The Smell of Failure

September 21, 2023September 21, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 2 Comments

Write about your most epic baking or cooking fail.

Anthony Bourdain hit rock bottom, and afterward he got a gig as a brunch cook. Therefore, in “Kitchen Confidential,” one of my favorite lines was that “hollandaise was the smell of failure.”

I believe that for entirely different reasons.

I had to clean the egg pans with lemon dish soap for a while at my own brunch gig. It ruined the taste of Hollandaise for me permanently. Not enough Old Bay in the world. Jesus could come back, bless it himself and I’d still be all like, “nahhhhh, fam….. you go ahead.” But I would have made him the best Hollandaise he’d ever had even if it was just the first. I can cook the things I don’t like, too. I’ve never done liver and onions in my own house, though my dad and stepmom have served me fois gras at theirs. It’s not that I can’t put up with the taste so much as the smell of it while it’s cooking. Smell is primal with me. Bad ones make me throw up at their memory. I know that I would have eventually learn to cope if I’d been a doctor, but I would have thrown up at a lot of things first and second year.

I will try something even if I don’t like it, so the fois gras had its excellent points, especially the raspberry jam against the perfect crispness of the liver. I just can’t get over the taste and smell of iron no matter whether it’s Luby’s or Le Pigeon.

It would be great if my greatest epic fail was throwing up into a stock pot and having to start something over because of the smell. It’d really tie the room together. But no. I was talking about how cooking informs the rest of your life before I get down to the nitty gritty. Plus, I’m ADHD, and every thought comes with bonus content.

I want you to know that I know what I’m talking about even when I’ve come across as a dumbass to chefs. I can describe it better than I can do it, just like Bourdain. He was a journeyman in the kitchen, a chef in the New York Times. His logical mind was in the kitchen while his heart poured onto the page, just like me….. unique on the page and mundane in my technique. But my creativity in writing comes across in new ideas rather than how many covers I cook for that night. I read recipe books like novels because I am not going to follow them. I’m going to look at spice combinations and see if it works in some dishes, or reference how to braise something because I can look at what part of a recipe matters and what doesn’t. What concepts will translate and what has to be specific. For instance, the instructions in how to get a medium rare on a steak with a cast iron skillet is useful in braising, period. You cannot take a Japanese palate and mix it with a Russian’s without studying its components and adjusting. For instance, I think Russians/Finns/Ukrainians et al would love salted licorice mixed with fruit, but at what ratio? I would imagine it would be a lot of fruit and a tiny bit of Aquavit and a whole lot of fruit.

In cooking, you have to know which flavor is going to be dominant ahead of time to save it when you’re cooking. I already know that peach works with licorice because I had a frozen drink called a Greekarita that fulfilled my life’s dream, the apex of mixology. And for the Russians, it was vodka. I do it because I love you despite your dickhead of a ruler. I am sure that during the Trump years, you thought the same about us. That’s how cooks dressed as spies can change the world. People telling others to stories who can actually do something if they’ll open up vs. the fear of getting caught and tortured. Very few people in Russia are that courageous, and those Russians absolutely saved our lives. I think about that a lot. I have the same relationship with the Russian people that I do with my chef. I’m friends with the other people on the brigade because even my worst enemies wouldn’t let me fail on purpose. We are not united in brotherhood all the time, but we’re united in trying to be the best at our jobs. It’s good we compete. You get better food.

The thing about “even your worst enemy won’t let you fail” is bullshit when someone actively wants to get rid of you. The bond comes from how you treat each other outside work. If someone fucks up and you can’t get over it to the point we can all have a beer later, it takes a lot to get that trust back. Getting on another cook’s shit list isn’t good because it spirals. They take a negative inventory and it affects how they talk to the people who actually can hire and fire you. They prove your incompetence out of revenge, because the kitchen is a meritocracy and you let someoone fail. It’s not out of malice. It’s that you let them down. In some cases, you’ll never be able to save their ass in a way they can see it. That shit happens, and it’s not personal. It’s how people survive chefs like Ramsey. Even when he’s as angry as he pretends to be on TV, I have no doubt that he’s beloved because he’s not angry when he’s not under pressure.

This is what leads to my most epic fail. We were busy and I had to work with the person that sexually harassed me and the owner of the restaurant, who had no cooking experience at all. She didn’t pick up that I was nervous because of the sexual harassment, and criticized me at every chance she got because she didn’t know shit about timing and would blame me for being slow on a ticket that came in 30 seconds ago and needed 10 minutes to cook. The sexual harassment guy and I got into a rhythm where he’d drop things into the fryer and I’d pick them up. Because the owner thought I was lazy anyway, the one time he didn’t was the last straw for her, even though she was the least experienced at being a cook and the most at being a horrible boss. She couldn’t keep a chef more than 15 minutes, contracted out the food, and still managed to tank that before closing the food side altogether. She didn’t know me, didn’t see me when I was on my game. She judged me on the one night she had to pitch in after not firing the person who sexually harassed me because we didn’t communicate something we’d been doing like clockwork and dropped the ball once.

No one made allowances for me on dish, either. I was called slow because I couldn’t lug 80 pounds of water up three flights of stairs without it taking longer because all of my muscles aren’t as strong as everyone else’s.

But that wasn’t my most epic cooking fail, and it’s a miracle no one got hurt. The person who sexually harassed me left a hotel pan of raw chicken on top of the freezer, and when asked, told management it was me. This is after telling me I’d be running my own kitchen within six months and how I could always be counted on and I’d do great things.

I didn’t realize the lovebomb/discard pattern because I didn’t realize that he was slowly moving all our shits together so that when we were both closing, he’d leave early and I’d be stuck cleaning for both of us. He thought he had that right even though he wasn’t my boss. The only way you get respect in the kitchen is to earn it, and he had no authority. I just took it because the lovebombing was complete. By the time he sexually harassed me, the betrayal hurt me the most.

I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life, but never once have I put people’s safety in danger……. even when people say I did.

While it is true that I do not have the physical strength to be in a kitchen, it is also true that I have come into my own and wouldn’t think twice about ripping another cook a new asshole for focusing on me and not the mission. It’s not that women can’t be the best chefs in the world. We’ve been the chefs for all of history, yet unrecognized until men did it. Escoffier didn’t make anything at The Plaza that his mother didn’t teach him first. Le Guide Culinaire is based on personal experience. Your mother generally teachers you how to cook because your father’s not interested. This is slowly changing as society has made it cool to cook. We all love dad favorites like steak and French fries, we just do it in a cast iron skillet rather than grilling because steak tastes better from the crust that develops from confit, which means cooked in its own fat. When you grill, the fat drops into the coals. Steak tastes even better when you put a little bit of butter on that crust right before you serve it. Make sure the butter is melted because once the steak has had time to rest, it probably won’t make the butter melt naturally. I also like to add fresh herbs to the butter, like rosemary. If I only have dry, I don’t make it fancy. Salt, pepper, and garlic is all a steak really needs. Just make sure the salt and pepper are of good quality. I prefer Kosher salt and fresh ground pepper to the table version of either, though ground pepper is okay if it’s fresh.

If you accidentally oversalt the meat, you can fix it one of three ways. If it’s steak intended for fajitas, throw a margarita on it using fresh lime juice. The acid will neutralize the salt. With American, increase the herbs without more salt and add lemon juice. If lemon juice is not part of the palate, make a balsamic reduction by putting vinegar in a pan and letting it sit on low heat for like a year. No, seriously. Until it gets to “coat a spoon” stage. I put dried cherries and (also dried) mushrooms in mine and let them plump up. It takes about 45 minutes to an hour depending on volume. This is a sauce you can double and triple to save the syrup for later. Leaving out the mushrooms and making it really thick would be good on vanilla ice cream.

The day I reached for a spoon out of an egg pan and didn’t realize it was boiling hot wasn’t all that great, either. It fused to my hand and I had to just put some burn cream on it and keep going. My worst enemy wouldn’t have let me fail, and I didn’t have them in the kitchen. I had my wife. She could have empathy without coddling me and I knew we were both doing what we needed to cope. It led to some of my successes, including the biggest. I got my name on the menu for my chili.

Despite all my fails, if you like food you’re missing out on being my friend. It is your epic fail, not mine. 😉

Comfort

September 17, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 12 Comments

What are your favorite types of foods?

I want to tell you a secret.

When you become a professional cook, you stop cooking at home. You do not have the time or energy. There were nights when dinner was microwave popcorn over the sink, I was so tired. Just stuff a few handfuls in my mouth before I pass out. I also bought lots of junk food. We all do. Most cooks I know are absolutely obsessed with dino nuggets. Some of us even take the time to warm them up. 😉 My favorite is grocery store pizza, because it takes less time to put it in the oven than it does for delivery, and I can put whatever I want on it.

I want to tell you another secret.

Most, if not all professional cooks want you to invite them over for dinner just so they don’t have to cook it. We don’t care if it’s KD and ketchup. Just please, feed us without making us stand in front of the stove. We will help with dinner if you ask, but most cooks won’t go out of their way because they think it’s rude…. like we’re lording over a kitchen we don’t own. We’ve also been burned by people asking us to help out and then criticizing us as if we have no idea what we’re doing- or worse, something goes wrong and you’ll never live it down….. because professional cooks aren’t allowed to make mistakes, even among friends. We have to be arrogant on the line. There are too many people counting on us. But we cook the dishes in our restaurants over and over until they’re perfect.

You want something obscure, something that hasn’t been popular for 40 years, and we tell you that we’ll try. When it’s not impeccable, we can see the disappointment in your eyes, because you didn’t ask us to make something we’ve already made a thousand times and think it’s the same.

I liken it to handing someone a horn for the first time and asking them to play the third movement of the Hummel trumpet concerto four minutes later.

You’re expecting Carrnegie Hall when they don’t know a straight mute from a spit valve.

Let them have at least five more minutes……………..

Cooks rehearse like trumpet players, and are the same amount of obnoxious. I have been a trumpet player AND a cook, which means I have no problem being an absolute dick in the kitchen some of the time, because there are no seconds to spare. There aren’t even nanoseconds. Cooking is all about fear, surprise, ruthless efficiency and an almost fanatical devotion to the pope….. usually black, not cute red uniforms.

But make no mistake. The Spanish Inquisition is coming for you, and they generally look like waitstaff.

The thing is, though, you don’t go from read-through to full dress. You stage- pronounced stahj– which is basically “get your ass handed to you and if you survive, you might get the job.” These are all unpaid, though in most places they’ll either comp you a drink or make you something to eat (or both). In my stage at Denizen’s, the pub I worked for in Silver Spring, we did 300 covers that night. Just tickets on top of tickets and the entire kitchen was in full-tilt panic mode.

Rehearsal is actually during the performance, and if you fuck up anything, you just have to hope someone catches it before the food goes out. It’s your third day, not theirs.

It was a complete surprise to me that I got hired, but I did notice that I had improved considerably since my last gig. It really kept the imposter syndrome to a minimum. I had my share of shitty days, but I had to get this job. I wanted it more than anything else in the entire world. That’s because I had two reasons that gave me drive and passion for it.

The first is that I was married to a chef trained at a Cordon Bleu cooking school. she actually had her stripes. She paid $20,000 for her education, then gave me all of it for free. It is a gift I will never be able to repay, but the flip side of the coin is that I had to prove to myself that I was a cook, I wasn’t just riding her coattails.

The second is that my mother had just died, and I was a shell of a person. I was flat affect for months. I could barely take care of myself. Cooking brought me back to life. I had focus and drive on something besides earth-shattering grief. My mother was dead and yet the world kept turning as if nothing had happened, because if it did, I missed it. I was out of it during my own year of magical thinking. It took time, but I got my mojo back one hamburger at a time.

It is a gift I will never be able to repay.

In terms of the types of food I like to cook in the restaurant, I’ll tell you by station instead of dish. I like saute because it’s basically throwing prepped food into a pan, flipping it a few times, and pouring it onto a plate.

Editor’s Note: I like pantry the least because plating salads and desserts to look beautiful seems to require angle of convergence and depth perception, two things I was born without that make up 3D vision.

In terms of food I like to cook at home, I don’t. Home kitchens aren’t built like professional kitchens and when you get used to that much specialized equipment that cooking at home is a drag. I want a flat top and some scrapers, not whatever the fuck this is.

