchment covered cookie sheet about 2 inches apart.

7. Bake for 10 minutes. You want them to stay soft for the ice cream sandwiches.

8. Sprinkle very lightly with sea salt.

9. Let cool.

10. Taking an ice cream scoop, place one scoop on one cookie and place another one on top, smushing down gently to make a sandwich.

And here I am making these on KATU’s show, Afternoon Live. Just click the pic!

It was over a month ago, and the incident still circles my conscience like a housefly over old garbage.

It was a random light-jacket-September-Tuesday, too early for the crispy leaves of fall and too late for the sun to turn my upper lip into a muggy mustache.

My friend Beth and I meet up every month or two to go on long walks. We trek up and down Northeast Portland’s winding roads and hidden stairs, our conversations often as meandering as our paths. Our talks are both healing and hilarious, and these hours with my friend have become a crucial ingredient in my recipe for 2025 survival.

It takes about 10 minutes to get from my house to Beth’s. It’s a left to a right, another left, then right.

Makeup-less, hair pulled into an exploding chignon, wearing leggings and an old sweatshirt, I steered my red Honda left and then to the back of the queue of cars making the first right turn. This has recently become a no-right-on-red intersection and often has a bit of a wait, but it was only 10:45 am, so the traffic was far from snarled. I was listening to music on the radio and thinking about absolutely nothing. It was a lovely moment of emptiness that I don’t often allow myself to bask in.

Then the light, many cars ahead of me, turned green, and I inched my car forward. I looked to my right and realized that my car had been blocking a car on the side street that wanted to turn left onto the street I was on. In the hatchback’s driver’s seat was a little old lady with tight gray beauty parlor curls and a pale green gramma cardigan. She looked livid.

“Oh,” I said to myself. This is the kind of thing that will fester in my head for days. I hate being an unintentionally inconsiderate driver being viewed as an intentional jackass. I was just spacing out. My stomach lurched with guilt. I mouthed “sorry” to the woman, shaking my head shamefully.

But no apology would suffice when it came to this galled granny. Her eyes grew wide, her shoulders shook, and she raised her arm aggressively to shake her middle finger at me.

“Oh!” I repeated to myself as my car rolled slightly forward.

There was no cooling her rage. The ferociousness of her stare bore into me as she shook that bird with feist and fervor. Her eyes blackened now, her arm desperately searching for new ways to emphasize her finger waving.

I inched forward more, finally clearing her car, and the bitter biddy made her left turn behind me. From my rearview mirror, I saw her roll down her window and thrust the limb out, finger straight up to the sky, arm angled at me as she drove away. I honestly believe that if she could have safely continued to drive, she would have wiggled through her skylight and given me the finger from the roof of her car.

I don’t know that I’ve ever made someone this rageful before. I was so riddled with shame that I didn’t tell Beth about it on our walk. I didn’t tell Francis until much later. I was horrified… and then fascinated. She didn’t fit the standard finger-giver archetype—who I think of as a hormonal teen showing off for friends or a dude in a MAGA hat driving a pickup (NOTE: I’ve never been given the finger while driving before, this is just who I think of as the average finger offender). The lady also didn’t honk at me to let me know I was in her way, which I’m sure both of my ne’er-do-well examples would have.

The more I thought about it, the closer I felt to her. My daily frustrations, disappointments, and fears regularly bring me to the edge of a meltdown. Maybe this was her moment to snap, to let it all go, to rage at me in a way she has never raged before. Maybe her instincts led her to give me the finger rather than kick her cat or yell at her grandchildren. Maybe she finally felt some clarity in her life by letting it all boil into that one long finger of fury.

Or maybe I should pay more attention on the road.

These concepts are not mutually exclusive.

And…she might just be an asshole.

We’re all trying to get by in this crazy world.

When in doubt, I make small food…

Sesame Glazed Chicken Balls

Makes about 28 balls

Ingredients for chicken balls

• 1 pound ground chicken

• 1/2 cup panko

• 3 tablespoons fresh ginger, chopped fine

• 3 garlic cloves, chopped fine

• 1 egg

• 2 teaspoons sesame oil

• 1 1/2 teaspoons soy sauce

• 1/2 teaspoon salt

• 1/2 teaspoon Sambal Olek

• cooking spray or oil to grease the pan

1. Preheat oven to 450 degrees.

2. Mix all of the ingredients together. Cover a sheet pan with parchment and mist the parchment with cooking spray or lightly rub with oil to prevent the balls from sticking.

3. Using a #60 scoop or a tablespoon, roll mixture into balls (makes about 28 balls).

4. Bake balls for 10 minutes. Let cool for 5 minutes before glazing.

Ingredients for Glaze

• 3 tablespoons soy sauce

• 2 teaspoons rice vinegar

• 1 teaspoon sesame oil

• 1 tablespoon agave syrup or honey

• 1 teaspoon cornstarch

1. Pour the soy sauce, rice vinegar, sesame oil, and agave (or honey) into a large fry pan and stir together.

2. Sprinkle the cornstarch over the mixture and heat over a medium temperature, mixing the cornstarch with the wet ingredients so that it doesn’t clump. It will become a shiny glaze quickly.

3. Place the chicken balls in the pan and gently toss them in the sauce to glaze every ball.

Serve with a sprinkle of sesame seeds.

I made this recipe on KATU’s show, Afternoon Live, the other day. Just click on the pic to watch!

Not like jogging around the neighborhood or 100-mile marathons.

I’m a runner, like I leave relationships at inopportune moments.

It’s confusing because I’m one of the most loyal people you’ll ever meet.

I don’t take off when it makes sense either. Instead, I stay too long, push too hard at the wrong focal points, and then break hearts with my surprising and sudden disappearance. I’ve done it all my life.

When Francis first proposed, he didn’t actually ask me to marry him. He didn’t get down on one knee and pull a fabric-covered box from his secret pocket. He knew I was uncertain about marriage and that a better approach would be declaring his dream that we be together forever.

There, in the hallway of our old high school, I was elated and terrified. I had to get honest with myself. I knew I loved him. I knew I trusted him. I knew that I had a better shot at discovering what love really was within the confines of marriage. I needed the door to be shut… LEGALLY… so I wouldn’t run again.

Because the truth is that marriage is really hard. It’s annoying and exhausting and frustrating as much as it is thrilling and stimulating and comforting. And maybe I would have taken off long ago if it had been easy to do.

It’s been 10 years since our big day, and I only have regrets on days that start with T never regret our decision to get hitched.

Happy anniversary, my love. Here’s to many, many more decades.

I wrote the piece below years ago, which is a long play-by-play of our wedding day, October 10th, 2015. I know I’ve flooded your inboxes with my words this week, and I know many of you read this years ago on my old blog, awonderlandofwords.com, so I understand if you’d like to run away from my verbosity. I really get it. You can just scroll to the very bottom, where I’ve posted the recipe for the greatest cookie in the world. Just ask the people at the Salted Butterscotch Cookie table.

Caterer:

I lay awake, staring at the ceiling of my parents’ guest room at 4:30 that morning. This was nothing new, as my eyes had anxiously popped open at that hour for the past month and a half. I was thinking about the cookie gift bags and how I still needed to fill them and tag them, and how sometimes fun little tasks like this wind up as tedious battles with a lot of paper cuts and cursing. It was too early to go downstairs, so I just lay there hoping I’d remembered everything. I kind of knew I had.

Bride:

I listened to Francis breathing next to me. I smiled in the dark. We had originally planned to spend the night apart, so as not to put the “curse of the groom seeing the bride before she walks down the aisle” upon us. The more I thought about it, the less I cared about superstitions. I needed his steadiness to calm me. I needed his ability to make me laugh even when I feel the weight of the world upon my shoulders. “Huh”, I thought to myself, “I actually don’t feel stressed at all. He’s the one. He’s my person. Today, he will become my husband.” I lay there and grinned as the sun started to rise.

Caterer:

My dream, months earlier, was to cater my own wedding, an idea that was quickly shot down by my family. Francis wisely stayed out of that conversation. It wasn’t so much that I wanted to cook for 80 people on the day I got married; I just wanted to share the passion I have with the people I love the most. We found a fantastic Middle Eastern restaurant in Fairfield called Safita that could drop off freshly cooked food to my parents’ house right before the ceremony. It was the right way to go. I knew that, but I still wanted to share something.

There was the question of party favors for guests. Jordan almonds? I think not.

Then it hit me; I could bake different flavors of cookies and have the kind of cookie that you receive in your gift bag be the name of the table you’re sitting at.

So, a bag of snickerdoodles with your name on it? Snickerdoodle table. Brownie Cookies? Brownie table. Thin Mints? You get my drift.

Bride:

It’s hard to properly wrap your head around your own wedding day. My dad was making coffee; my mom was doing her morning yoga; my brother was still sleeping. It didn’t look different than any other day, though there was an energetic tingle in my body that I was trying to suppress for another couple of hours. My focus was to stay present. I struggle with being in large groups of people. I always have. Even if they’re the best people I know, I can go into smiling zombie mode—detached from my feelings to survive socially. I looked at Francis drinking coffee and smiling at me. He keeps me present. If I could look at him all night, I knew I’d be fine.

Caterer:

Francis and I sat at the dining room table and filled, tagged, and tied the cellophane cookie bags. It was quick and painless; no papercuts and only the normal amount of cursing. They looked good, too. I had baked Chocolate Chip Lace Cookies, White Chocolate Oatmeal Cookies, Lemon Biscotti dipped in White Chocolate, Chocolate Cherry Biscotti, Homemade Thin Mints, Homemade Oreos, Brownie Cookies, Salted Butterscotch Cookies, and Snickerdoodles.

Bride:

At a certain moment, you just let go of everything you’d been worried about. I wasn’t there to be prettier or thinner or taller than I am. I was there to be myself. I was there to give my heart to this person who has changed my life. I was only nervous about one thing… my vows. I was terrified that my voice would quaver or my hands would shake violently, which they do when I’m speaking in front of people. I was worried that Francis would think my words were silly or random. I didn’t want to bore him as I rambled on.

Here’s a secret: my vows had been written before Francis had even proposed. For months and months, I had words crawling into my head as I slipped into the cloudy pocket between awake and asleep. I couldn’t explain it, but vows were forming beyond my control. There were things I wanted to say to Francis—things he needed to know. We weren’t even really on the marriage path, but these damn vows kept writing themselves in my head.

If I could get through the vows, I could enjoy the day.

Ding dong, the make-up and hair ladies arrived.

It was getting closer.

Caterer:

I had asked some of the star players from my catering staff in New York to work the wedding. They arrived as I was getting ready, and I talked them through some basics. They got the bar set and the cookies placed. They got the tables finished and the kitchen ready.

Bride:

I walked with my father to a place where the guests, seated in my parents’ backyard, could not see us. I had been struggling with the thought of us walking down the aisle with no music (the backyard area is far from an outlet, and the thought of walking down the aisle to Pachelbel’s Canon on a tinny boom box was more depressing than anything). Maybe we could hire an expensive team of sopranos or, better yet, a virginal flaxen harpist? You really don’t know me at all, do you?

Instead, we asked our guests to be prepared to hum the first verse of “Here Comes the Bride” as my dad and I walked toward the altar. My mother, Jill, led them through a couple of practice rounds. There was laughter and a discombobulated sound, but they soldiered on, and it started to come together. I was blown away when, quite suddenly, they sounded as if they had been working on “Here Comes the Bride” for months. It was the first session of The New York Philharmonic Humming Chorus, Easton, Connecticut Division (NYPHCECD).

My heart was bursting.

My dad took my hand, and in we walked.

When I saw Francis, I could do nothing but smile. This was the place I was meant to be.

One of my oldest and dearest friends, Jerry Glackin, had agreed to officiate. He had constructed a ceremony that was a patchwork of traditional greetings; excerpts from the writings of John O’Donohue and Joseph Campbell; a memorial for friends, family members, and pets that were no longer with us; and an introduction to our vows. Francis and I had not heard each other’s vows until that moment, though Jerry had read them all and had tweaked them a tiny bit so they would be more like a conversation than individual statements.

I was first to speak.

(Alison):

Magic (I titled my vows, though I did not read the titles in the ceremony)

Shel Silverstein wrote:

“Listen to the mustn’ts. Listen to the don’ts. Listen to the shouldn’ts, the impossibles, the wonts. Listen to the never haves, then listen close to me… anything can happen, anything can be.”

I have to tell you something: I’m really cynical. I’m not surprised by much. I don’t believe in unicorns.

It has been my theory that if you focus your attention on building something, you will see results. While I like to be playful, I have become much more apprehensive and skeptical over time.

But something changed a year and a half ago. Something happened that made me realize there might be a bigger, unpredictable force guiding life.

You remembered me.

That would have been spectacular enough on its own, but there was more. Because you didn’t remember me during the drunk years. You didn’t remember me when I was an asshole know-it-all. You didn’t remember me during all those peculiar hairstyles (that’s true for both of us). Of all the moments I have thought of you over the years, and there have been many, you remembered me at the exact moment that you and I would most perfectly fit together.

You hear me. You see me. You challenge me. You thrill me.

And because of that, I am more myself than I’ve ever been.

You are the love of my life. I don’t know how I managed to get this far without you. I am grateful that I don’t have to anymore. You have opened my eyes.

I promise to keep my eyes open to experience every moment of this spectacular world with you. I promise to nurture you, support you, and to be honest even when it would be easier to lie. I promise to never take for granted the unicorn that is this relationship. I promise to remember that magic does exist and that, by your side, ANYTHING is possible.

—————————————————————————————————————————Then it was Francis’ turn…

(Francis):

Walk with me

Walk with me

I feel your love

I feel your strong love

I feel the patience of unconditional love

I feel a strength

I feel your faith in me

I’ll never let you down no matter what you do

If you just walk with me and let me walk with you

I’m on this journey already….I don’t want to walk alone.

-Neil Young

I have two very distinct images of your face that I carry in my head that I visit every day that I‘m not with you, which has been all too frequently the last few months. The first is from a photograph, one that most of our friends and families have seen. It’s a picture of you in the fall of 1983 when I first met you and immediately felt attracted to you; it was a picture I took because I was supposed to be taking pictures for the yearbook, but I took that one for myself. You’re smiling and look simultaneously happy, excited, curious, open, inquisitive, and, of course, pretty.

All those things turned out to be true when I got up the nerve to talk to you.

The other image I hold in my head of you is from the night we had dinner in April of 2014 at Tia Pol after 30 years of not seeing each other or even speaking to each other. There was an amazing moment of recognition of each other. You nodded your head up and down, as if to say, Yup, that’s him, alright. And on your face, I saw the same happy, excited, curious, open, inquisitive expression, unchanged after all that time.

I will get to see your face every day we’ll be together for the rest of our lives; all your expressions are variations of how I remember you from the first moment I felt that huge, amazing teenage crush take hold of me. How lucky I am that it never let go, so we could meet again and pick up where we left off and fall madly, crazily, bi-coastally in love.

—————————————————————————————————————————

(Alison):

Balls (again, the title was not read)

When kids play catch, the game changes as they throw the ball back and forth, back and forth. They learn things about each other. Sure, they see how good the other is at the basic tasks of catching and throwing, but they also learn what thrills the other and what pleases themselves. Some moments, the game is about the play, and sometimes it’s about the challenges. As the game continues, the bond grows.

I’m going to throw it to you with the trust that you will reciprocate and throw it right back.

But some kids throw too hard. Or way off the mark. Most kids get bored and walk away to find something more interesting.

I’m not sure when our game of catch began—a year and a half or 32 years ago—but when you threw the ball to me, I was astonished and flattered and flummoxed. What if I didn’t catch it? What if I waited too long to throw it back? What if you thought my ball was the wrong shape or size?

But you didn’t.

