Workhorse

An Essay where I Write About My Kitchen, but Feels More Like I am Writing about Myself

I’m doing kitchen research + prep for #thanksgiving today for our usual non-traditional tradition: yakitori. (I’ve been saving chicken skin in the freezer since last December)

Thanksgiving will be like this: About 25 people, some kids + dogs. People pitching in to grill on the yakitori grills. Food on sticks. The smell of smoke, hot chicken fat + burning bichotan. It’ll get too chilly. Back doors wide open. Inside is outside. Outside is inside. We’ll put on sweaters. Start a bonfire in the pit. No silverware. We’ll eat with our fingers. People will have to lick them. No one will mind.

A turkey we didn’t kill this year will stomp and pop around the backyard, showing off his feathers. Tom is a proud boy.

I just got the Robata: Japanese Homecooking cookbook (@sushisilla) which is giving me new ideas. I make lists for tares, sauces, condiments and pickles. All the lists are made with a specific black flair tip pen, in a special hard cover book that makes notes on each dinner party, what worked, what didn’t, what we will try again + how it can be re-made. Lots of notes everywhere + things taped in. The books live in stacks categorized by their year.  They are the closest thing I have to diaries. 

My kitchen is a workhorse, a place for creation, for fighting, for slow kissing my husband, for working shit out, for hiding from the kids, from the doorbell, from anyone who wants to talk to me. It’s for boiling the hell out of a thing + then doing it again, gentler this time, more thoughtful. Patience, Kim. Calm the fuck down.

My writing tells me how I feel. 

My cooking tells me how I feel. 

My kitchen knows how I feel. 

My kitchen is on-your-feet meditation on what dinner + family + community can become. This is not an aesthetic kitchen made up to look nice for IG. This kitchen, she - she is a she -  is a steam engine, clumsy + potent. She is complicated + overwhelmed + highly inventive + conscious + pushing, always pushing. Then, resting, a tumbler of tequila on ice, elbows on the butcher block, alone cause she likes it dark + clean + silent. She likes to have done it more than doing it. Everything done + put up. Tidy. It won’t last, she accepts that too. She adapts. 

The kitchen + the cook adjust. 

She’s the center of the house. But she’s not always pretty. Dear God, she can be a mess. This kitchen gets crammed with people + cooks + people who probably should never cook who rummage through things in the night kitchen, leaving crumbs + discarded dishes for me the next morning. The kitchen secretly loves this. She looks after my teens, while I sleep. She is patient while they wade through the pantry + the freezers to tell them what they want to eat. She waits while they feed themselves + leave traces of what they ate everywhere, on counters + floors. The kitchen loves being full. All the time. Her lights are dimly lit all night. She is 24/7. On demand. But because of this fullness she always needs organizing + cleaning out, putting back together. Shit breaks down. Someone is putting something in the back of the fridge in some container + leaving for me to find, not in time.  Way too late in the game. Fine. 

A kid flies on the handle of the fridge. Snaps it. 

Another slams the freezer door. Busts it. 

Someone left a pan on the burner. Smoke alarm. New pan. 

I just bought small bowls, why do we no longer have any small bowls? For warm rice and a softly fried egg on top that I can crack open with the back of a spoon that slides through yolk like a katana splitting a melon clean?

My kitchen does not like to make chicken nuggets, or mac and cheese, or anything that involves the microwave or is overly simple or needs a box, a cup of water, an egg + glug of oil to make it come to life. She bitches about that. Furiously. Holds it as a deep deep resentment, which I feel for her everyday when a child asks me earnestly to make one of these items for them. As they do. I end up slamming the microwave door just a little too hard. I stew about it over the washing of the dishes.

She murmurs softly around me. She gets me. She knows.  

My kitchen is a living, growling beast. A work horse. 

A dark horse.

 I love her. 

Today, David will come home from LA and in the morning, without me, he will make himself eggs in the small pan he always uses. He will do it the way he learned from Gordon Ramsey, salt at the end only. And then his own twist, a little labneh to finish, to make them creamy. Carrot top pesto for the garnish. I will smell the eggs and know he is home. I will know it is real by the cooking. I have missed him.

Then, we’ll plan for Thanksgiving. It will be a divine, imperfect coming together of lots of people we love. The cook + the kitchen are thrilled + ready.