I want a gas stovetop, not electric. We can’t do that because the kitchen isn’t wired for it. I learned this because I asked Hayat for a gas stove after the fire, and I really like the electric one she bought. It’s just not the same because an electric range doesn’t let you refine the heat from the jump. I need to cook on an electric range a few times to learn the difference between three and four. On a gas range, I can just tell by how hi the flame is- consistent across brands.

If I am cooking at someone’s house for the first time, I sweat bullets because I am cooking on unfamiliar equipment with unfamiliar pans. You don’t think of this, but the thickness of pans varies, so you can’t always use the same amount of heat. At a restaurant, you don’t buy equipment piecemeal. All the saute pans are the same, all the rondeaus (wide thin pots) are the same, all the storage containers are the same. You don’t want anything to affect consistency.

The hardest part of getting an A team together in a restaurant is to make sure everyone makes everything to the same standard. If you’re on the B team (generally Sunday and Monday nights), you know why. You are not fit for Saturday night. You’re not even old enough to watch the show. Go sit in the corner.

If you start out on Mondays, when you get a Friday or a Saturday night it will feel like Ed McMahon showed up at your house with a big ass check.

The reason you need comfort food once you get off work is that all the food in the restaurant is so rich that sometimes you just want a sandwich.

In fact, it’s been 15 minutes since I wrote that last paragraph because I realized I hadn’t eaten dinner and it’s 0212. I had a cup of coffee way too late today, but it’s Sunday morning. I’m pretty sure I’ll still wake up at 0500, that’s automatic. But I’ll go back to sleep easily after I realize my entry is already done for today.

Instead of writing, I’ll roll out of bed and make my ultimate comfort food, breakfast. Yesterday I had scrambled eggs with pickled jalapenos, cheddar, and a dollop of plain yogurt. Nothing fancy except the difference between having made eggs every day of your life and making a hundred in three to five hours during every single brunch shift you’ve ever had.

That’s when dino nuggets taste best.

Writing a Letter

August 27, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 3 Comments

Mel told me that she looked forward to my food entries, and I told her that’s because I’m writing her a letter in every single one of them, because even from across the world, she can catch what I’m throwing. She is a chef, the level above me, which means that if I put down a steak, she’ll stand at the expo window and bitch at me even though she knows that a steak takes 13-18 minutes and the ticket was just put in 30 seconds ago please for the love of God make it stop make it stop…….. Kidding, of course I’m kidding. But in the ballet on the brigade, she’s an artistic director, caught between letting me play and impressing the owners before we do a new menu rollout that will hopefully have something I created on it.

So, since every food entry is a letter to her, here’s a real one.

Dear Mel,

I remember that summer is the worst. My first job was in Portland, Oregon where it is both hot and wet in August. There was no air conditioning in the kitchen, and we kept the back door open all the time. Our customers were so bold they’d try to go through there no matter how often we told them it was illegal, even more after they’d already been drinking. If a fight was going to happen at the pub, it was going to happen in front of us, because the back door faced the very tiny parking lot. I was always so glad I worked there, because it was a guaranteed parking spot if you showed up for your shift instead of trying to come in later just to hang. Of course it was my favorite bar. That’s where I actually got meals that someone I knew cooked and it wasn’t me. However, if I hadn’t been drinking, I could go back into the kitchen. If that was the case, every cook knew it.

I’d order something and I would hear a yell from the back…. even from my ex-wife, which made it funnier….. “LANAGAN! Come cook it yourself!” Busted. I figured out that ploy real quick. Clock out and go IMMEDIATELY to the bar and take a shot of something. Anything. Quick, they’re coming! I want a burger and I am not going to stand there in no air conditioning to get it. Do it yourself, Cat Cora.

That was the restaurant where I learned the most, because I was in the kitchen with people I trusted both as coworkers and guinea pigs. If I came up with an idea, Drew would improve it and so on.

When I was at the pub, I did brunch almost every weekend, where there I made pancakes the way you make them. Light, airy, except with a bit of hazelnut fluff. It’s the closest I’ll ever get to pastry, I assure you.

If you ever do come to DC, I have to take you to Milk Bar CCDC. It was a concept built by the woman who, I believe, is the best pastry chef in the world and if you have a chance, come study with her. She’s called Christina Tosi, and she’s one of David Chang’s best friends. Dave had already had success with momofuku, and gave Christina the money to start Milk Bar. Therefore, in both New York and City Center DC, they’re right next door to each other and Milk Bar supplies momofuku with desserts.

Their cereal milk soft serve is divine- not too sweet because it’s made from plain corn flakes.

I am certain that you can get Milk Bar delivered for cheaper than you can come here yourself, but nothing tastes better than a fresh ice cream cone, and I’m not sure they ship in in pints, anyway.

Milk Bar also makes some of the best cakes on record, but they also make a corn pie that’s the most popular thing they sell. To be honest, I’ve always been obsessed with the ice cream and cake aspect. I haven’t had time for pie. But I know Christina’s work well enough that I will shove anything she made into my face no questions asked.

I am less interested in being a pastry chef than knowing a pastry chef. 😉

The closest I’ve gotten to pastry is pantry, where I helped make ice cream bases (bacon, cafe au lait, banana putting, buttermilk [which was actually aciduated milk and froze up like cheesecake], creme brulee, and beignets. It was Cajun food, but a very French execution because my chef and sous were classically trained.

The one exception was the jambalaya, which was served as a risotto and so good it would make you cry. It makes me cry to think that the restaurant doesn’t exist anymore, because it was one of the most exciting times of my life.

One Monday night my coworker, Trina, and I got a comment card that only said “Hot. Lady. Chefs.” And of course you know now my life is complete. No additional compliments necessary for the rest of my life.

Cooking has also been an intro into meeting people I never thought I would meet, because powerful people don’t want to talk about power.

They want another pancake.

Maybe one of these days we’ll take over the world as line cook and pastry chef. Until then, we will have to settle for fantastic food conversations and reminiscing about “the life.” I hope you do get back in the kitchen eventually. I will live vicariously through you. I can even teach you how to flip shit.

I think your dishwasher’s about to quit.

Love,

Leslie

Live, Laugh, Love

August 27, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 11 Comments

What’s your favorite recipe?

Anyone who actually knows me knows two things. The first is that I don’t have any recipes, and the second is how much contempt I have for the phrase in the title because it is emotional shorthand for a whole mood…. the Karen special.

However, I do cook well. I can’t give you recipes, but I can tell you how I do things and you can cook like I do- I became a professional cook by tasting every step of the way. That’s why we don’t use measurements. We add until the gods have let us know that they are sated.

So much depends on what kind of technology I’m using. Cooking over a fire is different than gas and electric ovens/grills. You also cannot ignore the part of cooking that involves feel, because I get why we need to wear gloves. I believe others underestimate why it’s important not to wear them and just wash your hands constantly. A grilled steak or chicken breast will have a certain feel to it. Wearing gloves dampens our ability to detect it. Moreover, an open flame grill often made mine catch on fire and fuse to my skin. On an open flame, you really have no choice but to touch it because you cannot be certain that the heat is equal everywhere you place it.

To combat not trying to touch things, we risk presentation because we’ll have to cut something open to make sure it’s done in the middle. I do not want anyone to get served pork or chicken medium rare.

These are all of the things that run through a cook’s mind before we even start thinking about ingredients. You don’t buy the ingredients for the technology, you work with what you have.

I saute most things. I even prefer it to the microwave and toaster, because I would rather toast bread in the skillet with butter. I make a mean cheese toastie (grilled cheese). 😉

I start with lots of butter and herbs in a skillet on very low heat. Most of the time, it’s Montreal Chicken Seasoning or herbs de Provence. While that’s warming up, I butter some bread and add hot sauce, pico de gallo, or black pepper, along with two thick slices of cheese. I set the sandwich in the pan and it takes time. You don’t want the toast to be black and the cheese to be unmelted. Putting the lid on the pan for a few minutes during cooking will help the cheese melt with steam, but you don’t want to leave it on too long or the sandwich will be soggy. Low and slow is the name of the game. You can use softer cheeses to speed it up, like Gouda or Jack. You cannot increase the heat. You’ll know it’s time to flip when you see the edge of the bread turn the color toast you like. I prefer to get it very, very brown- almost black- because I think char stands up well to cheese.

To really up your game, make caramelized onions beforehand. Caramelized onions take a lot longer than you think. A lot. I don’t think I’ve ever achieved perfection in under 45 minutes. That’s because caramelization is a process. If you help it along too much, they’ll have charred edges and not done enough in the middle. You have to put more butter than you think you need into a pan with way more onions than you think you’ll need (just like 20 pounds of spinach is almost enough to feed one person after cooking it) and just leave it on low heat. Don’t stir it as much as you think you need to, because the caramelization happens when onion touches metal. Think about how often you’re interrupting that when you turn things over.

Touching the metal is what cooks mean when they say “respect first contact.” That means put it on the grill and step back. Do not adjust, do not do anything. The process of caramelization has already started and moving it will rip the crust that has begun to develop immediately. If you respect first contact, the caramelization process will have created a crust so thick that the meat will lift off the grill on its own….. same for pancakes. I know to flip mine when I can lift up the skillet and the pancake slides around independently. I still use a spatula to flip, though, because generally there’s so much hot butter that it would splash in my face. Besides, I like to make my pancakes really thick and it would ruin them to be flipped with that much violence. I save that kind of movement for foods that can take it, like eggs.

Eggs are there for you when no one else is. I swear it. You can add an egg to anything and instant meal.

Eggs are another food where it’s best to respect first contact, but hold the butter to a manageable level. You want enough to coat the pan, but not enough to splash in your face if you’re trying to be me, the home version.

You can flip an egg in any frying pan, but I find that the smaller ones are easier. Not the ones marked “egg pan.” Those are so tiny it’s like playing with Barbie cookware. I mean the smallest normal-sized frying pan because it feels balanced in my hand. If you’re 6’6 and 280, you’re going to have a different favorite. Choose the one you like based on how it feels to you.

When I say respect first contact, I mean that the same thing will happen with eggs that happen with meat and pancakes. They’ll stick to the metal and develop a crust, lifting independently. When you can move the egg in the pan on its own, it’s safe to flip. How long you leave it after it has flipped determines whether it is over easy, over medium, etc.

I find that flipping eggs is infinitely easier than trying to guess when sunny side up is ready. It helps to put the lid on the pan for those, too, because it ensures that the bottom and the top cook evenly.

With scrambled eggs, I tend to respect first contact and break them up very little. I also undercook them a tiny, tiny, tiny amount so that they remain cheesy in texture. Very important sidenote: eggs don’t need anything. They don’t get fluffier with water or milk. You can add volume, but the flavor will thin out to an enormous degree. I would go with a drip of cold water before I’d add milk, but I wouldn’t do either unless I was almost out of eggs and needed to make them stretch.

Cooking is all about learning how to make things stretch, and not even from a financial perspective. It’s also learning how to make use of what you’ve already bought, because you had a creative idea for something…. where you rise to the level is forgetting everything you know and just looking into the pantry.

I always keep pancake mix on hand, as well as cheese, bread, butter, pasta, and the occasional frozen pizza, with which I almost certainly will make double cheese and double jalapeno before I bake it.

Everything I make has a ton of calories for two reasons. The first is that I don’t eat often and I walk everywhere I go. The second is that my stomach needs some help if I’m going to go balls to the wall with Scoville every day in search of relief from hideous allergies. I pad my stomach with the butter and cheese no matter whether it’s dairy or plant-based. A not dog with vegan cream cheese and kim-chi hot enough to blow your head off is just as tasty as beef or pork franks.

Another thing I do is buy spring mix when it’s on sale so that I can do warm salads. My favorite is to saute spring mix, carrots, Brussels sprouts, and kale in a combination of olive and sesame oils. Sometimes I add nuts, seeds, dried fruit if there’s no added sugar, etc. When the veggies have cooked for a little while and I can tell the stems are getting soft, I hit the pan with rice wine vinegar and close the lid.

When the veggies are entirely wilted, I push them to the sides of the pan and crack two eggs in the middle.

It’s done when the yolks are just starting to get hard. I like them best when the texture is gelatinous, not runny.