You always responded, making me more delighted and more interested every day. That we managed to find each other is one thing, but that we’ve managed to cultivate this much respect, love and support regardless of distance or time, speaks to how perfect we are for each other. You have never, since the moment we reconnected, made me feel like I was alone.

I promise you, no matter how the game changes, that I will never stop throwing the ball back.

————————————————————————————————————————–

(Francis):

I will always keep trying to put into words how I feel about you, how much I love you and how much better my life is with you and how safe I feel with you, all of which is frequently beyond words. I can’t ever seem to say it all exactly the way I want it to sound to you, so I promise to keep trying new ways to tell you how much I love you all the time.

I will take all your efforts as seriously as though they were my own efforts.

I will take care of you to the greatest extent I possibly can.

Things have happened to me and to us and to people very close to both of us that have made me very conscious of the phenomenon of a vanishing existence. There is no magic elixir that can alter that. I will accept that truth and walk with you and build you up through all the existence we can possibly have together.

And so, I promise to take care of myself to the greatest extent possible so that I can continue to take care of you until we’re old and funky.

I will make you and our life together the greatest priorities I have in life; everything else is just an offshoot of you and I being together. I will treat you with respect and dignity when life is challenging and always take the time to listen to you and explain myself clearly so we can work together on whatever difficulties we’re faced with.

A relationship can be hard work sometimes. It’s not a thing you can take for granted and just expect to flourish. I promise to stick to it no matter what and do the hard work.

I will embrace the fleeting nature of life and enjoy every part of it with you while we can. Life is short and it’s vibrant and joyful if you let it be that way. I promise to look for all the joy and vibrancy and fun that we can possibly have together.

(Alison):

Yes

As a person who has stood pretty solidly in my conviction that I would never marry, I wonder how it is that I’m here today.

I felt like, as the world expanded around me, I had gotten smaller. Apathy and fear dominated my days. My options were becoming more and more limited.

Do you want to go to this party? Not really.

Do you want to see a movie? Not so much.

Do you want to go explore the world? No.

In truth, apathy and fear are kind of easy. It’s feeling that’s hard.

When you showed up out of the blue– after 30 years– my perception began to shift. I started to feel like I had nothing to lose. I could be brave with you because it was so unbelievable that you were there in the first place. I told you the truth like I had never told anyone because we speak the same language and we created a space that felt safe and exciting. I started to see things in a different light; a vibrant light that spilled out onto everything else in my life. I was more grounded at work, more fearless with friends, more sensitive to my surroundings.

And suddenly the answers to the questions changed.

Do I want to go out for coffee? Hmmm. Yeah.

Do I want to come visit you in Portland? Definitely.

Do I want to spend the rest of my life with you? Absolutely.

Do I want to look into your eyes as we drink all the juicy nectar out of life together? Without question.

Yes.

I promise to remember that saying YES is how all the greatest stories begin… or continue.

­—————————————————————————————————————————

(Francis):

We see and understand each other’s strengths and weaknesses and we help each other to see our strengths more clearly and more often. I will support you when you’re strong AND when you’re not so strong, and when you’re not, I will help you see that you ARE strong and smart and capable.

I’ll always have those two images of you, one from 1983 when we were kids and the other from our first real date – smiling, happy, excited, curious, open, inquisitive, and always see you in my mind’s eye and smile and love you. I’m going to be with you for most of the rest of OUR forever. Even when I’m not right next to you seeing your face, I’ll always be with you and I’ll always be in love with you.

It was a perfect day.

Salted Butterscotch Cookies

Makes about 4 dozen cookies

Ingredients

• 2 sticks unsalted butter, room temperature

• ¾ cup brown sugar

• ½ cup sugar

• 2 eggs

• 3 teaspoons vanilla

• 2 teaspoons almond extract

• 2 cups flour

• 1 teaspoon salt

• 1 teaspoon baking soda

• 1 teaspoon cinnamon

• 2 cups butterscotch chips

• Flake salt, such as Maldon, to sprinkle on top

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

2. In a large bowl or the bowl to your standing mixer, cream together the butter, brown sugar, and white sugar and mix until fluffy. Add the eggs, vanilla, almond extract, and water, and mix thoroughly.

3. In a small bowl, combine the flour, salt, baking soda, and cinnamon.

4. Beat dry ingredients into wet ingredients gradually.

5. Stir in butterscotch chips.

6. Drop rounded spoonfuls of batter onto a parchment-lined sheet and bake for 12-14 minutes.

7. Sprinkle with flake salt and enjoy!

\

In the 14 months after reconnecting, I visited Portland twice, and Francis came to New York three times. He always had family and old friends to see – happy non-negotiables that come with returning home, even when you’re visiting your super cute new girlfriend. Rhythms developed between us amidst the chaos of travel. In one way, a long-distance relationship is hell. But in another way, the challenge to prioritize your significant other while you have vacation-brain gives you a crash course in the true nature of your relationship.

On that trip, Francis stayed at his brother’s and sister-in-law’s apartment in Brooklyn for a couple of nights, and was then with me in Morningside Park for the rest of the week.

It was a beautiful May morning, and we had plans to visit his mother, Jane, at the Hebrew Home for the Aging in Riverdale (the Bronx). I think I had met her twice at that point, and we got on well.

We had tickets to see the Yankees that evening, so we figured we’d go from visiting Jane directly to the game. Easy peasy Bronx stuff.

Francis had mentioned months before that it might be funny if we visited The Bronx High School of Science, where we went to school together 31 years before.

I was… well… not so sure. I associate the place with significant failure and pain.

That morning, he said we should make it a reality, since we’d be up in the Bronx anyway.

I sang “Hmm.. maybe”, thinking “NO” and hopped in the shower.

Clean and clothed, I stepped into the living room, and he said he’d just realized that, with all the new-fangled security measures, we couldn’t walk onto the campus randomly. My shoulders released, and I exhaled a long, anxious breath.

But then he said he had just emailed the main office at Bronx Science, and a woman replied that they love to see alumni and she would be there to let us in that day.

Huh.

“Ok, I guess we’re going back to school,” I thought to myself as my static breathing pattern returned.

Francis was elated. He had a great time in high school.

I was terrified. I have dreams about it all the time, and not good ones. I was actually kicked out of Bronx Science after my sophomore year for being a terrible and unpleasant student. That was after Francis, my biggest high school crush and a senior when I was a freshman, had graduated.

It’s funny how a fully formed, successful adult with a list of notable achievements can crumble when faced with old trauma. I wanted to hide. But I could see how much going back meant to Francis, and I like to face my fears head on, so screw it, Bronx Science, here we come.

Our walk from the subway to school was chock full of memories. The delis were all in the same place, but seemed smaller than I remember. I used to get a toasted bagel with a schmear wrapped in wax paper in the first one and a pack of Marlboro Lights and a coffee in the second. I’ll never forget kids waiting on the brown stained linoleum to play Asteroids and Pac-Man in that bodega, and Billy Idol playing “Rebel Yell” from a rinky boombox in the corner.

We passed under the elevated #4 subway tracks and then over the train yard, and there it was: the school where I had so many issues. It looked much nicer than I remembered. I pretended not to be shaking.

We met Eleanor, the woman that Francis had emailed, at the security desk past the glass wall of the main entrance. She gave us a full tour, which was nerve-wracking and wonderful. I have fewer memories of the actual classes than the delis– go figure– but it all started to ring a bell once I was there. Francis ran into Mr. Levy, who shockingly remembered him after 31 years, and they laughed about other teachers and students. Francis’ experience at Science was very different than mine. Very.

We were on our way out, saying thank you to our tour guide and old teacher, and I felt a quiet peace with our time there. Faced head-on, it was just a place, just a school… not the evil empire.

We were walking by the auditorium and Francis said, “So it was around here when we said goodbye forever 31 years ago?”

I chuckled softly.

“Show me where we were that day,” he said.

And I took him to exactly where I remember it being, in the hall between the library and the auditorium. I could hear students rustling in class, just like that day, knowing the bell would ring soon. He was standing there, where he stood, and I was standing exactly where I was that last day of my freshman year.

And then Francis leaned in toward me, looked right into my eyes, told me he loved me, pulled out a little bag with a simple silver band, and asked if I would spend the rest of my life with him.

Turns out, he set the whole thing up weeks before. Eleanor knew we were coming and was in cahoots with Francis the whole time.

He didn’t even say “will you marry me” until we were outside Loeser’s deli, where we had an extremely romantic turkey on rye with extra Russian dressing.

I said yes then, too, of course.

He’s the one. Always has been, I guess.

I’ve never been so happy.

Oh yeah, the Yankees won that day, too.

Amelia jumped up on the couch and pressed her face against mine. Ok, right, I’m not completely alone.

Turning on the TV for some background noise, I took a deep cleansing breath and grabbed my iPad. There had been an email I glanced at earlier that day when I was on my way to work. It was somebody from high school contacting me through my catering business email, and I’d stopped reading after the “long lost memories/ I don’t know if you remember me from Bronx Science” intro. Also, the signature on the email was an automated, unrecognized business signature, not a personal one. I didn’t have the headspace at that moment for any kind of spammy reunion (most of the people who contact me this way want money or information about people I’ve long lost contact with), so I flagged it for later.

“Ok, what was this again?” Nothing really pulled me in until I got to the very end… the personal name hidden at the end of the business signature.

Him.

Ohmygod.

It’s important to say here that I was a mess in high school. I know, I know, everyone is a mess in high school, but I had been in a bad car accident on spring break the year before, and was in the hospital for most of my last quarter of 8th grade. I had been accepted into The Bronx High School of Science before I was hit by a car; before the coma, before the body cast, before the traumatic brain injury.

When I started high school, I was trying to access a pre-accident brain that no longer existed. Overwhelmed and confused, I struggled immensely and failed almost all of my classes in my freshman year. I was also awkward in my body, constantly tripping and walking into things. I dreamed of the days when I felt smart and cute and alive. They were just a year earlier, but they were long gone. In those dark times, I developed a superpower that would stay with me to this day: invisibility. I blended into the woodwork so as not to bring attention to my disabilities. I barely existed.

But someone could see me.

He was a senior. I was a freshman. One of my friends, Sam, had an older brother, Paul, who was good friends with him, Francis. We never hung out outside of school, but once in a while, he would walk me from school to the train, or we would sit together and talk at lunch. He was always a good listener, seeming genuinely interested in the things I was saying. I don’t remember if I talked about my accident with him or how scared of life I felt, but I do remember him making me feel like I was not a broken mess. He made me feel unmistakable and valued during a time I didn’t think I wanted to be seen. We were never romantic, just casual friends. I dated other boys that year, but I always felt butterflies when I saw my crush in the halls.

I’ll never forget running into him next to the auditorium on the last day of school. He saw me before I saw him, and he called out to say goodbye. He was off to college-- from the Bronx to Berkeley-- far, far away. He was full of energy and maybe a little last-day-of-school-Budweiser. I had many more years of school to go and felt embarrassingly unsophisticated. He gave me a big bear hug and said it was nice knowing me. I wished him luck and watched longingly as he faded into my past.

But then…almost exactly 30 years later, something reminded him of me, so he tracked me down online, found my catering website, and emailed my business.

And what did I do when I saw his name at the bottom of that email? Well, I kind of freaked out. I couldn’t sit still. I ran around my empty apartment screaming his name over and over again.

“Francis Dardis! Francis Dardis!!!”

Amelia started jumping and barking at my sudden boost of energy. “Bowooowooowoooof!”

“Francis Dardis! Francis Dardis!”

I finally calmed myself down and spent a few hours writing my reply. I was playing it casual, but interested. His email signature said he was based in Portland, Oregon, and was an architect. I asked him questions about his life. Why Portland? Why architecture? Was there a wife? Kids? I rewrote my email about 40 times- blushing, sweating, grinning. I felt 14 again, but better, because I wasn’t 14.

A few days later, I was in line at Trader Joe’s when my phone let me know I had a new email. It was from him. He was glad I remembered him (!). He wrote, “If I recall, I had a mighty crush on you back in high school.”

And now, I would like to make a public apology to all the people shopping at the Upper West Side Trader Joe’s that day, because I made a squeal that was really not appropriate for grocery retail. I turned to the stranger behind me in line and almost showed him the email I had just read.

I went to cook and took the long bus ride home. Then I walked my dog and made myself dinner-- the whole day writing my response in my head. I was still playing it cool. I told him, in so many words, that I had a mighty crush on him, too, back in the day. What I wrote was, “Right back atcha”: casual, easy-going, breezy, but more importantly, terrified, excited, and very interested.

He wrote, “I’m coming to New York to see family in a month or two. Would you like to grab a cup of coffee?”

“Sure”, I said, “I drink coffee...”

I’m a minx.

I was still reeling from my breakup, though. As much as I wanted to explore a rompy rebound with my high school crush, I found him much more compelling than that. We became pen pals, writing once a week in the beginning and then more and more frequently. I wrote to him honestly about the end of my relationship. I wrote him about work, giving him play-by-plays on cooking in strangers’ apartments in the city. I wrote about my family, friends, and pets. He listened. He responded. He was supportive in a way that didn’t make me feel like he was just putting up with my dialogue until he got to speak again, just like he had been 30 years earlier. It felt different than anything I’ve ever done. I was different. I was broken from my breakup-- broken down and then broken open. All I could be was myself.

We decided to have dinner instead of coffee.

I was nervous.

That’s putting it mildly.

30 years is a long time. He used to have a shaggy, layered mop of ‘80s hair, and at the restaurant, an unrecognizable bald man introduced himself as Francis. But seconds later, I saw in his smile the boy that he was back then. It was as if an alarm clock rang inside of me. Him. Holy crap. It’s really him. No time had passed at all.

We talked for hours and hours. We ate tapas (Tia Pol) and walked on the Highline. We sat outside and told stories while looking at the sky over New Jersey. We split a sundae at a coffee shop. We didn’t touch. We didn’t kiss. It was too soon for me to get romantic, though it was, by far, the most romantic date I’ve ever had.

After he went back to Portland, we continued to write daily, and our relationship grew through visits to each other’s cities.

You can’t rewrite history, but your perception of it can shift. I have done a lot of stupid things in my life because I felt I was invisible. Would I have done those things if I knew at least one person could see me? Probably. Does his remembering me after all this time make all my frustrations disappear? Nope. But it means that, when I stand on top of a mountain with bright red hair and shout out to the world, “DO YOU FUCKING HEAR WHAT I’M SAYING?” at least one person says, “Yup.”

It’s nice to know I wasn’t wrong about everything in high school.

Months after that first connection on his next trip to New York, I had a party in his honor, introducing him to my best friends. We had a Moroccan feast, which I cooked, of course.

Here is the recipe for my Moroccan chicken with tomatoes, saffron, and honey. It is one of my most requested dishes in catering/ private-chef-land, because it hits all the best points on your tongue. It’s a perfect fall meal... great to share with an old friend.

Moroccan Chicken with Saffron, Tomatoes, and Honey

Ingredients

• 1/ 4 teaspoon saffron

• 2 ice cubes

• 4 large chicken thighs

• 1 tablespoon olive oil

• 1 tablespoon butter

• 1 large onion, diced

• 1 14-ounce can whole peeled tomatoes, preferably San Marzano

• 2 teaspoons cinnamon

• 1 teaspoon ground ginger

• 2 tablespoons honey

• Salt and pepper to taste

1. The very first step of this recipe is blooming the saffron, which is a key step to yield the full taste and aroma of saffron. Put 2 ice cubes into a small bowl and sprinkle the saffron over the ice. Leave the ice off to the side as you prepare the rest of the dish. As the ice melts, the saffron will bloom, and then you’ll add it to the sauce to reap the biggest saffron reward.

