A Moveable Feast

Some fragmented thoughts on cooking in unfamiliar kitchens, an unexpected bok-choy harvest, negligence as gardening strategy, and Advent waiting

Dec 09, 2022

Advent II
Friday, December 9
Cary, N.C.

I meant to send this to you, friendly reader, before I left home yesterday. But I was already behind schedule prepping for this trip to North Carolina. I’m here for two reasons—first, to cook dinner tonight for a friend and her family, and then, to preach this Sunday.

Some folks have written to ask why I travel to cook. Well, honestly, mostly they ask when I am going to come cook for them. But a couple of you have wondered both about the logistics and the meaning.

The logistics are not that complicated.

My friendly Zojirushi rice cooker, which cheerily plays “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” when it begins to cook, tucks neatly into one of our rolling suitcases. Its bowl, lined with a kitchen towel, is the perfect traveling compartment for whatever spices I need as well as, on this trip, a Ziploc bag of rice and another of dried shiitake mushrooms.

I have been surprised how many of my friends do not own rice cookers. But then not all of them come from cultures in which rice is life. Anyway, I don’t know how to make edible rice on the stovetop.

“How do you cook rice?” I recently asked a friend.

“I ruin a small pot and spend years scraping the bottom after,” she replied.

My flat-bottomed wok nestles at an angle over the rice cooker. My knife bag goes against the hard protective edge of one side of the suitcase, as does my wok turner. That leaves plenty of room for other ingredients—on this trip, some Chinese greens I happened to have in the fridge, a bag of bok choy that Fozzie and I harvested yesterday morning, a carefully wrapped bottle of oyster sauce. Sometimes I’ll slip a cutting board into the outside pocket, sometimes not. Extra kitchen towels provide padding.

I used not to pack any of this. But I’ve learned that just having a few of my own tools gives me just enough familiarity to help me produce a decent meal.

Anyone who has cooked in someone else’s kitchen probably understands the utter disorientation. Of course all the basics are there (usually): sink, oven, cooktop, refrigerator. But you can’t rely the patterns of movement that you’ve developed over time without knowing it—the glide from fridge to cutting board, the dance from stove to sink that you’ve done so many times until it’s etched into your muscle memory. What drawer are the utensils in? What do you mean you don’t have a cabinet in which you keep the plastic containers from every takeout meal you’ve ever eaten?

My mother never just comes to visit—she always comes to cook—and I remember her first trip to cook for me in Brooklyn. I had gone into the bedroom to do something or other—probably, let’s be honest, just to take a few deep breaths—and when I emerged, I found her in my shoebox of a kitchen, which had approximately six square inches of countertop, opening and closing cabinet doors: She was silently evaluating my placement of spices and sauces, my organizational decisions regarding dishes and mugs. “Hmph.” Later, I realized that she had rearranged things to her liking—the kind of liberty you can probably take only if you gave birth to the owner of that kitchen.

To be given access to another person’s kitchen is to be invited into an intimate and personal space: What an honor, not least because it can be such a gesture of vulnerability. You can find so much evidence of faded ambition: All those expired spices! They tell stories of far-flung countries and foreign cuisines, cookbooks admired but never opened or entrancing recipes that got cooked just once. An eerily empty refrigerator can speak of overwhelm and busyness but also sometimes of fear, because you never learned to cook, or loneliness, because it can be terrible to cook for one. Sometimes the pantry tells on you: A Costco-sized case of boxed mac and cheese might bear unwitting witness to plates of uneaten food scraped into the trash and countless tear-filled dinnertime hours when the kid refused to taste anything else—“but it has a green thing!”—no matter how lovingly prepared it was.

For the visiting cook, though, yes, it’s disorienting and uncomfortable and inconvenient—and I don’t mean that negatively at all. We’re often inclined to perceive “disorientation” as a bad thing. At least in this context, I don’t think it is. Discomfort can be a gift, especially for those of us who have forgotten why we do what we do. Inconvenience can be a teacher, particularly for those of us who struggle with patience.

Cooking in another person’s kitchen compels me to be more attentive to what I’m doing and more thoughtful about why I’m doing it. Things necessarily go more slowly— what might take me thirty minutes in my own kitchen could take forty elsewhere—and I’ve found that being shifted into a different gear can make me a better cook. I don’t know the character of this other cooktop or the idiosyncrasies of this other oven either. I have to read the room. I need to observe. I have to learn.

