Cooking as Fast as I Can (26 page)

One time I arrived at a producer's apartment so drunk I couldn't tell whether she had six cats or I was seeing double and she actually had only three. This struck me as hilarious—cats were everywhere!—and I
tripped right over one, falling on my ass. The more the producer scowled, the more I cackled like a hyena, which only amused me more. The producer was pissed, although she got over it, going so far as so ask me to cat-sit a few months later.

seventeen

I
knew Jennifer was The One from that day in the lodge in Tahoe, and I saw no reason why we couldn't have a splashy, romantic courtship, just like any other couple. After we'd been dating for about a year and a half, her nanny job sent her to Paris. I followed along, claiming I wanted to revisit the land of my culinary internship. On her first night off I suggested we check out the Eiffel Tower. The evening was warm and the tower was lit from within and glittered bright gold. I threw open a blanket on the lawn beneath it and broke out some good champagne and Brie. Not a minute after I set out my spread some guys standing around nearby started catcalling us, and I hollered back in my kitchen French to beat it and leave us alone.

Jennifer laughed, amused but also growing less enchanted by the minute. It was late and she was hungry. Once the French guys had moved off, I popped the cork on the champagne and poured us each a glass. We sat back and gazed up at the lights of the tower. At 11:00 p.m. the nightly light show began, and as the lights began to sparkle and dance, I asked her, in French, to marry me and produced the ring I'd been nervously fingering in my pocket for hours.

She said
oui
.

We kissed, knowing this was a great beginning to our life
together. On the way back to the hotel, in anticipation of some serious champagne-fueled lovemaking, we stopped at a phone booth and called everyone we knew. It was a glorious night, despite our eleven-hundred-dollar phone bill.

Even though we could only be domestic partners in California at that time, on June 30, 2001, we had a wedding with a capital W at Tre Vigne in Napa. Both of us were beautiful brides in white gowns and delicate veils, with a flower girl, a proper wedding party, and 125 guests.

Our families were all for it, give or take a relative or two who thought it was all right that we were gay—they had no problem with
that
—but why did we have to parade it around by being so celebratory and public and, well,
straight
about the whole thing? Couldn't we just live together and keep it to ourselves, like a couple keeping an illegal cat in a pet-free apartment?

When I left my job at Postino the official response was “Don't let the door hit you in the ass on your way out.” I had an insane range of things keeping me busy. A production company in San Francisco had contacted me about developing my own show, and my first cookbook,
Cat Cora's Kitchen
, was coming out in the fall. I'd followed Rocco's advice and gotten an agent at William Morris. Endorsement deals for stuff I'd never even heard of came my way weekly.

My first commercial was a big one, for Johnson & Johnson. Saran Disposable Cutting Sheets. They paid me more money than I'd ever seen in my life. It was the summer after I left Postino, and I was doing a stint at Chez Panisse for fun and to keep my skills up. In those days any chef who dared to do a commercial was considered a sellout, and I knew some
of the purists at Alice Waters's place were making comments about me behind my back. One of the servers, who despised hypocrisy, pulled me aside and told me that every female chef in the industry—even some of the gals looking down their noses at me—had auditioned for that commercial, but I was the one who'd landed it. I had a bit more spring in my step after that. Plus that huge payday.

Even good money from Johnson & Johnson wasn't going to last forever. I took a lot of meetings, but a great meeting does not pay the electric bill.

Sometimes I wondered what in the hell was I thinking? Here I was, a trained chef with a good résumé who left a good full-time job at a well-respected restaurant to
build my brand
, a nebulous task if there ever was one. One of the great satisfactions of being a chef is that the work is tangible and obvious. That pile of onions has either been chopped or it hasn't. The stock has been started or it hasn't. The three-top at station six either has received its appetizers or it hasn't. I was trained and wired to work merciless hours tackling what was directly in front of me.

Now my project was launching a chef named Cat Cora. Who was she? Female, first and foremost. Even at the turn of the century the top chefs were overwhelmingly male. Sure, there were Julia, Alice, Anne Rosenzweig, and Melissa Kelly, but they were outliers. Mostly, women were welcomed only in the world of pastry, where the work was precise, calm, and measured, the environment controlled, the ingredients sugar and spice and everything nice.

