Tour Whore, May 27, 2012

Comfort Food

by Cameryn Moore

I just finished filming some short-short promo videos for my upcoming presentation of Phone Whore in the Zoofest Festival in Montréal, and it’s all getting a little meta. The promo videos are from an imaginary webcast series called Cooking with Cameryn Moore the Phone Whore. The amount of coordinating and dishes and shifting shit around was a little discombobulating, and yeah, the whole time I worried about the phone ringing with an actual caller. 

The filming was challenging enough, it’s a whole new project. But the kitchen situation, well, that’s a chronic issue: the kitchen is not my own. I’m on tour, remember? So I have found out that here there was only one pan large enough to handle the baking of the bacon, and the tongs are weird, and I couldn’t really tidy up the kitchen because I don’t know where all that mail on the table needs to go, and even though I firmly believe that everyone likes the smell of bacon except vegetarians and people who keep kosher or halal, that’s just a belief, not an actually proven or prove-able fact. And there’s no jarred crushed garlic in the fridge, and I’m not sure about the freshness of the olive oil, and etc. etc… 

My need to own my own kitchen goes much, much deeper, though.

Borrowing other people’s kitchens makes me a little twitchy. I was a food journalist for five years, and have been a decent-to-excellent cook for four times that long, so I spent a lot of my adult life deliberately cultivating my foodie impulses. I enjoy putting food together, for myself and for other people, I mean, REALLY enjoy it, so much so that I try to organize brunches in every Fringe city I visit (see monkey bread, below). 

My need to own my own kitchen goes much, much deeper, though. In a family of seven children, with underemployed or unemployed parents since the late 70s, every bit of food in the house was tracked. We scavenged in the fruit trees out back, and I gorged myself on summer blackberries, to make up for a certain level of scarcity on the home front. I stole change and bought handfuls of penny candy and little bags of Cheetos, and snuck food: wedges of cheese, slices of bread. When I stopped going to church, my dad put a padlock on the fridge before taking the rest of the family out on Sunday afternoons, and I got the message: you only eat what and when we let you.

So, um, yeah. Not to get all Flowers in the Attic on you. The point is, controlling my own food supply is very important to me. When I’m on tour, that comfort is gone again and I am back to being a tolerated stranger in other people’s kitchens. Other people’s kitchens, full of equipment that makes no sense and food that is not mine, not of my choosing. All I get is a little section of the fridge, a corner of the cabinet. It stresses me right the fuck out.

I kinda like the way the butter melts in the summer heat.

This is all complicated by the fact that, out on the Fringe circuit, my time is not my own, either. I have no time to cook, and it’s usually too fucking hot, and I’m usually with other people, and they’re like, hey, let’s get some poutine (La Banquise, I’m comin’ for ya!) or the bangers and mash (hi, King’s Head in Winnipeg!), and I want to be social, and I forgot to pack a Tupperware container with my dinner, so I say okay, and there goes another mealtime. 

I do my best, though. I try to do a grocery run at some point during my first couple of days there: bread, butter, yogurt, orange juice, bananas, yams, chicken thighs, those little microwaveable sippy cups of soup. (Let me point out that having the Deerinator with me is a real luxury for transporting groceries.) Every day I try to fix at least one meal for myself. I make yogurt and fruit for breakfast, frozen fruit defrosted and topped with plain yogurt and raw oatmeal and nuts and brown sugar. Sometimes for lunch I’ll pack an apple and a peanut-butter sandwich, peanut-butter-banana, if the bananas are going brown. The sandwich always gets squished under the packing-tape gun, but it’s still edible, and I kinda like the way the butter melts in the summer heat.

I bring pieces of my own kitchen with me.

At night it gets tricky. Once the fringe gets going, I normally don’t get home until 1 or 2 in the morning, later, in Montreal. If I refrain from the street food or the bucket o’ poutine, I’m going to be eating dinner at 2 in the morning. Honestly, a lot of times I nod off over a plate of cheese and salami and olives. When I have the time and energy, I’m partial to a pan-seared pork chop and a baked yam (last year the broccoli bloomed in the vegetable drawer more often than I actually got to cook with it). Occasionally chicken curry or a West African peanut-chicken stew; I know that I’m only going to get to make one big-pot meal while I’m there—maybe two, if I want to cook for my host—so I need to get it out of the way first thing. 

I bring pieces of my own kitchen with me. Not all of it, but some. I have a chef’s knife (Wusthof) and a knife sharpener, because I still can’t believe the shitty-ass knives that some people keep in their kitchens. A mini cutting board. A camping spice kit that originally held weird stuff like marjoram (who uses marjoram on a camping trip?) and now has more useful seasonings like cayenne and powdered ginger. A bundt cake pan, for making my signature monkey bread in. And a whole heap of non-perishable things, random foodstuffs that I culled from my kitchen when I moved out of my Boston apartment: Ovaltine, Thai Shake-n-Bake-style peanut coating, nutritional yeast (sprinkled on top of lavishly buttered linguine), a tin of oysters.

I don’t know. Maybe at some point on the tour I will want some oysters. And if I can supply those myself, out of my own “kitchen”, they’ll taste even better.

Cameryn Moore will be at the Montreal Fringe June 15-23, at Zoofest and at the Winnipeg Fringe July 19-29

camerynmoore.com