The egg and the rice wine vinegar play off each other extraordinarily well.

But recognize that there are certain things at home you cannot do well and pay the people that do it. For instance, I have no shame in admitting that it would cost me hundreds to do rotisserie chicken the way I’d really like to do it, or I could just go to Don Pollo. I don’t have to buy their sides, I can just add their chicken to what I do know how to cook well at home…. or, at least, I would if I did that kind of thing. The last time I went to Don Pollo was years and years ago, and I still remember the taste of the black beans and pico because it was served cold, like Cowboy Caviar (Texas black-eyed pea relish). I loved it because they’d taken the time to dice the jalapenos, so they were perfectly deseeded and none of them were bitter.

The other thing they have at Don Pollo that I could not do at home is fried yucca. It’s delicious and I wouldn’t even attempt it because I don’t want to own a deep fryer. I want them to own a deep fryer. 😉

If we’re talking about my personal favorite foods, let’s play the chef’s game. You’re on death row. What’s your last meal? There are no stipulations to this game. The food can come from anywhere.

I would start with bone marrow and crostini, paired with a simple red table wine.

Next, a salad filled with vegetables. Please do not fool around with an iceberg wedge and some bleu cheese. Put your back into it. I want a bright yuzu vinegar with some cracked black pepper. Heritage tomatoes. Romaine. Real food and not restaurant filler.

If John Kinkaid was going to outlive me, he’d know that as my chef, my last meal would be his. He could surprise and delight me, but I already know what he would make.

It would be a vegetable jambalaya and a Purple Haze from Abita.

Because it’s the end of the night, and I’m about to clock out.

Assemble, Prepare, Adjust, Discard, Modify, Complete

August 13, 2023August 13, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 6 Comments

My friend Emily is a teacher in Seoul, and we were talking about our lives. How everything about us makes us, well, us. We weren’t close in high school, but we both went through the same process (performing arts high school vs. “real high school”) and therefore both are driven to create. This entry is kind of “Your Blog Makes You Sound Like a Dick: Kitchen Edition, Part II,” but I decided that I didn’t need as much authority when I’m talking about being subservient for a purpose.

Creativity is a hard mistress. But that’s exactly what Emily wanted to know.

My head plays music when I cook, if this even makes sense. Not music I’ve heard, just tuneless sound that progress in order of mood depending on how the food is going. It makes me hum. I’m interested in what happens when you assemble, prepare, adjust, discard, modify, complete

It’s such a complete question that I had to think about it for a couple days before I was ready to address it. There’s an attack to cooking, and a laserlike focus. What there is not is room for error. Life comes in ticket times, the most important thing for every diner there. Whether you fold under the pressure or not is your own doing, completely. I respect a dishwasher that walks out during the first shift rather than thinking they can do a job and dragging everyone else down with them. It is why I left the kitchen to an enormous degree. I was making other people slower.

That doesn’t take away the burn, literally or figuratively. It’s an essential ingredient to creating a life in which you don’t want to escape. You don’t need drugs because you live them. The kitchen is a living, breathing organism from which there is no escape. My books have more in common with Jonna and Tony Mendez’s than they don’t. Both cooking and spying require a relentless focus without thinking of the outside world at all. To do so would be paralyzing.

People with ADHD do this better than most. Because we have no executive function, we hyperfocus on the thing at hand, a better coping mechanism for most in the race against the clock that being a cook requires. Nearly every kitchen employee I’ve ever met who decided to do it long term is because their brains and the kitchen’s rhythm fit together like a glove. People who can’t hack it should leave quickly, and often do.

Executing an idea is one thing. Prepping it for large scale is quite another. That’s because cooks play around until they like something without any recall as to how they did it to precise measurements. Did we throw in a teaspoon? Who the fuck knows? Eat it.

To prepare something for a large scale, you have to take the idea and retroactively fit it. My best example of this is hearing a pop song on the marching field. The marching band can play the melody, but it sounds off by a wide margin because everything the singer did to personalize it is gone, plus the rhythms try to mimic it and nobody has time for that.

Preparing a recipe in a restaurant is to make that dish a hundred times with different variations because you’re trying to get the best version of it on paper that you can, because you can’t really capture lightning twice. You can try, but it’s chasing the same high as everyone else.

Once a recipe is divided up, it goes into separate parts of the kitchen. A good for-instance is a steak salad. The salad is made by pantry, the steak is made by grill, and we meet in the middle. What I have come to call the ballet on the brigade.

Assembling is often more difficult than you think over a certain amount of time. By hour five you are not the same team that you were at hour two. You’re too exhausted to communicate and too behind not to try. Part of getting in the weeds is setting everything up perfectly so that if you get into the weeds, you can recover quickly. Being in the weeds is being 50 tickets deep and not panicking while expo and chef are breathing down your neck. There’s also a group project aspect, and I have caused mine to flunk. I have thought people have done things that they haven’t and paid for it, like assuming that another line cook was frying the chicken I needed, but they weren’t. We hadn’t made stations on boundaries clear. It always made me feel like the worst player in the game. I wasn’t, I was just bad at talking out loud. People would ask me what I was doing and I’d tell them and they’d tell me they didn’t need my excuses. For what? I am explaining what you asked me to explain.

The benefits outweigh the costs to an enormous degree. It ruins you for any other job quickly because going to the office feels like cutting off a limb when you’ve been on the A-team of a well-oiled machine. It is worth the arthritis and burns and cuts to feel like you actually did something that day. It’s the job you can’t wait to leave until you actually try to fit back into your old life. Maybe you can do it, maybe you can’t. Most ADHD people cook long enough to know that there’s a reason why they fit into a kitchen and they don’t fit into an office.

It costs an enormous amount to be a cook, because you’re just far enough above the poverty line not to get health insurance from your job and not poor enough to qualify for Medicaid. Therefore, you have to purchase your own insurance with no subsidy from anyone. Meanwhile, you always need a doctor for something. Most likely it’s arthritis and chronic pain. Sometimes wound care.

We work like doctors who stay over after their shifts because they can’t come down from the adrenaline of treating patients all night. If we’re not cooking, we want to be with other cooks in the restaurant, anyway. We’ll sit at the bar and talk to the bartenders, occasionally talking to a cook if they’re allowed to breathe at all.

Most of the time, they’re not.

There is a limited amount of time between one shift and the next. We have to look at what we’re selling and what we’re not, because we have to be able to plan forward with accuracy. We can’t make six orders of fried chicken if we only have enough for three because we didn’t think we’d sell that many. All restaurants have this problem. It’s a matter of degree.

The reason cooking requires such high intensity energy is that you start getting tired and you can’t stop. It’s great in the beginning. The first three hours are AMAZING. But when your shoulders are aching from being five foot two and flipping a full paella pan, you still have to keep moving for four more hours. People think about the hours we spend in the kitchen assembling, cooking, and serving. They vastly underestimate the number of hours of prep that go into every meal. That it takes a team of people on the line and in the back to keep up with demand. Prep cooks do not need to speak with as much authority as line cooks, because it’s not their ass on the line if something burns. They’re literally out of the heat. We prep everything that needs to be cooked, they prep everything that doesn’t. Line cooks don’t give orders, they give supervision. I have been the one that has chopped 20lbs of mushrooms into small dice and the person that watched over someone else to make sure they did it the way chef taught me. The thing most people do is call all cooks “chef.” This is irritating and incorrect. Chef means boss, and those motherfuckers will remind you of it constantly. It’s a meritocracy. You don’t argue with it, you decide toward running your own kitchen or you don’t. Every cook has their level. For me, I would be a horrible chef because of all the administrative paperwork and inventory. I have watched lots of people turn down chef and sous jobs for that very reason. We were made to be weird. Chefs were made to be “the man.” It is very much like being an executive director for an arts organization, because even though you’re enabling creatives, you still have to talk about money. There is nothing worse than working for owners that constantly disagree with your staff so that you’re constantly hung out to dry on personnel matters. You can’t always go back to the kitchen and tell the employees that their demands, once again, have been ignored. The owners who do this to chefs really do not care about turnover. Cooking is a small enough interest that if you fuck over a cook at one restaurant, they’ll never work for you again and they’ll tell all their friends. It will not go unnoticed.

It affects the art of completion to an enormous degree, because you cannot be the same restaurant if you have an A-team and keep submarining it. It’s a crime when you’ve got a great team and dismantle it because someone wants a dime raise or needs a day off. Most cooks don’t have the ambition to dream big because they’re only focused on improving the food.

They’re not asking you to give them the whole world. Just to help assemble, modify, and complete it….. and that other stuff Emily said.

Whatever It Is, It Isn’t Enough

August 9, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What’s the most money you’ve ever spent on a meal? Was it worth it?

I am a cook, therefore I cannot afford to eat all the places I’d really like to go. Since my sister can afford to treat me, she does. But that’s not how I spend money on food and drinks. I lay out serious cash at the grocery store, because I can make food exciting by making a dish, then making a completely new dish out of the leftovers. I buy things at grocery stores that most people just think, “it’s too much work.” I will roll sushi at home. I will soak beans overnight so that I don’t need the convenience of cans. I will wash rice. I will do all the things it takes to be an awesome prep cook so that I’m comfortable on the line at home as a solo act.

The only thing I don’t do is buy meat at the grocery anymore. It’s fine if I’m eating out at a restaurant. I just don’t like wondering if it’s going to spoil, or the whole process it takes to thaw things without cooking them. I don’t want to leave chicken in the sink with water dripping down because my housemates will either get soap in it or try to clean it up. I have had them throw away things when I went upstairs to get my phone.

I think the most money bit comes from having the “keeping up appearances” marriage first. We ate a lot of money trying to be social with our ExxonMobil friends. We went to bars and restaurants that cost a lot, but we never really got anything substantial out of them. There’s only one thing I remember from that time in my life with clarity. It was a brewpub out in Fairfax that made banana clove beer. The combination of lightly sweet banana (not artificial) with Belgian spices made my palate sing. This was before I met Dana, before I went to her mini culinary school. The palate was there, I just wasn’t putting energy in to the right direction.

Meeting Dana brought a lot of things together. The above paragraph is why we would have had a lot of fun in DC together. The thing is, though, I had to get away from her to become a better person, and I hope she feels the same way about me- that we are both wonderful people, but we do not need to be together to know that. We’ve checked.

It would have seemed less weird to the outside world if we’d moved to DC together, but the plan was always to end up here eventually. It’s an adventure we wanted to go on together, and when we split, I still had fire in the belly to do it.

It made it look to the outside world that I was chasing a girl, and I did nothing to help myself out there, but I just didn’t care. It wasn’t worth the energy to figure out how to care about so many things that were beyond my control. Getting the girl in the end would have been nice, but it wasn’t necessary. She and DC are not synonymous in that if I’d suddenly taken off to a city I knew nothing about and the only thing other people knew is that she was there, I’d allow everyone to raise eyebrows at me. Clearly that’s insane.

But when you’re presented with a move that will solve every need including getting the girl? We’re getting somewhere. That’s because there was never any pressure on the relationship to succeed. Washington is big enough to hold both of us, even at full strength.

I stopped thinking about food a few paragraphs ago because I’m still reeling after getting an e-mail from Supergrover that I don’t know what to do with. I’m just spiraling out in my little neurodivergent head because she is bound and determined to wall off and let me know she thinks I’m not that great a writer because I paint my feelings as fact and everything is all about me.

This is my web site. I don’t project feelings onto other people unless they’re interacting with me and I am trying to explain it. No one else in her life has made any move to get to know me, so what they think is all her business and none of mine….. but it would be my business if I knew what she was talking about.

I am only an authority on me and what I perceive.

What I perceive is that prepackaged food holds no nutrition, and very few people are willing to create a dish without shortcuts.

Wash the rice. Soak the beans. Dice the mirepoix.

The most expensive ingredient in food and relationships is time.

Starch

July 23, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What’s your go-to comfort food?

I don’t have a go-to comfort food, I have a comfort Venn diagram in which any combination of groceries could be my go-to, but starch is always the base. It’s going to be some kind of rice, mashed potatoes, or corn. Possibly all three if we are eating fried chicken.

