A Woman, The Measuring Cups, An Ironing Board and Her Meds.
An ever evolving directive that became the bane of my cheffing existence and how I ended the madness.
“You must have the patience of a saint,” someone once said when I told them that I ran a business where I specialized in cooking for people with special dietary needs. The truth was, I was just well versed in replacements and I honestly looked at each request as a culinary challenge. And when I hit it out of the park for clients, well, it made me feel amazingly good knowing they were happy and eating healthy.
Which brings me to one of the most challenging clients I ever cooked for. How I hung in there for as long as I did was truly a miracle. Or stupidity. As I have gotten older I don’t take as much shit as I used to, but when I was a younger person I would bend over backwards to help someone, even at the expense of my own self. My mother always said I was “too nice” to people. That I might “get used by people from all my kind heartedness” and cooking for the woman I am about to tell you about was case-in-pointe. My mother was right.
Kitty was a single woman in her 40’s. She lived in a small townhome on the outskirts of Baltimore. She had contacted me in what sounded like a dire need to lose weight, as prescribed by her doctor. She had met with a nutritionist and wanted me to follow the guidelines that the nutritionist had recommended. I told her I could definitely help her reach her goals. We met at her very small house so that we could go over the plan as well as for me to see her kitchen. When I got there, we sat at her dining room table and first went through my intake questionnaire, only for me to find out how much she hated vegetables. Yikes, I thought. I hoped that the nutritionist knew about her dislike of anything green. When we went through all the veggies on my list she scrunched up her face like a two year old at the mention of broccoli, kale, spinach and brussels. There were many more vegetables that I would get me that same reaction to. We then moved onto the game plan that the registered dietitian had created. “Everything has to be weighed and measured,” Kitty said in a stern tone. “Yes, I will weigh and measure everything,” I replied back. “Please make sure. I NEEEEED to lose this weight so bad!” she cried. We set a date for me to start making her weekly meals. I then went through her kitchen and realized how VERY LITTLE room there actually was for me to work. Her counter space was at a minimum and what space she did have was cluttered with chatskis galore. I asked her if she could clean off the counters before I came to cook. “I’m not sure where I would put it all, but I’ll try,” said Kitty. I was nervous about her response and expected to see the same abundant piles of things when I arrived the following week.
When I arrived, Kitty was getting ready to leave the house for work and as expected, she had not decluttered a bit. “Ok. Here’s the key to lock up. I’m excited to eat dinner when I get home! Oh, sorry for the mess…I just haven’t had a single minute to do a thing!,” and off she went. I looked around and decided to move all the things off the counter into the dining room and place it all on the dining room table. She had a small, round wooden drop leaf table in the kitchen, so I removed the things she had on top of it and placed them onto the corner of the floor and out of the way. I popped up the leaf of the table to get more space and began unpacking all the groceries. I got her game plan sheet out and started making her a weeks worth of breakfasts, lunches and dinners. When I started pulling things from the oven in need of cooling I realized that there was literally nowhere to cool them, so I began looking around the first floor for anything I could use. In a closet across the hall was an ironing board. “Sweet!,” I said out loud. I had used this trick in “Baby Food Man’s” townhouse kitchen as well. I would always pull her board out each time thereafter to use as a cooling rack at each cook.
Not her actual kitchen…
All the meals were weighed and measured as per her instructions, both before cooking (such as all proteins) as well as after cooking (measured cups of grains and vegetables) and packed into complete meals in individual containers. When I was finished, after 3 hours, I left her a bouquet of flowers along with a nice card.
When she got home she sent me a lovely email about how happy she was in her decision to hire a personal chef. I was happy for her as well. I cooked for her weekly for about 5 months when one day she let me know that she would need me to start cooking for her bi-weekly and that she would like two weeks worth of meals made at a time because she was more financially strapped. I agreed and began cooking on that schedule for her.
During that period, I had hired an assistant chef to come with me so that we could cook for more than two houses per day. Now, wIth my new assistant, Andrew, we could cook for 3 homes a day. The first time I brought Andrew to Kitty’s place, his jaw dropped at the cluttered counters and the lack of space in general. “Yeah,” I said, while looking around the kitchen, hands on hips, “We have to clear off the work spaces first. I have to do this every damn time,” I said while looking at Andrews expression of disbelief. “Why can’t she move all this before we arrive?” he asked. “Dude, I’ve asked numerous times…she just won’t,” I said as I carried the Snoopy Cookie jar into the dining room. Over time, when I would pick up Andrew in the morning, he would ask who we were cooking for that day and I would watch his mood morph from semi sunny to a definite sulk as we drove to Kitty’s house. He hated cooking there. I did too. I had been cooking for her for 7 months at this point.
One evening while I was checking my email I saw that Kitty had written to me. She said she couldn’t afford the service anymore and would need to stop. She also said that she wasn’t losing any weight. I didn’t bring up the fact that I saw many snacks in her pantry as well as Cokes filling the fridge. I wished her the best and told her if she ever needed me again I would save her a spot in my schedule.
2 months had passed when I received an email from Kitty one night, desperately pleading that she needed me to cook for her again. “I have gained MORE weight and I just need your help! Please, please, please… can you cook for me again?!” she wrote. I replied back that I could get her back into the schedule. We set up a new date and time, and begrudgingly so, she accepted the new day and time. She would continue to beg me to change the day of the week back to what it had been, a Monday, so that she could start her diet back at the top of the week, but I couldn’t abide as I had gotten new clients after she had left and they had taken over her old day. Her’s would be a Wednesday. “But I was your client FIRST!’ she would write. “I’m sorry Kitty, but you had left, and I didnt know if you would come back…and I had to accommodate others. I hope you understand.” She never would and she would continue emailing me asking for a Monday cook date.