Cat Cora was a cook and she could cook as well as the boys. Petite and pretty, but not so petite and pretty that she didn't
look like she could command a kitchen. Determined and tough, but not so determined and tough as to make her appear unfeminine. Small but mighty was how she played it. She possessed a background people found intriguing, and when she quipped that she grew up eating grits and feta, folks were charmed. Over the years a mistake would be perpetuated that both her father and grandfather had been restaurateurs. It was my godfather, Taki, who was a chef and restaurant owner.

I had managed to charm some key individuals. But charm doesn't pay the mortgage. I called my agent as many times a week as I dared. I let it be known at the Food Network that I was game for anything, was available to fly to New York at the drop of a hat. They took me at my word. Some executive would call and ask to see me as soon as I could get there. I'd race back to Manhattan to do a bunch of auditions, and when time after time I was cast in shows that everyone believed would be big hits but wound up falling flat, I wondered if
The Melting Pot
had been a fluke, and whether it was hubris seasoned with a little insanity that made me quit my regular paycheck job.

Tell you what: I wasn't feeling so full of myself now.

But I was never despondent for very long. Rejection increased my focus, caused me to dig in my heels. A chef's training also confers the habit of never dwelling on failure. I kept on. Just you wait, everyone who'd said thank you but no thank you.

Finally, I was hired to cohost a show called
Kitchen Accomplished,
where a team of kitchen experts—designer Wolfgang Schaber, contractor Peter Marr, and I—would collaborate on a remodel for a lucky homeowner whose kitchen needed renovation.
Kitchen Accomplished
was a hybrid cooking show and home improvement show, where my main job was helping
select the big-ticket appliance items, plus smaller but no less important kitchen equipment like knives and cutting boards, bantering with my colleagues all the while. Even though there wasn't much cooking involved, I dug it. I immersed myself in the experience, trying not to pay attention to the reality of the situation: the Food Network had ordered thirteen episodes, but as the weeks passed they failed to order any more.

Looking back, there's no doubt that my ongoing freak-out was due in part to the fact that Jennifer and I had decided it was time to start a family. Not long after we married we bought a town house in the town of Fairfield, equidistant from San Francisco and Sacramento, and less than twenty miles from Napa. I was thirty-six—tick-tock, tick-tock—and if Jennifer and I were going to have the big family of our dreams—we agreed that four was the perfect number of children—it was time to get on it. With that in mind, Jennifer legally changed her last name so we and our future children would all be Coras.

We considered adoption first. I was the poster girl for successful adoption, managing to maintain a close relationship with both my adoptive family (whom I just thought of as my family, period) and my birth mom. Jennifer and I set out to find an agency to help us. We interviewed at least a dozen, and to a one they were all encouraging until the moment they learned that Jennifer and I were not sisters or friends, but wives. Every single agency turned us down flat.

I had a romantic notion that the Mississippi Children's Home, the agency that had placed me with my parents thirty-six years earlier, would be open to helping us. They were solely responsible for placing me with wonderful people, and I was sure they would want to continue the legacy. The social
worker I spoke to first was delighted to hear from me, the famous hometown girl who'd made good, calling to adopt. Of course they could help me! When I told her the situation, that I was gay, she was hesitant, but still open. When I told her I had a wife, she said absolutely not. I was hurt and mystified; a single gay woman could adopt, but not a married couple? It still breaks my heart to think that one of those kids could have been ours.

We started to explore in vitro, which would require a donor. Before we even settled on the right sperm donor bank we were stricken by the responsibility of being placed in the position of deciding on the other half of our future children's DNA. The sperm bank we used gave us a dossier of profiles, which we pored over for months. The donors were mostly med students at UCLA and Stanford, who'd aced organic chemistry or quantum something or other. Obviously, most would-be parents in search of a donor wanted to do their best to ensure their kids had some smarts. But we were also interested in physical features, religious belief, and appetite for world travel. We went through one insane week when we thought we should know the donor's favorite color. Finally, we decided on a smart, seemingly attractive Greek American (we had no pictures of the donors, only physical descriptions), a painter and an athlete who'd traveled and whose ambition was to finish medical school and do research in genetics. Even more appealing to us, he had, according to the sperm bank, retired from the donation business. We wanted our children to feel as though they belonged to us and weren't part of a huge tribe of half brothers and sisters roaming the planet. This apparently was a common attitude, because the bank had a policy that once you gave birth using one of their donor's sperm, you could buy the rest. After our first son was born,
we bought every vial of the donor's sperm and took them to our OB-GYN. This nameless, faceless donor is the biological father of all of our children. Our boys call this man their “sperm dad,” and we are endlessly grateful to him, whoever he is.