My mother hated hosting in a way most women of her generation hated hosting. She felt obligated to do it as the only daughter in the family. She was frantic and underskilled. I would sit in the kitchen behind her while she tried to make things. I learned from a young age how to be useful in the kitchen but still out of the way. A dish washed while standing on a chair. Tasting something and adding salt. Turning on the oven light to see if the dessert was burning (it often was).
My mother hated hosting so much that when she got cancer that would eventually kill her and Thanksgiving rolled around, she ran her hand over her bald head and said, “Well at least I don’t have to host.” Her laughter cracked through a house like mine did. Something we share. Something I learned from her—that women do not have to be quiet with their anger or their joy.
My mother and I are different in far more ways than we were alike. I think that’s why it was hard for her to raise me. Every time I host a dinner party, her ghost haunts me. When people ask me how I learned how to cook, I tell them that I learned to cook by failing. But it was following her around and trying to make things a little better, a little easier, like scraping the burnt top off hashbrown casserole and acting like it came out of the oven that way.
I learned to cook by watching her fail.
I hosted my first dinner party when I was 19 years old in a shitbox of an apartment where the ceiling fan burst into flames and mold hung out inside and underneath the porcelain in the sink. You couldn’t scrub it out. The bathroom door had a cutout for the toilet. Once when I ran my fingers over the clothes in my closet a cacophony of roaches ran towards my hand. It was $500, everything included. I was proud of it. It was mine.
I had a floral glass table that I kick myself for throwing out–it fit 6. So that’s who I had. 6 people sitting in a tiny apartment that overlooked the alley between Pleasant and Grand, roaches hiding in the walls. Simple marinara with tons of garlic, simple salad with lemon and olive oil and good salt, chocolate cake that I slowly bought the ingredients for over a month. BYOB. It cost like $20 all in to feed 6 people something they might not make themselves.
That’s how I lived most of my life in my late teens, bringing teaspoons and measuring out the spices in the bulk aisle, which led a chef to follow me out of the store and ask me if I wanted a job. His eyes narrowed as I put whole spices in tiny bags I had used over and over again and he asked me, “What are you making?”
Without looking up I said, “Garam Masala.” 90 pounds soaking wet, probably still a little drunk.
He said, “What?”
And I said, “Garam Masala.”
When I checked out, the person working asked me if I wanted to get anything else, knowing at that point that I often did. Tiny, fleeting moments of luxury. When apples were on sale and freed up space in my budget or when a spice weighed in as zero instead of .05 (this is why I weighed them separately) or when all the produce together just somehow weighed a little less than I planned. I knew the cost of everything by pound—I knew how to plan. Shallots. Tiny bottles of vinegar. Manchego. Pomegranate. A couple lemons. Sometimes these made their way into my basket when I was under my weekly, measly, budget.
This chef was behind me while I checked out. I said I wanted a shallot and I’d be right back and I was so sorry to hold him up. He just handed one to me, a little bewildered.
When he asked me why I didn’t get it the first time I said, “I didn’t know if I could afford it.”
He knocked on my car window to ask me if I wanted a job in his kitchen. I said no to him. He gave me his number and told me to call. I never did. Some people tell it was a mistake, but I don’t think it was. I think my place is here, in my kitchen at home, making things for the people I love.
I haven’t done laundry in over three weeks. It’s piled high in a room with a shut door. My days have been long–10-12 hours of work–and I just can’t seem to find the space to catch up with the acts of a household. But here I am, standing in my kitchen, cursing over the ratios in the gluten-free vegan chai cake that I am making for my gluten-free and vegan friends.
I should, honestly, be doing other things. I should be fixing my sink, which is peeling away from the counter. Or I should be working. Or I should be wallpapering a wall I’ve been meaning to wallpaper for months. Or I should be installing the toilet paper holder for my bathroom that I’ve had for almost a year. Or I should be taking my car in for the oil change it is 1,500 miles overdue for. I mean, actually, really, truly? I should be washing my hair.
