Cooking as Fast as I Can (30 page)

Meanwhile, Jennifer was caring for Thatcher, who was three
months old and still waking up to be fed twice a night. Meanwhile, Caje was two and had just entered the phase of toddlerhood where he liked to open the kitchen cupboards, remove all the pots and pans, then bang them together before hurling them across the kitchen floor. Meanwhile, Zoran was five, the only one not in diapers, and was anxious about starting kindergarten in a few short months. Meanwhile, Everest-size mountains of laundry gathered. Meanwhile, bills piled up on the dining room table, then slid off the table onto the floor. Meanwhile, we all needed to be fed. Somehow I could battle a world-class chef on national television but could barely get it together to mix up some rice cereal and banana for Caje and roast a chicken for the rest of us.

Meanwhile, my work.

Before I got pregnant, I finally went into business with a restaurant group to open my own place. After
Iron Chef
took off I'd been approached by several people, but nothing that seemed like a sure fit. I knew what I wanted: a place where regular people could get great, interesting food. I wanted to build a restaurant that catered to people like my parents, who worked extraordinarily hard their entire lives, who were savvy home cooks, eating well and keeping alive dozens of beloved recipes from their forebears, but rarely went out to eat because they couldn't afford it. When they traveled, the furthest thing from their minds would be to secure a reservation at Barbuto or the Gramercy Tavern—or the equivalent in whatever city they found themselves in—where they would sit among the so-called beautiful people in their hundred-dollar T-shirts picking at their thirty-five-dollar burgers.

In August, a scant month after Nash was born, Kouzzina (“kitchen” in Greek) opened on the boardwalk at Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando. When in my wildest dreams I
imagined the locale of my first restaurant, it hadn't been Disney World, but the opportunity was too good to pass up.

In 2008 I'd signed on with Disney to do an On Demand show called
What's Cooking with Cat Cora
and they'd approached me to see if I wanted to partner with them on a restaurant. It was a licensing deal in which they put up the money to build out the space and launch it, while I focused on creating the menu, designing the décor, and building a culture within the staff. For that, I would receive a percentage of the gross profit.

I was on the verge of having four little kids at home; I'd be supporting six people. Opening a restaurant demands a twelve-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week commitment and a willingness to tolerate a lot of financial risk at the outset. The arrangement with Disney would allow me to spend time with my family while enabling me to do my part to change the landscape of where regular people eat. Theme parks, department store restaurants, and airports typically served food that was limited, fatty, and subpar, and this would allow me to introduce good, healthy food to folks in a beautiful setting.

Everything I was, everything I believed in, went into creating this place. It occupied an existing restaurant space (good-bye, Spoodles), but part of the deal included renovation. I wanted to offer adults and adventurous kids something a little more elevated than the usual club sandwiches, cheeseburgers, and fish-and-chips, in an environment that was restful, or more restful than the usual Disney boardwalk eatery. I wanted to create a place that kept the kids happy, while their parents could enjoy sophisticated wine and food. I wanted to offer a respite from the whimsy, an oasis.

The designers knew it would be Greek influenced, and at first they showed me blue-and-white china and napkins
and thought the walls should be plastered with Greek travel posters, the ones we've seen a hundred times before, with a white village perched on the side of a mountain overlooking the bright blue sea.

“That's Greek kitsch,” I said. “Too hokey.”

I wanted a restaurant that you could airlift into an upscale Manhattan neighborhood. I aimed to evoke elements of Aunt Demetra and Uncle Yiorgios's home in Skopelos, the rustic wooden table beneath the ancient olive trees, laid end to end with platters of bread, hummus, tzatziki, spicy feta spread, artichoke hearts, spanakopita stuffed with fresh spinach, and those wobbly ladder back chairs we'd sit in for hours, eating and talking.

Kouzzina had an open kitchen—shades of Postino—with marble surrounds and big copper pots hanging from the ceiling, gleaming in the fire from the open woodstove. We also put in a walk-up pizza window for folks strolling by on the boardwalk. I knew every parent there needed to fortify the troops before setting off for the day, so we opened for breakfast. Steel-cut cinnamon oatmeal, blueberry orange granola pancakes, Greek yogurt with fresh fruit, and turkey sweet potato hash with two eggs and arugula salad topped that menu. Dinner was trickier. I could now see how easy it was to fall into Giant, Ten-Page Menu Syndrome.

I'd put my name on four wines I'd sourced from Northern California, two red and two white, and also served Mediterranean sangria. The bread service came with olive oil and a few perfect kalamatas. Appetizers included calamari, grape leaves stuffed with a good goat cheese, and that old showstopper, saganaki: fried cheese flambéed at the table to the cry of
opa!
and then extinguished with a squirt of lemon. I had to offer spanakopita and
kota kapama
as entrées, and also a whole fish,
even though I suspected we wouldn't move a lot of them. (Too many thoughts of Nemo.) For sides, I offered caramelized Brussels sprouts, salt-roasted beets, and Spiro's Greek salad, named for my dad. My substitute for french fries? Smashed garlic-fried potatoes. Desserts: a dense, dark chocolate budino, a molten chocolate pudding cake, and, of course, baklava.

