CW: ED’s
My girlfriend is making potatoes for dinner and the reason I won’t tell her that I hate potatoes is because I’m not sure that I do.
Recently, my Saturn returned as if I had thrown it a really good stick in 1995 and it had run back to tell me that my wife was cheating on me and that I don’t know anything about food. In the dragging months of packing tape, blocking a few dozen otherwise lovely relatives on social media, assets lists and cancelling Spotify Duo that followed, I considered that maybe Saturn was right.
At 31, I’m equal parts amused and deeply concerned to admit that food remains largely a mystery to me. It’s becoming increasingly likely that I’ve spent so much time avoiding cooking, it’s developed into a mild irrational fear.
We all know one person who constantly suggests going out for dinner. Either they’re too rich, too lazy or too self-aggrandising to cook at home. Often, all three. Despite my unimpressive salary, average daily step count of 20,000 and impressive lack of any ability to sell myself whatsoever, I am that person. Yes, I, on my call centre/barista/personal assistant’s wages, have routinely opted to pay for a dinner for six at Cutler & Co and skipped rent that month purely to avoid the suggestion that I whip up something instead.
And if you think dropping $950 before wine just to avoid borrowing an Ottolenghi from a friend and sucking it up is intense - once, to impress a date who was coming to my house, I bought a full tray of dhal and satay curry at a local Hare Krishna shop, put the food in the fridge until my date was almost at my house, took the tray out of the fridge and divided the curries into separate pots.
Then, I chopped random bits off some specifically purchased carrots, peeled a few rogue potatoes for the skin detritus, rubbed a tomato and a few shakes of curry powder into a chopping board and had the whole scene appropriately staged for her arrival before I threw a tea towel over my shoulder, cued some soft jazz on Spotify (Premium, for deserving singles) and proudly served her a perfectly seasoned bowl of steaming hot lies. I even researched common spice flavour profiles to be able to wax lyrical on cumin when she inevitably said This is so good! What’s your secret?! Deception, Sandy. Delicious, fragrant falsehood.
It was easier that way. I could have spent the whole night explaining how I had chosen to go to drama school in my early 20s, years that are traditionally reserved for scraping meal potential out of sticky packets of ramen and wonky eggs in a share house of a dozen humanities students and their expired communist dreams.
And that everybody knows drama school hours roughly 8am – the rest of your life, so I never had the time to learn to cook. And how it's widely understood, Sandy, that a Bachelor of Dramatic Arts involves three years, two boring English subjects, one lifelong friend who you’ll avoid inviting to important events but text when you feel like doing drugs at a warehouse and roughly six-to-eight years of an eating disorder.
In summary, I earned most of my HECS debt making sure I was too busy to cook so I was never tempted to eat. Happy, simple times. Dessert? It’s potato skins with milk.
Like all good eating disorder origin stories, mine begins with a deep love of food. We were inseparable. Even my dad’s Wim Hoff phase, during which he made my sister and I do 40 minutes on a stationary bicycle each morning wearing heart monitors to strapped to our teenage chests before he pushed us into the pool to make us better people, didn’t stand a chance.
Food was my best friend. It didn’t want me to be skinny. It didn’t make comments on my bowl cut or hire me a personal trainer at seven for my own good.
Like most queer kids growing up in a semi-rural town on the fringes of racism and other permanent Queensland icons, being young could get lonely. And food was always there to lend comfort and mild stomach cramps.
To me, there was no party invitation, no sleepover, that could come close to mainlining plastic cheese and custard from the carton until it was time to go to bed or throw up in the spare bathroom. Naturally, I decided early on that I didn’t need people. They were all hard work and heart monitors. All I’d ever need was free and fair access to a well-stocked refrigerator with a natural leaning towards thickened dairy.
Back then, I was already at odds with the balanced meal. Why bother with that shit when you could skip straight to the good parts? Adults had clearly lost their way.
My parents, for example, travelled a lot for work and left us in the company of a deeply religious and profoundly myopic nanny named Sue. There’s your first mistake.
Amongst other fouls committed against our proper care, Sue’s glasses were so insufficient that she couldn’t see what I had made myself for dinner, after I had pretended to be allergic to her sausages and offered to practice my homemaking skills.
She had agreed cooking rehearsals would help for when I eventually found myself a husband, so I was free to have at it. Sometimes I think about Sue. And how she would have come away from our family wondering how such a highly allergic child was so very fat. I heard her pray for me on more than one occasion.