Instead, I am pureeing Carolina Reaper into paste for those who want more heat in their dishes. I am grinding my own masalas. I am chopping 30 onions, 30 garlic cloves, grating 6 pounds of beets, throwing 25 tomatoes into a food processor and liquifying them. I am taking one shallot out of a bowl of shallots and grating it into another tiny bowl.
If I could back in time and show something to my younger self to tell her that she was going to be okay, it would be something like this: a bowl of 9 shallots or the over 120 spices in my house spread across three entire drawers and my fridge or an entire shelf of vinegar sourced from boutique vinegaries in far off places.
It happened slowly over many years, the change from weighing out spices in the bulk aisle to walking into specialty spice stores and getting things like ramp salt or dried thyme from a family farm on the side of the road or special garlic powder from Vietnam. I’m still her—the girl weighing out spices in the grocery store, but I know if that version of me walked into my house today, she would open the cupboards, take out a vinegar that I couriered here from Japan because you can’t order it online, and look at this version of me and say, “No fucking way. What did we do? Did we rob a bank?”
Cooking like this, my brain is empty in a way it rarely is. It’s a gift.
I am working backwards from 6pm on Sunday while it is 2pm on Friday. I am crying over onion after onion. My fingers smell like garlic from peeling the cloves. I’m cursing at beets because my hands are blood red. I am coughing over Carolina Reaper with gloved hands. I am tracking allergies and dietary restrictions and places at my table and I am vacuuming the floors.
The world gets so quiet when I am in my kitchen like this–with nothing but an extravagant meal and a deadline. I can’t tell you how it happened that I learned how to cook well and at scale, just that it did, over many years of failing and failing and failing.
I used to stand in that first kitchen I had and make dishes that weren’t very good, trying not to just follow recipes but make my own. Or sometimes I burnt things, which hurts when you are spending the little money you have on food. I’m self-taught, self-taught self-taught, standing over a stove for hours in the heat of summer making stock with scraps and seeing how high I could push the heat in a dish.
A chef I briefly dated many years ago, before I felt I knew anything about food, watched me make us salad dressing while he made the main course. “Do you have a shallot,” I asked. He didn’t. “Fresh herbs?” Wilted. “Red wine vinegar?” No. “Any wine vinegar?” Probably not. “Honey, maple syrup, agave, anything?” Not a chance—because the kitchens of chefs are full of Kraft mac and ramen and beer and little else. “How far is a grocery store and how long until you’re done cooking,” I asked, my coat already on, ready to do it in the right way. Ready to do it my way. “Okaaaaaay,” he said a little sexy, like he had just learned something about me. “Do you know how to cook,” he asked—I didn’t say yes because I honestly felt the answer was no, so I said no and then when I made him a salad he said, “Never tell anyone you don’t know how to cook ever again.” To which I responded, “It’s a salad.”
One day, I realized I had something decent. One day, I realized I had gotten better.
After I moved home from New York on the tail end of my Big Break Up, I didn’t cook for months.
I kept trying. Kept failing. I stood in front of the stove and could not figure out how to cook for myself. For years, I had cooked for others. The rich women I worked for, who lived on Lake of Isles and thought I could be their nanny and their maid and their cook. My exes. My best friend when she moved in after her husband died. My ex-fiance’s friends who stopped by at 6:00pm randomly for dinner, everyone else chatting in another room while I cooked.
I’m not like the women on House Hunters who want an open kitchen while they host. I want you to go sit in another room and fill my house with laughter while I make you something beautiful in the quiet of my kitchen. I want to get empty, the way drugs used to make me empty, and feel nothing except some goddamn heat–just for a moment.
When I moved back home to Minnesota last February, I kept turning on the burners. I had ingredients set out. I tried to pick up the knives. I would stare at the flame when I lit it and kept putting the knife down, leaving onions on the counter to get hard and die.
The first time I cooked after I moved home was six months after I moved here. For a party. Where I just had to. I just had to cook. Bolognese and pasta and breadsticks and a big salad and chocolate cake. The simplest dinner party—almost identical to the first one I ever threw. But it did what I wanted it to do–it shook me awake. Cut after cut after cut. The sound of oil sizzling. The way a home smells when you’ve been cooking, how the smell of it sticks in your hair.