After about 5 months into our second “tour of duty” of clearing off counters, weighing, measuring and fielding random emails about her scheduled day of the week, I received the most surreal email from her. I awoke one morning, checking my email to find a long tirade she had written to me at 3 am. It began with the sentence:
“SHIRLÉ - I JUST DON’T KNOW WHAT I’M GOING TO DO WITH YOU!”
From there it went on... “I JUST TOOK OUT EVERY PORK DINNER AND, AS I HAD REQUESTED FIFTY MILLION TIMES, IT IS SUPPOSED TO BE ONLY 4 OUNCES, BUT I SEE IT WAS ONLY 3.5 OUNCES! ARE YOU TRYING TO STARVE ME!!! I ALSO MEASURED THE QUINOA SIDE DISH AND IT WAS OVER A QUARTER OF A CUP. I EXPLICITLY TOLD YOU IT NEEDED TO BE A QUARTER OF A CUP! WHAT DON’T YOU GET ABOUT THIS ALL HAS TO BE EXACT!! I DON’T THINK THIS RELATIONSHIP IS WORKING OUT. DO YOU WANT ME TO NOT LOSE WEIGHT??? I NOW KNOW THAT YOU ARE THE REASON I DIDN’T LOSE WEIGHT LAST TIME! WHY DID I EVER HIRE YOU AGAIN!” …and so on.
At first, I was going to reply with the logistics such as, when you weight meat for a diet, you weight the protein PRE-COOKED…it loses moisture after cooking, hence the 4 ounces to 3.5 ounces. And the quinoa?…well, it had moisture in the container, which then must have plumped it up more after it sat cooling on the counter after I packed it up. But, at the advice of my husband, who knew I had hated to cook for her, he suggested I not reply. “She’s deranged or something. You have better clients so why even stress over her. Don’t even bother replying” was what I recalled him saying.
The next day when I went to pick up Andrew, I told him about the strange middle-of-the-night email I received from Kitty and told him we would not longer be cooking for her. “HELL YES!!!,” he shouted. We both laughed and went about our day, both of us feeling a little lighter.
3 months after receiving Kitty’s “cap-locked and loaded” email, I was about to close my laptop and there it was. Kitty’s name and the subject title of “OMG! I’m SOOO Sorry!” She had written saying that she wasn’t sure exactly what had happened, but she had just found the email she wrote me in her SENT file and didn’t remember writing it. She said that she had been on new meds from her doctor and that she must have had one of her episodes that night. I was suspicious because, think about it… Over those 3 months hadn’t she wondered where I went, why I was showing up for her? It just didn’t seem plausible. She begged me to come cook for her. After a few minutes of debating in my head (My head saying: NOOOOO! Listen to David! Don’t do it!… but my Heart said: Maybe she really NEEDS your help!) I simply hit the delete button and closed the laptop, never to hear from her again.
Until next week, thanks so much for following along on this journey!
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Thank you again,
- Shirlé
**All names, places and occupations have been changed to protect the identity of all clients.
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A Shout Out to this Weeks Paid Supporters:
A very special shout out to the following paid subscribers:
Robinlee Garber, Chef Lynn Warlick Wells, Jake Brokaw, Miyuki Furtado and Spanky Wilson, . A special shout out to new paid subscribers Myra Ruppe Schwartz, Lisa Deemer Sethi and Claudia L Sanders, Laurel Estabrooks and Leela Montella,! Thank you all soooo much for your support!
-Leela is a person I have known since kindergarten. She has made a lovely life for her and her family and I love watching her kids success stories.
-Myra is an old NC friend who I recently got to see here in beautiful Lisbon with her partner Scott. Maybe someday they will become expats in this fair land.
-Robinlee is a childhood friend and all around renaissance woman, living and playing music in Chicago.
-Chef Lynn is a fellow Personal Chef buddy and owner of Thyme Well Spent, Personal Chef Service, based out of Greensboro NC. When not cooking for clients or food styling for cookbooks, she can be found hobnobbing with tastemakers and culinary shakers all over the country.
-Jake and his wife Brigitte have long been huge supporters of my cooking and are also huge supporters of the arts in Baltimore, Maryland. Jake also has an Orthopedic practice I have had to use a few times.
-Miyuki has been a lifelong friend and bandmate of mine from days long past. He’s also one of the best fathers and husbands I know and has raised one of the coolest kids, his daughter Mino along with his sweet wife Tricia. Miyuki currently plays music in his Alt-Country band, Divining Rod. You can listen to Divining Rod out on all music platforms. (Chef Lynn, I think you would LOVE his music!)
-Spanky has been a huge supporter of my cooking from my NC days. When not fire fighting you might find Spanky hiking the Appalachian trail.
-Lisa has been in my life since the early 90’s. She’s a huge music supporter and a lover of all things delicious.
-Claudia is an old friend from my days in North Carolina. I met Claudia at a pig pull back in 1998, when I first moved to Chapel Hill. Since then, Claudia has started a successful Personal Chef business, Good Intentions Personal Chef Service in the Hillsborough area, as well as serving the Durham and Chapel Hill area.
-Laurel Estabrooks is a new expat friend, recently becoming a Portuguese resident. Parabens!! Someday I hope to meet up face to face. Muito Obrigada Laurel!!
Thank you all sooo much for supporting me in this endeavor. I am truly grateful for you.
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Whew! She sounded like a doozy. Good story.