I was what is lovingly described as a latchkey kid. For several reasons—-one, I am an only child and two when I was younger, under 7, we moved to Staten Island so my mother and stepfather would journey back and forth to Manhattan to work. My elementary school was like 3 blocks from home so I would stroll back and forth. When I got home, there would be food left or I could make snacks. Slowly I started wanting something more substantive—-this came from the fact that I have only eaten school lunch maybe a handful of times in a decade of school. My stepfather was a chef so my tastes were high end.
I started begging my parents to teach me to cook and after them seeing that in my adult free time I was going to experiment, they started making rules and parameters for my learning. One, I could only prepare what I had been directly taught by them and my grandmother. This came about when I defrosted chicken, put some oil in the pan and proceeded to make non-crispy, greasy chicken. I didn’t understand how one made fried chicken.
Nor did I understand rice—-which I will say is one of the hardest things to learn and then you learn to do it intuitively—-I got into a huge argument with a live in boyfriend because I couldn't’ explain to him at 30 how I’d been cooking it for decades but couldn't explain how I knew how to cook it. Automaticity!
In a few years I was in charge of coming home, getting the grocery money and going to the supermarket and having dinner reasonably ready by the time they got home from work.
Oddly, it was my father, who my mother married after my stepfather (long story), who thought this so odd and turned the supermarket into a family event—-usurping my role. he came into a family that had roles! After my biological parents separated, we got back to our routine and I was given greater and greater cooking responsibilities.
My mother was a member of AA and they would have annual large parties. One Easter she volunteered to take the collected cash and cook for 75 people that coming Sunday, about 2 blocks from our house.
She arrived home, handed me the money, gave me a deadline and told me to make it varied and dynamic.
I was 15 then and squealed in delight. I of course had a relationship with the local butcher by then so we discussed my budget and needed servings and finally he and I decided I would do a trifecta of chicken wings—-friend, barbecued and teriyaki—-three 40 pound boxes of wings.
Then a strong neutral base—-white rice with butter, scallions; then multiple vegetables—-broccoli with butter, tri greens—-I always do collards, turnips and mustards with a mix of spinach, onions, tri-colored peppers for colors, cayenne for kick and in a blonde roux )a recipe from Emeril Legasse) with an eventual split pan of one with ham hocks and the other with turkey wings. bright corn on the cob, sautéed in butter and 20 pounds of baked potatoes with butter—-4 bags, about 10 potatoes per bag. And several cakes baked from scratch.
My mother and aunt, the three of us roommates, had long since abdicated the kitchen to me, were in charge of getting beverages and ice (from the corner store) there and then corralling the carts to wheel huge trays two blocks. Somehow they managed this minor feat.
I had food for 75 to 100 people ready by Sunday morning.
Behind several long tables of food steaming warm over little flames, a hundred folk lined up to oooh and ahhhed, and my mother, sweat less and in a nice Sunday outfit and huge hat, explained how she’d labored for hours. She side eyed me and paid me handsomely to be quiet.
I’d been doing the cooking and shopping for years—-I ad a relationship with the neighborhood butcher! lol—-so I became the go-to for these huge catered affairs. My mother and stepfather had toyed with catering affairs for years.
New York City
Then after undergraduate, I moved into my first HUGE swanky NYC apartment—-with a roommate—-2 bedrooms, huge dining room, working fireplace! it was enormous so we started planning and throwing seasonal dinner parties.
My roommate eventually went transsexual crazy and spent almost two years hiding in his room, debating the vagaries of identity—but I continued to throw the seasonal dinner parties. I had friends traveling from Pennsylvania and Connecticut to my dinner parties—-so I would do them on 2 days—-Saturday and Sunday—-Saturday would be larger—-say 12 people, Sunday an intimate 4–6. This allowed me to only have to cook 1 1/2 times—-one time I experimented with a beef roast on Saturday then used the rest of it, sliced up into chunks in a mushroom gravy for the Sunday dinner.
There was one time when we invited 50 people in total for the year, thinking like always half would show—-all 50 showed.
There was a power outage in Queens so I was stuck in line at Pathmark for 3 hours so I was 3 hours late making roasted chickens, mac and cheeses (I have a DEADLY 8 cheese mac and cheese, that I make sparingly), veggies, dessert. What this taught me was one, to buy groceries progressively leading up to a dinner party—-like every weekend for 6 weeks.
Two, I now cook only half of the meal—-I cater the rest. From favored delis and restaurants I’ll get like several boxes of Popeye’s fried chicken—-drizzle a honey-cayenne sauce on them, put them in the oven for 5 minutes and then out onto a platter and no one is the wiser.
Or a big pasta dish, of say lasagna sliced out onto a nice platter (nice platters make it look like yours) with a drizzle of parsley and shredded cheeses. A huge platter for salad with tongs—-salad bags mixed together, three bowls of side dressings.. Several roasted chickens cut up onto a platter. What this does is allow me to focus on my blonde roux greens or sofrito rice or recaito rice or gumbo or Osso Bucco—-I make mean Osso Bucco because I let it simmer for 12 hours. I also found this incredible African vegetable stir fry recipe and then a delicious white bean, potato bacon soup.
To The Eye
Social class is that poverty is filling, middle class is to be at value but upper class is to beauty to the eye. To zhuzh a meal up I always try to add color—-simple as peppers that are green, red, orange, yellow added to rice or vegetables to additives like garlic or onions to plain spinach or broccoli. Potatoes or yams I slice and do drizzles of herbs and butter and honey. I generally leave the skins on to make it a bit rustic.