Still, I can feel yearning when I cook. For someone to cook for, not just these nights, but every night, who will wrap their arms around me at the stove and ask me, “Whatchu making?”
Over a year of parties, my friends and I have assembled a rhythm.
I text them a week before to confirm. Then two days before with instructions (come in the back, you don’t need to bring anything, Mr. Rogers the dog is LYING when he says he wants to be picked up). They arrive around 6:00-6:45pm sometimes with small gifts like flowers, but normally just with tupperware. When 20 people come over, I cook for 40. When 15 come, I cook for 30. I have tried so hard to make the right amount of food and still, somehow, cannot help it.
The first to arrive read a tiny whiteboard that outlines what their first steps are (grab your glass, get a drink, stay out of the kitchen, mingle) and they pass it on to others, telling them what the drink is (tonight jeera soda and rose chai). They pet the cats, they give me a hug. They sit on my couches and talk to each other about their lives. Someone always tries to hang out in the kitchen in the last minutes of meal prep, when everything needs more attention and my mind needs to focus on acid, salt—and someone always gently pulls them into conversation elsewhere.
Someone fills the water glasses. Someone lights the candles. Someone puts out napkins. Someone worries behind me at the sink with a few dishes. It is rare that I run late. Most dinners served actually right at 7:00pm.
I give a spiel. About the food. About what it means. These dishes tonight, what they mean to me is my origin. How I learned to cook on Indian food drilling recipe after recipe not like butter paneer but like beet pachadi. Not like saag aloo but like kohzi aloo. Not like chole but like phaal paneer. So I tell my guests the origin of the food (literally, where it is from regionally in India) and what it means to me and also—that I’m so sorry but I don’t actually know how hot it is, just that it’s hot enough for me to taste the heat so it’s hot. Like here is a part of my heart–like here is the thing that gives me three days a month to feel nothing except fire.
I do it for you, yes; I also do it for me.
We eat. Tonight, someone who hates beets loves the pachadi. Tonight, people talk about how much they love kaju masala, a curry made of cashews, one of my favorite textural dishes in the entire world. Tonight, people taste rajma—simple but rich, with flavors people often don’t associate with Indian cooking. Tonight, someone says the flavors, in general, are more distinct and defined than Indian restaurants—and I tell them why. It’s not me, it’s where, like the reason for that is these Indian dishes come from regions all over India and not just one place we’re used to eating food from night after night. But also that more than one of these dishes is from Kerala—and you probably haven’t eaten Indian food from Kerala. Tonight, people taste Reaper for the first time. Tonight, people sweat.
Someone gets up and clears the plates, unloading and loading my dishwasher. Normally, it’s the same couple, like they’ve adopted this task as their private moment in the kitchen, sometimes teaching other people where the forks go or tonight worrying over my sink and wondering if they can fix the space between the sink and the counter. I walk into the kitchen with everything under my counter removed from it so they can figure out if they can fix it, the two of them standing there like they’re totally innocent of the pile on the floor. They’re also the people I’ll sit you next to if you’re new, full of questions and laughter and curiosity about you.
Forks stay on the table while everything else goes. Coffee or chai or mint tea or some N/A after dinner drink comes out. People help run it to tables or you come up and get it yourself. Tonight, gulab jamun cake sprinkled with rose petals or chai cake with Thattu masala biscuits. Other times, four different types of cookies or blood orange chocolate cake or homemade saffron ice cream atop Persian Love Cake.
I used to tear down my parties alone. Rejecting help. Getting underneath tables and undoing every leaf one at a time.
Carrying 20 chairs into the basement solo (there are 37 chairs in my house). Taking every dish into the kitchen, taking out the trash. Washing the counters. Moving the candles, the name plates, the flowers. I remember the moment it changed, a friend’s hand on my shoulder after a particularly hard month in the dead of summer. She said, “Let us help.” She did not just mean the party, but that’s where it started—slowly letting people in after months of trying to do everything alone.