2. Season the chicken pieces with salt and pepper.

3. Heat the oil and butter in a large sauté pan. When the butter has melted but before it browns, place the chicken pieces skin side up into the pan, making sure not to crowd them. Sear until the chicken has browned, about 5 minutes each side, and then transfer the chicken onto a plate. Keep the pan with the juices and fats on a medium heat.

4. Place the chopped onion into the pan and salt lightly. Lower the heat and sauté the onion until it softens and becomes translucent. Add the canned tomatoes with juices, the cinnamon, the ginger, and the saffron ice (now saffron water). Let simmer for 2 minutes. Add the chicken pieces back to the pan, spooning sauce over the chicken (the sauce won’t be too saucy yet, and that’s ok). Cover the pan and cook over low heat for 20 minutes, stirring occasionally.

5. Transfer the cooked chicken pieces to a serving dish. Stir the honey into the simmering sauce, and taste for seasoning. Let it cook, while making sure it doesn’t burn, for about 5 minutes.

6. Spoon the sauce over the chicken and enjoy!

They shared the bench at her picnic table, where two plates, napkins, and printed menus were set. From the kitchen, I brought small platters of prospective wedding lunch bites and then stood before them describing each dish.

“These are little phyllo parcels filled with wild mushrooms, leeks, aged gruyere cheese, and fresh thyme,” I said, flicking my hand open above the platter like Vanna White revealing the appetizer prize. “These are gluten-free Parmesan crisps topped with an heirloom tomato, corn, and basil salad. These are great now, but will be a million times better by your big day in late July when the tomatoes are really popping.”

They ooohed and ahhhed, devouring the bites.

Luckily, I don’t get asked to cook a lot of pre-party food tastings. They are a loss leader for me, and a pricy time-suck for clients, so I’m grateful that most people trust the numerous client testimonials on my Google and Yelp listings.

Of course, for weddings it’s a little different. The tidal flow of pressure for couples to represent their connection through food, music, and linens can grow as powerful as a tsunami. I’m not staffed or kitchened for the really big parties, so I often have a valid excuse, but the truth is I’m not interested in the drama of wedding catering.

This wedding felt different to me. They weren’t a cutesy couple proving their love to the prospective caterer by booping each other’s noses or giggling about their upcoming nuptials (oh, the people I’ve met). They were adults, talking openly about the process as they sussed me out. These budding flowers were perennials, much like me, with achievable expectations.

It would be a daytime wedding with a buffeted variety of finger food, my favorite kind of party to cater. For all the little complaints and fears I have about my job, there’s nothing better than knowing I can do it well. We talked about estimates for food, rentals, staffing, and sketched out a timeline for the big day.

“Oh, and what about tipping?” the bride asked, as they walked me out.

I smiled warmly, grateful for the question.

“I don’t add gratuity automatically because I think tips should be based on quality of service, but I also know that my team is the best in town and they deserve a generous gratuity. What you tip is up to you. Thanks for asking. I know a lot of people are confused about it and are too shy to ask.”

We felt like old friends at that moment, grinning and thanking each other in the doorway. I was so excited to live up to the promises I had made.

And.

I.

Did.

We all did.

My team went above and beyond to provide an unforgettable day of food and service. A few guests even came back into the kitchen to praise us. The bride and groom went on and on about how happy they were.

I had started cooking at 3:00 am that morning, and by the end of the event, I was delirious with pride and exhaustion. At 7:00 that night, after seeing a Venmo payment notification on my phone, I crawled into bed with a heaping bowl of pasta that my husband had made and turned my brain off.

The next morning, I was sitting on my couch, slurping milky sweet coffee in my day-after-a-big-gig-recovery-jammies, and I opened the Venmo transaction. It was paid in full without gratuity.

Hmph.

My post-gig emotional bandwidth is like a nasty hangover after going on a bender. I’m frequently sensitive, debilitated, and histrionic. That’s on a good day, which this suddenly was not.

NO TIP!!! I was flooded with feelings.

Guilt was the first to land, because I had told my staff they could expect a tip when the client said it was coming. They make an hourly wage from me, but without gratuity, they make less working for me than they do working in a restaurant.

Then came anger, not at the client so much as the perplexity of gratuities these days.

The rules that I made up for my business are that I never ever skim off of my team’s pay or tips (which a lot of caterers and restaurants do). I don’t charge people blindly for gratuity, and I don’t bring it up unless they do. Some people tip very generously, some people don’t tip at all, some people tip odd amounts that are probably a percentage of something on the bill, but I can’t figure out where the number came from. Some people tip me too, but I knew not to expect that this time. This wasn’t about me, because honestly, if this were a performance-based conversation about me, I could find a million things I did wrong. But this was about my team that worked their fingers to the bone.

Oh, screw it, I sent a text to the bride.

“Thank you so much for the opportunity to cater your beautiful wedding and for the payment in full. I see that you did not include the gratuity and wanted to double-check that the service was satisfactory.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry. I forgot.” She replied.

Which was probably an adjustment of truth, but also relatable. We’ve all done it. I know I have. You think about how expensive everything is, and you start to justify skipping the tip.

I know, for example, that this wedding couple had to pay an exorbitant fee to have an off-site caterer cook for their wedding. As in, hundreds more dollars than I’ve ever heard any venue charge. Plus, a coffee service charge from the venue that was just like setting fire to their cash. Plus the booze and the rental of the space and the glasses and dishes and silverware, and let’s not forget those linens. None of those were things my team had any involvement with, but I know it adds up in a person’s head. I’ve been there. I get it.

And then sometimes you start to tweak the experience you had into an unsatisfactory one. “Well,” you think, “my plate wasn’t picked up very quickly, and I didn’t get a water refill for what seemed like hours! I think they deserve a much smaller tip!”

I have had more than a few clients who told me they would send the tip later and never did.

My husband has said many times that if he got a bill from a caterer, it wouldn’t occur to him to add a gratuity on top. He gets feisty when I bring this issue up. And take it from me, if you’re at dinner with a bunch of friends, don’t mention the 20% tip nudge we all get from the kiosk when you’re picking up your own food or just grabbing a cup of coffee? Mayhem! Everyone feels like they’re being robbed.

On that morning of obsessive thinking, I stared at my phone, hoping for something to happen.

Nothing.

In a living room symphony called Anxiety and Malaise, my dog and I panted and sighed, sighed and panted, switching roles and positions throughout the afternoon. I felt rage and sympathy, compassion and dishonor, all for money that wasn’t even mine.

I was consumed by what has become a way for me to validate my performance.

Four days later…

My phone buzzed. It was from the bride. She sent a very generous tip. I almost fell over, I was so surprised.

People aren’t bad. Not most of ‘em anyway. We’re all in this together, trying to figure out how to play by the rules that are constantly changing.

I’m grateful to my clients for the opportunities they give me to examine life.

And to my team for working so hard on my little dream.

Here’s what I woke up at 3:00 in the morning to cook that day. These take a little time, but once you start rolling, you develop a rhythm that makes sense. These are vegan and gluten-free, but could be filled with sushi-grade tuna or salmon.

Mini Edamame Avocado Handrolls

Makes 28 rolls

Ingredients

Sushi Rice

• ¾ cup Calrose rice, cooked and still warm

• 2 tablespoons rice vinegar

• 2 tablespoons sugar

• 1 ½ teaspoons salt

Mix rice vinegar, sugar, and salt in a small bowl. Heat in microwave or on the stovetop for about 30 seconds or until the sugar is no longer visible. Toss the mixture with the warm rice and set it to the side.

Edamame Butter

• 1 cup shelled edamame

• ½ teaspoon salt

• 1 tablespoon olive oil

• ½ teaspoon MSG

Boil edamame for 4 minutes. Place cooked beans in a food processor and blend with salt, olive oil, and MSG until it’s a bright green paste- about 30 seconds, scraping down the sides.

Avocado Paste

• 1 avocado

• 2 teaspoons lemon juice

• 1 teaspoon olive oil

Smoosh the avocado together with the juice and the oil with a fork or mortar and pestle.

Seaweed sheets

• 7 sheets of nori

Cut sheets of nori into 4 pieces per sheet, measuring 5 ½ x 2 ½ inches.

• 1 Cucumber, cut in half and then into strips.

Fill a small bowl with water.

Place one nori sheet, laying horizontally in front of you on a clean board, shiny side up. Dip your fingers into the water and gently cover the nori with a light coating of water. Place about 1 1/2 teaspoons of sushi rice on the upper left corner and press it down flat. Using another spoon, place about a half teaspoon of edamame butter and then avocado butter on top of the sushi rice. Set a cucumber stick on top of the rice/ edamame/ avocado.

Starting from the lower left corner, fold the nori up like a flag for one fold to cover the rice mixture. Then roll the nori-covered rice mixture over the remaining nori to cover it completely.

Serve with soy sauce to dip.

And here’s a clip of me making these on KATU’s Afternoon Live.

Rolling on Afternoon Live

Every afternoon, Ms. Cooper would glide the tips of her third and fourth fingers along the depression of thick, slimy Vaseline jelly in the plastic tub on her desk. She would share the goop with the same fingers on her other hand by massaging the tips together.

Then she’d smooth the yellowish-brown waxy oil onto her face in big, circular motions around her eyes, making her thin, naturally rose-tinted skin supple and shiny. She’d smile quietly to herself, pop the jelly tub shut with a hollow burp sound, slide her round, pink-framed glasses up onto her skinny nose, and prepare for her afternoon classes. I’d never seen a woman rub petroleum jelly on her skin before, and it seemed gross, but fascinating. I was 10.

Ms. Cooper was my teacher for 4th and 5th grade, and I was one of her star pupils. I would return from lunch early, sit at my desk, and stare as my strawberry-blond teacher performed her afternoon beauty practice. I felt unique and exceptional to bear witness to what felt like a private, grown-up moment, though she was sitting at her big wooden desk at the head of the classroom, not in a personal space. It was ritual, not intimate, and I studied the practice like I was a 10-year-old following an eyeshadow tutorial in Cosmo —attentive and baffled.

“Will you help me correct tests today, Alison?” my glistening teacher inquired.

A lightning strike of pride and nerves jolted through my body.

School becomes more challenging in 4^th and 5^th grades, and I understood the format, methodology, and impetus to succeed. I would not hold on to this language of education for long, as my high school grades were disastrous, and I think of these years with Ms Cooper as a time where I felt non-negotiably confident in my abilities.

“Yes! I’d love to help!” I belted out, tucking my long, brown hair behind my ears to get into serious teacher’s assistant mode.

I don’t remember if the test was one that I had gotten 100% on, so that I would use my test as the guide, or if she gave me a guide sheet to follow, but the tests were simple A, B, C choice questions and easy to mark right or wrong. She handed me a red felt-tip pen, which I regarded as vitally powerful as a knighting sword.

I lined the slim stack of tests next to the test guide on my small, wood and metal wrap-around desk and eagerly uncapped the pen. On the first test, I saw that the first answer was correct, and I drew a big red squiggly check mark next to it.

“Now, Alison,” Ms. Cooper admonished. “The rules are that you only put exes on the wrong choices. If someone gets a question correct, you don’t write anything on the page. No check marks, please, only exes.”

This felt disappointing, as it meant that I would get to write on the tests much less than I had originally thought.

“Hmmmm,” I responded. “Ok, I guess so.” I nodded, my eyes not leaving the test in front of me.

I scratched out the check mark, disappointed with myself for the messy red blotch on the page, and scanned for wrong responses. There were none on this test. My heart sank. I put that paper at the bottom of the stack.

On the next sheet, I quickly found an incorrect answer. I beamed up at Ms. Cooper after carefully penning a big red X on the mimeographed test paper. Feelings of importance, trust, and pride swirled around my little body. By retaining my help, Ms. Cooper had empowered me. I felt smart. I felt useful. I felt seen.

But my superhero cape flapping in the wind behind me soon settled, as many of my peers were also outstanding pupils, and their tests received no marks.

Something in me changed at that moment. I wanted to do a good job, but I thought I couldn’t prove I was doing a good job unless there were exes on the papers. I started to hope for my peers to fail so that I could participate. I prayed for mistakes. Please let this friend screw up, please, please.

No, I didn’t write in exes where they didn’t belong. I don’t cave to the dark side that easily. But I think about that day more and more as I look at how the thrill of negative commentary has become our society’s dominating form of interaction. Everyone wants to wield the red pen of corrections so that they can prove they exist. So they can participate. So that they can feel seen.

At 10 years old, I had no concept of how much the red pen stimulated my dopamine receptors, but I do now. “Proving” that other people are wrong has become habitual in our society, and not that much fun when you get beyond the momentary dopamine thrill.

Maybe the addiction is too big to change now, but it’s worth considering. Think of that little girl, unable to cheer for her smart friends because of an unexplainable momentary high.

Put your red pen down. Eat a chip and this dip. Other pleasure centers will be stimulated, I promise.

Cotija Corn Dip

Cotija Corn Dip

Ingredients

• 1 tablespoon olive oil

• 2 garlic cloves, chopped

• 1/2 serrano chili (seeded for less heat or just leave as is for more heat), chopped

• 1 medium red onion, chopped

• ½ teaspoon salt

• 1 teaspoon agave

• 2 cups corn (I frequently use frozen white corn, but fresh corn can be shucked right off the cob now that it’s corn season)

• 1 lime, juiced

• ½ cup sour cream

• 3 tablespoons mayonnaise

• 3 teaspoons Aleppo chili powder

• ¾ cup cotija cheese, crumbled

• ¼ cup cilantro, chopped

1. Heat the olive oil in a small pot over a medium flame. Add the chopped garlic, serrano chili, and red onion, and sprinkle in the salt. Sitr in the agave and cook until the onion has softened a bit, about 10 minutes. Turn the heat up and add the corn. Sauté for 2 minutes until the corn has taken on a bit of color, but before it becomes mushy.

2. Put the corn mixture into a large bowl and stir in the lime juice, sour cream, mayonnaise, Aleppo pepper, and cotija cheese. Then stir in the cilantro.

3. You can serve it like this or put it into the microwave for 2 minutes to meld the flavors and melt the cheese a bit.

Here I am on Portland’s KATU show, Afternoon Live, making this recipe. Just click on the pic!

I’m thinking about starting a band. Here are some names I’ve been working with…

The Loose Patellas

The Unsteady Servers

The Wobbly Caps

Liquid Knee

I’m kidding, of course. I’m absolutely not starting a band.

A few weeks ago, I had a physical setback, and while I drove to doctors and physical therapists and acupuncturists, a game formed of telling my story with fictional band names only. Here are a few more:

Bummer Diagnosis

Bedrest

Much Too Young

The Sexy PTs

Osteofuckyourself

The 30 Reps

The Boring Chard

The Beatles (this one needs work, I think)

Hey, it was a fun distraction for a few days. Here’s what happened…

I was cruising down the stairs thinking about the pint of vanilla Häagen-Dazs ice cream I needed to pick up on my way to the dinner I was cheffing that night. It would be a secret bonus option that I would scoop onto the ramekins of peach crisps with amaretti streusel I had made for dessert.

Down the wood stairs I dashed: left foot, right foot, left foot, liquid. It felt like my right leg had suddenly melted. There wasn’t even pain in that first millisecond, just disappearance. My knee was gone. It was like I was tripping on acid, but without any spiritual expansion of mind or soul; no happy journey, just a liquified limb.

I’ve had injuries and setbacks before, but this felt significant.

My imminent to-do list engaged with this new single-leg moment, and I felt like I was being held under water until I took the fatal gasp.

“I guess I’ll just die on these stairs.” I sighed, to no one. I couldn’t visualize a plan of action other than giving up.

After dying on the stairs became boring, I crawled up the stairs to the bathroom, ate a fistful of Advil, and precariously hobbled my way to my gig (after a slug-paced purchase of vanilla ice cream). My knee had returned, and though its stability was unreliable, it wasn’t liquid anymore.