I also enjoy fried and baked potatoes, so sometimes the base is French fries whether I’m at home or out. As I was telling Zac, I like the fries at Zaytinya, because I will slowly build the most monster poutine you’ve ever seen in your life if you sit next to me long enough. See Lindsay for details. I am a human trash compactor.

One of the reasons I eat so much is that I have trouble maintaining my weight. It follows my anxiety to an enormous degree. When I am troubled, I do not eat. You can take that check to the bank and cash it. When I feel out of control, it presents by controlling what I can…… presenting as “food is unsafe, but drinks are okay.” I buy cases of Instant Breakfast when it happens. I also don’t eat much. Yes, it may be 2,000 calories but I haven’t been hungry enough to eat more than once a day for years.

Not being hungry is hard to diagnose, because when I get down to “food is a straight up problem,” sometimes it’s me and sometimes it’s a drug interaction. ADHD medication is not known for allowing you to have nice things. Physically well and mentally stable are constantly buying new military equipment to blow the other away. My physical health says “eat all the things,” and mentally that feels like an overwhelming task. It is hard to grocery shop when you have medically induced appetite suppression. I’ve cried when I realized I needed to buy enough food for a week, but everything looked unappealing. I have teared up at restaurants because there was nothing on the menu that sounded good. Being ADHD is a kitchen superhero skill, but only in managing other people’s food.

Therefore, I rarely step outside my comfort zone when I’m doing other things. I can’t focus on food when I have two sentences that are falling flat. Not focusing on food is going to be a sandwich and potato chips, or baking French fries in the oven if I have them.

Dating Zac has brought my appetite back a little bit, because I am more likely to eat if someone is eating with me. That’s because they’ll get hungry when I don’t and thus remind me to cook something, or cook it for me and bring it to the room where I’m tearing my hair out.

So much of my blood is spilled on these pages, more in the lines you don’t read.

Most of the time, my own blog entries make me go to the place of not finding a carb I wouldn’t inhale. It takes a lot out of me to read this shit, because you didn’t live it, are not living it. Depending on how you think my situation is going, you have no concept of that fact. Some entries break me, but they let light in.

I am taking the places inside me that are empty and filling them with gold. I would even settle for wax, because no human is ever sin cera. In sculpting, if you were able to see the angel in the rock and get it out in one shot, it was called “sin cera,” without wax, because there’s no filler to cover a mistake.

On days when I can get the entry out of me sin cera, I feel well. If I take myself to the mat, the road through hell is paved by Ore-Ida.

…because I had to.

July 2, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

One of the things that makes me frustrated about this time in my life is how crazy this must all seem to the outside world because I can’t be any more specific that I can right now. It doesn’t make any sense why an Internet relationship would make me react this way, and I can’t give you any more than “if you knew, you wouldn’t think I was crazy at all.” Nothing in my life is as it appears, I can only show you what I can show you. I need to protect my beautiful girl as much as I’m protecting myself, and these entries are just for me. They are written so that I can tell what kind of progress I am making, but not telling her story. Please remember that you are missing at least 50%, and I am comfortable looking like a total wack job in front of the whole world. All I can do is rest in my belief that no one else’s opinion matters. You’re just looking at my reputation.

I am looking at my character.

If you cannot see the difference, then you’re probably not introspective. When you dive into yourself, you see the difference between what others think of you and how little it matters compared to whether you can look in the mirror every day. How others’ opinions don’t pay your bills. How no one else is going to save you, so you have to find ways to save yourself. It’s a tangled web I’m weaving. It looks from the outside like I’m a fly, but I built this web by hand in a rainstorm.

The fact that there’s a chunk missing doesn’t make me feel good, but it’s not my work to sit with that. It’s my work to look at what happened and why. I feel like it’s an important story…. Critically so as we slouch toward a digital society where everyone lives and loves like this to some degree. Also, it’s an important story, but not unusual. It is to people who haven’t lived on the net since ‘99, maybe…. If you look up “geek” in the dictionary, it’s just a picture of me and Wil Wheaton.….. where was I going with this?

It’s not an unusual story, or at least, it doesn’t begin in an unusual way. Our deal was to be confidantes. I love women, so that kind of shit made me catch feelings (an inconvenient truth). She loves women, too, but not in the same way. She caught feelings, too. They just didn’t match, and yet that doesn’t mean her feelings are lesser than. There is no such thing as “the friend zone.” Either you love someone and want them in your life, or you don’t. If you think otherwise, grow up.

I have always felt this way. It’s just that as my life starting spinning out of control, she was the unlucky recipient of shit rolling downhill, and it wasn’t pleasant for either one of us. She kicked my ass, daily, in a way that truly hurt for all the right reasons. I was in the hospital for a few days because I couldn’t get in to see a regular psychiatrist quick enough to deal with acute suicidal ideation, and it was my beautiful girl’s idea. Just move under your own power. I did, and I’ve never regretted it.

I haven’t regretted it to the point that think her strident, no bullshit personality could have saved other people struggling with depression as well, because depression uses the very best lies against you to make you powerless against your own thoughts. No one loves you. You’re too much. You’re so much no one will ever love you. No one will ever be able to put up with you.

I find it interesting that her words made me go to that place sometimes and lifted me out of it in others. It all depended on what my disease wanted out of me that day, and it was relentless. Neurotypical people want to save you, and there is no way to do that. It’s not that they’re incapable. It’s that they don’t know how to fight brain gremlins, and if we already feel like you think we’re too much, we’re not going to help you or even let you know what they are.

I got to that place with my beautiful girl. When she cut off her emotions from me, it didn’t feel safe to open up to her anymore. We weren’t dealing with our mutual brain gremlins anymore, which made me feel like a freak show most of the time. She’s neurotypical, which means that even our brain gremlins are different. But that doesn’t mean hers are less valid. It didn’t feel safe to have a sounding board that was just me talking to myself, because for as much as I got out of workshopping my issues, what makes me feel safe in a relationship is mutually diving into things. Feeling supported as well as supporting others. She supported me and wouldn’t let me support her, so I always felt like “the younger one.” I have bipolar and ADHD, which leads a lot of people to attribute my behavior to immaturity, when in reality, it’s just different. You don’t get the same behavior out of people who literally have no idea how to function in society.

It’s exhausting to feel like you’ve given 350% to something and it still looking like you’re in kindergarten because everything went wrong at once because of some fucking brain chemical or another. At night, I’m not relaxing. I’m paralyzed with indecision and it reads as lazy.

Here’s why it’s so much effort to be alive. I have to remember to do everything. Nothing becomes habit, nothing gets easier. The morning routine is hard every day. It does not “get easier once you get used to it.” Ever. You spend the same amount of energy on every task, every day.

Because I’m not just ADHD, my bipolar and anxiety remind me all the time of just how unacceptable that is, and it’s not something I can change. I just have to manage it. If I designed a house, it would have all my shit where I could see it, because my mind doesn’t store where things go. My mind doesn’t store the memory of where I put things, even if it was just a few minutes ago. I have very little peripheral vision, so I can drop something next to me and spend 20 minutes looking for it, because where I thought the thing dropped is several feet from where I thought it would be.

If it’s not one thing, it’s your mother.

Speaking of my mother, it’s a shame that I didn’t get to have the relationship I wanted with her until the very end. I think all the time what it would be like to have my mom as my beautiful girl…. The one I look to for love because I can…. The one who’d die to protect me and I’d feel the same. I would never have traded one relationship for the other. It’s just a type of female friendship that my mother and I would have enjoyed.

I’m not sure that I mentioned what it was like seeing my aunt Nancy at my grandfather’s funeral. It was my father’s father, and I knew in less than a second that she hadn’t come for her. Of course Lone Star, Texas is a tiny town and they knew each other, but she was bringing my mother’s spirit even though it was the other side of my family.

I choked up and tried not to cry the minute she started talking. She could have read the phone book and I’d be sobbing. That’s because there’s about the same age difference between my mom and Nancy as there is between Lindsay and me, so their voices are for all practical intents and purposes, the same. That voice is still in my head days later, and I’m glad that she comes to DC all the time. My cousin Nathan is a doctor in Alexandria, VA, about 40 minutes from me.

My aunt still has a house in Lone Star, very near my grandfather’s on Starlight Lake. Our family has agreed to all chip in and keep the Lanagan house so we’ll be neighbors even if I’d originally come to spend time with my dad’s side of the family.

Here’s the thing about Lone Star, Texas.

It doesn’t seem ideal until you realize that with a fast internet connection and being able to buy land for a dollar, it’s not so bad. I’d never want to be that isolated full time, but I get it. If I could get an affordable lake house somewhere, that’d be the end of it for me, too…. It just wouldn’t be in Texas, and I’m not sure there are any lakes in this area where the houses aren’t a million dollars…. Wait. Scratch that. They were a million dollars in 2001. Now they’re seven.

The great thing about buying land is that if you didn’t have a lake before you bought it, you can just put one in. 😛

(Oh, that would be so fun. I’d love swimming in water with actual fish.)

So, you can do all that in bum fuck, Texas, and nothing on God’s green earth would tell me buying property there would work out well. I would hate the politics. I’d hate the struggle. I left all that behind because Lindsay is strong enough to work with those people and try to get them to change their minds. I am a nervous wreck when it comes to that kind of stuff. In this case, I think it helps her that she’s straight because she has more clinical separation than I do.

Maybe in ten years I’ll be grouchy enough to rejoin the cadre of Texans screaming to get their state back. Dallas, Houston, and Austin are tired. Get your shit together, Texas. I realize that in some ways, Austin is the problem….. but they have the same issue as DC. The government is conservative as shit, and the locals are actually smart.

Speaking of Texas, I reconnected with a high school friend from HSPVA that lives in The District, so he’s even closer to me than when he lived in Virginia. He posted on Facebook that he needed a house sitter because his regular one was unavailable, and even though we hadn’t talked in legit years, I thought, “this is an Honors Band friend. You gotta do it.” He felt the same way, so we spent some time together on Saturday. I met his partner, dogs, and corn snake. I think it will lead to more down the road, as we both have mutual friends here, as well as having gone to PVA, so our friends come through all the time.

I learned something I didn’t know, and that’s always fun. My 10th grade science teacher gave Beyoncé a C. 😛

I wasn’t there at the time. It must have been either the year I left or the year after, because I don’t remember whether B was two years behind me or three (yes, I am older than Beyoncé. I was hoping you wouldn’t notice).

Since I’ll be in The District all week, I’m looking forward to having a home base in the middle of everything. The house is indescribably close to the Metro, easier to walk from one to the other than drive because you can cut through parking lots. It’s also a classic DC row house, just the perfect house I’d have picked for myself had I wanted to live in the middle of the city all the time.

I do not regret choosing to live in the suburbs, because for what I pay, what I get is RIDICULOUS. I chose to have the smallest room in a GIANT house. I love having a real kitchen and not a shitty apartment galley. The only thing I would change is the stove- it’s electric and not gas. When we had to replace the stove, I asked if we could switch, but our kitchen isn’t wired up like that. No big deal. I have friends who will let me cook at their houses….. even if they have All-Clad, DANA. 😛

That is an old, old joke. Dana’s All-Clad set is heirloom. Her great grandkids wouldn’t have to buy new cookware, and I was there when they were new. It took Dana a little bit to trust me with them, and it became a running joke. Here’s a story she doesn’t know. I invited a woman over to hang out while she wasn’t home, another cook so I thought she was sane. I told her that Dana would freak the fuck out if she used steel wool on the pans, so please don’t. I come in the kitchen and there she is, scrubbing the fuck out of our pans with exactly the thing I told her not to use. I didn’t care if she wanted to “get away with it.” I bitched her out and we’re not friends anymore, mostly because she thought I was crazy for telling her what to do.

It was a “keep my wife’s name out your mouth” moment.

It’s ok, though…. That I looked crazy.

I did it because I had to.

Gurl Please

June 29, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What’s the most delicious thing you’ve ever eaten?

I am a cook. I don’t have a way to rank anything because in my world, when I say “apples to oranges,” I mean actual fruit. What I will say is that I have a very advanced palate, so it takes a lot to impress me. It doesn’t need to be fancy. I can tell a good cook from a bad one in one egg.