At this party, she chastises me for carrying my 200 pound grill up the stairs by myself—or the table from the basement for that matter. But sometimes, I just am this way. Sometimes, as a single woman, it is easier to do the thing alone than call someone and ask them to swing by to move a grill. Sometimes, no matter how hard you try, you feel in the way of the lives of other people who have lovers they can call. Sometimes, the road you walk is alone.
It started with just having people move plates into the kitchen and blowing out candles, but it morphed into something else.
Everyone tears down the party together. A moving, breathing thing.
A table goes into the basement, along with chairs. Candles are moved back to the mantle. Some dishes are hand washed. Any moved furniture goes back into its home. People take out tupperwares–or one of my friends brings an entire bag to give you one if you forgot yours–and all the food is gone, new people gently asking if I am sure I do not want leftovers (I am sure—I want to cook tomorrow). Someone takes the trash outside.
The last person out is always the same–has been the same for a decade. Like he can feel that when he leaves, the space I’ve created goes with it. Sometimes we watch TV or talk about the food in detail and he eats bits of leftover dessert and takes photographs of my dogs. We talk about our love lives, about our friendship. When he goes, it is normally around 11:00pm. The first thing I do is vacuum the floor.
Aside from a round or two of dishes in the kitchen, by 11:30pm it is like no one was ever here. Like nothing ever happened. Around then, two of my friends text me questions like, “Can we get you more pink serving spoons,” because I always say I’ll get them and I never do. It is hard for me to say yes, but I do. I say yes.
My friends have created a spectacle of a thing over a year–in which norms and rituals at parties are handed down to newcomers in a way few things are anymore.
When my friends leave, the world comes whirring back.
The pile of laundry, which has grown. The work week, which is still full of 10-12 hour days. The reality of my aloneness–and also the fullness of my house, with so many animals and so many chairs and so many people, but still, ultimately, alone. I try to push it away a little longer.
A long bath with epsom salt. A spiky ball I step on to get into the grooves of my feet which hurt from three days straight in the kitchen. The feeling of cleaning the counters. The ritual of turning off every single light one by one by one. The smell of the air when I take my dogs out one last time.
Tonight, I sit on my front step. It’s a year after I bought this house that is too big for me. The ivy has started climbing the walls of my house again. I should tear it down, but I can’t. It’s so beautiful. I bought this house intending to have two children and a husband I haven’t met yet and like maybe his mom all living here. Maybe it’s unfair since I can’t reciprocate, but it’s a thing I look for in a man: family. Like the thing he was gifted, that I was not, is something I would never take for granted. Like a mother who wants a daughter-in-law to call and talk about the weather would never be seen as an imposition, but a gift. Like the mother-in-law who feels a little lonely and wants to drive up to see us on a weekend would never feel unwelcome, but would be greeted with a dish she loves on the stove.
I was looking for three bedrooms. A basement that could be turned into a mother-in-law suite. I considered the school district. I thought about mornings with an unruly toddler spent around the same lake I took the kids I nannied in my teens. Weeks after closing on my house, I sat in a room with a doctor while she gently suggested that maybe, probably, that dream wasn’t possible. I went home and said out loud into my house, “Well what the fuck is it for then?”
But… this house is special not just for the basement and the bedrooms.
It is house big enough for three dogs and three cats. The basement fits 37 chairs for god’s sake. It is the downstairs floor plan unique enough for a 14 person dining table every damn day. It is a house capable of running a U shaped table spread of 40 people for my dream Thanksgiving party. It’s special for the deck that can fit 15 people and a 66 inch grill. It’s the parking on the street, which can actually hold 40 cars in South Uptown no problem. It is a tiny shitty kitchen that will one day get knocked down and blown out into the living room. I’ll have an eight person island so you can sit and talk near me while I cook. I’ll have triple ovens. I’ll have an industrial sized fridge. I’ll have a real pantry. I’ll have open shelves like at a bar full of vinegar, so I can tell you about the vinegar. I’ll have a 10 burner Viking. I’ll have a goddamn vintage malt machine.
I bought this house for two children and a husband and maybe his mom, but on nights like this, sitting out on my steps with a Masala Biscuit and a jeera soda, before the world whirs back, I feel like maybe I actually bought it for this feeling. I feel like maybe I actually bought it for you.