I pulled up to my client’s home, thrilled to see only a single step rise to their front door. I slowly brought in my bags of food and equipment. This being a party of 6 guests, they had opted to have me serve them instead of hiring a waiter. That decision was made long before I became this wobbling, lopsided, molasses-speed garçon. They frowned and nodded, looking both dubious and sympathetic as I explained my sudden disability.

I was there and I would do everything I could to make this a perfect night for them (it was a 50^th anniversary party).

In many ways, I’m lucky that I got to cook that night. I reached within myself to truthfully acknowledge my power and my weaknesses. My clients were thrilled with their meal, but I know it was a bit underwhelming (especially with the rainbow chard, which I am rectifying for future clients today).

It turns out that a kneecap issue from my childhood has resurfaced with a brand-new osteoarthritis tag for me to become emotionally paralyzed by. Will this be the nail in the coffin of my business? The end of travels with my husband? Walks with Amelia?

No.

Life is a work in progress. I’m up now, fighting to get back to normal with support from friends, doctors, family, and pets. I’ll push as long as I have to.

In a declaration of my journey to wellness, I give you this beautiful edit on rainbow chard!

Rainbow Chard with Honeyed Chili Crisp Sauce

Ingredients

• 1 bunch of rainbow chard

• 4 garlic cloves

• 1 teaspoon spicy chili crisp

• 1 teaspoon honey

• 1 teaspoon sherry vinegar

• 1 teaspoon salt

• 1 teaspoon sesame oil

• 1 tablespoon olive oil

• parmesan grated on top (optional)

1. Wash chard and then slice the inner ribs out of the leaves. Slice the ribs to make 3 or 4 long, thin rib pieces and then line up all the ribs together and cut into 1/2 inch dice. Stack the leaves on top of each other and roll them like a cigar. Slice the rolled chard into ribbons.

2. Finely chop the garlic and put it off to the side.

3. In a bowl, mix the chili crisp, the honey, sherry vinegar, salt, and sesame oil.

4. Heat olive oil in a large saute pan. Add the diced rib pieces and saute for 1-2 minutes over medium-high heat.

5. Add the sliced leaves and saute for another minute, seasoning with salt and pepper. The leaves will wilt a bit.

6. Add the chopped garlic and toss together for 30 seconds.

7. Add the sauce mixtures and saute for another minute, mixing the flavors together.

I love to serve this over polenta or as a side dish, sometimes sprinkled with some grated parmesan.

If you need more guidance on how it’s done, click on the picture. I made it on KATU’s show Afternoon Live.

It is a turn of sadistic wizardry that I wound up spending my life cooking for thousands of bounding, flapping, inquisitive non-cooks.

But I don’t want to write about cooking right now. I want to write about confidence. Because the chaos my mother created by walking into whatever little cooking project I had set up for myself (this is probably me as a 10-year-old baking brownies from a box) was formed by my insecurity. I could be derailed because I hadn’t set proper tracks down.

Decades later, it’s close to impossible for a client to impede my achievements. They surprise me all the time, but they can’t thwart my progress. Clients often remark that my cool-headedness is the reason they hire me time and time again. My steadiness is a performance because inside I’m a bundle of nerves, but it’s a show I know how to give after years of practice.

I suffer from devastating stage fright. This terror is convincing enough to make me self-sabotage an entire acting career in my 20s. I needed to find a way to get good at something, and so I cooked, which has always been a thing I could kinda do. And while I know I am always getting better at my job, I haven’t given credit to how much my doggedness in the kitchen has informed the rest of my life.

My parents are performers who, if they suffer from stage fright, manage to cloak it with talent and charm. My dad is an author, and in February, in a theater in Connecticut, my mom and dad read some of his personal essays, and it was fantastic. My brother Max and his wife Megan were not able to come and asked if my parents would fly to Portland to perform the same kind of event. They would call it The Tucker Family Circus, and Max and Megan would perform some songs between the stories. They eagerly said yes, and then asked if I would read a few personal essays of my own. I was petrified, but said yes, of course.

And you know what? I was ready. Somehow, in the decades I’ve been cooking and writing, my destructive insecurities have quieted. My quavering voice and shaky hands were a thing of the past. I could stand by my work AND find the space in my often-overloaded ego to witness my family’s brilliance. It was the perfect night.

Thank you to everyone who joined us on our “sold”out event.

.

For those who were not able to come, here is one of the stories I read that night. I wrote it back in 2016, and it’s been updated a bit.

The Plaza

February 2009.

In those days, the small bedroom in my apartment on West 123^rd Street functioned as many rooms: sleeping room, dining room, entertainment room, storage room, and office. Sitting on my bed, sandwich on the bedside table, notebook on my lap, and a pen in hand, I picked up my phone and dialed.

“Hello?” The voice that answered my call was faint.

“Hello, is this Sharon? This is Alison Tucker. I’m a friend of Cynthia’s.”

Sharon Gans was a friend of my mom’s masseuse, Cynthia, whom I had only met once at my parents’ apartment as she blew out a scented candle and folded her padded table. I guess she and my mom had been talking about the struggle of my work search, and the masseuse thought I might be the perfect fit for her friend, Sharon, who was a former actress who ran a theater group she had started with her husband, who had recently died.

I continued into the phone. “Cynthia, the masseuse? She told me to call? I’m the chef. She said you might be looking for someone to hel..”

“Oh yessssss, Cynthia,” the woman said slowly. “She’s such a dear to connect us. She said you might be able to help me, but I forgot all about you. I can’t keep anything in order anymore. I don’t know if she told you, but I’ve suffered a terrible loss and haven’t been able to eat properly since my husband passed away. I’ve put on some weight, and I hate the way I feel.” I pictured a round, elderly widow, fond of Renaissance artwork and teapot collections.

“Yes, ma’am. I heard. I’m so sorry for your loss. I really think I might be able to help.” We continued talking for a while about food options, logistics, and cost. Excited to “truly begin the process of healing” with my cooking, she suggested I start the very next day.

I was over the moon. It had been a long, arduous search for work in the year since I’d moved back to New York. I was running out of money and belief in myself. But that all flipped during this conversation. She needed me, and I knew I could help.

I got the job. I got the job. Everything’s going to be ok.

I walked down the long hallway of my railroad flat into my living room, making sure my socks didn’t catch on the splintery wooden floor as they often did. My large bay window faced north, overlooking the projects-turned-luxury-condos, the renovated tenements behind them, and the George Washington Bridge twinkling in the distance. I took a deep inhale, feeling a lengthening in my spine. Had I grown an inch in the past hour? It felt like it.

I called my best friend, Blaine.

He answered quickly. “Hey, what’s up? Did you talk to that lady?”

“I did! She sounded terrible. Like really tired and depressed. I think this could be a real leaping off point for me.”

“That’s great!” he said.

“She wants me to cook for her twice a week, and Blaine, I’ll be cooking in THE PLAZA!”

Sharon Gans lived on the residential side of The Plaza. As a kid growing up in New York, the Plaza was more than the massive, iconic luxury hotel on Central Park South; it was the home of the mischievous and precocious Eloise. Eloise was a semi-autobiographical book by Kay Thompson about a little girl who lived in The Plaza with a tiny chihuahua, a turtle, and a nanny. Though I lived in an apartment on 89^th street, had an insanely obnoxious poodle, and no turtle or nanny, I saw myself in Eloise. We were both smart, curious, and unfettered in our respective worlds. When I was younger, I had been in the hotel lobby of The Plaza, but never on the residential side, which has a whole different entrance and specific floors that hotel guests can’t access. I felt a pixieish thrill at the thought of cooking there.

“What’s her full name?” Blaine asked, and I told him.

I rambled on, “She’s exactly the kind of client I need right now. I can focus my attention on helping her regain strength and feel more like herself. Then she might tell other people in The Plaza, or her students, or her friends, and before you know it, I’ll be cooking all over town.”

Blaine made a sound. A wary “Hrm.”

“What, Blaine?” I said sharply. Blaine can be a bit of a pessimist when good things are happening. I didn’t want his attitude to ruin my evening.

He said, “Hundreds of former victims, or 'students,' of Alex Horn and Sharon Gans gave accounts of families being destroyed, emotional abuse, slave labor, and brainwashing. As of late October 2007, Sharon Gans was still believed to be running the cult in New York City.”

Now, Blaine is brilliant. He’s quick-witted and twisted and likes to play games, but these words came out of the phone too quickly for him to have just made them up.

“Stop, Blaine, that’s not funny.” I was really confused.

“What? I just googled her name!” he said. He had found a website devoted to the work she had done with her husband and their theater-group-turned-cult called The Theater Of All Possibilities.

“STOP, Blaine! I can’t deal with this right now. I am going to cook for this woman tomorrow, and I need to be focused and calm!” I hung up abruptly.

Could what he said be true? A cult leader? With victims?? Brainwashing!?! Luckily, our phones weren’t as smart in those days, so I couldn’t Google her right then and there. I made the choice not to turn on my desktop computer.

‘Impossible,’ I thought later as I crawled into bed, trying to recapture my innocent victory from mere hours before. ‘She sounded so sweet.’

I woke before my alarm the next morning. Her first week’s menu was based around The South Beach Diet, rich in proteins and vegetables, no carbs, sugars, or starches. I stood in my kitchen that morning, staring into cabinets and drawers, coffee in hand. What would I need to bring with me to cook in this woman’s apartment? She had mentioned she had a few basic pots and pans, salt and pepper, but none of the exotic spices or oils I would need.

“Ooh! Smoked paprika for sure. And Garam Masala. And I’ll need the white pepper and the avocado oil.”

Dexter, my dog, blinked at me from the hall, framed by the cockeyed doorway as I talked to myself. My kitchen was styleless. The paint was chipped, the wood-paneled cabinets were hung unevenly, and the sink was so cheap that the handle broke off the first week I lived there. But it was a nice-sized room with plenty of counter space and a gas oven that could comfortably house a large roasting pan. After cooking in some of the most astronomically large and well-amended kitchens in Los Angeles, you’d think I would become snobby, but I liked this space. It was mine to do with what I wanted.

Into my insulated shopping bag, I wedged my spices and oils next to my favorite saute pan, my sheathed knife, and my chef coat. I hopped on the bus downtown to start my grocery shopping. I carefully inspected each bouquet of broccoli, every soft curve of a plum tomato, each knuckle of ginger before placing the winners in my basket. Only the finest fish and poultry for this new client! I folded the receipts into a zippered pocket in my wallet, which would be tallied up at the end of my cooking session and added to my hourly fee.

When I arrived at The Plaza, it was as if 30 years had disappeared from my body. A large guard tipped his hat as he opened the door to the residential entrance. I skipped through it, though my groceries felt like a bag of bowling balls.

“I’m here to cook for Sharon Gans,” I told the front desk. “And I’ll be back in a few days to cook for her again!” as if they would hand me the keys to The Plaza right then and there.

They responded with a numb sort of “good for you, miss,” but I was too zippy to hear anything other than “Hooray for Alison!”

I chose the middle elevator, which I shared with a slim brunette woman with a wide-brimmed hat and an older man in a tailored suit. They smelled floral and musky, like I imagined Paris and wealthy grandfathers do.

“Have a nice day,” I called to them when they got off on the third floor. They hummed back with a slight over-the-shoulder wave.

I took a deep breath when the elevator doors opened on her floor. This was it. A momentary flash of Blaine’s words popped into my head, but walking through the fancy halls of Eloise’s Plaza helped me forget quickly. Was this the first day of the rest of my life?

I took my folded chef coat from my bag and gave it a hard snap to air it out. One sleeve at a time. Knot buttons. Now a mint.

Knock, knock.

Nothing.

Knock, knock.

The giant wooden door opened to reveal a tall woman, maybe 70 years old, in an indigo caftan and dark oval sunglasses. Her wild orange hair was like a straw explosion, and a long menthol cigarette dangled from her mouth. She silently motioned for me to come inside. I peeked behind her, wondering where the frail, old, grieving widow was, but we were alone.

Her furniture was ornate and antique, with half-full ashtrays on every table. The windows were hung with floor-to-ceiling mahogany damask curtains. Thin columns of daylight leaked like secrets between the drapes and a cloud of minty cigarette smoke hung mid-air. It was like attending a screening of “Rosemary’s Baby” in a smoldering storage unit.

In hindsight, I see how I anesthetized I had made my ability to read a room from my need to succeed as a chef and caretaker. I felt like I was watching a horror movie, not like I was in one.

She kept her sunglasses on as she motioned for me to sit on the couch across from the tapestried chair she sank into.

“I see you’ve brought food with you.” She sounded villainous and accusatory.

I nodded, perplexed by this comment. Of course, I brought food with me. We had spoken about this. I was there to cook the menu that she’d requested. What little of her face I could make out from behind her glasses was stuck in a frown. Blaine’s words crept into my head again. ‘Cult leader. Brainwasher.’

“So, you’re going to cook for me today. That’s good. I would also like for you to teach me how to cook when I start to feel better.” And she lit another Pall Mall.

“Uh huh,” I mumbled, staring at the dark curtains obstructing one of the most prized panoramas in all of New York: the north-facing view of Central Park from a top floor on 59^th Street.

I could feel my spirit oozing away. If Blaine hadn’t read those words to me, would I think this room was dark for mourning? I’m sure I would have been even further drawn into her story. I wasn’t aware at that point that her husband had actually died 2 years earlier.

“So, now let’s see that kitchen!” I whooped with much more energy than was appropriate for this opaque room.

The kitchen was itty bitty and lit with fluorescent tubes that burned my eyes as soon as they came on. The room was a third the size of my kitchen at home. I know that many of the apartments in buildings like this were made when developers split single-level residences into multiple units. The small kitchens in each apartment were formerly butler’s pantries. Hers had plain white wooden cabinets and a small oven that wouldn’t have accommodated any of my roasting pans.

I started to unpack the groceries and my cooking tools onto the small counter as she stared sourly from the doorway. I attempted a smile, thanked her, and told her I would be about 3 hours.

“THREE hours! I can’t imagine what you’re going to do in all that time!!!”

‘Cook. I’m going to cook your breakfast, lunch, and dinner, asshole’ is what I didn’t say.

I needed to start chopping, searing, and braising. I needed to reconnect to the food, to who I am at my core, because nothing was feeling right anymore. I cooked for three hours and left her fridge full of food. Unable to find her in the next room and unwilling to search harder I left her bill on the kitchen counter with a “Thank you!” and a smiley face. This was out of character for me, but I was desperate to find her soft side.

When I got home, I could have fallen into bed immediately, but instead I sat down at my computer. “Sharon Gans,” I googled. Website after website spewed information about the cult she ran and the 8.5 million-dollar Plaza apartment that was purchased for her by one of her “students.” There had been abuse. There had been manipulations. There had been a lot of money conned. I stared at the wall. I needed this job. I needed it so badly. And these websites were written by bitter former students of hers, not journalists or documentarians. I closed the websites and cleared my computer’s cache. And then turned it off. And then unplugged it. You can’t be too careful.

Four days later, her apartment door opened slowly to reveal the same impenetrable sunglasses, wild red hair, and a different dark schmatta. She announced to me that there had been a major problem: she could not find the food I had cooked.

“What?!?”

Her fridge had been almost empty, and I had just stacked one Tupperware container on top of another. I couldn’t imagine that I’d hidden them behind other things. There were no other things! We went into the kitchen together, and I tugged the refrigerator door open. There they were, towers of the food I had worked so hard to perfect the previous week.

“This is it. This is the food I cooked. See? Here it is! It’s right here!” Pointing.

She said that friends were helping her through these troubled times, and I really should make it easier on them.

“But it’s right here, see? Here. This is it!”

