Chaos in the Kitchen or: Ben, Katie-Bug and Big Tone Make a Mess and Some Rules

Right around the time I started to realize that food was interesting (but long before it began to wholly consume my consciousness) my cousin Ben stayed with my family.  This was the summer after my freshman year of college, my sister was still in High School and at home.

The condition upon which Ben lived in "The Hovel" (a partitioned off portion of our unfinished basement that the graduating Literature major managed to make charming in an old type-writer, starving artist kind of way) was that he would regularly cook meals for the family.

It is possible that I romanticize these meals and their preparation, but if I do my whole family does as well. 

Ben would mole-out of The Hovel, squinting in the mid-morning sun, make a cup of tea and toast with peanut-butter (someday I'll tell you about the peanut butter wars of that summer) and jam.  We would watch PBS, "Sunrise Earth" if it was early enough (it almost never was) and mostly "History Detectives."  Ben would leaf through his cook books, or think and talk about that night's recipes. A list would be made.  I have fond memories of trips to the People's Food Co-op, using tiny scoops to fill bags with spices, buying bulk food that then was exotic and novel and now are staples of my diet.

But the cooking bit was the really exciting part. Sometimes my sister, my cousin Tony (Big Tone), or Ben's sister, Sammie would help, but mostly not. Mostly we sat at the counter and watched the chaos happen. Ben had a knack for using every pot and pan in the kitchen. It was an event, a delicious, messy event that lasted for whole afternoons.

At some point my sister began  to ask questions. She was not confident in her ability to cook much of anything, and marveled at Ben's unbridled confidence in a kitchen. "How do you know what to do?" she wondered more than once.

That's when the rules started coming:

Rule # 1 : Be a Rebel. 

The rules came fast and random (I promise to tell you all of them over time).  Soon they ended up on hot pink post-it notes sprinkled around the kitchen, hiding in cupboards and behind spices. 

They were a neon, mis-numbered manifesto on how to have a humorous, chaotic, delicious kitchen where the first rule was to break the rules.

Most of us have tee-shirts now.

Part of me would like to re-write the Chaos in the Kitchen rules and put them around my own cupboards now, but I know the magic isn't something that can simply be recaptured but a few cheekily placed post-it notes.

I do try to keep that spirit in my cooking though. I rarely try the same recipe twice, preferring to experiment and deviate.  To rebel against a recipe, to scoff at Bittman (and then go running to Bittman to figure out what went wrong). To let myself be extravagant. To try things that feel impossible in the glossy pages of cook books. To let myself be confident. To play with my food. To dirty all the pans.

In my current grad-school life there are a lot of rules, a lot of expectations.  Some of them are real and some are self-imposed. It's become really important to put on an apron, take off my socks (Rule # 11: Take off your socks when you’re ‘bout to get serious in the kitchen.), pull up my  hair, and make some things and break some rules. 

Ben now owns a small organic livestock CSA out of Stockbridge, Michigan called Bending Sickle Community Farm. Please visit their website.  

Ben with his goats as featured in AnnArbor.com .