Free The Kitchen Counter Cooking School by Kathleen Flinn Page B

casserole.” She shoved it into her canary-colored retro wall oven.
    â€œMore than anything, I wish that cooking could become natural to me. I’ve come to realize that it’s important for me to find options around food that I don’t feel I have right now. If I’m going to eat right, I have to finally learn to do it myself.”
    Cooking seemed like a minefield to Donna, in terms of both her own relationship to food and the power struggle she felt in her relationship with her husband. He could cook, she couldn’t, and that unfortunate balance led her to a place where she felt uncomfortable and out of control in the heart of her own home. She described it as “his kitchen” and commented that she didn’t even know where to find some utensils and pans. She worked fifty-hour weeks trying to help feed kids in Africa, and her husband’s buying decisions meant that she ended up wasting a lot of food. Yet she had clearly hit a point in her young life where she realized that she needed to make a change. Of all the people I visited, I felt that Donna had both the most to gain and potentially the most to lose.

ANDRA
    â€œI’m sorry, it’s going to be so hot!” Andra apologized repeatedly as she walked us up the stairs to her apartment. Edging toward the nineties, it was unseasonably hot for early June. “I have no AC, so I hope you don’t mind, but it’s just too hot to wear a bra.”
    The life of Andra, a forty-three-year-old paralegal, had clearly taken some curious turns. Raised in an affluent family, she lived in what she called “a sort of a slum,” a complex of low-slung apartments that offered subsidized housing adjacent to the airport. In the wake of the economic meltdown of 2008, her firm slashed both her hourly rate and her hours during a major round of cost cutting. On a good week she took home $180 after taxes. For the past four months she’d been using food stamps for the first time in her life, a fact she kept secret from her colleagues and from her parents living nearby in an upscale suburb. “They have a personal chef now,” she said, an edge of what could have been either jealously or dismay in her voice. She hadn’t seen them in three weeks, not since she sold her ten-year-old Honda Civic to keep up with her rent and cover her daily living expenses.
    Large furniture overwhelmed the small apartment. A curious collection of knickknacks gave the impression that she had moved here from much larger quarters, and that perhaps not all of her decor originated from the same place. Expensive handmade Venetian masks hung on one wall, while pink-cheeked sweet Hummel characters and Franklin Mint–style woodland critters cluttered shelves not far from items emblazoned with Harley-Davidson logos. Crescent moons and astrological symbols decorated everything from pillows to a faux wall tapestry, and an inflatable celestial globe hovered in the corner of her dining room. On her coffee table, there was an inexpensive plaster cast of a bald eagle clutching a struggling fish in its claws. The beaded curtain separating the living room and kitchen somehow did not seem out of place.
    Andra apologized for not having much on hand. “It’s the end of the month, and my food stamps don’t kick in until the first.” She had visited the food bank in the past week, where they had given her a package of frozen boneless chicken thighs. “I’m really not sure what to do with those,” she said, thumping the hard pack with her wrists.
    In stark contrast to Jodi, she had absolutely nothing in most of her cupboards. In one, she had just four items—a bottle of dried Italian herbs, a small jar of mustard, a bottle of Wesson oil, and half a package of dried egg noodles. In another, she had just two cans, cream of celery soup and beef ravioli in sauce, both marked with bright orange “Damaged—Half Off!” stickers.