“Anyway,” she held up her hand, “please get started. And next week, I’m going to need you to pick something up for me. Will you please grab four tall low-fat café lattes from Starbucks with eight packets of sugar on the side. Thank you.” And out she walked.

Five days later, I showed up with her four Starbucks.

There is a very specific humiliation involved in buying coffee for someone you dislike, especially when you are also carrying all their groceries. I did it, though. It was my job. Or kind of my job, anyway. It was job-adjacent. I wasn’t technically being paid for this part. And no, I’ve never picked up Starbucks for any other client. Oh wow, it’s not my job at all. Fuck.

Sharon had found the food in the fridge by the second week, but thought most of it was tasteless and told me so, point blank. She also said that she felt hungry after every meal, which I suggested was a side effect of being on a diet, but she poo-pooed that and told me to get to work. I started to cook and noticed that the garbage can was full of cigarette butts, Starbucks cups, and empty mint chip ice cream pints. Pints-- with an s.

There was one thing I made that she did like: the egg muffins- they were South Beach’s take on a mini quiche-- but with no floury crust or doughy insides. They were all protein and veg and yummy, diet or no. I thought, ‘Ok, cool, I’ll make them every time.’

The next week, she opened her door sunglasses-free. It was the first time I saw her eyes, though I didn’t look too deeply. Progress, I thought. She leaped for the Starbucks cups like a puppy for a treat and then disappeared into another dark room.

In the kitchen, I opened the fridge to find most of the food still there from the last time. Sharon suddenly appeared in the doorway and said that one of her students had brought her food, and she had just eaten that. She said I should pack the rest up for the homeless. I wondered, would the homeless population of 59^th and 5^th Avenue appreciate the subtlety of the South Beach Diet?

And, for some reason, on that afternoon, mostly because there were still 5 of them in the fridge, I did not make new egg muffins. It felt ridiculous to make new ones when the old ones were still good.

Two days later, I was in the middle of prep for a big cocktail party for awesome new clients when Sharon called. “Where were the egg muffins? How could I have not made them? This is an outrage! What the hell was I thinking?”

I don’t like to be screamed at, especially when I am wrong, but I had to give myself credit… I had subconsciously figured out an exit plan.

I arrived at her apartment later that day, and the glasses were back on.

“I think I should find you another chef.”

“I think it would be best,” she responded breathily, as though she were on her deathbed and I had violated her beyond repair.

Every day I worked for her, I arrived full of energy and left almost unable to walk. In 3 short hours, I would be drained. She was a powerful person.

Could she have been a cult leader? Could she have hoodwinked thousands of people out of their common sense and cash? I don’t know, but I do know she could devastate my vital force through sunglasses three dark rooms away.

That day, though-- that day I grew stronger with every step I took away from her. Other than believing her initial portrayal of a sickly woman in need, I had not fallen prey to her cons. I made it out alive paid in full.

Mini Egg Muffin

Mini Egg Muffins with Turkey Bacon, Spinach, Tomatoes, and Basil

Makes 12 mini muffins or 9 regular muffins

Ingredients

• 2 pieces turkey bacon

• 1 teaspoon of olive oil

• 1/4 red onion, chopped

• 1/2 cup baby tomatoes, cut in half

• 1 cup of baby spinach

• 1/2 cup of basil, cut into chiffonade

• 6 eggs or 1 1/2 cup egg substitute

1. Preheat the oven to 350 and lightly spray a mini muffin tin (or regular muffin tin) with cooking spray.

2. Heat a small pan on a medium flame and sear the turkey bacon for about a minute each side. Transfer to a cutting board but keep the heat on the pan.

3. Add the oil into the warm pan and then the onions. Season with salt and saute until the onions become soft and translucent. Add the tomatoes into the pan and turn the heat up to medium hot. Add the spinach, which will release water and wilt down quickly and cook on medium flame until the liquid has evaporated about another minute. Toss into a bowl.

4. Chop the turkey bacon into small cubes and toss that into the bowl with the vegetables.

5. Break and whip the eggs in a separate bowl and then add to the veg/ turkey bacon mix. Season mixture with salt and pepper. Stir in the basil chiffonade.

6. Using a small cookie scoop, transfer the egg mixture into the mini muffin cups a little more than 3/4 full.

7. Bake for 15 minutes for minis, 20 minutes for full-size muffins.

8. Let cool. Enjoy!

Egg Muffins with Caramelized Onions, Spinach, Tomatoes, Zucchini, Basil and Goat Cheese

Makes about 9 full-size muffins

Ingredients

• 1/2 yellow onion, chopped

• 1 teaspoon olive oil

• 1 cup of washed baby spinach leaves

• 1/2 tomato, seeded and chopped into 1/4 inch pieces

• 1/2 cup chopped zucchini

• 5 basil leaves, chiffonaded

• 1/2 cup goat cheese

1. Preheat the oven to 350 and spray a mini muffin tin (or regular muffin tin) with cooking spray.

2. Heat oil in a small saute pan and add the chopped onions. Season with salt and saute until the onions become soft and translucent. Add the spinach, which will release water and wilt down quickly and cook on medium flame until the liquid has evaporated, about another minute. Add the tomatoes into the pan and turn the heat up to medium hot. Add the zucchini and then the basil. Let cool.

3. Break and whip the eggs in a separate bowl and then add to the vegetable mix. Season mixture with salt and pepper.

4. Using a small cookie scoop, transfer the egg mixture into the mini muffin cups a little more than 3/4 full.

5. Add the crumbled goat cheese into each muffin tin, about a tablespoon or more per tin.

6. Bake for 20 minutes for full-size muffins.

7. Let cool. Enjoy!

Francis and I are Yankees fans. We’re from New York, so it’s no surprise our blood runs in pinstripes. For years, we have made the pilgrimage to Seattle to watch the Mariners play the Yanks, staying in cheap, sterile, soulless hotels. Oddly, staying with friends has only worked out once (and that person has moved since). Maybe if we were there to support the Mariners…

This year, we decided to stay in a historic, little hotel in Japantown, with an easy, though dodgy walk to the stadium.

The woman on the phone replied excitedly, “Yes, yes. Is that you in the red car? Listen, there’s someone walking up the street right now that’s having a bit of a hard time, so stay there and give me a second to make sure he’s all right.”

I peered into the passenger rearview mirror and saw a man with low-hanging, well-worn dungarees and a frayed tan work jacket talking to himself as he sloppily weaved his way in our direction.

I liked how she said she wanted to ‘make sure he was all right.’ Her tone wasn’t alarmist or judgmental. It was maternal and proactive for both her incoming guests and the drunk. It’s clear this is something that a small hotel manager in downtown Seattle witnesses often, and I liked that her plan wasn’t just to bark at him to get off her property.

Suddenly more focused on the ticket I knew we’d get if we parked on the street, I said to Francis at the wheel, “Let’s park in the lot instead,” which was right next to us and the hotel.

I walked to the sign describing how to pay online for the lot space, which I did on my phone, and then grabbed my overnight bag from the backseat.

In front of The Panama Hotel’s doorway, there stood a slim woman with red lipstick and curly jet black hair pulled into a bun. Sporadic corkscrew tendrils defiantly danced free from the hairdo like a wild halo. She nodded as she spoke with the scruffy drunk, who then walked across the street, smiling, and passed out on a bench. She looked up the block and waved to us.

Booking a hotel is a task I have failed at many times in my life, and I was worried Francis might freak out about this one. Its reviews online are mixed. It’s a historic landmark, built in 1910, with very few updates, so if you’re looking for flashy amenities, this ain’t the place. There are many stairs to climb; the bathrooms are in the hallway, not in the rooms; and a lot of the furniture is original, like from 1910. But I am always interested in weird, bona fide old spots that feel frozen in time. No, that’s a lie. Sometimes I want a big first-class hotel to prove to me that they’ve considered every single molecule of comfort, safety, and ease for a traveler. Sometimes I want to feel spoiled. Sometimes I want to feel rich. Because sometimes traveling is about becoming someone different than who you are. For this simple trip, though, we didn’t need any bells or whistles, and the price and location fit us perfectly.

“It’s right this way,” she said as she held the heavy front door for us. We walked up the two original leatherbound flights of stairs to the main floor with Jan Johnson, the owner/ manager/ history teacher of The Panama Hotel. As we entered the office, her ringtone, Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons,” blared from her cell – possibly the only modern-day appliance in the building. She gestured for us to sit at the large, paper-strewn dining table she uses as her office desk. Done with her call, she leapt into a lengthy narrative about when the hotel was built, what it was used for, its place in the historic registry, and her purchase of it in 1984 (a monumental task for a single, unwealthy woman).

One by one, I thought of friends and family members who would not have coped well with these surroundings. My mother couldn’t have climbed the entrance stairs, good friends wouldn’t have cared about Jan’s love of the building, a younger me would have rudely rolled my eyes at this 30-minute pre-check-in monologue, and even me at 55 on the wrong day would have been annoyed.

On that day, though, in that moment, I felt like we had found a trunk full of maps to guaranteed hidden treasures. We hadn’t found the gold, we’d found the person who knew where it was. I welcomed this character’s contortion of time and space because it’s so different from my own regimented existence. I could find her passions easily; in this property, in this city, and neighborhood, with a close-knit community looking out for each other. She’s a small business owner in 2025, playing by her own rules as a quirky, spirited caretaker. She doesn't sugarcoat what to expect about the hotel - she highlights its uniqueness. I was expecting the area to feel scary, and it didn’t because of her watchful eye. I was expecting the hotel to feel dingy, and it felt like a single woman was taking care of something she loves with a small, like-minded staff. I was expecting the manager to be a bit nutty, and she absolutely, positively is.

We were shown to our room, the Chickadee Room, which was lovely with original detailing, art, and antiques (there is a lamp with chickadees painted on the gorgeous glass shade!) It’s stuck in time—it’s like Analog Land--there’s no TV and I’m not sure they even had Wifi. Again, it’s not for everyone, but for a brief stay, I’ll take this kind of authenticity over a hotel with Allen wrench bedroom sets that would fail a black light inspection in 2 seconds.

She gave us some maps and recommendations for galleries and museums and bookshops, and restaurants to visit before the game. “Tell 'em Jan sent ya,” she said, again and again. I think she knows every person in Seattle.

Around the 3^rd inning, I got a call from a local number. The screaming crowd made it impossible to hear, so I let it go to voicemail. It was Jan. She said someone on the street just let her know that a red car in the lot was getting a ticket. Dammit, I said under my breath, frustrated but also impressed with her ‘eyes on the street’ community.

I texted back, “I truly hope not because I paid for the space until 12:45 am. We’re at the game now, so there’s nothing we can do. Thanks for letting me know.”

“Enjoy the game!” Jan texted back. And we did.

When we got back to the hotel and the parking lot, the ticket was tucked under the wiper. I had mistyped my license plate number into my phone when I got the space. I knighted myself the stupidest person on the entire planet, but eased up eventually. Mistakes happen. At least the Yankees won handily.

The following morning, we had coffee in the tea house on the main floor of The Panama Hotel, which has a handful of colorful regulars who meet for a daily coffee klatch. There was an older woman in a long red overcoat who instantly let us know she’d had a double hip replacement, and that her grandson calls her The Bionic Woman. There were a few grey-haired gentlemen whose double espressos didn’t need to be ordered; the barista just knew. There was a cat named Miu Miu who rolled on her back at the foot of my chair, achieving the belly scratch she craved. All the regulars said she was having a very good day, and you trusted their gauge of Miu Miu’s mood because that might be the only thing that changes daily. Her mood and the random hotel guest venturing down for a latte and a scone.

Ready to hit the road, we were unable to find Jan to return the key to our room, so we gave it to the barista.

I was just clicking my seatbelt shut when Jan knocked on our car window.

“I’m so glad I caught you!” She said, grinning and waving papers in her hand.

I said, “We just gave the key to the barista. Thank you so much for…”

She batted her hand like she couldn’t have cared less about the key. “I called the people from the parking lot where you got the ticket. I think you wrote the wrong license number on the form when you got the space, so that’s why they tagged it. Anyway, she said it happens from time to time, and if you have the receipt, she’ll void the ticket.” She handed us a small stack of torn scratch papers, with the name and number of the parking lot owners and various scribbles of information all over. “I didn’t want you to leave Seattle with a bad feeling.”

How perfect is it that I got a ticket due to a cell phone blunder while visiting analog land? And then it was solved by communication with real people? The ticket was dismissed, and my faith in humanity was restored. Thank you, Jan and The Panama Hotel, for making us feel seen in an anonymous key-drop world.

Many people over the years have said that I should run a B&B, mostly because of the pastries I’ve baked. I don’t know if I have the temperament to pull it off. My patience has its limitations. But I’ll keep baking and see what happens. Here’s something I’m serving at a brunch soon. It’s special because it’s not a buttery pastry, but a sweet focaccia. Trust me, you won’t miss the butter because the focaccia is so pillowy soft and delicious. Enjoy!

And if you are serving this for breakfast, you can make the dough the night before. Let it rise in the fridge after making the dough and then pound it down, let is rise for another 30 minutes, cover it with streuesel and berries and bake!

Sweet Focaccia with Cinnamon Streusel and Fresh Berries

Makes 2 10x5 inch loaves

Focaccia Recipe

• 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons water, warm but not hot

• 1 tablespoon yeast

• 1 teaspoon honey

• 2 tablespoons olive oil

• 3 ¼ cups all-purpose flour

• 2 teaspoons salt

1. In a large bowl, or the bowl of a Kitchen Aid mixer fitted with a paddle, mix the water with the yeast and the honey. Let it sit for 5 minutes for the yeast to bloom (it will get foamy).

2. Add the olive oil, the flour, and the salt and mix until it comes together. Then knead on a board for 10 minutes or with the paddle for 5 minutes. Oil the bowl lightly with olive oil and coat the dough ball for rising. If you’re baking this for breakfast the following day, this is when the dough goes into the fridge.

3. Cover the bowl and let the dough rise for an hour. Punch down and let rise another hour.

4. On a lightly floured board, cut the dough in half. Press each piece down into two rectangles that are about 10 inches by 5 inches and transfer them onto a baking sheet. Let rise for 30 minutes.

5. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Prepare the streusel:

Streusel Ingredients

• 4 tablespoons unsalted butter

• ¼ cup brown sugar

• ¼ cup white granulated sugar

• ¼ cup all-purpose flour

• 2 teaspoons cinnamon

• ½ teaspoon nutmeg

• ¼ teaspoon cloves

• pinch of salt

• 2 pints of berries (I used 1 pint each of raspberries and blackberries)

1. With your fingertips, blend the butter with the rest of the ingredients until it's well mixed and there are no big pieces of butter.

2. Sprinkle the streusel onto the risen dough on the sheet pans and then press the berries on top of the streuseled dough.

3. Bake in the preheated oven for 25 minutes.

And here is a clip of me making this sweet focaccia on KATU's Afternoon Live. Click on the picture to watch.

The kalua pork butt, massaged vigorously with thick flakes of Hawaiian pink salt and impaled by many garlic cloves, spent 5 hours on a rack above smokey hardwood, and was then wrapped in banana leaves and set in a 325 degree oven for another 4 hours. The sumptuous meat collapsed upon itself after resting awhile, making the two forks I had eagerly readied for pulling feel useless. The tender pork would be tucked into the pillowy soft Hawaiian rolls I had sweetened with a splash of pineapple juice and softened with a smidgen of potato flakes.

This was the second Hawaiian-themed party I’ve catered in the past couple of years. Admittedly, my only indigenous island affiliation is the Isle of Manhattan. Still, the requests came from people I’ve catered for multiple times who trust me to honor the cuisine without misappropriation.

I chose a blue lei from the basket of flower garlands next to the door as I entered my client’s home.