While my joy comes largely from the preparation, to be pushed beyond the comforts of my own kitchen reminds me, too, that cooking for others isn’t really about me or my likings, my preferences or my palate, my appetites or my context. Yes, I’m almost always cooking Chinese food, so obviously I bring my own heritage and history with me. But ultimately it isn’t about me. To cook for someone else is to have the chance to feed them—to nourish, yes, but hopefully also to hearten, to encourage, and to bring just a little taste of delight.

What I’m Growing: We got some snow in Grand Rapids in mid-November, so I had no expectation that any of our remaining vegetables would survive. The community garden officially closes at the end of October, but Fozzie and I went out to our plots yesterday morning anyway, just to see if anything was still growing. I was so surprised that two varieties of our bok choy are thriving. We collected enough greens for one dish in tonight’s dinner.

I’ve also been neglecting the growing spaces in our backyard. I was out there yesterday, scrambling to get the tulip and daffodil bulbs in as well as to plant the garlic that should have been planted weeks ago. I noticed that some of the bok choy from the summer has held on—and where the bok choy bolted and went to seed, so many baby leaves have popped up. Negligence as gardening strategy for the win!

What I’m Reading: Novelist Chelsea Banning tweeted the other day that only two people came to her first-ever book signing. Her candor sparked a beautiful outpouring of stories and commiserations from authors including Margaret Atwood and Neil Gaiman.

I think most authors have similar stories. For my first-ever reading, Elliott Bay Books in Seattle arranged an event at a large church in the city. I entered the sanctuary, which could probably hold 800 people, to find maybe a dozen—nearly all of whom were my friends, my relatives, or bookstore staff. “I’m sorry I let you down,” I said to the lead bookseller afterward. She was so kind. “You just have to remember,” she said. “The right people came.” I don’t know if that was true, but it was what I needed to hear anyway.

One other thing that has been on my mind, since Christians around the world are in the midst of Advent: This time in the church year reminds us that we are still waiting—waiting for liberation, waiting for justice, waiting for wholeness. We are waiting for salvation.

The Advent call to wait faithfully for salvation feels particularly painful this year for those of us who identify as both LGBTQIA+ and Christian.

The week before Advent began, five people were murdered at Club Q, a gay nightclub in Colorado Springs. In the aftermath of the attack, the Department of Homeland Security warned of a heightened domestic terror threat, noting that posts “have cited previous attacks and attackers as inspiration.” Last weekend in Ohio, a holiday-themed drag story time, hosted by a private school at the First Unitarian Church of Columbus, was canceled after dozens of armed protesters, including members of the Proud Boys, showed up. Police in Moore County, N.C., are investigating possible links between a power outage and protests against a fundraiser for an LGBTQ+ nonprofit that was happening at the same time. And this week, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in a case in which an evangelical Christian web designer wants to secure her right not to create wedding websites for queer couples.

We can quibble about the specific circumstances of each of the above; that’s not my point. Against this hostile backdrop and even with the news this week that Congress has secured some level of federal recognition of same-sex marriage, “salvation” for LGBTQ+ folks on one level simply means the freedom to live our lives. For those of us who also identify as Christian, our Advent longing for salvation has even greater significance.

We live in a culture that doesn’t wait well. Perhaps that has something to do with the perceived passivity of waiting. But particularly in Advent, waiting can and should have a different texture. And for those of us who have known the feeling of being unwanted, even vilified, for who we are, waiting can take the shape of love—love for ourselves, love for our siblings, even love for a world that so often doesn’t love us back.

Christians mark Advent in anticipation of Christmas, when we believe that salvation arrived in the form of embodied love. The best resistance to hate that I can imagine is to embody love. “Present your bodies as a living sacrifice,” Paul wrote to the church in Rome nearly 2,000 years ago. “Let love be genuine; hate what is evil; hold fast to what is good; love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honor.”

Our bodies, our marriages, our lives—these bear witness to faithful waiting.

We wait by showing up.

We wait by letting queer kids know that they’re not alone.

We wait by setting another place at the table for someone who could use the companionship.

We wait by refusing to let our faith be erased.

We wait by declining to allow an exclusionary vision of Christianity to monopolize the messaging.

We wait by doing our best to flourish and by helping others to flourish, even amidst hatred and bigotry.

We wait by persevering in testimony through our very existence.

We wait by loving.

What’s on your hearts and minds as we move through this Advent season? What can I be remembering in prayer?

Notes of a Make-Believe Farmer

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