Kouzzina's grand opening was September 17, a mere two months after Nash was born. He'd been sprung from his apnea monitor by then. His pediatricians thought that whatever had been wrong with him had resolved itself, even as it had come close to putting his mothers in a rubber room. He would live. Indeed, as I write this he is as hardy as a Viking.

But leaving my little guy then was excruciating. I was a wreck as I laundered and packed my chef whites. The way I carried on, you would have thought he'd been ripped from my arms by a cruel despot, never to be seen again. I sobbed as I packed, sobbed in the cab on the way to the airport, sobbed as the plane taxied down the runway. I collected myself only when the flight attendant started giving me the side eye. It had taken everything I had to get on the plane and
go.
The last thing I wanted was to be yanked off by a pair of TSA lackeys. My deep fear was that if I didn't go now, I'd never go, and we'd all wind up living out of a shopping cart in one of Santa Barbara's well-maintained parks.

My parents and my brothers came to the opening of Kouzzina to offer their congratulations. Mike had found himself at last. After his wrecking business in Little Rock, he'd moved into marine engine mechanics, and was now making an excellent living as an instructor at Marine Mechanics Institute in Orlando. He used to amuse the entire family by taking apart
the lawn mower and fixing it in ten minutes flat, and now he'd found a way to put that special genius to good use. He was a master mechanic, a “professor” in pressed khakis and a polo shirt with the school's logo on the pocket. He and his wife, Carrie, live in a nice little house on a canal in Kissimmee. He can hop into his own boat, finally, and go fishing with his kids, my niece Anna, and nephews Nicholas and Andrew.

Over the last decade my relationship with Chris had become strained. He had always been the smartest of the three of us. In high school he tested well and had an aptitude for drawing. There was no doubt that he would end up as an architect or something equally brainy and refined. The summer after high school one of his buddies got him a good job driving a truck for Budweiser. Time passed, and he enjoyed the money and freedom, and soon it seemed a little too late to apply for college, and then he met a girl and got married, and he was thrust into adulthood. He saw me parlay my trade skills into a nice career and resented me for it, I think.

But then Kouzzina opened, and Chris showed up to have a look around. He arrived with his family in tow, his wife, Jennifer Ann, and four kids: Morgan, Lexie, Paxton, and Hallie. He wandered in, inspected the black-and-white pictures of our parents' wedding that I'd hung in the entryway, took in the open kitchen with its gleaming copper pots, the box-beam ceilings, and wooden floors, the whole big, busy, efficiently run enterprise, and just said, “Wow, Cathy. This is great. I'm really impressed.”

We were in our mid-forties by then. Whatever rancor had grown up between us had dissipated. His generosity—and the fact that he'd come to the opening to support me—moved me more than I could say.

nineteen

W
hen you meet Jennifer, she doesn't really strike you as stubborn. She's a laid-back native Californian. No hostile set of the jaw, no laser-eyed stare. She's got a gift for going with it, hanging out, and being cool. Except when it came to Battle Nanny.

After I was fully back at work at the end of 2009, I begged her to consider hiring a nanny, but she was having none of it. I knew she was a great mom and was an experienced nanny in her own right, but now we had four kids under the age of six. We could almost have fielded a basketball team.

“I
am
a nanny,” she'd say. “Or I was. And wasn't that the whole point of my staying home? To take care of our kids?”

“We're in the weeds!” I'd counter. “You're doing a great job, of course you are, but you're only one person. All I'm saying is that you could use a little help.
We
could use a little help. And I just can't go out into the world to support us feeling as if I'm leaving you stranded.”

“As long as I'm organized I'm fine,” she said.

We had this argument many times. Once, as I recall, she was nursing one baby while changing the diaper of the other.

“This is going to break us,” I pleaded.

Finally she gave in and we hired Christiana, a Brazilian woman. To this day I can't figure out whether hiring a nanny
was too little, too late, or whether Jennifer “agreed” but harbored more bitterness than I imagined. I thought hiring help would ease the tensions between us, but the only thing that changed was having an extra pair of arms around the house during daylight hours. No small thing when you have four little boys under the age of six, but still.

Some people have expressed surprise that the same thing that happens to hetero couples after a new baby enters the picture happens to same-sex couples. One statistic that doesn't surprise me is that 70 percent of the roughly 50 percent of marriages that end in divorce include those with children under the age of seven. I wish I could report that Jennifer and I were different, that our twenty-first-century, bad-ass approach to conception and childbirth continued on into parenting, but I'm afraid we were no different from everybody else. Jennifer resented me because I got to pack my bag, get on a plane, and go, and I resented her because she got to stay home. She felt stuck and glamorized the fun and freedom of travel, and I felt shackled by the demands of being the breadwinner, forcing myself to smile, nod, and engage with the world when I'd rather be in my sweatpants on the sofa, snuggling up with my babies, reading stories.