Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant

Occasionally I have written here about some of the culinary revelations and atrocities that occurred while eating and living within the co-operative system at my unnamed hippie college. About a year ago, I received an email from a woman who had stumbled across my blog and was struck by my description of a particular dish. Apparently the phrase "Bragg's-soaked bowl of burnt brown rice" was too big a clue for her to ignore any longer.

"This is kind of random," the email began, "but did you by any chance go to Oberlin?"

Yes I did. And so did Jenni Ferrari-Adler, editor of the newly published collection of essays on eating solo, Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant. In fact, Jenni and I lived together in the same co-op during our sophomore year, so if you're looking for an objective review of the book, you certainly won't find it here. What you will find is my highly biased and warm, fuzzy, fellow-Obie opinion of her work: she gets a big thumbs-up.*

The co-op experience could be maddening, but I'm sure for many of us it's formed some of our most powerful and pleasurable collegiate memories. In co-op kitchens, we learned how to cook -- and to cook for huge crowds, no less -- after being let loose with giant Hobart mixers and massive stoves that always required a burning piece of spaghetti to get a flame lit. We worked with no measuring cups (yogurt containers are great substitutes), missing ingredients (rival co-opers and sneaky students would make off with anything good) and precious few actual legitimate eating utensils (ain't nothing wrong with fingers), while constantly waging drawn-out battles with an omnipresent militant vegan minority who would have had us eating brewer's yeast and butter beans seven days a week if they could have gotten the vote.

As such, I'm sure that Jenni knows her way around a giant steaming cauldron of smokey, charred brown rice for fifty. And how to make a mean grilled cheese from potato bread and a 5-pound block of cheddar. And how gross it is when someone loses a spoon in one of those big white tubs of honey (thank God we voted in favor of having honey), creating an icky bug-in-amber effect that leaves you hoping, if nothing else, that at least the perpetrator started out with a clean spoon. (Unlikely.)

Here's one of my favorite photos of all time. It's me and E in the middle of a food fight in the co-op kitchen, delirious with fatigue and beer after cooking a Greek-themed Saturday night dinner for the whole house.

For me, the year that we lived in the co-op remains hazier than any other time at Oberlin, which is saying quite a bit. I remember it as a swirl of parties, male nudity, black lights, black eyeliner, mononucleosis that spread around our germy living quarters like wildfire, and my extremely concerted effort to get a guy in one of my poetry classes to lust after me. (I achieved limited success.) After that, I went away to London for a year. All those Ohio cornfields had started to feel suffocating.

In retrospect, I would say that the co-op experience was the closest I ever came to living with siblings. Everybody was always in your business. We had communal toothpaste, the thought of which today makes me shudder a little bit. There were episodes of anger, and fights, and theft, and crazy superhuman lifelong bonds were occasionally formed. I don't recall ever eating a meal alone.
So I think it's wacky that one of the people who was present during that year of intensive co-operation has just popped back into my head again with her pretty purple book. Which I just love, in case you missed me saying that earlier right before I took the long, windy path of digression down memory lane.

I loved the Steve Almond piece, because that man can write no wrong. I loved the M.F.K. Fisher, even though it made me feel sad to think of her holed up in her room with a can of soup. And Courtney Eldridge's piece, where she expertly skewers an asshole ex-husband who turned up his nose at her canned-food childhood. I have been that asshole, and it made me ashamed. Loved it. The Phoebe Nobles asparagus essay was also funny, even though I can never really understand the desire to eat one ingredient over and over like that. (Except peaches, which I am currently eating at a rate of six per day. But asparagus??) And I especially loved the essay on the magical powers of salsa rosa by Ben Karlin. I loved it so much I must quote from it right now:

Here, a lesser writer might surrender to cheap hyperbole, and say something like, "Salsa rosa changed the very course of my life."

Salsa rosa changed the very course of my life.

Yes! If that doesn't make you want to buy the book, I don't know what will. So buy it. And some night when you're all alone, curl up with a nice steaming bowl of burnt brown rice squirted liberally with Bragg's, eat it with your fingers, and enjoy Jenni's wonderful work.


*Note to co-op outsiders: that's how we officially voted on stuff. Each person offered a thumbs-up, a thumbs-down, or a thumb hovering in the middle that indicated something like, "Whatever, I don't care. Can we finish arguing about whether consuming honey exploits bees and just eat our tofu stir fry now?" Even in meetings nowadays, I sometimes have to resist the urge to stick my thumb out to express myself.