“It looks so festive!” I exclaimed to the hostess, who had outdone herself with island-themed adornments for the buffet tables. Her husband, whose birthday party this was, peeked into the kitchen where I was getting set up.

“Happy birthday, Sam!!!” I whooped as he grinned and waved and then disappeared. Guests wouldn’t arrive for over an hour.

A little while later, my server and friend, Wendy, walked in with an orange lei around her neck.
“Hey!” she said with a big grin.

“Hey!” I introduced her to the hostess and then quickly started explaining her tasks. “I need you to unpack the platters and set up the buffet with utensils and framed labels. The menu is there.”

She nodded. She’s a pro beyond pro, and we’ve worked together long enough for my directions to be more performative than necessary.

“I think you saw it on Insta, but THIS happened last week!” My right forefinger lifted the back of my black chef coat and pulled my phone from my back jeans pocket. With a slide, tap, scroll, tap, we were both staring at the face of my new kitten, Gryphon.

She beamed, “He’s gorgeous! Those eyes!”

Wendy and I have a friendship where our most important life stories are shared in dribs and drabs while serving tens to hundreds of people.

“I know!” Grinning like the proud new cat mom I am, I turned to the stove where the fry oil I had put on a medium flame was coming to temperature. I pulled on my food safety gloves and took off my blue lei. Delicate polyester flowers and fry stations don’t mix.
“Will you pour the Huli Huli sauce into that bowl?” I pointed to a pint container on the counter with blue tape that said HH. “I’m going to fry the cauliflower right before guests get here. I don’t want to do it during the party because Cathy said a lot of the family will be walking through the kitchen.”

“Sounds smart,” she said, pouring sauce into a small square bowl. “What’s his name again?”

“It’s Gryphon,” I said as I laid chicken and pineapple teriyaki skewers out on a foil-lined sheet pan. “Will you start hinging the buns?” I pointed to the foil pans of homemade buns on the counter that she would cut in half almost all the way through.

She nodded.

“Francis and I didn’t even know what a beauty he was when we adopted him. You know, it’s been about 6 months since Grace passed away, and we’ve had it on a vague to-do list that we would adopt another cat soon.”

I dipped a cauliflower nub into the rice flour/ cornstarch/ seltzer water batter and then carefully placed it into the hot oil. It lay there bubbling unremarkably, so I plucked it out with my handy tongs and turned the heat up a bit. I plated the spring rolls.

“The Mae Ploy is over there,” I said, pointing to the pint container with blue tape that read ‘Sweet Chill’.

“Got it,” Wendy said, as she poured the sauce into a small oblong bowl.

Holding a hinged bun in my left hand, my right gloved hand plunged into the warm pulled pork, scooped out a hearty handful, and stuffed it into the open-mouthed bread.

“I always need to plan a path before I do something brave. It’s really hard for me to make important decisions about things when I’m in a new situation. So I thought we should go to the Oregon Humane Society to snoop around first. We could go and see how it felt before we felt the pressure of actually adopting. Saturday felt like “break the seal” day. Dip our toe in, y’know?” The kalua pork sliders were slowly filling the long rectangular ceramic platter.

Wendy nodded as she fanned napkins and gathered serving utensils.

We most often cater parties where guests are late, on trendy diets, or they spend their entire night at the bar. Not this party, though. This family was both early and hungry! For a 5:00 start time, the crowd began arriving at 4:40, and many stood right in front of the double oven where I had food heating up.

“OPENING!” I bellowed as I reached for the door of the top oven. Most guests nodded and apologized. A few just stood there, like they always do, but eventually moved when I started to open the oven door onto them.

“Thank you, sorry, thank you,” I said, trying to acknowledge the awkwardness of my professional kitchen voice in a casual family home (but knowing no other voice would have gotten them to move quickly).

I plated the skewered crispy coconut shrimp with tamarind dip and handed it to Wendy to put on the buffet.

“We walked through OHS, staring into pens and cubbies. Vet techs were pimping some of the more extroverted kitties who batted their lashes at everyone who patted on their glass.” I started dancing a bit in the kitchen like those saucy cats at the pound. “There were ones that we both thought were cute, but they were the cats everyone thought were cute. There wasn’t that special feeling. It was good, it just wasn’t our time.”

I returned to the almost-smoking oil and filled it with battered cauliflower, which now fried quickly. Placing the lightly browned cauliflower on a paper towel-lined pan, I sprinkled it with salt and continued.

“Francis and I decided it wasn’t our day, but we filled out the OHS application so that the next time we went, we could meet with a cat immediately.”

I pulled the mini turkey burgers with cheese melting on top from the lower oven and placed them on the hinged mini burger buns arranged on another platter.

“We had a delicious Indian lunch in St. John’s and looked back at the OHS website.” I gently squirted ketchup onto the burgers and closed the top bun. “And there was this grey cat that we hadn’t seen in the main building!”

Wendy took the cauliflower, burgers, and chicken skewers out to the buffet. “Did you go back?”

“We did! Right after lunch. Is everything out?”

“Yup!”

“Will you tell Cathy?” Wendy nodded and went to let the hostess know the buffet was open.

I started washing a few pans. “So we went back and told the lady at the front desk that we’d seen this cat online. She said that someone would be right with us. Then the vet tech came out, and her name was Amelia!”

“No way!”

“I know! We told her that that was our dog’s name, and she was delighted. She said that the cat we wanted to meet was a bit traumatized, which is why he wasn’t in the main building. She said we couldn’t even take him out of his cage. He’d been returned the day before after being adopted.”

Wendy exhaled loudly. “Oh my god, how awful!”

I wiped down the kitchen counters, pulled a new pair of gloves on, and started swirling coconut frosting onto the mini pina colada cupcakes.

“You have to know, of all the cats available, I was most drawn to the one that felt scared and abandoned. I connected so deeply to the look in his eyes. I immediately knew what giving him a good, loving home would do for him.”

I was grinning. The cupcakes looked perfect, the party was buzzing with happy guests, and I was sharing a life-changing event with a good friend.

“We got him home and he hid under the bed for three full days – no food, no water, just terrified. But then suddenly he came out like it was no big deal at all! That third morning, he was exploring the room and sniffing us, and we realized he had CLEANED his plate of food while we slept. He was still shy, but we could see his hilarious personality peeking out from behind his fear.”

“You know, they say it’s the 3/3/3 rule with new pets,” Wendy said as she diligently washed cooking equipment. “It takes them 3 days to get over the initial shock, 3 weeks to learn the ropes, and 3 months to truly settle in.”

“Wow, that feels exactly right. Thank you for knowing and sharing that.”

Life felt radiant at that moment; my gloved fingers sticky with frosting, my black jacket crusted with batter, my shoulders releasing with pride. I felt found. I felt rescued. I felt strong.

Like I always do in the kitchen.

Here is the recipe for the mini pina colada cupcakes I made. They disappeared quickly!

If you'd prefer to make full-size cupcakes, use the same recipe and bake for a few minutes more (20 minutes).

Mini Pina Colada Cupcakes

Makes about 35 mini cupcakes

Ingredients

• 1 2/3 cup all-purpose flour

• ½ teaspoon baking powder

• ¼ teaspoon baking soda

• ½ teaspoon salt

• ¾ cup brown sugar

• ¼ cup white granulated sugar

• ½ cup melted unsalted butter

• 1 egg

• ¼ cup pineapple juice

• ½ cup crushed pineapple

• ½ cup coconut milk

• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract

• 1 teaspoon coconut extract

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

2. Fill the mini cupcake pan with mini cupcake skirts (cupcake liners).

3. In a large bowl, combine the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt.

4. In another bowl, whisk together the melted butter with the brown sugar and the white sugar until well combined. Add the egg and whisk. Add the pineapple juice, coconut milk, vanilla extract, and coconut extract and mix.

5. Pour the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients and mix until no lumps remain.

6. Using a cookie scoop, fill the skirts with the batter 2/3 full.

7. Bake for 18 minutes. Let cool before frosting.

Coconut Frosting

Ingredients

• 12 tablespoons unsalted butter, at room temperature

• 2 ¾ cups confectioners sugar

• ¼ cup coconut milk

• 1 teaspoon coconut extract

• Salt to taste

1. Beat the butter with a stand mixer or beater for about 4 minutes.

2. Add the confectioners sugar, coconut milk, coconut extract and beat until the frosting is smooth and shiny, about 8-10 minutes. The difference between frosting that has been beaten for 2 minutes and frosting that has been beaten for 10 minutes or more is phenomenal. As you beat it you can see it get smoother and shinier as it aerates.

3. Frost away! Aloha!

As promised, here’s the clip of me making these on KATU’s show Afternoon Live. https://katu.com/afternoon-live/cooking-recipes/pia-colada-cupcakes

My phone rings.

I’m begrudgingly scrolling through thumbnail pics of my food to see if they’re worth uploading to my website. It’s a dreary day outside, and I have sunk into the dead-brain funk of my slowest work season. This is an annual winter condition, exacerbated by the political horror show in America right now. Don’t fret; that’s my first and last mention of it. It’s too big to squelch and too big to take on here.

My phone rings again. The screen reads, “Pompano Beach, Florida,” and I know it’s spam because I live and cook in Portland, Oregon. I’m desperate for work, though, so “Hello.” I say, without much effort toward charm.

“Hey there! Am I speaking to the person in charge of A Wonderland Food?”

Here’s a tip. If you’re calling a company to sell them something, get the company’s name correct.

I sigh. “It’s A Wonderland OF Food. And yes, I’m in charge.”

“Hey, sorry about that!” He sounds like an asshole version of Keanu as Bill or Ted. “It looks to me like your Google and Yelp accounts are really lackluster. You aren’t handling them yourself, are you???”

My thumb, with a mind of its own, gleefully thrusts its thickest pad point into the red “end call” circle on my phone screen.

I feel like Miss Manners for spammers, but don’t insult me when you’re trying to sell me something, ok, Keanu? I’m better than that.

I’m better than that…I repeat the thought to myself, unconvincingly, because I am handling my company’s marketing, and it’s neither a job I’m qualified for nor one I’m successful at.

I stare at the grey soles of the once-white socks poking out from my overworn leggings and collapse vertebrae by vertebrae into a “vacuuming’s pointless” yoga stance I call Denial Pose or Downward Facing Day.

Finding work has always been a struggle.

Back in the early aughts, when I was a freelance chef in LA, I worked for big catering companies. I booked smaller jobs through private chef friends who couldn’t take on more regular clients, and that grew organically. Word of mouth is key in my biz.

When I moved back to New York, I joined the American Personal Chef Association. The APCA website linked prospective clients to local chefs in their area. Clients who clicked on my image were linked to the terrible handmade website I built for my company. This was 2007, so the glossy high-def food porn that dazzles web browsers now was a little lackluster.

But a few people found me and liked what they saw. The first contact went like this…

Customer Request: “I’m looking for someone to cook for my mother. She’s been living with me for the past year due to a heart scare and has to watch what she eats. Let me know if this is possible. Thanks, James.”

How sweet, I thought, a good son taking care of his little, ailing mother. Immediately, my imagination went wild, creating images of a tall, slim man hopping in and out of cabs in perfectly pressed linen suits and Italian shoes. I imagined he was a lawyer, but a good one, like a civil rights attorney who hadn’t had time to focus on marriage or kids due to his fight for justice and the love of his mother. I imagined a tiny grey-haired woman, still grinning optimistically as she soldiered on through life with a snazzy blue rollator and a restrictive diet.

I would fill their huge, sun-filled apartment with the smells of freshly baked bread, lean herb-crusted meats, and freshly caught fish. I would turn the vegetables they hated as children into gourmet treats they would crave from now on. I would inspire them with overflowing bowls of perfectly ripe fruit on every table. The more I thought about them, the more I realized I’d never imagined a client as perilously desperate for my care as they were. It was fate.

I emailed James a breakdown of how I worked with price points and menu options. He would order a week’s worth of food, and then I would arrive with all the groceries. I would cook in their home and then pack everything up in the fridge for them to reheat throughout the week. At the end of the day, he could expect a clean kitchen with an itemized invoice for my time plus the cost of food (with receipts).

James said that sounded great, and we set up my first day for later that week.

In Los Angeles, I cooked for actors, managers, and producers who needed no pre-job screening. I could look them up on IMDB.

New York was different. My job was like Internet dating. These people hadn’t been vetted, they were strangers. They hadn’t validated anything except their ability to purchase a computer and an internet package. Back in 2007, you couldn’t do the deep exploration into a person’s private, business, and social life that you can nowadays. I take a leap of faith with every job- that the people are real, that they will actually pay me, and that they won’t murder me when I’m alone with them in their homes.

James was the first client whose home I entered in New York. I was going to show up no matter what. That’s my job. But as I got ready to go, I realized how terrified I was. I took a deep breath and told myself I would be fine… and then I gave my parents the name and address of this guy just in case I was never heard from again.

James’s building was nice enough. It was your basic 10-story, pre-war, doorman building in the 70s off First Avenue.

“I’m Alison Tucker,” I said emphatically to the doorman (possibly the last person who would ever see me). “That’s ALISON TUCKER here to see James in apartment B-6.”

He touched his cap, bowed a bit, and smiled strangely as I shouted my name 12 inches from his face. Then he pointed to the rear of the building where I found James’ apartment. I set my grocery bags down and steadied myself by remembering I would soon be cooking. Beyond the money or the people or the stories, the fluidity that awakens in my mind/body/soul when I start to cook is the reason I am a chef.

I knocked on the door.

James was round. Like really round. His little dome balanced on his thick neck and stuck out of his stained and puckering polyester shirt like a turtle head. Where was the slim linen suit guy I’d imagined?

James was thrilled I showed up and all smiles. His kitchen was two steps away from the front door and only about four steps wide in any direction. He opened a few cabinets quickly to show me a saucepan and some old olive oil and then said he had to run.

“Oh yeah, my ma is in the back. She might come out and say hey, but you just do what you gotta do. Ok? I’m outa here. Oh wait, you need some money, right? How much we owe ya today?”

It was like talking to Tony Soprano. I guestimated how long it would take me to cook, and he handed me a check, badda-boom. The front door slammed behind him, and then there was silence. I had not been murdered. Excellent.

I slipped the check into my wallet, preheated the oven, and lifted the groceries onto the counter in the tiny airless kitchen. When I lifted my arms and stretched my fingers long, I could almost touch opposite walls. In front of the sink was a scuzzy plastic garbage pail that held a murky, half-filled paper bag that was guaranteed to fall apart if you tried to remove it from the can. I nudged it with the tip of my shoe into the farthest spot from the action I could find. The fridge hummed like a dog that needed to be walked as I set perishables onto the only unstained shelf inside it. I opened soot-sticky cabinets, painted dark red, and pulled out warped and burned pans. There was a kitchen window peeking halfway out behind the fridge, painted shut and covered in thick New York apartment kitchen sediment. Natural light was a distant memory. I touched as few things as possible and made mental notes of the equipment I would bring with me the next time. Pots, pans, cutting boards, trash bags. My own things bring me a feeling of familiarity and safety that I miss in other people’s kitchens.

If I were a different person I suppose I could have said I would not cook in a kitchen like this, but that’s not who I am. I take my work seriously and every kitchen/ client has a new challenge. It’s my job to make great food in spite of the hurdles. Soon, I was searing, chopping, sautéing and once again present in my body.

Sometime in the middle of my prep, the mother appeared in the doorframe between the kitchen and the rest of the apartment. She was a stalwart, husky woman in a designer pantsuit with jet black beauty parlor curls and large sunglasses.

Focused on deglazing the fond from the beef tenderloin with some red wine and mounting butter into the sauce, I shrieked when I saw her.

“Oh, Ma’am! I didn’t see you. I’m Alison, the chef. Nice to meet you.”

