2.27 Interview with Brigette

Background info

Published in

Team Rice

3 min readMar 1, 2017

36 years old design school professor, 1 brother, 10 month son Jack, husband is a financial adviser, parents both work in food industry (chef/waitress), lived in Pittsburgh for 8 years
food is a large part of her family culture, and is always a positive one
they prefer home-cooking and fresh food, and think food taste better at home, they don’t eat pork

Cooking is equally a creative process for her like design, except she doesn’t feel the pressure as she feel from her professional practice.
She likes the challenge/adventure of exploring and creating new things in a short time, and sharing the outcome right away with others.

Before their son is born, food is a big part of their relationship. They used to go brunch and grocery shopping together at the strip district every Sunday. The trip was more of a experience than task. They would try a variety of food, and would stop to get coffee.
They eat out 2–3 times a week and love to go to new restaurants.
They enjoyed building relations around co-cooking. They cook together at home 3-4 times a week. They learned how to work around cooking, and have roles acted out: husband chops all ingredients/gets all tools/pile dishes in sink, and he is good at making salmon and salad; she does everything else. She is a multitasker, he can only do one thing a time.

Current Situation

Everything is about Jack, relations with food becomes secondary/limited. They don’t have time to care what they eat when Jack is awake and needs to be taken care of. She can count by one hand the number of meals uninterrupted by Jack.
She plan the same thing for every meal for the entire week. 80% grocery shopping done by husband because he works next to Giant eagle. He buys the same thing every time.
When she is away for work, she eats in the car a lot. There is one particular convenience store on her way to school, where she buys horrible breakfast. Her husband eats same Panera bread every lunch. Her mom would bring leftovers to her husband.
They still eat together 4 times a week, but there is no enjoyment. Jack’s left overs, microwave burritos, frozen chicken, or order take-out.

Initiatives

Her and husband appreciate he mom (Jack’s grandma) comes 3 times a week to help them cook dinner. They try to have a big family dinner every Wednesday, which made the family member relationship much closer.
When Jack takes a nap, she would have time to prepare with something she likes. When Jack is not present, she tends to enjoy food a lot more, and become more aware of the sensory satisfaction brought by food.
She just came back from Barcelona, where she took a cooking class, and enjoyed the creativeness of cooking.
She makes chocolate chip cookies for her husband and Jack because she loves them. Also because her husband tasted the cookies made by her mom, and think it is the best cookie he ever tasted, so she wants to compete with her mom, and makes equally good cookies for the family.

She and her brother grow up with her mom’s cookie all the time. They make cookies every Christmas and at the beginning of each school year. By making cookies, it reminds her of her childhood and her mom.
It is her mom’s chocolate chip cookie recipe, not hers or her grandma’s. It is the perfect chocolate chip cookie, and she feels that she has the responsibility to learn that, and that would make her mom happy.
She cannot use the recipe online because the taste is just not right every time she attempts to follow the online steps. Her mom uses a old porcelain cup for measurement, so she has to transfer this unique measurement to standard cups.

“mom I made the cookies half-burned.” “I told you you can’t step away from the oven. It only takes 8–9mins per batch. It has to be the perfect color. Maybe you can have a glass of wine, but you can’t leave the kitchen.”
“mom the cookie tastes too fluffy, what’s wrong?” “You put too much flour in.”