Feeding for Keeps

I think the way most chefs cook is a lot like the way some people tend to date.

Now personally, I love the “one night stands” of the dining world: those meals made for you by chefs who know that you will only eat their food once, and they want you to remember it forever. In my experience, every plate that leaves their kitchen is generally a beautiful little franco-american lovechild with an extra scoop of animal byproduct nestled somewhere between its chubby folds. These meals strive to shatter flavor ceilings and pull out all the stops to accomplish this. They often succeed.

And many a time, I have lived for these meals.

With one night stand cooking, a chef tends to only consider the immediate impact-fulness of their work, and rarely the eventual consequences of it. We want it to be the best food that our diners have ever had, and because of this, we will do things that we wouldn’t normally do every night. I’m not feigning innocence in this space either. I’ve done my fair share of one night stand cooking. And I can tell you, you end up breaking so many of your own rules in the process that if you were to eat that way every day for a year, you’d probably get fat and die. (I mean, you’d definitely die lusciously well fed, but still… totally dead.)

There’s an old saying that goes “never trust a skinny chef”, but some of the best chefs I know are also the thinnest. So many people look at me after eating my flavor-packed food and teasingly say, “How do you not weigh a thousand pounds?” (which quite frankly is the equivalent of asking someone who you just had fantastic sex with, “How are you not a prostitute?” #rude)

I do not weigh a thousand pounds because, like many chefs in my age group, while I love food, my one night stands with it are rare, my cooking is cleaner than most, and my lifestyle is anything but sedentary.

(Also I love food on a totally different sub-level than most of the general population seems to bother with; food and I have been healthy partners in crime via the garden for a very long time.)

And this is where it gets interesting. Because there is a “long term relationship” equivalent that you can have with a chef, but it doesn’t happen in their kitchen… it happens in yours.

When I’m cooking for someone for one night only, I’ll try to show some restraint in terms of the richness of my menu, but if I want to incorporate a bucketful of butter or bacon or cheese, then I do. After all, it’s not my duty to make sure that my diners take care of their health. They are in and out in a few hours and full of food, and if I’ve done my job well, then the meal that I’ve fed them will be fondly looked back on someday, or compared to many other things that they’ll eat for the rest of their life.

But when I’m cooking for the same someone multiple nights in a row, it is absolutely my duty to make sure they take care of their health. In fact, because I am responsible for determining what they put into their bodies on a daily basis, taking care of their health is literally the definition of my job.

So I feed them as much real food as possible, because I want to keep my job, sure, but also because over time, I develop a relationship with them... and I start to care about their physical wellbeing.

I have more invested.

I want them to stay happy and healthy and alive.

And for my expression of love, through cooking, to endure weeks or months or years with someone else, it has to be slow, steady, consistent, deeply nourishing on an almost cellular level, and not leave the people I’m feeding feeling guilty afterwards, or worse, still hungry.

Because they have decided that they want to eat more than one meal with me, and I get the chance to wake up the next day and do it all over again.

There’s an implicit level of trust that comes with being a private chef. You learn a lot about people’s relationships with food, and themselves, and the world around them… and you learn a lot about yourself too.

Like how you might have a skewed perspective on what you think people want, yet your own personal defaults for cooking and eating from the markets and the garden are exactly what the rest of the world needs more of in their lives.

I truly believe in fresh, whole, real food.

I believe that the best ingredients need little adulteration, are inherently the most nutritious options in their purest forms, and I love cooking for people who share a similar perspective.

I believe in doing everything within my power to not waste ingredients “just because I can”, and will squeeze two or three uses out of something before it ends up in the compost pile, because as a gardener, I know the level of work that went into producing it.

I believe in taking the time to get to know your food better, and doing the extra bits of work required so that all of your ingredients are kept as pure as possible.

And I believe in finding the joy in experimenting with dietary restrictions in the same way that one might with new and different cuisines, because learning all the things is awesome, and at the end of the day, everyone deserves to feel both comfortable with and satisfied by what they put in their mouth.

So I guess what I’m saying is… I’m not really looking for one night stands anymore. I’d much rather play a positive, loving, and long term role in someone’s dietary life, than help encourage them toward an early grave.

(After all, sometimes the best you’ve ever had is actually the one you get to consistently have.)

…plus, we still always manage to eat dessert. ;)