The kitchenette in the closet: how I started cooking

As many of you know, I grew up in a food-focused home—surrounded by freezers filled with meat from Dad’s hunting trips, immersed in Mom’s daily kitchen creations, from rendering lard and boiling down maple syrup to the sweet aroma of a vibrant pot of sauce, and having unlimited access to Grandma’s weekly cookie bakes (her strawberry tarts and anise cookies were second to none). As much as I love food, I didn’t cook a single meal as a kid; however, I certainly didn’t go hungry either.

While living under my parents' roof, I hardly scrambled an egg, yet I keenly observed Mom, Grandma, Nana, and my many Aunts doing their thing in the kitchen. They moved about the kitchen with the finesse and ease of ballet dancers, making it look so incredibly graceful that I thought when I got “old” like them and started cooking, it really wouldn’t be that hard.

They effortlessly prepared delicious home-cooked meals using ingredients like anchovies, buttermilk, leaf lard, ricotta, and horseradish from their gardens. Above all, the feast—because every meal truly was a feast in our family—was brought to the table in an orchestrated manner, perfectly timed. Out came the beef rump roast, surrounded by roasted carrots, onions, and parsnips, along with a giant bowl of mashed potatoes overflowing with pools of butter, followed by the tray of homemade potato bread, accompanied by its mate: room temperature butter, the softened, saturated butterfat perfect for spreading on freshly baked bread.

From birth to eighteen, I definitely ate much more than I cooked. I feel that when you have a personal Sicilian Nona as a mother, cooking becomes an afterthought to eating. I didn’t expect to start cooking and grocery shopping—planning meals for the week and creating a thoughtful list to bring those meals to life—so soon in my young adult life. To my teenage brain, cooking was for grownups with professional jobs, gas stoves, collections of cast iron cookware, and cupboards filled with adult kitchenware like bakeware sets and Hawthorne strainers.

The reality of having to feed myself three square meals a day quickly set in when my parents dropped me off at college in a tiny 200 square-foot dorm room without a kitchen (which I shared with a roommate). I would spend the first year of my semi-adult life in a space that would induce a claustrophobia diagnosis in anyone, and with no kitchen to even attempt boiling, frying, scrambling, or poaching an egg. Eggs, because aside from toast, are the easiest food to learn to cook for a beginner chef.

Before my parents and two siblings drove away in our white Ford truck for the long trip from my college in Alabama to our home in upstate New York, we stopped to eat at the infamous rib shack in town, Cooter Browns. Nothing on the menu looked remotely appealing; all the items were artery-clogging, fried in canola and corn oil, and served with a slice of dry white Wonder Bread on the side—except for…the ribs.

The ribs at Cooter Browns became my comfort food safeword and a sanctuary for the next four years. My teammates and I would dine at Cooter Browns whenever we could afford it. We all ordered a slab of ribs for the main meal, along with an extra slab of ribs To Go for our midnight snack. However, those ribs never made it to midnight. I recall driving home from Cooter Browns one night, with half my teammates in the car with me and the others in the vehicle ahead. Every few minutes, rib bones would come flying out of their window, as if there was a BBQ free-for-all happening in the back seat of their car.

After my family and I bellied up to the BBQ pit, indulging in more than our fair share of ribs at Cooter Browns, I hugged them goodbye, swallowed my grief, and the tears lodged in my throat for at least a week after they left. I quickly realized that aside from the loaf of banana bread and half-pint of homemade strawberry jam my aunt prepared for me, I had run out of homemade food until I saw my family again at Christmas.

My once-familiar relationship with food—give a man a fish—quickly pivoted to—teach a man to fish—almost overnight.

I wouldn’t have a kitchen until my sophomore year, but I couldn’t wait that long to get at least some version of nourishment and homemade food into my stomach regularly. Since my dorm room lacked a kitchen, I created a makeshift kitchenette. Instead of hanging clothes in my closet, I fashioned a tiny-house-like kitchen consisting of a mini refrigerator, toaster, hot plate, saucepan, silverware, dishware, and dish towels all stacked and hung in the spots where t-shirts, gym shorts, shoes, and pajamas belonged. My kitchen was in my closet because the RA of Fitzpatrick Hall, where I lived, didn’t approve of my creative way to avoid eating the terrible food served at the dining hall, which for me was a proven method to trigger at least a three-day bout of IBS. To prevent aggravating my leaky gut while having a reliable source of real food, I concealed my kitchenette in the closet, and whenever it was time for room inspections, I firmly shut the “wardrobe" doors.

I guess I’ve always been a rebel at heart. If you tell me I can’t do something, I will almost always find a way to do it anyway. Little did I know, as well as the RA of Fitzpatrick Hall, that the kitchenette in the closet was my doorway into the cooking world.

Here’s to taking the first step toward your kitchen and cooking endeavors,

Chef Heathar

Need help in the kitchen and motivation to cook amazing, nourishing meals? Several times per month, Heathar hosts a live Q&A call for all Eat Heal Farm paid subscribers right here on her substack page. To join the calls and access the replays, become a paid subscriber. Don’t forget to email your food, wellness, and farming questions to Heathar so she can address them in detail during the live calls.

Achieve your food and health goals when you sign up for an ancestral food plan with Heathar. Do you need structure but not rigidity regarding your food? How about a nourishing food resource list, meal ideas, and inspiration? Learn more about Heathar’s Ancestral Food Plan right here.

While Heathar is a chef and homesteader, she’s also a homeopathic practitioner. You can study homeopathy with Heathar and learn about her homeopathic practice on her Study Homeopathy Substack.