I was taught by the best, so I’m the best through transitive properties. But I’m the best at home. “No Fish on Mondays” is written from the first person perspective because I was living in a memory, not recalling it. However, I decided that the kitchen was too much for me physically- that I could have cerebral palsy or get my stripes in the kitchen, but I couldn’t do both and I figured that not being a chef was easier than curing CP.

That reminds me of a beautiful memory with my Supergrover, which I only bring up because I need it so bad. I figured out some more stuff that went into our demise that I could have told her, but I didn’t because I was trying to spare her feelings. As a result, I’m working through all of it on my own so that I don’t turn into a bitter queen. I don’t read “angry dyke.” I read “bitchy queen” all day. Anyway, the story is that another line cook sexually harassed me and she offered to kill him. I know enough to know it would have been with her bare hands. Honey badger don’t care. God, I feel the same way. I go apeshit inside when anyone crosses her. Believe me when I say she is a monster in the best sense of the word. It’s a good feeling when you’re the one holding the leash, and the ones closest to her often do. She’s not mean to us. She’s mean for us.

If you don’t have that friend, you don’t have a friend. Choose wisely.

And now back to our regularly scheduled program. It just feels better to write about all the things I love about her rather than sending negativity out into the world. I don’t even know if she’s reading and I don’t care. It’s not about her. It’s about healing me.

So, no way to rank but lots of standouts. I love everything, from cheap to expensive.

My favorite cheap thing is grocery store pizza, particularly the fancy kind with rising crust that actually smells like yeast. If you get your pizza delivered, you can’t enjoy the smell of it baking and it takes the same amount of time now that Domino’s drivers aren’t constantly tasked with delivery or death.

My favorite middle tier thing is pesto sauce. This is because you can buy pasta for a dollar a box and $15 pesto and all of the sudden you have a dish you could sell at a restaurant for more than that.

My favorite expensive thing is sushi, because even at the grocery store, sushi grade ahi is pricey. So is good wasabi. However, being able to “roll my own” has meant a lot to me in terms of education. I can make pretty good sushi-su (sp?), the rice with Kewpie and rice vinegar. I never roll it tight enough, but I don’t care. I could eat ahi and rice out of literally anything. I should learn the difference between Japanese and Hawaiian cooking because I could probably do a poke bowl with one hand tied behind my back…. but again, sushi grade ahi is just ridiculous in price most of the time, and even more expensive at a restaurant, where I’m always tempted to upgrade to yellowtail, soft shell crab, or salmon (seriously, there is no logic to the Philadelphia roll. WHY IS IT ADDICTIVE.)

The funniest conversation I’ve had in a sushi restaurant is that I told Dana that I wanted a Mexican roll (I don’t remember what was in it, probably fried jalapenos). She asked me if I could eat a whole Mexican, didn’t realize what she’d said, and then we both ended up nearly on the floor…… just shaking with laughter. The whites are so pretty next to the coloreds (that was the lights on the Christmas tree). Lord Jesus, help me I’m falling down the stairs I’m laughing so hard…. as if I was listening to the Eddie Murphy routine from whence the line appears.

When I talk about food, I talk about my ex-wife. It’s inevitable, because most of my adventure with food started at “Hi, I’m Dana.” We worked together for three years (I think?) and two restaurants. In the first, we basically ran our own kitchen because we were the only ones on shift. The second was at the Portland airport, and those restaurants don’t come to play. It wasn’t irritating locking up the knives at night, but it was hell trying to find parking at the airport and it took a long time to get from the parking into the building.

The coolest part of my cooking career was having the badge that let you walk directly up to the planes if you wanted. I could literally stand out on the tarmac and no one gave a shit. You cannot imagine how many times I imagined stowing away, but the issue with being on the tarmac is that you have NO idea where the planes are going. To some, that might be exciting. X means airports with international flights, so at PDX I could have ended up in Houston or Helsinki. Those are two very inconvenient cities to arrive with no luggage…. not that any city is, but not to know whether you need ski pants or sundresses isn’t that great.

Speaking of ski pants, I watch this YouTuber named Dave Cad that has ads for the most amazing Finnish clothing company. It’s kind of like REI and Uniqlo, and I’ll look it up if you’re interested in the comments. Anyway, Dave lives in Helsinki, but he was road tripping up to Kilpisjaarvi (sp?), which is so far up it was only three degrees Celsius in late June. It makes sense. Lapland is supposedly where Santa Claus lives, as well as the thrill of seeing Dave’s glass igloo. The glass igloo is so that you can ile in bed and watch the aurora borealis. OMG Bryn. That’s on our bucket list now, too. Note to self…. rent a car. Kilpisjaarvi is the most beautiful tiny little town I’ve ever seen. If I lived in Finland, that’s where I’d settle. I want hygge for the rest of my life (from Norwegian… the cosy feeling you get in the winter…. SO similar to Portland except not constantly raining. Snow is easier to me to deal with than rain, because it doesn’t hurt as much when it’s being pelted at you.

Plus, I’d like to start a garden. I’ve watched a couple videos on Finnish chefs because the palate is so much different than ours. I mean, just straight up BIZARRE. In every piece of footage, I am reminded of Anthony Bourdain in Iceland. It’s my favorite episode of No Reservations because he is the crankiest little bitch I’ve ever seen all the way through it. Comparable to Namibia, where he griped he hadn’t had anything without sand, fur, or shit in it for three days.

That part of the world has completely different plants. Vegan food would be off the chain when fruits and veg are in season. If I did have the strength to open a restaurant, Kilpisjaarvi would be excellent because it’s a tiny, tiny town and I could start out small. (I’m just gaming this out. I’m not crazy enough to do this by tomorrow). I think I’d close in the winter, at least part of the time, because I don’t think there would be enough business to survive on bread, cheese and meat until Spring. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe that’s what they eat. Just don’t drink with a Finn. Ever. You just don’t have it in you, and I don’t even know you.

I would be an excellent Finn, for the same reason that I’d rather spend time alone as much as they would. I may not have Finnish blood, but my personality is limited to one country. 😛 No DNA test needed.

Actually, I think Lindsay said we do have some Finnish blood, but it’s only like 3%, which is obviously enough to practically knight me there. Obviously.

Stating the obvious to an obscene amount, what would it be like to live in a country where they don’t hate women and lesbians?

That means I’d go check it out even if the food was terrible.

The Heart of a Chef

June 2, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What quality do you value most in a friend?

Having a sous with excellent cooking skills and a criminal mind is one of God’s great gifts. -Anthony Bourdain

Everything I know about love, I’ve learned through cooking. That’s because my relationship with Dana was very much chef and sous, without the hierarchy. We cooked at home the same way we cooked at work. “You put ’em down, I’ll pick ’em up.” I relied on her technical expertise and soaked it up like a sponge. She learned that when I said I could fix something, she could take that check to the bank and cash it. Instead of just serving me things, she asked for my input. It meant the world to me, because who even am I in the kitchen? I’ve never been to culinary school. My absolute and total belief that she was the chef made communication in the kitchen so easy, because Dana didn’t have an ego and yet there was a line, like Leo being Jed’s best friend and his Chief of Staff. He wasn’t the president, and he knew it.

Our home life fed our work life and vice versa. I couldn’t wait to be in the kitchen with her every day, and that communication made us closer in that if we could communicate under that much pressure, we could talk through anything. It gave us emotional bravery because we were pushing ourselves so hard physically…. especially me, and I’m not in it for the pity vote. It’s just that *everything* in a restaurant is heavy and she could do most things faster and easier than I could. She had more muscle mass. I lifted a lot of things that were too heavy for me, and I will be in awe forever of the memory in which Dana carries a 50 pound bag of flour down a rickety set of steps. The hardest part was not hurting myself in the kitchen. It was watching her in pain. Therefore, my heart stopped for a second at the danger of what she was doing. Then I realized how strong she was.

And if she fell, she’d have a much better survival rate than I ever would have, because I’d have tripped over nothing in the first place. It’s a miracle I didn’t die, especially during a shift, I just couldn’t lift 50 pounds while I was afraid of the stairs that rode the line between step and ladder. Because I have no peripheral vision, the only thing that happened to me that made me afraid was backing down the stairs into a stock pot of cold oil- I couldn’t see it, so I stepped into it up to my shin.

I couldn’t believe what a patient teacher she was, and I’d like to believe I was a good student. I may have gotten a job on Dana’s word, but I kept it. I just couldn’t always be on my A game because my physical limitations show there more than everywhere else. Why wouldn’t they? Cooking combines balance, timing, depth perception (particularly in plating). I had to keep track of all that and sometimes my body rebelled.

I’m proud of what we accomplished together, because combined we had a well-rounded chef. One with both a great palate and technique.

Now that I’m not married to a chef anymore, I’m not saying I want to be with another one. I don’t know what my future partner will do for money. But what I know is that they’ll have the heart of a chef. They’ll either be great cooks or willing to learn how from me. That’s because closeness comes through activity, and life happens when you’re doing something else.

I need someone not afraid to try new things, who doesn’t have hangups about a particular ingredient before they try it. I need someone who is bold and brave in their choices as to how they do life. By this, I mean that they need to have enough confidence to admit when things are wrong and how they contributed to a problem. To be vulnerable with someone is the hardest thing on earth.

When you find that person, it makes you explode on the inside. Everything looks new, even if you’ve been in love a thousand times. When your brain comes down, you think about consequences and how much you’re willing to open up based on what’s happened before the relationship started. You use heuristics to say that what one person is going to do, they all are. That comes out both in very positive and negative ways.

As an INFJ, my inner landscape is huge. I let people in, and walk away from people that are frightened by it. My mind is a very busy place, and to be let in is a privilege. I don’t trust easily, and because I’ve been hurt before, I’m not as approachable as I’d like to be. I walk as if I’m in pain and don’t want to be bothered, and I can’t find a lie.

In terms of learning about love in other ways, my beautiful girl invested so much in me that I couldn’t help it. My brain flooded at all the dopamine, because I heard a message that I hadn’t heard in a long time. That what I bring to the world is valuable, and keep going. Looking inside yourself isn’t for sissies.

When my mind stopped turning a deep, platonic love into something the relationship would never sustain, I realized that even though I had been in love with her and it sucked ass carrying around all that emotion, there was no part of me that wanted to reject her. I often did when I was angry, but I was never alone in doing so. That’s because we’re a little too much alike. First children can be assholes to each other because they’re used to being the authority on everything.

She has the heart of a chef, but her passion is for different things that line up with the thousands I share. We do such different things that even if we lived a mile from each other, our lives would never cross over unless it was on purpose. We’re both introverted. Good luck. I think she’s less shy than I am, but we both have social batteries that drain vs. shyness in meeting anyone. We both think a group of people is called a “no, thanks.”

So, sufficed to say, I thought I’d found a lifemate, but not in terms of romance. My personality profile says that I only have one or two really close friends at a time because I’d rather be deeply intimate with them rather than having surface level friendships with a lot of people. It has been true my whole life. God forbid I be at a party, just having fun and not talking about anything of importance and enjoying the moment.

No, I am knee deep into all sorts of things, very few that were outside my beautiful girl’s wheelhouse. I wanted to soak up her knowledge for all time, because she cares about the same issues I do.

And yet, we fought like cats and dogs because she was everything my personality profile said I’d get, that I’d find someone willing to walk in my inner landscape with me. Why that side of me, the one that felt hurt and rejected won, I’ll never know. Why didn’t I just let it lie and stop responding? She gave me things to think about that will turn over forever in my brain. Why give that up?

It was easy when I realized that we’d never get back what we had, and I was too crushed by it. She didn’t deserve to know how I felt about her anymore, because clearly it didn’t mean as much to her as it meant to me. The reason it took eight years is that she did things that touched me deeply…. that even though there was no going back, we could move forward.

As long as we didn’t have to talk about what did happen, and it was making her reactions all the more muddled…. loving and also reinforcing the idea that I was intruding on her life rather than adding to it. Those words aren’t easily forgotten, and she said them. I just don’t know if she meant them. Was her response actually protective when it came across as angry? Why did I feel so defensive and afraid? Because I’d wronged her. She didn’t hang it over my head, but she didn’t solidify anything, either. That choice didn’t bother her, but it made me ruminate on what she actually wanted from me for far longer and with more intensity than I should have ever given it. I should have walked away sooner to protect both of us, but I didn’t because I wanted the question of how to move forward out of the way. How to navigate spiraling out because as much as we reject each other, it’s not really possible to disconnect now. We are both in each other’s minds and hearts but in different ways and for different reasons.

