Home range
By my senior year of college, I hated dining hall food, resented the expense of eating out, and loved food in general, and so wanted to learn how to cook. One of my college friends, the son of a native Hong Konger, had spent a year taking me to Sichuan & Cantonese restaurants around the city, feasting on massive lazy-susan flavor parades with a dozen-plus friends. I asked him how to cook. He told me to buy a wok & rice cooker. I did, and then I proceeded to make bad, flavorless stirfries for a very long time, because they were cheap and I was a student. I had no idea what I was doing, but the food was edible.
One conversation with my friend stuck with me. He said that most Chinese people cook with high heat, usually on propane burners, in order to get a specific flavor profile that has no substitute. As a result, he coveted a particular brand of gas stove that was famous for a ripping-high burner that could heat the sides of the wok appropriately. Oh, sure, one could bust out the blowtorch as a reasonable sub, but you know that’s a hack.
I am not one who seeks extremes for their own sake. If we’re going to get a 25,000 BTU burner, it had better be for a purpose, and that purpose had better be frequent.
Fuck around
Over the years, I kept cooking, and I kept the wok. I branched out past Chinese food, and my Chinese food got marginally less bad. I explored specific regions of China, refined a few dishes. I made my own chili oil, then refined that, too. I don’t claim to be an authority on any region of China, and I’m pretty sure actual Chinese people are better at writing about how to make literally anything, but I love what I love, and I cook what I love in order to show love to myself, so.
And then I moved into a house that had brand-new appliances. New is nice, sure, but they were the sort of appliances that your landlord gives you in a rental home: good enough, a bit of a workhorse, nothing special. I had just made the biggest purchase of my life and wasn’t about to replace a brand-new oven. I made a pact to myself: I would run this oven into the ground, and then I would buy the oven, the one my friend told me about long ago, the one that could give me what I was really looking for when making this kind of food that I’ll never be able to claim to fully understand. For years I’ve been constrained by my tools, making what I can. I wanted the full spectrum of possibilities.
In the meantime, I became known, among other things, for food. I cook all the time and barely eat out anymore. I make lunch every other week for anyone who wants to show up. I routinely hold gatherings where I cook for 50, sometimes over 150. The oven had been used several times a week for eight and a half years. It has served, by some estimations, over 2,000 different people.
This year, it started to show some signs of slowing down. During my biggest party of the year, it took a half-hour to start preheating. The door fell off at one point and was reattached with gaffer’s tape. It eventually got so dirty that a few friends banded together and spent two hours deep-cleaning it; we did not finish deep-cleaning it, we just tapped out after two hours. I could have probably kept the thing going for another year, but I looked at Draft’s finances and thought: if one of my clients renews with me in December, and we get paid with two weeks to go in the fiscal year, then it’s time.
So I didn’t just buy the oven. I bought an oven that required a different electrical line. So we spent three full 8-hour days wiring a new 240V outlet into the wall. Eight holes are now cut into the basement drywall to run the range to the mains box. The whole kitchen was covered in a thin layer of grease from an over-the-range microwave that just blew oil onto my top cabinet, and we spent a day cleaning it all, and replaced the microwave with an on-shelf microwave & range hood. I punched an 8” hole in the side of my home to ventilate the hood. In short, if I’m going to get the oven, then I’m going to do it right.
It doesn’t stop with the oven, either. I also bought a new fridge & dishwasher. My previous fridge was a loathsome disaster that I can’t believe I tolerated for the better part of a decade. The layout in my new fridge is good; the ice it makes is clear; above all, space is maximized, to the point where I was able to cool a 5qt pot with a handle by putting the whole thing sideways in the fridge. My dishwasher doesn’t leak anymore; the racks no longer slump to one side. My kitchen looks the same if you squint, but it is radically transformed into something vastly better.
The oven alone represents the single largest purchase I’ve made since buying this house in 2016.
Find out
I once threw a barbeque for a friend. They had all of their friends come by, and I made a bunch of food on the grill. In the process of cleaning up, I found myself in the kitchen, doing dishes, organizing things, trying to clean up in a way that didn’t subtweet that 50 people need to leave. And that’s when one of my pal’s friends started crying. They were shocked at how fluidly I was moving around my kitchen, how I knew where every single thing went. I told them I’ve lived here for five years; I have the whole thing down by now. They told me they had never lived anywhere for over two. I had never appreciated the unconscious kitchen-grokking I’d done to that point. I had never appreciated the ways that stability manifests to other people.
You need this story because the kitchen, now, in this moment, makes me feel slightly insane. All of my usual fluid muscle-memory grace has been discarded for a new reality, a pure reset. It looks like this but is wildly, hilariously very much not this. I keep swiping for a door handle that is now two inches to the left. I keep pressing the wrong button on the dishwasher. I involuntarily never open my fridge’s left-hand door, because that’s where the freezer used to be. I have no idea how to fill my water bottle with ice. I keep turning the wrong knob on the range. I have no idea where the hot spots are, or how long to cook anything for. I keep it conservative, setting the timer low, then adding two minutes over & over again. I express nonzero shock when I realize that the simmer burner is turning off & on again, over and over; and realize, after some online searching, that this is a feature, not a sign that my house will burn down.
I will learn. We always learn, given enough time. I think of two years from now, when I will know what knob does what, what button to press, how long to wait, where to reach, what door to open, when I’ll find my balance and relearn all of my limbs again.
One meal
None of this was guaranteed. For one, the client could have not renewed. But also I’m a dual citizen; I saw what was coming a year ago. I was on the brink of hitting the big red button on my existence in Chicago and starting a new life somewhere else. I had a flight booked, money saved up, goodbyes started. Then I found someone, and that someone is currently sitting across from me on the couch as I write this, and I’m happy enough that I feel like investing in a whole new set of kitchen appliances is maybe not a bad idea, even considering what’s coming, even considering everything I could be doing, instead. Every other dual I know has already moved. None of them threw a goodbye party. Nobody said goodbye at all, really. We, on the other hand, now speak of wintering, holding onto some vestige of our current lives, hoping the impact isn’t as bad as last time.
Two hours after the oven was installed, I seasoned a new wok, my second-ever wok, and prepped something I’ve always loved but never been able to make myself. I walked over to the oven, turned the burner on, and let ‘er rip. I made the thing I always wanted to make. I made it in my own home. And then I served it to someone else.