That empty feeling

A couple times in writing this blog, I have described my house as the house of leftovers, and often that's a good thing, but there is a dark underside to that situation too, which is that if there are leftovers then there are no people to be eating my cooking. The last few days, looking at buildings for my illegal restaurant/subscription supper club, and plotting the first dinner (May 19, first appearance of the G. Dead at the Carousel Ballroom in 1965) the fear of having no one to cook for has been in the back of my mind. That's the sad side of the house full of leftovers.

I really thought about this (and wrote about it in the very first post to the blog) when I read the beginning of Nigel Slater's Kitchen Diaries, where he says something about the right food at the right time - and throughout the book, Nigel always seems to have someone, or several someones, to share the food that he makes with - he is not real forthcoming about his domestic arrangements, sounds like he lives with at least one other person, but he always seems to be having the cook's joy of preparing appealing food and having people right there to eat it, when it's ready. I only hope it works out so well for me!

I was the cook at a co-op women's dorm at the University here for almost 6 years, and I know that one reason that I stayed so long was because it was just so much fun to have this constant supply of eaters for the meals I prepared; to be cooking the everyday food for a large group. And, in many ways, it was the best job I've ever had - I got to cook all day, and no one cared what I looked like, what I wore, how many hours I worked, or when I showed up, so long as the meals were on the table, it was stuff the kids liked (that was the trickiest part - think about the varied tastes of 50 young women ages 18-22), and I stayed within the budget - and it turned out that my practices of making food from scratch - I baked bread, made soup, cut fresh vegetable, peeled real potatoes, and used very few processed ingredients - kept the costs low.