I cook my pasta sauces—-tomato form half scratch—-that means I might add several tomatoes or a can of crush tomatoes or diced to my best sauces—-Rao’s (they are incredible and worth the price)—-so I can stretch a sauce—-by adding lots of colorful peppers, well chopped carrots, garlic, bay leaves, herbs, chunky mushrooms, sausage, then ground beef, pork, chicken so that the sauce becomes like a thick stew with or without pasta.
I have a Ninja 10 in 1 superduper oven now so I’m constantly experimenting with it——rolls, air frying, fast spare ribs.
As a Youth Coordinator/Group Facilitator I was responsible for 3 to 4 meals every week for 40 to 80 guys so I did a lot of the above, supplementing the low non-profit purchasing of food with other foods. Then I did Friday meals for another non-profit and I try to repeat what one of my mentors, Carlene hatcher Polite did for her university classes with my own, ordering a full spread of pizzas and wings for the last class. Unfortunately I’m still sampling restaurants nearby, we don’t have a La Novas, the best ever in Buffalo. (I used to order 100 wings for me, the dog and the cat and we’d sit on the porch just chewing away.) lol
I love cooking, trying out recipes, baking cakes and pies—-my mother would make breads and even croissants from scratch 9which is how I knew the difference between her liking my stepfathers and loving my father! lol) I lobsters and mussels and fish and lamb and I’m eyeing goat and oxtails….soon.
I look forward to big cooking as long as I’m in the mood and like most of the people. For a whole semester I was the featured Sunday chef at Swarthmore College. Years later I would manage the overnight shift of a restaurant but though I toyed with the idea, I didn’t like the whole regimentation and condescension and forced hierarchy of restaurant world so I never pursued it professionally.
Yes, baby, I can burn and I love it. My new fantasy is to learn how to hunt so I can hunt food and then get like a garden and a chicken coop and just be out there hunting up dinner and cooking it up.
It’s kind of good. I was just laying in bed, cuddled with my wealth of pillows and comforters and thinking on what my next moves were going to be. Two books had arrived from the printer (of course there are minor corrections, but that’s to be expected.)
Rewind.
I was on the #5 bus headed up Broadway to the post office to pick up this box of books. And since it was just a short jaunt of a few blocks, I had my phablet and was listening to music but hadn’t brought along a book. So I was thinking.
I was thinking about a past relationship and as I am inclined to do—-getting a little steamed about the thought, person, argument. Replaying it in my head and looking at it from a new angle—-which was spurred by a spontaneous dinner with a colleague a few weeks ago and she’d asked me about my dating life, as we’d talked about hers. I laughingly told her a comment a guy had made, judgmental but complimentary, yet it had taken me a couple of years past the relationship, to realize he meant that he was intimidated by me. It didn’t help that my bus ride, weeks later, was to pick up a book that had included bits and pieces of that relationship, fictionalized.
This is why said gumball was rolling around at the back of my mind. I get to the post office——frightened there will be a long line in the middle of the afternoon—-no line! I wait maybe 30 seconds and hand my slip to the attendant and a minute later have this huge box in my tote bag. I open it in the park across the street and the books are brand new and sexy and pretty and heavy and smell good and when I page flip, the text is crisp and visible.
I start smiling and beaming, overjoyed.
I realized, running mentally through past classmates and friends and folk who wanted to be writers that I’m standing here with more of my books, adding to the passel selling around the world. I’m not just blooming with gratitude and joy, I’m grateful that I’m not living the tortured life of some other folk.
I made a decision over 10 years ago to step out of the matrix known as Corporate America——having done financial work, securities litigation work, a host of things, a strong resume——for education and then used my time to control my schedule and to simply write.
Write, I do.
When I was young, scoring 6,7,8 grades ahead of my own peers on Standardized tests and imagining what I might be interested in, I was writing. I never took my writing “business” seriously so after undergrad I went into companies because they were “serious business”. You get to go up in the elevator and you have a desk—-that one!—-and it’s yours and you decorate it. Eventually I didn’t decorate as much because I was consulting so there were time limits on how long I would be there. I made it a point to not get comfortable. To not make that part of my identity. For about 10 years or so I didn’t know what the alternative to that corporate identity was….because I liked business, liked the intricacy of it, had owned several businesses as a child/teenager.
I even had friends/schoolmates who sailed into CA, never to be heard from again…..until I saw FB pics or them on the street—-fatter, a lot less hair. I realized they had a desk and probably decorated it, perhaps even the Holy Grail——an office—-a room, a little room in a bigger office, that is yours, but not really yours.
But I get to—-write even this blog post—-write a novel most of my working time, my work now taking up about 5 hours of active working. The other 35 is my writing Kyle stuff. I’ve been offered several promotions, could get all ambitious and hungry, and play dirty games……but I can literally feel the days, the hours, when I write less at work. When work takes up too much of my attention away from my Life’s Purpose.
I’m living and creating my Life’s Purpose. Yes, I know when I die, but I often think about what happens if I die this year? To the books? The TV show? I then think in production plans and product plans, I have to make an Exit Strategy plan for me, in case of death.
I used to think my giftedness meant I could do anything, that I could simply focus and learn and master anything—-which I sort of can. Which for awhile provided a whole range of possibilities.
Then I found this one, good thing to do well, very well, and it all clicked.
I’m walking down Amsterdam, swinging my tote bag full of books I’ve written, good books, and I’m beaming like the sun. I start to think of the ex and friends, near and far, and how they’re going to that desk, maybe in an office, inside of a bigger office, and how I’ve made the conscious choice not to.
It’s not what I expected, but I am happier with myself, little ol’ me.
#KylePhoenix
#TheKylePhoenixShow