So, whether she shows up or not, I have to be there for myself. I have to offer myself the relief I was seeking, because relief is the only thing I wanted from her that I didn’t get. That’s why it was too painful to continue the relationship on a surface level. Not talking about the real thing led to superficial snarks, real and perceived.

So, there’s a lot in me that’s fighting right now with what is real and what isn’t. How much I should believe based on what I saw and not what I heard, because maybe I missed what she was trying to say in favor of thinking I was right. I also have defensive mechanisms and a stunning need to be correct. Thinking about it now makes me laugh, because none of our younger siblings would believe the lengths we’d go to in order to prove each other wrong because it’s good to be the king.

I feel deeply about every win and loss, because no matter the outcome, I screamed with empathy. It hurt more to watch her in pain than it did to be in pain myself, and 90% of the time I caused pain because I’d stepped on a land mine thought to be dormant. The other 10% was in reaction to feeling completely dressed down and unable to express my point in a way that had merit. I’m not the person that always has to be right in most cases. It depends on what I know about the subject, and I will defer to the smartest person in the room, always. But what do you do if your subject matter expert doesn’t think the same thing about you, or expresses that? What I mean by that is the people in your life not yielding to you at least part of the time. No one is ever wrong to the point there is no redeeming quality about them a hundred percent of the time. There is no relationship where one person knows everything and the other person is absolutely brainless and never has better sources and methods than you.

I will never in my lifetime have a conflict with someone in which I don’t have to own consequences, so I expect other people to feel the same way. I write to people privately the same way I write here- which is to say that I look at every possible combination of factors that could be going into someone’s behavior. I clearly express my 3D opinion, which is that I love you, but that doesn’t mean we don’t got shit to do.

When the response is rejection, trauma kicks in. It’s my job to stop. I can’t throw around words the way I have. I don’t judge people, I judge whether situations are fair. Just how long I’ve been feeling defensive because I spoke in a quiet voice and was ignored. How that builds up and my voice gets louder. I need to know why I’m doing it in order to change, and I can point fingers, but only for comprehension to understand the pain’s source. I cannot blame other people for my reactions, and I will not allow people to think that theirs are more important than mine. Different and equally valid.

Most of the time, I don’t understand the charge I’m leading because I don’t think the way a neurotypical person thinks. My filters are different, and the symptoms are akin to Asperger’s. I don’t process emotion like most people, so I don’t always know what to say in a way that doesn’t make them upset because I simply wasn’t thinking about it. My brain doesn’t say “you can’t say that.” Where my empath kicks in is seeing when I’ve caused a negative reaction, mostly because my calculations are foreign. I’m not running on the same operating system. There are no “things we don’t talk about.” That’s because every instinct in my body says that being vulnerable is the key to being strong. That it takes more courage to tell people how you feel when you are terrified of rejection. It takes courage to have an opinion, a right I’ve denied myself for far too long. That’s because when I began to have opinions, I rocked the boat to the point I thought I wouldn’t survive all the upheaval. That I had to fight this mental battle with my health so that I’d have enough energy to also self-soothe.

I didn’t want to continue a relationship where I thought I’d found Richard from Texas and she’d found Groceries. That’s because I made it where it didn’t feel that way and couldn’t get enough confidence in myself to give me any slack at all. I knew that my brain chemicals were beyond FUBAR and didn’t retreat the way I should have.

And exactly none of that turned down all the warmth I felt when I thought of her, not a fire in the belly but a day at the beach. I will feel that every time I think of her, which is how I know there’s no set of circumstances in which I’d refuse anything she wanted. It wasn’t a little deal to me that nothing felt solid, and the inconsistency drew me into myself. I was trapped in this cycle of believing that everything was fine and she hated me and yet still somehow tolerated my presence. Say that sentence all in one breath and you’ll get close to how I felt when you’re winded.

At the same time, I wasn’t always good about letting her know that I was thinking of her feelings because I talked about them, but she never talked about mine. Over time, I realized that my emotions didn’t cause much in her when I felt like Elvis had left the building, awakened out of a stupor caused by awe. When you love someone, aren’t both of those things true? That you can grieve what is lost and enjoy what you had simultaneously, because love and conflict live in the same house?

But if the only thing I can be counted on is saying we’re done and not done, I won’t waffle. That’s because I showed up for every holiday for nine years and wrote to her every day. For nine years. Pretty sure I can be counted on for more than a political point. When I said that it was over, we both had steam in our ears by then. I had no guidance in how much I should feel, so my attention never wavered from the first time we had a conversation. It should have been different. I should have known she was sharing my words with other people because she should have told me she was going to do it rather than telling me after it had been done. I don’t care about her sharing my blog entries, but my letters are another matter. Who knows what went on between her and the people who read them? I ruminated on that for years, because she’d said to keep things tight from everyone, and never said she wouldn’t.

I can’t do that. I can’t face a firing squad over what I’ve written, and neither can she. Neither one of us would want to walk into a room knowing that everyone there knew what we’d said, which meant that integrating our lives would have been difficult. I just would have had to sit through a lot more uncomfortable conversations because I haven’t said shit to anyone. She has a clean slate all day, every day. I do not.

He’s never known it, but I think about her husband all the time. Why wouldn’t I both love and fear him? How would I know how he felt in all of this? When can I stop shaming myself for it?

I am not pushing my memories with her away. I am letting them come and visit me in my dreams, her words pouring thoughts into my head that made me feel stronger and smaller than I ever had. But her words didn’t do it all. My reactions were often poor because my self image was so destroyed.

I do think that I’ve gotten a peace of mind that hasn’t been with me in a long time. I didn’t want to be selfish, and I waited until I was so defeated that I just slunk off into the night. That’s because she laid out everything on her plate and I couldn’t take it. I’d already spent years thinking of everything on her plate and knew there was no universe in which any one of my problems could compare. I didn’t get impatient until we’d been tearing at each other for almost a decade. I don’t know what created that push/pull…. that we could say it was over like that and sign up for more.

I think it can be chalked up to our different approaches to everything, but I never knew when she was going to see a change as positive or suspicious. When she felt attacked, she attacked me. Sometimes, I was stable enough to say “no, that’s not what I meant,” and sometimes her reaction was so fiery that it engaged my escalation mode. In fact, the last exchange we had started with “I don’t want to fight about this.” It ended with her feeling like she had to delay reading my e-mails because they brought on guilt and shame when none was meant. I am not responsible for that guilt and shame. I am only responsible for communicating my needs and hoping that they create a desired reaction because my happiness is just as important as theirs. When her response was to go find other friends, I did. I would like to believe that she popped off as much as I did, because she knows I know everything in that letter intimately. That no obligation of hers went unnoticed to me. I couldn’t believe she thought she needed to spell all that out as if I hadn’t noticed. I’d been drowning in it. I knew I was last priority, I knew why, and I couldn’t make anything better.

If I’d been the sort of person that compartmentalizes emotion, we would be in any of the situations we are now, because I could have just laid back and enjoyed having a friend that was smarter than me.

But I didn’t. I walked around hurt too much of the time, not because of how she felt about me; it was all about my emotions. The guilt and shame that was above me dripping down. I can’t speak for my beautiful girl, but it seemed like something was brewing on her end that read similar. My emotions were too big, and I knew it. I didn’t know how to tamp them down properly, and I never will. Someday a neurotypical can tell me what that’s like.

Right now, I’m just trying to turn my attention, living around this loss instead of kicking it out. Dealing with it while it’s happening so it doesn’t come up later. It’s important to me to have a verbal tapestry of our history, because even if I never get what I want again I still want to remember when I had it.

I want to cry out all the pain, and relive all those laughs. The fact that I look at this whole experience together makes me invincible, that I am not swayed into “it was always bad” or “it was always good.”

I didn’t handle it with power, grace, or style. But I felt it all, all the time. What kept me going was the heart of a chef, that the same give and take I had with food was there with all relationships…. that all of them were a balance of clutch and gas.

Texas Questionnaire

March 27, 2023March 28, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Notes on Being a Texan According to Me

BBQ brisket or ribs:

Neither. Turkey and sausage with white bread, pickles, raw onion, and an iced tea on the side because I like the spicy barbecue sauce best. Now that I live in another part of the south, I hate to say it, but I like this barbecue better. Pork and vinegar are such good friends.

Big Red or Dr. Pepper:

Neither. Diet Wild Red from HEB. Why is Big Red even on this? Wild Red is the GOAT. I am positive that HEB would like to hear this. Please tell them the next time you shop.

Tacos or Tamales:

Combination plate. Let’s not get stupid.

I like all kinds of tamales, but the green chile chicken at Pappasitos is my go-to. I also have said for years that “I like crunchy tacos because chips are a part of the meal.” You only lose points with me if the chicken is too clean. I want it to look like it’s been in the oven for hours and just prepped (pulled)…. And if you’re wondering what I mean by “clean,” it’s stuffing canned chicken with no seasoning into anything that’s supposed to be Mexican food.

Texans or Cowboys:

I don’t watch American football much. I am likely to be seen at a Dynamo or a Dash game. Watching sports on TV is kind of boring to me, but I do like going on YouTube to see 30 second clips of really elite golf shots, points on goal, etc. I used to have two friends that were obsessed with golf, and thanks to them, I got a free beer. Jordan Spieth was the answer to a question at pub trivia, and I never would have pulled out that answer unless I’d heard someone else talking about it.

UT or A&M:

Texas, because nobody is trying to upset Matt McConaughey here.

Sixth Street or Riverwalk:

I have never been to Sixth Street, so I can’t really say. What I can say is that my favorite restaurant on the Riverwalk is “Paloma del Rio.” Keep in mind it’s been a long time, so it might not be there. If it is, give it a shot and tell me if it’s still good. 😛

Houston or Dallas:

I don’t know Dallas well enough to really have an opinion here. I just hate Dallas because I’m from Houston and that’s what we do.

Ever drove across TX:

East to West a few times, but not South to North.

Been to the Alamo:

Yes. It’s basically the only field trip that anyone likes. The IMAX movie is also amazing, and it’s near the mission.

Crossed the border:

Several times. I went with a group from my church and attempted to preach in Spanish. Hilarity ensued.

Floated the Frio:

I don’t know. Is it near San Marcos? I’ve done most of them.

Been to the State Fair:

Yes. It’s one of my favorite childhood memories. One year we also saw “Cats,” which is much better if you’re seven.

Killed a snake:

No, but my dad has. We came home to a huge snake in our garage when I was a kid. We didn’t stop to check if it was venomous or not. My experience with Texas wildlife is limited to trash pandas (raccoons).

Saw a rodeo:

So many, yes. The Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo is one of the most famous in the world. I know I’ve been to a couple of cool concerts as well, but I’ve slept since then and can’t remember the acts.

Two stepped at a dance hall:

Very, very poorly.

Rode a mechanical bull:

Absolutely not. Have fun tho.

Own boots and cowboy hat:

I have owned boots, but I just don’t like those kinds of hats on my own head. It’s not that they don’t look great on other people.

Drove a tractor:

I would, but no one has ever asked me.

Shot something:

Yes, but I wasn’t living in Texas at the time. I went to an outdoor range in Estacada, Oregon and proceded to waste a trashed Dell computer. As an “IT Guy” it was cathartic in a way I didn’t know I needed.

Willie or George

Neither. Chicks for life…. although I would like to meet Willie.

Forgetting an Attachment

December 21, 2022 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

It’s a double entendre, that title. Earlier today, I talked about fully letting go of Sam. Then, I forgot to add all the tags I normally add so that the readers that normally read me couldn’t find me….. like forgetting to attach a picture to an e-mail when basically all you’ve said in the e-mail is “here’s a picture” and still forgot to send it. Basically, I’m writing another entry to notify my readers that there’s a new entry. The writer reader relationship in the digital age. I hope we’re in love, otherwise this web site is me being Pepe Le Pew. I am not that desperate.

I was amused when I was in Facebook Jail that I watched two women fight over my picture. They weren’t fighting over the right to ask me out. They were fighting over whether kd lang was hotter than me. I didn’t pay attention to the outcome.

