FIRE

I think about cooking

Disasters suck.

Wildfires. Hurricanes. Tornadoes. Pandemics. Snowmageddons.

Getting back to normal when the new normal isn’t where you really want to be.

I remember the months after Hurricane Katrina being filled with exhaustion, opportunity, sadness, hope, and perseverance.

Despite being displaced for little less than a month, I felt like I needed to get back to doing the only thing I knew how to do – cook. The restaurant wasn’t going to fully reopen in its previous incarnation without a staff, who all safely made it out of New Orleans before the storm hit -- and, considering the condition of the hotel, where the restaurant was situated. Flooding had subsided just a few blocks away as we anxiously watched on the Google Earth Camera, but a damaged roof allowed water to creep into the building from the roof down, and there was now mold. The hotel soon became a boutique barracks of sorts for contractors, security personnel, and workers of all kinds.

Being up for anything at that point, I got a gig preparing breakfast for disaster relief workers. It was anywhere between 150-250 PEOPLE a day. I would get into the kitchen around 2:30-3 am to put the soup pots on the stove to boil the water in which I would “cook” the bagged eggs. I would make creamy grits too, that would get dumped into a cooler, closed, and sealed with plastic wrap. Sheet pans of frozen biscuits, trayed and baked. Buckets of Instant Sausage Gravy. Tons of pre-shredded Hashed Browns, cooked on the flat griddle with the addition of peppers & onions. And gallons of fruit salad made from jars of citrus segments to which I added diced melons, grapes, apples, and hard-unripe strawberries, reminding no one of the juicy sweet fruit we had been getting from Pontchatoula, LA just a few months earlier.

Thanks to several similarly positioned people's efforts, somehow we eventually reopened as a makeshift breakfast canteen/early evening hot buffet, serving a hodge podge of morning fried egg sandwiches with crispy hash brown patties, cheese grits, fresh fruit, and hot coffee from 7 am to 10 am. I would then run errands, procure foodstuffs, and hopefully take a 2-3 hour nap and shower before heading back to work for the evening buffet. It wasn’t anything special – sometimes I’d make meatloaf stretched with mushrooms and oats, other times it was Green Chile Pork Fideos. Always a salad and dessert, too.

Once I was all cleaned up, I would head home to sleep, waking to a lonely alarm a few hours later and trudging past the National Guard Checkpoints to do it all again.

This was my contribution as we all faced devastation and loss. We committed to each other and New Orleans to do what we could to move forward and rebuild.

It was like that until it wasn’t and I found myself without the kitchen or the breakfast contract. Luckily for me, my business partners, and friends, who had planned to open a Gourmet Kitchen Wares store just before Katrina, were finally able to do so. Not to sell fancy peelers and copper pans but to serve the community that was now inhabiting the new New Orleans. The Savvy Gourmet became different things for many people. It sort of morphed into a hub of hospitality for gathering as people slowly managed their return. Being one of the first businesses to regain internet access, we played host to cops, military men and women in full gear, journalists, and TV crews. Farmers, whose crops had continued to grow post-storm but who had no farmers markets to sell from and no customers to sell to trucked in their collards and turnips, and we brokered them out to the handful of restaurant kitchens serving food. We decided that we could turn this brand-new catering kitchen into a lunch/brunch spot with great food, a strong cup of coffee, and fellowship.

As we soon discovered, the customers we were feeding had lost something more than their homes, jobs, and friends in the flooding, and while they weren’t quite ready to repair, they were ready to share. So we started having Re-Vacuation Fridays. Chefs would Pop-Up with whatever they could find, creating tapas menus and tastings. Strong drinks to match. It quickly became the party NOLA was missing as everyone came to tell their story, commiserate, and mourn, but always with a plate in one hand and a cold beverage in the other.

The Cooking classes that we couldn’t even fathom holding just weeks earlier, with the city in distress, soon became popular weekly gatherings that allowed New Orleanians to escape their weekdays filled with navigating blue tarps and FEMA. The focus of the 4-week series of fundamentals classes I taught was to introduce cooking techniques, building on the week before. The hands-on, 2-hour class was followed by a meal we all had prepared family-style to be served and eaten at the long community table.

The first meal started quiet and awkward as strangers passed around the Creamy Potato-Leek Soup (good practice for knife skills) and the Local Citrus & Beet Salad with Farmer’s Cheese (recipe below for paid subscribers) and Honey Vinaigrette. Once we started eating and talking about how delicious everything was and “when could we learn to make a good gumbo?”, the ice was broken. The next hour was filled with the laughter and tears of good friends who just needed to get out of their trauma and enjoy a well-prepared meal together.

Those classes were good for us all. Many people took the classes every time they were offered that first year. A few students even ended up working in the kitchen during service. For me, the camaraderie in the kitchen and the recipes we cooked for each other buoyed my spirit and allowed me to see beyond some dark days.

I hope the people of Los Angeles find something like this as they rebuild and rekindle the spirit of their community.