Many of you know I love to cook. I have 14 types of salt in my house and a liquor cabinet’s worth of different flavored vinegars and honey. I’m constantly researching and trying new concepts just to learn about different dishes, ingredients and techniques. I hate recipes, and my friends will tell you, I also hate crockpots. Recipes and crockpots stifle all the creativity out of me.
I like to make complicated, layered, time-consuming dishes that you have to plan out and “tend to” for an entire day. I work to plate the food beautifully, at just the right angle, drizzling imported oils and fancy finishing salts, placing edible flowers and herbs over it with forceps, pretentiously. Then I take it one step further and take pictures of it all, but let’s qualify that most artists don’t get their creations eaten immediately after completing them. I take photos to remember my masterpieces.
I know. I hear you…
Food Snob.
My friends roll their eyes, but they’re also afraid to make too much fun of me because I might stop inviting them to dinner. And lets be honest here, who benefits the most from my epicurean adventures? They’re not idiots.
Sometimes I spend an entire day in the kitchen, creating. I like the challenge. It’s soothing, it’s comforting, and it’s therapeutic. Chopping is like playing an instrument for me, completely calming. After a few hours, I’ll burst into my husband’s office cradling a spoonful of something and shove it in his mouth and watch him chew, nodding in anticipation. “It’s so good isn’t it?” and off I go back to the kitchen. The man doesn’t even like food. He tolerates me.
I rarely get invited to dinner at other people’s homes. People are honest, “I’d love to have you over but I’m too scared to cook for you.” Which makes me sad because I don’t expect anyone to look at food as seriously as I do. It’s my craft, my outlet, and I don’t sit at someone’s table as a NY Times food critic. I think people would be surprised at how good I find food tastes when someone else cooks it for me.
All food snobbery aside– true confession here–some of my favorite things are the simplest, most unimaginative foods. Yes, my palate and my approach to food might be refined, but if I’m sick or I’ve had surgery my mom will sometimes bring me a meatloaf and it’s sublime (that’s a big word with us food snobs). At that moment there is no better meal.
In the summer, a good tomato will bring a tear to my eye, and I grow them just to have that 3 minutes of joy dripping over the sink. I love McDonald’s, and I’ll run you a foot race for one of their little cheeseburgers or a Filet-o-Fish, and another true confession here: I drink it with a Hi-C Orange, like a four-year-old. My favorite snack in the world is Fritos and a Slurpee. The guys at my old job brought me KFC for lunch on my birthday once because they knew I loved it. I might be accused of being snobby about food, but I can eat down and dirty with the best of them.
I wasn’t born into food snobbery. I grew up on biscuits, cornbread, dried beans, sweet tea, Shake-n-Bake chicken, and fried pork chops and gravy. The only herbs I ever saw were dried. I thought cherries only came in Shirley Temple’s and asparagus came out of the can. We ate Vienna sausages (pronounced vi-eena) and our spaghetti with saltine crackers. There was no beef demi-glace or red wine reductions. We ate ketchup on our pot roast. We were not fancy people.
One of my favorite guilty pleasures, and I say guilty because society labels it that, I honestly don’t feel guilt associated with food at all–is a good baloney sandwich. Not bologna, I don’t know what that is.
About once every year or two I will have a yearning for a big baloney sandwich. And yes, on white “trash” bread, which is written in the baloney handbook somewhere as a requirement. I want a thick piece of baloney—thick as a spiral notebook– a slice of one of my tomatoes, some lettuce, mustard and copious amounts of mayonnaise and if feeling really indulgent a slice of “disadvantaged” cheese unwrapped from it’s plastic film. You know the one.
There is nothing fancy or food snobbish about a baloney sandwich. It’s basic. It’s overly processed bits and pieces of parts we don’t want to know about, all overly salted and that first bite probably causes a cholesterol flash flood in our arteries, but I don’t care.
For that next fifteen minutes I don’t care as much as I should that my tummy feels a little bit like a cat bed, because I’m transported to a moment in my school lunchroom or my childhood kitchen eating on the yellow daisy plate accompanied by an enormous can of Charles Chips, and in 1973 I was probably washing it down with Hi-C Orange.
My daddy loved baloney too and when it was in the house we both relished the delicacy much to my mama’s chagrin. She was not a fan of baloney. Or sandwiches. Or anything you ate with your hands. And she still isn’t, just invite her over for tacos and watch. It’s a traumatic event for her and she’ll have to lie down afterwards.
She’d succumb to frying a piece of baloney for Daddy once in a while when she was feeling generous, but mostly she just wanted the package to be eaten so she could stop smelling it. I always liked mine just the classic way, cold on white bread.
Granted we’ve learned a lot about nutrition now that we shouldn’t ignore, especially those of us with little cat bed tummies, and I still enjoy my “frustrated connoisseur” approach to food so I won’t be eating a baloney sandwich every day, even every year. But every once in a while this self-proclaimed food snob is happy to put down her kitchen forceps and just go back in time where the nostalgia is more flavorful than any edible flower ever hoped to be even with a sprinkling of fleur de sel de Camargue.