“Hmmm. I see you’ve started cooking.” Her voice was nasal and brimming with accusation.

I had been cooking for 2 hours by that point and the kitchen looked and smelled of it.

“I don’t know how you found us, but we’re doing just fine without you,” she said as if I’d ambushed her son in a dark alley and forced him to hire a private chef at knifepoint. “I’m going shopping and won’t be back until much later. Just pull the door shut when you leave.” And off she went without a goodbye or anything.

I cooked for four hours, packing the (not very heart-healthy- but you give people what they ask for) bolognese sauce, pan-seared beef tenderloin, rosemary chicken with potatoes, and creamy desserts into their odd-smelling refrigerator. I thought I’d better go to the bathroom before the long crosstown bus ride home.

I don’t ever snoop when I cook in people’s homes. I see the front door, whatever rooms I walk through to get to the kitchen, and sometimes the bathroom. Friends have asked me what the rooms are like in some of the mansions I’ve cooked in, but I can’t say. I’m not interested in the client’s private things, and it’s not worth the risk of having a client feel I’ve overstepped my boundaries.

Their bathroom was just as unkempt as the kitchen, with moldy towels on the floor and a dark ring around the toilet bowl. By then, I had abandoned my judgment until I went to wash my hands, reached for what I thought was a squeeze of soap, and found a puddle of LUBE on my palm. There was a, dare I say, family-size pump bottle of Wet and Wild next to the soap on the sink.

“I don’t want you to ever go back there,” my friend Jerry said to me that night on the phone when I told the family lube tale.

I felt like the boat I was on had hit rocky waters.

“Jer, I can’t quit. I’m almost out of money, and I’ve got no other prospects.”

Sure, it was different than I expected, but they weren’t bad people. Just odd, filthy…and lubey.

James emailed a few days later and said his mother loved one of the items I had prepared. Just one. But that’s how new clients are. It takes some time to learn what they like and how they like it prepared. He ordered more food for that week but said that no one would be there until later in the day. The doorman let me in, I cooked and was not paid. James emailed and apologized. When it happened again the following week, James called me and said that he would get one of his guys to drive the money over to me. He said he would “nevah not pay” with a deep raspy tone that gave me chills.

I stood on the corner of 120^th Street and Amsterdam Avenue for 15 minutes walking back and forth like the hookers I used to see on Broadway in the good old days. Finally, a guy in a shiny black Chrysler showed up. The window lowered. “Are you Alison?” I nodded, out came a wad of cash in a sealed envelope, the window raised, and the car drove off. It felt so suspicious that I actually looked around for the cops even though I’d earned this money legally.

Later that night, with the help of many gin and tonics, I emailed James to tell him I didn’t think we were a good fit. I finished the gin, felt braver, and went back to the APCA website to see if there were any new clients I could wrangle.

This is my life. And it will be for as long as I’m a freelance chef and caterer.

So what was the one thing the mom liked? It was my rosemary chicken with potatoes. It’s the kind of classic comfort food that I love. Simple, inexpensive, and delicious.

Rosemary Chicken with Potatoes

Serves 4

Ingredients

• 4 tablespoons olive oil, separated into 3 tablespoons and 1 tablespoon

• 1 ½ pounds Yukon Gold potatoes

• 1 tablespoon butter

• 4 large bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs

• 1 large red onion cut into ½ inch dice

• 8 garlic cloves, peeled but whole

• 1 28 ounce can of San Marzano tomatoes, drained and kept whole

• 1 1/2 tablespoons of fresh rosemary

• salt and pepper to season

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees.

2. Cut potatoes into 1-inch cubes and toss them with 3 tablespoons of olive oil. Line a sheet pan with aluminum foil and drizzle some oil on the foil to help make it nonstick. Sprinkle potatoes aggressively with salt and pepper and then bake on the sheet pan for 20 minutes.

3. Meanwhile, pat the chicken thighs dry with a paper towel and then season them with salt and pepper.

4. Let a large skillet heat up first and then add the 1 tablespoon of olive oil with 1 tablespoon of butter. The butter will sizzle, melt, and foam. When the foam subsides, sear the chicken skin side down first for 3 minutes on medium high heat. Turn chicken over and sear for another 3 minutes.

5. Transfer the chicken onto a plate and add the onions and whole garlic cloves into the skillet. Salt the onions lightly and cook for 5 minutes over medium-low heat. Take the potatoes out of the oven and add them into the skillet with the onions and garlic and stir to combine the tastes. With your fingers, smush half the tomatoes over the potatoes. Sprinkle with 1 tablespoon rosemary. Place the chicken thighs on top of the potatoes, and smush the remaining tomatoes over the chicken. Sprinkle the chicken with 1/2 tablespoon of rosemary and put the skillet in the oven uncovered for another 25 minutes or until the chicken reads 165 on a thermometer.

6. Remove the pan from the oven and place the chicken on a plate. Using a fork, gently smush the garlic cloves into the sauce that’s formed in the bottom of the pan.

7. Serve chicken on top of the potatoes.

And here I am on KATU’s Afternoon Live showing you how it’s done:

Heavy-duty steel wire racks displayed harnesses of all kinds-- leather and vinyl, with mouth cages and bits, extra-large and teensy-weensy. There were collars too, baskets of them on the showroom floor—utilitarian, leathery and studded, pink and frilly. Feathery poofs on the ends of thin plastic wands leaned out of bins on the floor and long mylar leashes hung from an a-frame rack.

My heart was not racing, I was not short of breath. I immediately felt I could be myself here.

This pet store (oh, you were thinking it was something else?) was about to celebrate its 20^th anniversary and needed a caterer to provide a sumptuous array of small food.

Amid a truly grim month in Wonderland, I was having a great day. I had slept well, booked a job, and successfully made a dessert on TV. Walking into this shop was the icing on my frostingless cake.

I stood solidly in my burgundy Chucks, my mini Toile De Jouy dress, and a very pilling vintage sky blue cardigan. It’s a style that screams alt girl from the 80’s or crazy houseless woman in her 50’s and I’ll continue to dress this way until presented with an intervention… and probably a while after that.

“I have an appointment with Gwendolyn. She’s expecting me,” I said, sounding more serious than I intended to the nodding woman wearing a Ramone’s t-shirt and a pixie cut.

“I think she’s in the back. I’ll go grab her!”

Moments later, Gwendolyn appeared in a dark pullover and loose jeans. She noticed me staring at one display.

“Do you have one?” she whispered in a benevolent almost maternal tone.

I beamed. “YES!” and whipped out my phone to show off my girl, Amelia. The two women behind the counter came to ooh and aah along with their boss. Pet lovers are on a friendship fast-track with me and January’s low/ no social life left me giddy during this interaction. We cooed at pictures of my dog and theirs until it was time to get down to business.

The request was simple: delicious vegan appetizers, easily eaten without a fork or plate. Grab it and pop it in your mouth kinda stuff.

“That’s my a-game,” I assured Gwendolyn with a confident grin.

“I’d also like to serve a dessert. Maybe a mini cheesecake or custardy tart thing,” she said.

“No chocolate!!!” A blue-haired woman in front of the register added. “There will be many dogs in attendance!”

“Right, good point. No chocolate. Can you handle it?” Gwendolyn and I agreed that I would figure dessert out and get back to her.

I skipped out of the pet store even happier than when I had entered. I love booking parties that I know I can nail, especially when they’re for good (pet-loving) people that I want to take care of.

I had so many ideas swirling in my cookbook brain that I could hardly keep my hands on the steering wheel.

And that’s where I hit the wall.

We are living in an incredible culinary time. As our bodies become less tolerant to many foodstuffs, we have overcome the challenges with substitutions and workarounds that make any meal possible for anyone. As a foodie businesswoman, I appreciate the development of these hacks so that I can cook more food for more people, but I also have an unspoken rule of don’t push it. Given the parameters of a vegan dessert, it seems like you’re walking right into the line of fire with a cheesecake or custard. When the first 3 ingredients of the non-vegan version are cream cheese, butter, and eggs you know you’re going to taste the substitutions. Yes, it’s been done marvelously by bakeries whose number one job was to develop recipes with workarounds, but I don’t get asked to do this enough times to make it worth the new recipe development time and money. I’m not lazy, it’s just a bad use of my resources.

That’s when it hit me… apple cider donuts—mini ones.

I developed this recipe years ago and it has both butter and eggs, but they are supporting not featured characters. They could easily be replaced without much difference to the quality. And what better time than now to work on a recipe with an egg substitution!

I started with flax seeds, which I ground into 2 tablespoons worth and mixed with 6 tablespoons of water and then let sit for 15 minutes as the mixture thickened a bit. This was the substitution for 2 eggs. The butter replacement was easy with a plant-based salt-free butter.

The dough came together well and I piped two dozen rounds into a mini donut pan. The donuts tasted good, but the texture wasn’t up to snuff. They were crumbly and fell apart when I flipped the pan over.

I left the “lab” of my home kitchen and headed out to the store for some applesauce, the other tried and true egg substitute.

Francis, my husband looked up from the couch where he was nap-reading.

“Where are you going?”

“Fred Meyer. The first batch of vegan donuts didn’t work. They’re too crumbly. It’s applesauce time.”

“Gotcha. See you soon.”

As I wound my way through the supermarket aisles, I got a text.

It was Francis. “What crumbly donuts? I didn’t see any donuts in the kitchen.”

“Haha! I lol’ed in Freddie’s!” I texted back. Which was true. I laughed out loud because Francis isn’t the sugar lover that I am. I was glad he found them and ate a few so I could interrogate him about the flavor.

Back home, I walked into the kitchen to find a completely empty donut pan with a donut-less sheet pan underneath. He had eaten every single crumbly donut I had made!

“I couldn’t stop. I really tried, I swear.” He didn’t look like he had tried at all. He did look satisfied though, so I took that as a sign I was on the right track.

The apple sauce trick of using ¼ cup for every egg in the recipe was even better. Francis was too full of donuts by that point to be an honest judge, but he suffered through a few for love and food science and then a few more just to be sure.

My plight was well worth it, though I know I’ll have to make twice as many apple cider donuts as any vegan mini cheesecakes because they are impossible to stop eating once you start.

Vegan Mini Apple Cider Donuts

Ingredients

• cooking spray or vegan butter for the donut pan

• 1 cup all-purpose unbleached flour

• ¾ cup whole wheat pastry flour

• ¼ teaspoon baking powder

• ¾ teaspoon salt

• 1 teaspoon cinnamon

• ½ teaspoon nutmeg

• ¼ teaspoon ground cloves

• 10 tablespoons unsalted vegan butter, melted

• ¾ cup brown sugar

• ¼ cup white sugar

• ½ cup applesauce

• 1 ½ teaspoon vanilla

• ¾ teaspoon lemon juice

• ½ cup apple cider

Topping

• 4 tablespoons unsalted vegan butter, melted

• 2 tablespoons sugar

• 1 tablespoon cinnamon

• Pinch of salt

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

2. Spray a mini donut pan with cooking spray.

3. In a large bowl, sift the flours with the baking powder, salt, cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves. Set aside.

4. In a medium bowl, stir together the melted vegan butter with the brown and white sugars. Stir in applesauce, vanilla, and lemon juice.

5. Pour the wet ingredients into the bowl with the dry ingredients and stir together until combined. Stir in the apple cider until blended.

6. Transfer the batter into a piping bag or a ziplock bag with the corner snipped off to make a small hole to pipe the batter into the sprayed donut pan.

7. Bake the donuts for 12 minutes.

8. While the donuts are baking, pour the melted butter for the topping into a shallow bowl. In another bowl, mix the sugar, cinnamon and salt.

9. When the donuts have cooled a bit, dip one side into the butter and then dip into the sugar mix.

And here's a clip of me making these mini vegan donuts on KATU's Afternoon Live:

“Just touched down,” I texted my parents, who had flown in from Italy the night before.

My mom texted back, “Since your flight was late, we have to go directly to the restaurant. We’ll see you outside the terminal.”

I looked down at my jeans and gently stained pullover. I touched my hair, unwashed after cooking for 30 people in Portland the night before. I thought I’d get a chance to freshen up at the hotel before dinner, but it had been a stormy October day in Maryland and my flight had paid the price.

“I’m not sure I’m dressed for Sabby’s,” I texted.

Sabatino’s is an old Italian restaurant in Baltimore’s Little Italy and has been a Tucker family haunt for as long as I can remember.

Staring out the window, my eyes lost focus over the airport’s rainy tarmac as I envisioned myself, 6 or 7 years old, excited beyond reason to be taken out to dinner at Sabby’s while visiting my grandparents.

I remember the anxious fuss swirling around Nana and Poppoo’s apartment at Ruxton Towers in Towson as we gussied up for our big night out.

Though he probably wore aftershave, to me Poppoo always smelled like the brown germicidal Listerine mouthwash he obsessively gargled while staring at the bathroom mirror in slacks and an undershirt. Nana probably wore Chanel No. 5 or some other classic scent, but I only remember the department store smells of her Estee Lauder compact and lipstick. That night, I had my straight long brown hair brushed back behind my ears, wearing some forgettable frilly dress they’d bought me at Hochschild Kohn’s with shoes to match.

“Let’s go!” Poppoo barked with his classic Baltimore accent (“Let’s gew!”) as Nana ran feverishly around the apartment, snapping and unsnapping her pocketbook to make sure she had what she needed.

Tumbling around unbuckled in the backseat of my grandparent’s big-ass American car, I tried to zone out as they bickered about finding a closer parking spot. We were excited. It was special to go to Sabatino’s. It wasn’t fancy exactly, but it wasn’t a jeans and stained pullover event. It was a nice outfit “that will be ruined if we have to walk 4 blocks to get there” affair.

But life these days is more casual, I guess. A lot has changed.

“You’ll be fine,” my mom texted back. “We’ll see you soon.”

I sucked on my bottom lip. My uncle Ed had taken my Aunt Barb to Sabatino’s on their very first date so of course that’s where we’d go.

Uncle Ed had passed away the week before.

My parents and I hugged deeply, but only for a second amidst the relentless honking, shouting, and whistling outside the airport terminal.

“To Sabby’s!” we exhaustedly whooped, not able to properly harness the weight of our loss quite yet.

At the restaurant, the host lowered his eyes when he saw my dad.

“I’m so sorry for your loss, Mr. Tucker.” And then to my mom and me, “Sorry, so sorry.”

Many more of the staff were standing in the entranceway of the restaurant and then in the main room, some with tears in their eyes, some looking forlorn, all heads bowed, “We’re so sorry for your loss. Ed Tucker was a great man.”

There’s a burrito shop up the street from our house in Portland that knows mine and my husband’s name from our frequent orders, and over the years there have been a few Chinese restaurants that knew me well enough to marry my name with my face, but I’ve never had a restaurant connection like the Baltimore Tuckers do with Sabatino’s. If I died tomorrow, there’s a possibility someone might say, I wonder what happened to Pollo Burrito Alison, but there certainly wouldn't be any weepy tortilla makers in the doorway. I’m too private or shy or jaded to build a deep relationship with restaurant owners. I feel life just isn’t like that these days.

Someone --was it my grandfather, Henry (Poppoo), or my uncle Ed —loved that extended family feeling and fed it enough to make it grow. I didn’t know my uncle Ed very well. He was an extraordinarily smart man, who often made me feel intimidated, but he had a loyalty to friends and family that was exceptional and a smile that could light up any room. These were rooms he had lit up many times.

We were led up to the second-floor private party room where the local contingent of family and friends had gathered. I squealed when I saw my cousin Lauren, one of my favorite people on the planet, and we hugged until our arms were tingly. I gave my handsome and hilarious cousin Matt a solid squeeze.

