Feeding Myself

The first time I went grocery shopping without my parents, I bought macaroni and cheese, cereal (I forgot the milk), and sliced turkey (I forgot the bread). It was August 2005, and the day before, I wailed in the parking lot of a Ruby Tuesday’s, begging my parents to take me back home with them.

“I can start college next year!” I cried.

They told me to stop being silly, and waved from behind the windows until they were out of sight.

That afternoon, I wasn’t crying about how terrible I was at feeding myself, but I should have been. In the following year, I perused the grocery store for two hours, buying virtually nothing of any substance, and leaving with 75 dollars less than when I’d entered.

Sitting in front of the TV, canned ravioli atop a television tray, I’d wonder where all my money was going. Why was I coming home, bags of food lining my arms, and running back to the store a week later for the same routine? In an alternate universe where adults with supermarket-intuition all lived together, there was, I assumed, a more successful way to eat.

Self-sufficiency is funny that way. I was never aware of how young I was, how underprepared to take good care of myself, until I was eighteen years old, in a dorm room beside my best friend, eating ramen noodles and drinking apple juice for dinner. In a house where my parents lived, some 100 miles south, dinner made sense, and it may have been because I never saw it in process, only complete, on the table waiting to be eaten.

I’d like to say “it was all so tough, and then I grew up”, like learning how to cook was this transformative thing, and the right ways to do it came to me in a dream, but that’s not true. I ate terribly for years: processed food, easy food, fast food, inexpensive food. There are nights that I ate “dinner sides”, a bowl of mashed potatoes, for example

In 2007, I met Emily Brown, a creative writing major like me, a native of Suffolk, Virginia, and a self-proclaimed cooking queen. We became instant friends. On weeknights after class, she’d invite me over and we’d experiment in the kitchen. Sometimes, we’d make “throw-together meals”, a way to use food in the refrigerator before it went bad. Other nights, we’d plan a meal ahead of time, go to the grocery store together and split the cost. We had potlucks, and soup cook offs, and grill outs. We made cinnamon acorn squash, tons of pasta, and homemade pizza. Over the years I spent in Emily Brown’s kitchen, I learned many things: how to use a garlic press, the versatility of spaghetti sauce, and the glory of leftovers. Most of all, though, and I have kept this with me ever since, I learned how to feed myself.

There is something to be said about being a serious cook. I don’t mean a Rachel Ray type, or a behind-the-scenes culinary artist at a high-end restaurant you love. I mean, grocery shopping like its an artform: preparing your meals for the week, compiling a list of ingredients that can be used again and again, and sticking to your guns in the middle of the aisle: buying what you need, and only what you need (Maybe a treat or two!) Then, having that same seriousness carry over into your own kitchen, allowing yourself time to learn and to burn things, but believing that, eventually, you will remove something outstanding from your oven. Not anyone else’s oven, yours.