Life-Changing Latkes, Pt 2

Ep 4: Following her painful latke pop-up, Dori reflects on the role of food and cooking in her life, and the people who influenced her most. She comes to some crucial realizations.

NOTE: YOU'LL FIRST WANT TO LISTEN TO LIFE-CHANGING LATKES, PART 1 

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Transcript

Reflecting on my holiday pop-up. I don't know, I feel kind of empty. I wouldn't call the venture a failure. I did sell lots of latkes, which made many people happy. And I raised a good amount of money for my local community fridge organizations that I volunteer for, but it was a real letdown for me on the joy front. 

I know I might be investing too much emotional energy into one event and not thinking about the long game, but I don't think so. My gut tells me that an irreversible shift happened this past year and really for the two years of the pandemic. And that it's about more than latkes.

Welcome to Life-Changing with Dori Fern, a podcast about the messy middle between when you hit pause and what comes next. I'm Dori Fern, a single empty nester in Brooklyn, New York who quit a corporate job at 55 on a quest to live a more purposeful exceptional. I don't know, happier life. I'm figuring it out as I go along.

But as my high school drama teacher used to say, the trip is the trip. I hope you'll join me.

I've loved to cook my entire adult life even way back in the late eighties and into the nineties. When it wasn't something most college-educated feminists I knew enjoyed doing. When I turned 18, I'll never forget the moment when I looked up at the skyscrapers from where I stood at my high school on 46th street, between sixth and seventh avenue in Manhattan.

And I said I'm never going to diet again. And I guess I think of that as the beginning of my cooking days in a way, because learning to cook was at the beginning, it was a way to heal from my teenage dieting and a compulsive eating disorder. Cooking was a vehicle to take back everything I loved about food and give me authority over how and whether I enjoyed it, no more dieting, no more scarcity.

I would learn to like the few foods I thought I did not because cooking them to my taste would give me a sense of abundance and it would expand my options in a way that I hadn't allowed myself to experience before. After I had kids cooking was not only a way to nurture and show love. It was if I'm being honest, a distraction from engaging in the motherly things that I prefer not to do, including giving my kids enough undivided attention.

I noticed this in my first episode, too, how I cook to avoid working on this podcast because it was easier for me and produced relatively immediate results. So I guess that's a pattern. My mother and my grandmother were not my culinary inspirations. They were fine cooks, but very practical-minded. Both had full-time jobs, and as was the fashion in those days, they took any and all available packaged shortcuts to get meals on the table. My grandmother's brisket with onion soup mix was a family favorite. And my mom was known for making shake and bake two ways each week, once barbecue and once regular, both chicken. My first glimmer of the joys of traditional home cooking came from my neighbor Dinah Stern.

Dinah was a slight and soft-spoken Jewish mother, an earlier-era housewife who always kept her candy bowl full. She would babysit my brother and me sometimes. I took great pleasure in watching her, make her a baked rice pudding and other traditional fare from scratch. When I was a teenager, she showed me how to make a chocolate pudding pie, pressing the Graham cracker butter into a pie tin with my fingers like she showed me. 

Then at 16, my parents split and Larry came into my mom's life and mine. Larry was a former restaurant chef who got out of that rat race for steadier work in healthcare, food service, which is where he met my mom at the nursing home where she worked. And later he opened his own locksmith business in the Poconos where they moved.

There was nothing my soon-to-be stepfather didn't know how to cook, while my actual father watched what I ate and told me that the snack cakes he caught me sneaking from the pantry were for my brother, not me. It was a revelation, if not an entirely guilt-free one, to have this new and, I thought, improved father figure in my life.

I would realize over the years that my beloved stepfather and I shared not only a love for cooking, but that we also shared that compulsive eating disorder in common, and also that the risky, not yet mainstream gastric bypass surgery, he opted for like a backroom abortion in 1969 to fix his morbid obesity, itself a by-product of his own childhood trauma, would also be responsible for just about all of his terrible medical wounds. As I sit here, he lies breathing barely in a Delray Beach, Florida hospice under his heart stubbornly refusing to stop his life with his best friend and great love, at its end.

This is another story. 

Timing may not be everything, but it sure does reflect how we do or don't see the world and its possibilities. Before I met Anna Klinger, chef and owner of Park Slope's al di la I didn't know any women chefs around my age, college-educated who cooked and ate like I liked to. One of the very first restaurants that opened in the early days of Brooklyn's 21st-century restaurant Renaissance, I wrote about their 1998 opening for time out New York.

The thought that I too could one day cook in restaurants, crossed my mind for the first time. But by then I had a two-year-old daughter and I was a very part-time freelance writer and full-time stay-at-home mom with a husband making a journalist's modest salary. Even after I did a cooking extra and ship they're seven months pregnant, huge, enormous with my son in the sweltering, summer of 2000.

I couldn't figure out how to make this low-paying, long hours career work with the life I was living. I'm very sure I drove a lot of people crazy over the years. Not least of which were my kids and then husband circling around how I maybe, possibly could become a chef. But every time I moved a couple of steps ahead, I'd hit a wall and bounce back to my reality.

So when I talk about that magical mantra, keep moving forward. In episode two its resonance for me is really a direct response to this kind of dizzying spin and retreat.

After my husband and I split up at the start of 2006, I was very fortunate to land an excellent career-building job at AOL. After a decade home, by the time I left there, I was the editor of AOL food and living. And this led to my next job as senior editor at Meredith corporation, working for their internal agency on the Kraft foods, Food & Family recipe website.

I even went to culinary school while I worked there less to become a restaurant chef or so I told myself and more, because it was a way to dip my toes in the culinary water without a commitment to change the rest of my life. These were the hardest nine months of my life working full time, going to culinary school nights and weekends, and the rest of the time doing mom duty.

But it was also the most exhilarating. I wrote a blog called she's fried to Chronicle. This time still lives on the internet. If you care to find it, once it came clear to me that any job in food service would pay me far less. And the more I knew about the perils of restaurant work and the hard differences between home cooking and running a professional kitchen just made it hard to justify changing my entire way of life and my ability to support my children and myself in the manner I wanted to continue doing.

But I've realized every decision I did and didn't make in those days was wrapped up in guilt in a sense that I wasn't doing enough to live my so-called purpose. It's only right this very second that I realize that I've redirected that old diet mentality and a compulsive sense of not enough from my youth and to my adult life choices.

I did successfully build great expertise in all things, food and cooking, but it was all the things that I didn't have that I wanted more, but there's no going back. And looking ahead, I wonder where cooking will fit into my life. Once we've settled into a new COVID normal, whatever that looks like.

Those Life-Changing Latkes of mine will be back this holiday season, I'm sure, in one form or another. Maybe I'll scale down and just go back to having my party again, assuming I get past the exhaustion of socializing with anyone for more than a couple of hours by then. Maybe I'll still produce a limited run of latkes for sale and to donate the money.

But this year I'll get some help. The joy I get from cooking is partly in the art and craft of it and the way it focuses my attention on creation, the other part, the feeding, the nurturing that's the purpose stuff that resonates for me now channeled through food or not. Cooking I realized has more than anything been a gift to myself. It's taught me a way to take care of people, to connect with them, to make them happy and to help them thrive. It's all starting to come together. This life of mine bit by bit and right on time. Thank you for listening to Life Changing with Dori Fern. I hope to see you again, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Bye.