Fuck yes I did, are you kidding me? I flat out won. I knew I would. People have called me a better looking kd lang since I cut my hair short back in ’95. I don’t see it, but a hell of a lot of other people do. I think it’s the brown hair and brown eyes, but mostly that’s where it ends…… except that most lesbians my age have the same resting bitch face. Maybe we look like each other in that way that when you live with someone for a long time, people think your facial expressions look alike. Therefore, it’s not even that we look like each other. It’s because we’re from the same tribe.

When I was a kid it was straight person code for “I know you’re a lesbian.” That amused me to no end, and I have gotten a lot of mileage out of it. I also can’t think of a universe in which it’s a good idea to tell you which straight people have said it, but that’s the funniest part of all. God, it sucks to be you.

Now that kd isn’t popular broadly and straight people have lost interest, I don’t get it that often. But put me in a room where everyone and their pets have listened to all her music on repeat since college and I am begging to get away from the attention. A stroke to the ego never hurt anyone, but after a while it gets embarrassing. I love attention to bits, but I microdose.

I actually think that’s why I was always so bubbly whenever Sam was around, because I was alone the rest of the time. It wasn’t that I wasn’t off doing my own thing and obsessing over her. It was that by the time she worked all day and put dinner on the table for the week, enough time had gone by that my social battery was recharged. I think it would have been a big shock for her to spend a long time with me to know that I am not bubbly in the slightest. The one thing that would never have changed, and hundreds of people will attest to this because they saw it with Dana for eight years, is the energy for me when Sam walked into a room. Time would just stop.

I had been married to Dana for four years before the accompanist at our church knew we were a couple. This is because Dana wasn’t a singer, and I drove myself to church so that I could sing and she could sleep in. When she walked into the sanctuary, all the joy rushed into my face, and it got warm. The accompanist said she just assumed that Dana and I must not be that close because I was always so happy to see her.

Quite the opposite. When we’d been best friends for three and a half years, we’d learned to talk with our eyes. She was everything I’d ever wanted and more. Neither one of us could breathe and not have the other one feel it. I didn’t tell her for a long time, because I knew I would be playing with fire. That I could destroy the most stable relationship in my life by losing myself to her, even if I was supposed to because relationships are all about compromise.

Our relationship did end, and it was traumatic. But I would go back in time and do it all over, knowing it either could or would end the same way. There are lessons I learned from Dana that she was there to teach me, because she’s the one in my life I felt was capable of doing so. Cooking was an authority I let her own. If we were in a professional kitchen, it was “yes, Chef.” Of course there were a couple of exceptions. Of course there were. But by and large, we were a dynamic team who could turn on a dime because when seconds counted, we could say things with a look. We could anticipate each other’s movements, because we had done it day in and day out for years at our house without missing a beat. It didn’t matter how a pro kitchen was laid out. Improvisation was our forte….. because Dana was loud. (I can’t wait until she sees that line and I hope it lights up her face.)

I didn’t just want any woman, I wanted Dana. It was obvious to everyone from the start, and our relationship lived on hope for quite a while in each of our minds, not knowing exactly how much platonic love had made room for romance while the other one dreamt.

I could have asked her so many times when we were alone, but I did not want to set the ball rolling on an affair, because that’s something that would have changed me and taken me away from who I was. No, if I was going to risk everything, I had to be sure.

I did and I won big. Just Kings full over Aces. To be clear, we did have an affair. We admitted our feelings to each other, and eight hours later, we told the people we were in relationships that we loved them, but that we were too close to each other to make it work with them anymore. They were unsurprised by this knowledge, and yet I apologize for the enormous amount of time it took for me to make my decision, literally and metaphorically. I’d cheated on my then girlfriend for eight hours, but I’d been leaning more on Dana for emotional support than anyone I’d dated for YEARS at that point. The clue phone was stalking me obsessively and I wasn’t picking up. Thank God I eventually did.

It took me two years to get it together, and eight hours for my life to absolutely fall apart. It was traumatic and painful for a higher purpose. We were both in relationships that were just fine. We could have been happy for a lifetime with them, but it wouldn’t be the fit we had. We weren’t breaking up with our significant others because there was anything wrong with them. Tokyo and Los Angeles are both beautiful cities but you’ll be miserable if your partner never wanted to come on the trip.

It wasn’t that they were wrong. They were wrong for us. We wanted cherry blossoms and strong matcha. They wanted Milk Bar.

Dana and I wanted an attachment we’d never forget, and that has been true. It was worth it to find the love of my life for a short time than never to have experienced a love like that at all. I reached out for fantastic, and I found it.

There’s one picture I love of Dana at my sister’s engagement celebration brunch at Brennan’s in Houston. She’s wearing a fabulous outfit, shoes, and jewelry that we spent the day shopping for, just giggling and laughing like we invented it. We’re at one end of the table smiling, and my mother is on the other….. also smiling. At the time, it was my favorite picture we took to display in our house.

Now, it is a beautiful artistic representation of what marriage looks like for me now….. my wife and I on one end of the table smiling, and my mother on the other.

It’s a shame I forgot the attachment.

Why I Eat Mostly Plants

December 9, 2021 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

This morning I had a vegan breakfast burrito that seemed larger than my actual stomach. Turns out, it was. I ate half of it before I tapped out. I got it from “The Impossible Shop” in Bethesda, where their burgers and burritos were buy one, get one free. I didn’t spend much, and I got four meals out of it. As I was eating, I realized I could write about it. Here, in no particular order, are the reason plant-based eating appeals to me:

I get to pay the ADHD tax up front.
- Plant-based food can sit in my refrigerator much longer than meat. I had to ask myself what was better…. protein that would spoil in my refrigerator quickly if I forgot about it, or protein I would actually get around to eating? I started stocking my freezer with veggie burgers that took a few minutes in the microwave, or 20 minutes in a saute pan if I was feeling fancy and wanted to crisp them up. I stocked my fridge with veggie hot dogs, cashew cheese, and soy-based cream cheese. I’m pretty sure that if Whole Foods stopped carrying veggie dogs, vegan cream cheese, and hot sauce I’d be dead by now (here, have the recipe for a really great hot dog). As a lifelong sufferer of ADHD, I generally don’t realize I’m hungry until I need food right the hell now. The ADHD tax is that my groceries are a little more expensive, but not horribly so.
It’s healthy.
- Hear this, and hear it well. You are not going to save many, if any calories on a plant-based diet, and it’s a huge misconception. However, what you do get is less saturated fat and more vitamins if you actually eat vegetables. It’s possible to be vegan and not eat them, getting by on Impossible burgers, sausage, etc. But if you’re willing to eat the rainbow along with it, you get superfood. A lot of nights, I will make salad mixed with lentils and rice, add dried fruit like cranberries or cherries, and use a handful of walnuts or pecans for protein. I found rice and lentils that take 90 seconds in the microwave…. and by salad, I usually get mise already prepared. Chopped red onion, carrots, Brussels sprouts, etc. You might be shocked that I’ve cooked professionally, have acceptable knife skills, and still buy the mise (short for mise-en-place, French for “everything in its place,” and means preparing your ingredients to throw in a pan/rice cooker/etc. beforehand), but remember…. ADHD TAX. Do I need veggies I can use quickly or veggies that will spoil because I won’t remember I need prep time? The ADHD tax is less than the amount I would spend throwing whole veggies in the trash.
Plant-based is better for my mental health.
- Between ADHD, depression, and anxiety, I will never (get to) go off meds in my life. They’re chronic conditions. However, eating superfood helps keep them at bay. My diet is the supporting actor. I also buy vegan meal replacement shakes and tiny vegan chocolate milks to drink with my meals because they’re fortified with all the vitamins I skip while cooking, particularly B and D (they help especially in the winter). When I get really, really depressed and anxious, I sometimes develop a block on eating, and both ensure I still get calories.
I propagate less animal cruelty.
- Michael Pollan’s mantra is “eat food, not too much, mostly plants.” I’ve taken it to heart, and only eat dairy sparingly and meat a few times a year. I have found that as I get older, I have less and less tolerance for lactose, and sometimes get mild stomach upset with meat. But I’m not going to become so fanatical about my diet that it affects other cooks. I don’t want anyone to bend to accommodate me. What we’re having is what we’re having. But eating less meat is better than having it for every meal. Pollan’s other mantra is “don’t eat anything that your great-grandparents wouldn’t recognize as food.” Though I’d have to explain cashew cheese, it wouldn’t be too foreign… you can make it as easily in your home kitchen as they did with whole milk and cheesecloth. I also don’t want to feel bad about the very occasional Nashville Hot Chicken or piece of bacon. I just don’t buy it for home use.
Plant-based eating made cooking exciting again.
- I already know my way around a kitchen using traditional ingredients over and over (and over and over). Figuring out substitutions, learning to make alternative junk food, and trading recipes on the Internet sparked my creativity in the kitchen, and I wasn’t bored anymore. I can make a mean vegan macaroni and cheese or Alfredo sauce. Pastry with olive oil is delicious. I don’t bake (different skill set), so I generally buy pastry and cakes, but I know from experience in eating them that I won’t eat non-vegan desserts unless I’m at someone else’s house and that’s what’s offered. Vegan desserts are just too amazing to ignore, or to skip eating because “they’re gross” and you’ve never even tried one. Girl, please.

My diet is entirely based on Anthony Bourdain, and I’d like to believe he’d be proud of me. His disdain for vegans and vegetarians was LEGENDARY (LEGENDAIRY?), so my mantra comes from him. “When you reject other people’s food, you reject them, because their hospitality is deeply rooted in their culture and family.” I’m paraphrasing, but you get the gist. I accept other people’s gifts as well as I do my own. However, it’s rare that other people cook for me. Most of the time, I’m on my own, and I have to cook food that aligns with my values… the biggest of which is paying the ADHD tax on the front end instead of owing more on the back end.

Life’s a Beach

May 8, 2019 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 1 Comment

I just put rice on for supper. This time it was spraying the pan with grapeseed oil, and adding brown rice, salt, all-purpose seasoning, and dried cranberries. When it’s done, I’m going to add black beans and a vegetable protein. Not sure whether it will be “chicken” or “fish.” I enjoy the taste of the “fish” better, but “chicken” would probably coordinate better. As I have said before, I occasionally eat meat, eggs, and drink milk. But what I have discovered over time is that a plant-based diet is better for my mental and physical health.

Most of the reason I still become an omnivore is that I don’t believe in making other people bend to accommodate me. When I go to other people’s houses and they offer to cook for me, what we’re having is what we’re having. It’s just how hospitality works for me. And on one occasion, I got a craving for bacon and asked for it on a veggie burger. It was at a restaurant, and Dan went to the bar and ordered for us. When she came back, she said, “the next time you’re going to do that, you have to order it.” Something about the bartender looking at her like she had three heads. However, I will tell you that bacon tastes even better with veggie protein than it does with beef, especially spicy black bean patties.

Last night I made myself a “double cheeseburger” with spicy black bean patties and vegan cheddar. It was so good I considered making myself a second one. I didn’t bother with “bacon,” because I have tried every single brand of veggie bacon available, and to me, they all taste like bacon-flavored plastic. Well, except tempeh. It’s not terrible, but that’s the best endorsement I offer.

I do love the hell out of veggie sausage, however…. especially the breakfast ones. Morningstar Farms makes maple-flavored patties, and Field Roast makes Smoked Apple Sage links. If you’ve tried veggie sausage before and didn’t like it, might I suggest cutting it longways and frying it on medium heat? Respect first contact, and don’t touch it until it’s time to flip. Let the bottom caramelize in the oil. The crispy outside is my favorite part. It makes my hot dogs look weird and kind of hard to eat, but I’ll never go back to meat dogs if I can help it. The ingredients in them scare me- always have.

And yes, I do enjoy both Beyond and Impossible burgers, but not as much as patties made out of black beans or chickpeas.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

Speaking of TED talks, I am reminded of Brené Brown. I really love her, but not just because what she says makes sense. When I watched her TED talk, I thought she looked familiar. I decided that I just knew someone who looked like her, and then I remembered that she went to University of Houston Graduate School of Social Work. My aha! moment was when I realized that I was the supervisor of their computer lab in 1999, and she was probably one of “my kids.” I fact checked it with her team, and it’s true. So I met her before she was a household name. I wish I could say that I remembered more about her at that time, but being able to say that we’ve actually been in the same room is enough. Most people who’ve watched her would give a limb to be in the same room now. But it’s not like she’d remember me and we’d go shopping together or anything.

