Cooking as Fast as I Can

by Cat Cora

  I was traveling about two hundred fifty days a year in 2008, and this was one of those days. I peeled down my jeans and propped my hip on the edge of the sink. I plunged a syringe loaded with Follistim into the top of my ass and winced. I was forty-two, and if I was going to have a baby the time was now. I couldn’t put it off a moment longer. So there I was in a tiny lavatory, my syringes rolling around the counter, the jet engines roaring in my ears.

  When Jennifer and I decided we wanted to spend our lives together and start a family, I was already what the doctors call an “older mother.” (Thanks, Doc!) We knew we were going to have to get creative to have the kids we’d hoped and prayed for. While I was in my thirties our doctor retrieved some of my eggs and fertilized them with the sperm from the donor we’d used for Zoran. Jennifer carried my biological son, Caje, who was born in 2007 (he’s the spitting image of my birth mother’s father), and now Jennifer and I were each going to be implanted with embryos created from the other’s eggs. Neither of us was getting any younger, and we thought we might as well have two babies in diapers at the same time. Creative, like I said.

  The more I traveled, the more hotel rooms in name-your-city I found myself in, the more precious my memories of growing up on Swan Lake Drive became. I didn’t have a fancy childhood, but I could bring myself to the edge of tears remembering all us kids—my brothers and me with various friends—in the game room with its pool table, foosball table, and wood-burning stove, jigsaw puzzles in progress on a card table. In the summer the screen door let in the throaty chirps of frogs and hum of night insects, the smell of warm freshly mowed lawn. I was desperate for my own kids to have a chance to live that simple life, to know their grandparents. I wanted to watch them race around in baggy shorts and T-shirts stained with Popsicle.

  I was now as ready as I ever would be, so I locked myself in airplane bathrooms to make sure I stayed on shot schedule for my upcoming try at in vitro.

  The first procedure took, a small miracle given my age. For three solid days I was euphoric, walked around with my hands on my flat belly, as if I could feel the embryo growing. I would bounce three-year-old Caje on my hip and imagine him with a little sister or brother, no longer the baby. I was thrilled to begin the journey.

  Jennifer was a genius of childbearing. Her birth experience was no more taxing than a minor dental appointment. She’d driven herself to the hospital to give birth to Caje, and the next afternoon went to the bank to pay our quarterly taxes.

  But I miscarried after three days. I couldn’t hide my disappointment from Jennifer or the boys. I lay in bed with my arm crooked over my eyes and sobbed to the point of dehydration. I was bereft, and also frustrated that no matter how hard I worked, pushed, planned, battled, I couldn’t control this. I ate well, exercised, took care of myself, and still my body could not be forced into cooperating.

  In the meantime, Jennifer conceived. Again. Her fertility goddess routine was amazing and a little annoying, truth be told. But then, after my doctor cleared me, I got pregnant again. Jennifer was due in April and I was due in July. It would be practically like having twins, we reasoned, and when I went back to work, as I would surely have to ASAP, as our household of six was not going to support itself, Jennifer could breast-feed both boys.

  You read that right. Two more boys. Four sons under six, two of them three months apart. The great blessing of my life. Also, are you fucking kidding me?

  Being pregnant together drew Jennifer and me closer than ever. After Caje was born we’d moved to Santa Barbara, into a midcentury house painted French butter–yellow, with white shutters and a little palm tree in the front yard. It was on a mesa overlooking the Pacific, on a block where kids could ride their bikes and skateboard, and the neighbors invited each other over for barbecues. At night, after Zoran and Caje had been put to bed, Jennifer and I would sit shoulder to shoulder on the couch, our increasingly swollen feet up on the coffee table, and compare notes on cravings, funny dreams, aches and pains, weird noises rising from our bellies, all that squirming. Privately, I worried about what would happen when we were both ready to pop. Who would lift the heavy boxes? Who would make the midnight runs to the grocery store? Who would tell the other one there was no need to freak the hell out? That had been my role when Jennifer was birthing our sons. Now that I was on the same side of the seesaw, I often wondered how we would manage.

  I had no doubt I could continue to work throughout my pregnancy. I was in great shape, and especially after my three weeks cooking in Gulfport after Katrina, had grown to feel “iron” in pretty much every area of my life. My Iron Chef battles for season seven were filmed early in the year, about five months into my pregnancy. I had trouble buttoning the bottom two buttons of my jacket, fast-walked instead of ran around Kitchen Stadium, but I thanked the gods of cuisine that I didn’t suffer any food aversions or morning sickness. I had visions of filming the big reveal at the top of the show. And today’s secret ingredient IS . . . The iron cover rises slowly into the rafters, the dry ice rolls out, and I spy a butchered goat or platters of glistening organ meats or tower of cheese that smells like a dirty sweat sock retrieved from the sewer, and I have to run offstage and throw up in a bucket.