On the gorgeous occasion of dinner with Sue, I would assemble a plate that, in my personal opinion, represented all of the appropriate food groups:
A dollop of raspberry jam (1 serving fruit), quarter loaf of banana bread, sliced from the middle so as to avoid the dud ends (2 servings fruit, grains), a modest stack of acid yellow plastic cheese (dairy), six large tablespoons of Betty Crocker chocolate icing, a handful of dry Sultana Bran crushed and scattered over the plate, yoghurt covered almonds (nuts and legumes) and a pickle to taste.
Carrying my plate to watch the 30 minutes of The Simpsons that Wim Hoff-disguised-as-my-father would allow me each night, I believed I was king and Sue was merely a citizen of my becoming.
Then, I turned 18. My secret high school girlfriend and I decided to travel to Rome and live there for the year. It turns out, when you’re poor and your mum’s not around to cook, you don’t each as much cake as you’d like.
So, on the days we weren’t in our kitchen shelling walnuts for 50 Euro cents a bag, secret high school girlfriend would steam up big batches of cheap soup for us to exist on in the absence of cake. I watched as the ingredients blended together in a pot of sugarless hell. No plate of treats. Zero flavour. Far too much potato and parsnip. But it was food.
I lost 25 kilos that year. People started to like me without hearing my jokes first. Weird how that happens. I’d never expressed interest in what a good jawline looked like, nor how bone structure presents in the recently thin, but suddenly, people were intent on telling me.
Of course, I blamed the soup. Then, I started to admire the soup. And I looked to keep eating things that were like the soup, so the weight would keep dropping and the compliments would continue. It felt like, for the first time, I was starting to make friends outside of food. And it was its absence that was responsible.
Now, soup is a beverage. So, once returned from Rome, I looked for other good beverages to eat. I settled on smoothies at first. After a while, I moved on to tea. Tea was easier. Better. Less effort, far less calories. Eventually, it became water. Free, always available and the sparkling ones mimic the feeling of food in your stomach. Brilliant. If I was starving, I’d boil a single broccoli floret and eat that with a handful of mixed nuts. That was the extend of my cooking.
And while what I “cook” now, as a recently divorced temporarily single millennial, no longer keeps to a schedule of starvation, it can hardly be called cooking. It’s assemblage, at a stretch. Pastiche, collage. Sure, I can throw together a series of ingredients that theoretically cooperate (avocado, boiled egg, sriracha and cheese), tie it up in a tortilla and loosely call it a burrito. But that’s as far as I go. With drizzles of sauce and sloshes of Kewpie mayonnaise, the food looks pretty but lacks personality, spice or depth. Coincidentally, that’s the kind of actor drama school always wanted us to be. Perhaps it’s up to me how I graduate. Perhaps I’ll quietly delete the UberEats app on my phone, shuddering under the thumb of sudden courage.
Like all good hero’s journeys, it will end with potatoes.
My girlfriend will be gliding around the kitchen, tea towel on her shoulder, pots of water seasoned with salt and good intentions.
I’ll have Jill Scott radio singing to some dim lighting from a few well-placed candles. She’ll split the flesh of a potato and the steam will spell the word LOVE in the space just in front of my nose. It surprises us both and we laugh through a kiss.
I’ll watch her hands and she chops and pricks and encourages the flavour from the beast. A slur of honeycomb butter. A generous crack of pepper and it’s raining delight on 7pm. The potato slides down the fork to melt on my tongue. Full, pillowy and rich, it’s the best thing I’ve ever tasted. I’ll tell her so. She’ll smile and says thank you, would you like the recipe?
Aware of my own capacity as a learned woman of 31, I’ll tell her maybe later, baby steps. And she’ll nods but look a little crestfallen. So I tell her I’ve made dessert, which I have. She whips her head around, curious and overjoyed.
What is it? She’ll gently enquires as I walk past the fridge, ignore the oven and arrive at the charging station.
Babe, what have you made? She’ll prompt again.
I’ll take my phone in my hand and beam her the screen.
A reservation.
Cutler & Co, 8:15pm.
Uber’s waiting.
X TN
Dear Tamara, thank you for sharing your wonderful writing-I loved every word. Congratulations too on your recent news!! I hope we get a chance to meet on your next trip to Melbourne. Love, Rebecca.
Wow. Vulnerability to the max. Love