Moving on, the title of this entry also comes from hospitality. My family and I are all getting together at a beach house in Galveston starting the first week of June. I’m all set except for needing to get a bathing suit or some board shorts and a top. I love swimming in the ocean, and wish we’d lived in Galveston longer when I was a child.

As an adult, my favorite memory involves my mother. I called her up and said that I was going to the beach for the day, and did she want to come? To my surprise, she said “yes. Come get me.” When we got there, she actually got in the ocean with me, and I don’t have any memories of her doing so when I was five. She hate hate hated cold water, so getting into pools and oceans was not her vibe. My mother was also constantly obsessed with calories, and therefore every time I ordered dessert she would just sit there, looking longingly and never taking a bite.

I always ordered something sour, like key lime pie, because to eat chocolate cake in front of her seemed like cruel and unusual punishment. When I ordered dessert at our post beach dinner, I offered her half and she ate it. That day was just full of unexpected pleasures, and exactly what made it so special. She got out of her comfort zone in a way that made me incredibly happy, and the memory ranks in my Top Ten list.

The end of the trip marks my mother’s birthday, so I am sure that my sister and I will go out to the cemetery in some sort of matching outfits to honor something that she always liked. It feels better to grieve with her than alone, but during Mother’s Day, that’s how it’s going down. I have purposely made myself busy that day, because otherwise I would hide under my blankets and sleep it off. I am going on the 2:00 tour of The International Spy Museum, and then I think I’m going to the Smithsonian National Zoo, weather permitting. This is because one of my favorite things to do in DC is to sit on the bench in front of the giraffe enclosure and write. I use a Bluetooth keyboard and either my phone or my tablet. I also really, really enjoy taking photos, and over time, I’ve gotten better at it. The reason I know this is that now I rely on my natural eye rather than The GIMP to get the angle I want.

I’m also going to take pictures at the spy museum, but I’m not going to post them publicly. It’s an experience that deserves to be a surprise when you go. No spoilers, especially since I’m going on opening day.

And on that note, I think my rice is ready.

Two Words

May 4, 2019May 4, 2019 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

It’s amazing how two words can make your whole day.

It’s amazing how two words can destroy it.

The two words that lit me up like a Christmas tree were “someday perhaps?”

The two words that cratered me were “Mother’s Day.”

The words that made me smile were in reference to a future hangout with the aforementioned pen pal that I’d never actually met in real life, but had been writing to for years and years. When he/she (not giving anything away) comes to DC, it will be fun to laugh together, hug, and show them my version of my city.

My mother died in October of 2016, and as you can imagine, I’m not over it. Mother’s Day happens every single year, and I am sort of used to the onslaught of ads that pointedly ask if you’ve remembered to buy presents. The thing is, though, I’d forgotten Mother’s Day was coming up, and being reminded when I wasn’t thinking about it and wasn’t prepared was, in a word, awful.

So, like you do, I immediately bought a ticket to the opening of the new International Spy Museum that day. What I mean by this is that the museum itself is not new, the-new-spy-museum-at they’ve just moved and expanded from F Street to L’Enfant Plaza. The only thing I will miss about their old digs is the Shake Shack around the corner. Because, of course, the thing you need after looking at espionage gadgets is a black and white malt. But get it to go. Every time I’ve been to a Shake Shack, seating was a nightmare.

I’m also saving some money for the gift shop. Last time I went, I got a t-shirt on clearance that says, “Argo @$#% Yourself” with the spy museum logo on the sleeve. It is brilliant, but I don’t wear it unless I’m hanging out with friends I feel comfortable with- not always a huge fan of meeting new people in a t-shirt that says “fuck,” even bleeped for child safety. Since I am such a huge fan of “Argo,” I found an old promotional t-shirt on Amazon for $10 that says, “the movie was fake. The op was real,” and has “Argo” in large letters with the skyline of Tehran cut into the bottom, plus the release date of the film. That one I wear all the time.

As I was telling a friend, I think I found the last piece of memorabilia available except the script, which I don’t need because I have the movie memorized, anyway. To say that I’ve seen it 25 times is an understatement by a large margin…. mostly because it is jaw-droppingly scary in some places and so damned funny I start laughing and can’t stop in others… especially every time Alan Arkin, John Goodman, and/or Bryan Cranston are on screen. To wit:

The setup is that O’Donnell (Bryan Cranston) is driving Mendez to an airport to get on the plane to Tehran.

O’Donnell: I’m required to remind you that if you’re detained, The Agency will
not claim you.
Mendez: Barely claim me as it is.
O’Donnell: Your ˜In Case Of’s’ good?
Mendez: Just Christine (his son’s mother, they’re separated). Guess I should have brought some books to read in prison.
O’Donnell: Nah. They’ll kill you long before prison.

For those of you who haven’t seen “Argo,” Ben Affleck both directed it and played Tony Mendez (emphatic fist shake at not casting a Hispanic actor), who rescued six diplomats who managed to escape from the embassy in Tehran and hide out in the Canadian ambassador’s house (the ambassador is brilliantly played by Victor Garber- also one of my favorite fictional spies as Jack Bristow in “Alias”).

I love how the movie is heartbreaking and hilarious in one breath. And no, I didn’t have to look up the lines, just can’t remember whether they’re at National or Dulles. And even though I’ve seen it more times than all my other favorites combined, I still cry at the end (not a spoiler, just the orchestral score).

My best wish for the new digs is that they have a huge Tony Mendez exhibit, because he died not too long ago and therefore, I would guess that even more of his ops are declassified. I am not totally clear on the rules, but I believe when you die you lose your covers, and the ops you’ve done can be made public… just not the ones that involve other people still alive and/or are still in progress. It’s possible some are still current, because I believe that after Tony left the CIA full time, he was still an occasional consultant. No one would want to lose all that experience permanently unless the person was really, really gone. I can’t imagine the grief inside The Agency, because he was a straight-up legend.

In a way, I think that subconsciously I picked going to the spy museum because Tony died to remind myself that I am not the only person in the world in grief.

I feel the same way about walking through cemeteries. To me, it is not morbid. It is an uplifting reminder that I am not alone in my sadness, situational depression, wondering what we’d be gabbing about if she were still here, etc. What I find is that as time goes on, the well of emotional injury gets more shallow, but there are triggers that pull me right back to her open casket, and how I felt completely disoriented, as if the world had started spinning the other direction and I could feel it.

One of those triggers was Tony’s death. I started crying and couldn’t stop, eventually realizing that it wasn’t all about him. Yes, it was devastating to lose a national treasure, but it was also a direct hit on how “gone” death truly means. And not to demean losing friends or extended family, but your reality doesn’t actually crack until you lose a parent. The entire universe seems different, and for a while, it loses all its color. You just wander around sort of half alive in grayscale.

I knew that I was getting better when I could make an effort to see friends, but at first, it was only other people who had also lost a parent. They were my people, the ones who I could confide in and share my rage at the dumb things people say when you lose a loved one, knowing innately that they mean no malice, so you can’t get mad at them directly. You can only get mad at the situation. Bad theology got on my nerves, didn’t measure up to one lady who compared the death of her cat to the death of my mother at church. It made my rage go to 11 and I had to excuse myself as not to emotionally rip her to shreds, because if I had waited even another three seconds, I would have taken her head off.

There’s only one other situation that makes me truly uncomfortable, and that’s the people who, upon hearing about your parent’s death, start crying because they can’t imagine what’s going to happen when their parents die, and that also happened to me in public (again, at church). The reason it’s tone deaf is because my natural reaction was “well, it’s a good thing I’m going through it and not you.” It’s just so egocentric that I cannot deal. It’s just another situation in which I just have to walk away, because I have not come up with an appropriate response, just a sarcastic one.

And that’s the thing. Because you know the people around you aren’t trying to hurt you, there’s just nothing that anyone can say that will make it better, you have no idea what to say in response to the awkward and often just stupid.

If you don’t know what to do, let me tell you. Grief is as individual as a fingerprint, and everyone processes differently, but this generally works across the board. Say “I’m sorry for your loss,” and offer to be present. And that’s it. The ones I loved the most during that time were people who showed up, but didn’t say much of anything. They just sat next to me as I stared off into space and were willing to listen if I could manage to talk. But they offered no advice on what to do, they just let me process verbally. It’s never a case of needing advice on what to do, especially if you haven’t lost a parent yourself. It’s giving the person room to breathe and never, ever comparing grief, even if you’ve been in the same situation. Because we’re not in the same boat, just the same ocean and trying to keep our heads above water. Suffering is universal, but we all have different ways of coping.

For instance, when I was actually in town for the funeral and with my sister and my dad, I hardly emoted at all because I was speaking at the funeral and I wanted to feel put together for it. I wanted to be able to be funny, because the eulogies I enjoy the most are the ones that offer real insight into the person. My mother was a church musician almost her entire life, starting at 12 or 13. So my opening line was, “this is the only funeral Carolyn Baker’s ever been to where she wasn’t working.” It had the desired effect. The entire congregation just broke up.

I am also quite socially anxious, and only three people I knew besides my family came to the funeral, so I had to put on a mask and a suit of armor to deal with being in a HUGE crowd where I knew practically no one. The mask and the armor are extroversion to an Oprah-like level, while inside I am shaking and counting the seconds until I can get home. In short, I didn’t look like someone in grief until I flew back to DC, where I only got out of bed sporadically for about three months. I allowed myself to completely fall apart, just not in front of anyone. I did once, and it was terrifying, so I never did it again. I gave lip service to letting people in, and then I completely isolated, only emoting through e-mail or crying into my pillows when no one was home. I couldn’t even bear crying that was loud enough for my housemates to come running, and they’re people I’d trust with my life.

In public, I became stoic and divorced from my emotions, because feeling even small emotions led to a flooding out I couldn’t stop. It was better not to start, because it would stop me from engaging in conversation. Even when I was with friends, there was a risk I wouldn’t take- being there, but not present….. people talking at my body while my soul was out there somewhere, unable to respond appropriately with laughter or empathy or whatever the situation needed…. as well as just nodding and smiling because I could hear people talking, but I couldn’t understand what was being said. It became background noise.

In essence, compartmentalization was necessary to have a fighting chance at moving on.

I thought I knew grief from bad breakups, and it was a wake-up call to realize how differently devastating this grief continues to be.

That’s because even though you gain and lose people to circumstances throughout your life, there’s still a small chance they’ll reappear. You apologize for being shitty people to each other and as long as the apology comes with changed behavior, it will generally stick…. or as I call it from a stolen line, “resurrection happening in the middle of the mess.”

As an aside, Easter is a very important holiday for me, because I don’t generally celebrate Jesus’ resurrection literally, but the way we resurrect ourselves, both individually and in community.

When a person dies, as opposed to a relationship, you lose hope. You lose the future. And if the person dies relatively young, you get angry at having the years stolen away in which you feel entitled. My mother was 65. She died just months after her retirement from teaching- she never even got to enjoy it. What I miss the most is that I thought we could go to church together more often, because she wasn’t working. Even when she took time off to come and visit me, she’d never take time off from church as well. When she died, she was completely free, because her church had so few members that they decided to close, and she hadn’t found a new church yet. I’d already started looking through solos because I thought I had my favorite accompanist back, and I’d already talked to my choir director about it.

My choir director and my mother were cut from the same cloth, and every time Sam played solo piano, if I closed my eyes I couldn’t tell the difference. When my mother died, it made me come unglued. I went to church for about six weeks after I came back from the funeral, and it was just long enough to realize that it was the biggest trigger of them all and I still can’t go back. I know I will; eventually I will get that trigger stamped back down to manageable, but today is not that day.

I do appreciate that Mike, the husband in the family I live with, keeps inviting me to his church, even though it’s relatively conservative United Methodist. I’d still take him up on it because I know the hymnal from front to back, as well as soprano descants for nearly everything. Singing would be the most important part of church for me no matter what the congregation believes.

In true introvert form, I want to be invited even if I don’t take you up on it.

Another two words that make my day?

Please come.