  When Jennifer was thirty-six weeks along, I went to a food and wine trade show in Puerto Rico. Our doctor assured us that she had a good two weeks to go, easy. I would only be gone four days, and would be back in plenty of time to be there for the birth of our third child. The day I left she decided she wanted to take Zoran and Caje to Disneyland, a last hurrah before the baby arrived. I begged her not to, believing that walking miles around an amusement park on a warm California day while nine months pregnant would induce labor, but she either didn’t believe me, or just wanted to do what she wanted to do. When I called to check in from Dallas, where I was catching my connecting flight, I could hear the noise of the park in the background—calliope music, whoops of people having fun, Zoran and Caje chattering at her side.

  I made it to San Juan and checked into my hotel room, and at a little after 1:00 a.m., fell into bed. I was still folding and fluffing the too-skinny hotel pillow under my head when the phone rang. Our friend Michelle said, “Hi, Cat,” and I started cussing. I knew why she was calling.

  Jennifer was in labor.

  I was dog tired, pissed off, worried, heart bruised, and did I mention pissed off? Jennifer was an independent woman and could do as she pleased, but I wished she had listened to me. Frantically, I tried to put together a plan. I could check out now, grab a few hours of shut-eye at the airport, and take the first flight out. But it was no use. Even as my brain was racing, I knew I would miss the birth.

  I went to sleep, or tried to. In the morning I called and Jen was still in labor. I was relieved. Even if I couldn’t be there, at least I wanted to be awake and alert. An hour later, while I was waiting in the greenroom before my first event, my phone rang again, and it was our doctor.

  “Hey, Cathy, we’re about to have a baby here, are you ready?” she asked.

  I plastered my phone against my ear and listened while Jennifer pushed, and our doctor encouraged her and then I heard the tiny wail, and Thatcher Julius Cora came into the world. Jennifer snapped a picture of him immediately and within minutes I was looking at my new son, who was every bit as handsome as his brothers.

  Five minutes later they called for me. I sped out on stage, waved hello, and cooked twice as fast as I did during an Iron Chef battle. I’m sure the audience thought I was on speed, that’s how fast and furious I put that demonstration meal together, sweat flying off my forehead, my hands a blur. Afterward I took the customary pictures with a huge grin on my face, zipped through some autograph signing, and was ushered into a waiting car that sped to the airport, where I caught the first flight back. It was worth every penny.

  Jennifer’s ability to pop out our kids like a human Pez dispenser didn’t rub off on me. My contractions started while I was on a conference call on a Friday. We rushed to the hospital, where
I made everyone’s life miserable that evening, then throughout the longest Saturday in recorded history, and on into Sunday, forty-eight fun-filled hours of breathing through the contractions while trying not to dwell on every pregnant woman’s worst nightmare, squeezing out a nice, long poo the moment the baby is born.

  When I was still in labor after two full days, to the best that anyone could tell, my body had begun to reject the epidural. It suddenly felt as if ice water was being injected into my spine. This may have been the point I started hollering, “I’m dying, I’m dying!” Shortly after that the doctor, worried that the baby was stuck in the birth canal, ordered a C-section. Had I known this would have been the outcome, I would have made an appointment for the procedure and saved myself two days of wishing I could throw myself under a train.

  Nash weighed 7.5 pounds, beautiful to behold, despite the trauma of his birth. He was Jennifer’s biological son, and inherited her dark, almond-shaped eyes. He immediately seemed at home in the world, not unduly alarmed by lights and noises, slept well, took to the boob like a champ. Then, after a mere twenty-four hours of perfect bliss, I was propped up on pillows in my hospital room doing what I thought was an expert job of nursing him when Jennifer looked at him, bent down and looked closer, then said, “Oh my God, he’s blue.”

  She called for a nurse, who rushed in and tore Nash from my arms before I could even utter the words “What the hell?” He was raced to the NICU, the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, where he was placed in an incubator, a hateful cage of Plexiglas where they hooked him up to monitors that could track his cardiac function and stuck a tube up his tiny nose to oxygenate him. The diagnosis that was no real diagnosis: he was having trouble breathing on his own. Over the next ten days there were MRIs, CAT scans, PET scans, and other tests I’ve since repressed. Everything was inconclusive. The theory was floated by one of the doctors that perhaps he’d just needed a little help getting his lungs up and running after the stress of delivery.

  Nash spent ten days in the NICU. Jennifer and I spent every day and evening with him. I breast-fed him, held him, rocked him, sang and talked to him, everything I could think of to assure him that everything would be all right. At night, Jennifer would go home to relieve the friend who was caring for our other three boys. Every night the nurse would tell me that I needed to go home, too, and try to get some sleep. She would remind me that he was being very well cared for. It was agony. The next morning I would be back before dawn.

  Eventually they sent us home, with no diagnosis and an apnea monitor. Day and night he wore a belt around his chest that chafed his armpits. The monitor was supposed to measure his chest movement and heart rate. It went off at least three times a day for reasons we could never glean, having nothing to do with his breathing. Whenever the alarm went off, tears started in my eyes. My nerves were raw from worry.

  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.