“I’m so glad you could come,” said my aunt Barbara, obviously tired but gorgeous in that stripped-down, here’s who I really am way that occurs only in devastating times.

“I wouldn’t have missed it for the world,” I replied honestly.

“Hey, Peachy, we’re going to need some more drinks!” someone said to Peachy, the 77-year-old waitress who has worked at Sabatino’s since the 70’s. “And let’s get some food going too!”

Peachy, nicknamed for her peaches and cream complexion, has a “keep on truckin” attitude, nodding as she jotted the orders down, smiling as she carried 6 plates at a time into the dining room, happily refilling glasses. I’ve met 20-year-olds who couldn’t do a fraction of the work Peachy did effortlessly. She is part of Sabatino’s charm. 50 years of waiting tables in the same restaurant feels both incredibly rewarding and stultifying. I learned later that she’s also a published author of 4 books, so I’ll be shutting the fuck up right about now.

Sabatino’s renowned bookmaker’s salad appeared minutes later.

“With extra dressing on the side,” Peachy said with a wink, as she placed a few small bowls of their famous salad dressing next to the bread baskets for dipping. The dressing has a classic punch of vinegar, a big parmesan umami hit, and tons of oregano in olive oil and I shoveled the smothered romaine leaves, chunks of salami, and cheese into my mouth. Suddenly I was back with my Nana and Poppoo, proud that they didn’t have to beg me to eat salad because the dressing was so good.

Then it was time for the entrees. Peachy placed the baked rigatoni with melted mozzarella and provolone in front of me and I eagerly scooped a heaping forkful into my mouth. It was…oh my…

There is a technique for cooking pasta that few people know. First, you boil the pasta in salted water for about 2 minutes less than you think you should. That gives the pasta a hardy chew that’s still a little rough but has room to absorb the sauce, which is key because perfectly cooked pasta is like a sponge that will soak up all the robustness of flavors that surround the noodles. Right before you add the sauce, and this is the real trick, you continue to boil the noodles for approximately another 45 minutes until they have lost their shape, their ability to play with anything saucy, and their will to live. You’ll find the pasta now resembles white phlegm both in taste and consistency.

This is the cooking method used very successfully on my rigatoni that evening. The loogie of pasta lay on the plate like toxic waste floating in a sea of canned, unseasoned, unedited tomato sauce under a layer of melted grated cheese medley that covered the pasta like a leathery roof shingle.

It was at this moment that my eyes refocused on the room; the yellowed white tablecloths, the carpets stained and frayed, the lighting sconces held together with that high-gloss scotch tape I hadn’t seen in decades.

I was chuckling defensively at my memories and my family and loving the experience more every second. I wasn’t there for the food. I wasn’t there for the room. I was there for the safety of tradition and the people I love.

Now, I know I’ve already given you a pasta recipe, but I like you and I think you could use another.

My Nana had a signature dessert that she made for all occasions. I can see her little ringed fingers shaking as she measured flour into a bowl, her shoulders tense as she whisked eggs with the oil. I have zero recollection of her peeling the apples, which is the only true cooking task of this cake, but peeled they were because she made a million of these cakes over her lifetime. After my trip to Baltimore, I asked my cousin if anyone had Nana’s recipe and she texted me a transcription that someone had written down years ago. I baked it, loyal to each word, and it was… terrible.

This is the moment in this story where I question my family’s judgments and perceptions of taste.

But I ate this cake as a kid and loved it.

The original recipe had no salt, a laughingly small amount of orange juice (1/2 teaspoon!), and only a suggestion of sugar and cinnamon to macerate the apples before they’re put into the cake. One of my favorite things about this cake when I was a kid was that when you pulled a cooked apple slice out of the cake there was a cinnamon fossil left. I thought the form left by the apple was a prize only I knew about and I would secretly dip my tongue into those fossilized apple cake spaces, licking up the cinnamony sweetness.

When I made the first cake, the apples weren’t seasoned enough to create any fossils. So I went back and added some more of everything. It’s not a fancy cake. It’s not the best cake you’ll ever eat, but it is perfect for these days when we all need something comforting.

Nana's Apple Cake

Ingredients

• 6 apples (I used 3 pink lady and 3 granny smith)

• 2 tablespoons cinnamon

• 4 tablespoons sugar

• 3 cups all-purpose flour

• 2 cups white sugar

• 1 tablespoon baking powder

• 1 teaspoon salt

• 4 large eggs

• 1 cup vegetable oil

• ¼ cup orange juice (low or no pulp)

• 1 tablespoon vanilla extract

1. Peel the apples and cut into ½ inch slices. Toss them in a bowl with the cinnamon and sugar. Let sit for 20 minutes for the apples to macerate.

2. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Grease a bundt pan.

3. In a large bowl, stir together the flour, the sugar, the baking powder, and the salt.

4. In another bowl, beat the eggs and then add the oil, the orange juice, and the vanilla.

5. Stir the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients and blend until no flour lumps appear.

6. Pour a layer of cake batter into the bundt pan, followed by a layer of apples. Repeat two more times until the batter and apples have been used up.

7. Bake for an hour and 20 minutes (that's 80 minutes).

8. Let cool. Enjoy!

Here is a clip of me making this apple cake on KATU’s show Afternoon Live.

https://katu.com/afternoon-live/cooking-recipes/alison-tucker-shares-her-nanas-apple-cake

I review the menu I will prepare for the romantic dinner for two. It’s a surprise birthday gift from wife to husband. I cook for parties of two about once a year. I’ve prepared meals for engagements, special birthdays, and anniversaries that have been so beautiful they’ve been life-changing for me as a chef. Those parties of two often become regular clients who hire me to cook for all the big events in their lives.

“I should warn you that some people are very shocked when they come home to find an unexpected chef in their kitchen,” I had warned the wife via email the day before.

“Oh wow! I don’t anticipate anything like that at all! He’ll be thrilled! I can’t wait!”

“Fantastic! It’s going to be spectacular!!!”

In the email language of personal cheffing, the more exclamation points you use, the calmer everyone feels.

At 6:00, after unloading three bags of food, serving platters, and cooking utensils, I ring the bell.

I inhale quickly when a lanky teen with long, straight, jet-black hair, kohl-rimmed eyes, and fingerless gloves answers the door. Then I chuckle, longing for the high school days when my sense of style could make a stranger gasp.

“I’m the chef.”

“Oh, yeah. Come on in,” the goth babysitter sounds intentionally disinterested, grins at my shock, and lets the door swing open while balancing the child on her non-existent hip. “We’ll be upstairs.”

This is my first time in this house, this complex, this particular Portland burb, but I know exactly where to go. These houses are all the same: entranceway with shoes lined up, stairs to the right, living room straight ahead with 2 couches and a widescreen, open kitchen with a little island, and small dining room beyond it. They are always spotless and straightforward, varying only in the family’s choice of Crate and Barrel or West Elm decor.

I know the couple will be home in one hour so I carefully unpack, preheat, refrigerate, simmer, and then unsheath my knife onto my cutting board for any last-minute finessing. The wife said she couldn’t put table settings out beforehand, for fear she’d ruin the surprise, so I snoop and find tableware and glasses that I fill with icy fridge door water. I lay the menus I’d printed earlier on top of the place settings.

20 minutes earlier than planned, I hear a key in the door.

She sings out, “Hi Alison!” when they enter the kitchen through the side door.

He walks in, eyes wide open, momentarily balancing himself on the counter, obviously very confused.

“Hi, I’m Alison, and I’ll be your chef tonight. Happy birthday!” I’m all smiles because that’s my job.

He is not disarmed by my charm.

“What the fuck is going on?” He says to the wife, in a secretly abusive suburban husband sort of way.

The wife extends her arm in a graceful Vanna White introduction manner. “This is Alison and she’s a chef and everything’s fine and she’s going to cook us dinner!”

“Hey!” I add perkily with a toothy smile, trying a more casual approach.

As I said, this kind of surprise is genuinely hard for some people and he’s like a bear discovering an intruder in his den. He’s an average-sized Abercrombie white guy in his mid-30s and he has a rage that I can tell is a frequent guest in their home. At that moment, his eyes are wild, his wife is humiliated, and I hate my job. If it were just cooking, it would be a piece of cake.

Normally I’m catering for a larger group so I’m with my team of trustworthy cohorts.

Not tonight. Tonight, it’s just me vs. Grizzly.

He throws his jacket somewhere, swings an arm wide to open the fridge for a beer, and I realize that he’s pretty drunk already.

“Want one?” He begrudgingly offers as he slumps onto a stool at the kitchen island.

“No thanks. I got myself some water.” I point to a glass of ice water from the fridge door.

“We have bottled water y’know. If you don’t like the kind in the fridge there’s two other kinds in the garage.” I picture his two-car garage jam-packed with single-use plastic water bottles and feel lonely in my conscientiousness.

“No thanks. You’re a little early, but I’ll have your appetizers out shortly!”

“Oh, it doesn’t matter,” the wife replies, making me feel unnecessary.

“I also wasn’t sure if there was a wine or beer that you wanted me to serve with the meal.”

“We have plenty of both.” She says, sounding suddenly furious, not answering my question, and walking upstairs. There is a pause that feels endless.

“How are you doing tonight, sir?”

“I’m a little freaked out, to tell you the truth.” His voice is deep and hard. “We had some drinks with some friends and I didn’t know you were coming. I had a… my brother-in-law… he… well, he cooked here one time and he cooked for hours and made a huge mess all over the kitchen!” He points to the spotless white cabinets and counters.

“I understand. I’m a professional though and I promise I won’t leave your home until the kitchen is spotless.”

“Oh, sure.” He randomly gestures at the oven and almost falls off the stool. “Hey, what kind of music do you like? SIRI, PLAY “DROP KICK MURPHEY’S!” The music jettisons out of the kitchen speaker with so much volume and bass it almost knocks me down. He laughs at me.

Shakily now, I turn to the wall oven to retrieve the bacon, corn, white cheddar gougeres, and lemon arancini and place them on the serving platter next to the goat cheese and drunken fig jam crostini.

Hearing the wife descend the stairs I fan some cocktail napkins and ask, “Would you like me to set the appetizers up here?” pointing to the corner of the kitchen island where her husband is teetering. He has opened another beer so we are not only off to the races, we are rounding another corner.

“Yes, that’s perfect. Oh wow! This looks so beautiful, Alison!” She sits next to him, whispering something that makes his lazy lids widen a bit. He pops a fried risotto ball in the roasted garlic aioli and nods with joy.

Keith Urban warbles through the speaker.

They whisper to each other. All I hear are consonants and exhales. Heads shaking in disagreement. He is upset about me and also about the baby who is wailing now.

“This is the first time we’ve gotten a babysitter and we’re trying to establish a little distance training,” she says softly to me.

“I DON’T AGREE AT ALL.” The husband storms upstairs to calm his son. And hopefully himself.

I don’t feel threatened, but I don’t feel safe.

Eventually, he returns, and they sit silently to salad (for her, as she is a vegetarian) and lobster bisque (for him).

“This is amazing!” he exclaims. “Best lobster bisque I’ve ever had. Hey, where’d you get this lobster anyway? When I buy mine at Safeway it just tastes like bleach.”

Now he and I are friends I guess, sharing shopping tips. And you don’t laugh at friends or humiliate them by saying that fresh lobster isn’t really a Safeway specialty… no matter how tempted you might be.

“I bought this lobster tail at Flying Fish. It’s a fish store in Southeast Portland.”

“Portland is a dumpster fire!” Now he’s shouting. “I would never go into the city. It’s just homeless people on drugs trying to steal your stuff! We don’t ever leave this area. We know we’re safe here.” He slurps his soup with defiance. “This bisque is like crack! Not that we’ve ever done crack. We’ve done some stuff but never crack.”

“Why would you say that to her?” the wife asks, looking horrified.

I consider secretly passing the wife a note that says, “ARE YOU OK??? DO YOU NEED HELP?” but he distracts me with a question.

“Do you know anything about the legal system in Canada?”

My head is cocked like a confused kitten, “Canada? Don’t think so.”

“I got a DUI in Canada after a Blink 182 show last year and I’m not allowed back in that country.”

I’ve heard a lot of things in my 32 years of cooking in stranger’s homes, but this was the most predictable.

“No sir, no, I don’t know anything about any of that.”

I turn back to the stovetop, and he won’t let me cook. I’m searing the filet for him and he’s asking me questions, talking about grilling tri-tip and baking potatoes. He’s coming over to the kitchen to point out drips I haven’t had time to clean yet. I’m roasting the stuffed portobello for her and he’s asking me what my favorite Mexican restaurant is (he offers Taco Bell). I’m roasting potatoes, and answering questions, there’s asparagus too, the sauce, the beans, the plating. I can’t catch up.

I don’t see him turn off the oven, but when I open it to bake the individual chocolate souffle desserts, the oven is almost cold. The souffles fail – I try to save them by cranking the heat which burns the tops. They are inedible. I have failed in every way because I’m terrified of this person who needs to be managed like a little boy.

When I’m done and the kitchen is clean, the wife has disappeared. He walks me out to my car even though I say aggressively no thank you. He gives me a hug that is chilling. I can tell that if I were years younger or a little more attractive it would have been more. I get into my Honda and drive away from this perfectly safe suburb. My hands shake as I hold the wheel-- afraid, angry, powerless.

Hours later, I think, at least I’ll get a good tip or a rave review, as if there’s an amount of money or praise that could retroactively erase the trauma. The wife gives me neither. Not even a thank you. She just venmos the amount on the bill with the date as the comment.

You have to leave it there, you know? There was nothing more to do.

Except realize how lucky I am.

There’s a team of women who work for me as servers. They are strong, smart, and responsible. While most of the time clients are generous and appreciative, I know that my servers have plenty of stories about serving drunken, handsy, entitled asshats like this one.

It wasn’t until I was fully vulnerable that I realized how much I rely on them as my first line of defense. These women create a protective boundary around me when I’m cooking that I take for granted. Ladies, I would be nothing without you. I am beyond grateful for your 5-star service, your ability to smile in the worst of circumstances, and your solidarity.

Since giving thanks is on my mind, here’s a side dish I’ve been working on for Thanksgiving (you can watch me making them on Afternoon Live on the link below the recipe!)

Thank you all!

Hasselback Sweet Potatoes with Maple Allspice Butter

• 4 garnet red-skinned sweet potatoes, scrubbed

• 4 tablespoons unsalted butter

• 2 tablespoons maple syrup

• 1 teaspoon salt

• 1 teaspoon allspice

• ½ teaspoon black pepper

• 1 tablespoon fresh parsley, chopped

1. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.

2. Place the sweet potatoes on a cutting board. Using 2 chopsticks, lay 1 on either side of the sweet potato lengthwise to use as a guide, and then cut 1/8-inch slices into the sweet potato, stopping before you go all the way through. The chopsticks will keep you from slicing too far.

3. Melt the butter, add the maple syrup, salt, allspice, and pepper.

4. Brush the butter mixture lightly onto the sliced sweet potatoes and bake for 30 minutes.

5. Take the sweet potatoes out of the oven and brush again with the butter mixture, this time making sure to brush the butter deep between the slices.

6. Bake for another 15 minutes.

7. Sprinkle with parsley and serve.

And just in case you’d like to make some of the other food I mentioned in this post here are some links:

Bacon, Corn, and White Cheddar Gougeres: https://awonderlandofwords.com/something-for-everyone-or-no-one-featuring-bacon-and-corn-cheese-puffs/

Lobster Bisque: https://awonderlandofwords.com/opening-the-box-in-the-drawer-in-the-safe-in-the-trunk-in-the-ocean-featuring-lobster-bisque/

And here I am making these on KATU’s Afternoon Live: https://katu.com/afternoon-live/cooking-recipes/hasselback-sweet-potatoes-with-maple-allspice-butter