APRIL 2020
THERE ARE A FEW minutes of confusion after I see my latest text message. “Do you have some time? I have a fun idea. Let me know, G.”
Before I even open up my calendar, I have a question: Who is G? I have no idea who this person is or how G got my phone number.
It turns out that G is Food Network star chef Giada De Laurentiis, and she wants me to join her and fellow star chef Alex Guarnaschelli in a Zoom-only special called Three Italian Chicks Helping a Home Cook. I am in, no matter what the idea.
I feel like the cool kids have invited me to hang out with them. I can’t wait. Then, of course, the anxiety hits. Can I do it? Am I really going to be able to contribute? Or will I be exposed as a fraud?
I don’t know Giada well. We haven’t spent a ton of time with each other so I would still call myself more of a fan than a friend. She is awesome and her talent and knowledge intimidates me. After getting her degree in social anthropology at UCLA, she studied at Le Cordon Bleu, worked with Wolfgang Puck, and opened her own catering business. And, yes, on top of all that intelligence and talent, she is also that naturally beautiful.
Alex, whom I know a little better, is that way, too. I adore her. Her mother was a cookbook editor, and after graduating from Barnard College—where she majored in art history—Alex worked in some of the best restaurants in France, New York, and Los Angeles before heading up the kitchen at New York’s acclaimed Butter restaurant.
Beyond last names with multiple syllables, both of these women share something that I think is essential to their success: a genuine passion for food and turning it into something delicious and memorable for others to enjoy. When I am around them, I am not surprised that they do what they do and are so good at it.
If multisyllabic last names were the only requirement to join this exclusive club, I would be a shoo-in and not feel so immediately insecure after I speak with Giada and find out that the three of us will surprise a Food Network fan and help her make something sumptuous from ingredients she already has in her refrigerator and pantry. “It will be fun,” Giada says.
I am sure it will be for her and Alex. As for me, I will have to put myself through the mental gymnastics and imaginary freak-outs of hoping I don’t say the wrong thing.
Other than that, I am fine.
I did not ever envision hosting my own TV cooking show and sharing tips with these top-tier foodies. It is one of the happy accidents of my life, though it may not be as much of an accident as I used to think. I spent most of my life on a diet; avoiding food; categorizing foods as good or bad, safe or disastrous; restricting my intake; denying myself the pleasure of eating; refusing social invitations if I felt I couldn’t afford a meal; fearing the bread basket at restaurants; and endlessly calculating calories. There are ninety in an apple, zero in a stalk of celery, five hundred sixty-three in a Big Mac, and two hundred in your average gin martini (give or take depending on the number of olives in your glass).
How was I supposed to let all that go and immerse myself in a life of food? But maybe it is more interesting to wonder how I got to that point and what happened when I did.
Before I incorporated a monkish regimen of restriction and punishment, I thought food was the way you expressed love. Until I was eight years old, I lived with my parents and three brothers in Claymont, Delaware. My father’s family was nearby, and we spent countless afternoons and evenings at my Aunt Adeline’s house, where she, my Nonnie, and the other women in the family gathered in her basement kitchen and made pasta while trading the latest news and gossip.
To me, that was our family. My grandmother and her cappelletti in brodo and her gnocchi and homemade bread. I can’t picture her without also seeing that flour-filled counter, the giant mixing bowls, and her wooden rolling pin, which she employed with varying degrees of effort, sometimes leaning into it with all her might and other times moving it over the dough with deftness and delicacy, as if she were wielding a magic wand; then, voilà, there were mounds of newly pinched pasta, broth simmering in a pan, and the scent of garlic wafting through the air. And we all were eventually called to the table because dinner was finally ready.
Then we moved to Clarkston, Michigan, then to Los Angeles, where my father went to work at the new General Motors plant there. I was eleven years old. At school, I met a girl who acted in commercials, and I went home and told my mother I wanted to act. Because I was extremely shy, she didn’t believe me. But something pushed me. At twelve, I got my first job on a JCPenney commercial. From then on, I was in a world where looks and size mattered. Everyone had their own idea of beauty, and no one was ever happy with their looks, including me. My idea of a meal went from gnocchi to no thank you.
I am simplifying here, but it’s the truth when I say that I didn’t eat again until 2010—and by eat, I mean enjoy sitting down at the table for a meal without spoiling it by overseasoning it with guilt. That’s a long time to go without something that was a true pleasure and a passion waiting to be discovered, embraced, nurtured, and shared.
* * *
It was January 2010, and I had a speaking engagement at the oldest theater in Wilmington. My parents traveled back to Delaware with me and we had a little family reunion at my Aunt Adeline’s house. The basement that held so many memories for me was intact and unchanged from the way I remembered it forty-plus years ago. I loved that. It was like entering a time machine. I walked downstairs into my childhood’s happy place.
A smile instantly appeared on my face. My aunt already had a pot of cappelletti in brodo on the stove. My grandmother’s recipe had become her recipe. I walked straight over to the pot and inhaled. The aroma was instantly familiar and sublime.
“I have way more in the freezer,” Adeline said.
I opened the nearby freezer the way I did when I was little. Inside were bags and bags of her pasta. When she made it, she made a ton. All you have to do is pour broth over it and you have a meal. This was my version of comfort food and exactly what I needed. I was hungry. Starving, in fact. I had spent all of 2007 losing forty pounds on Jenny Craig. Two years later, I lost another ten and fit into a teeny-weeny bikini two weeks before I turned forty-nine.
Then I reconnected with my Aunt Adeline’s cappelletti in brodo. With the first spoonful, I thought God had finally heard me and answered my prayers.
I was reunited with my people—and my pasta. I wanted more. I told my husband Tom that we needed to get out our suitcases and check our passports. I wanted to go to Italy. My family’s roots were there. Stories were passed down, not in great detail and not always accurately, but they were told and treasured. I had dreamed of traveling there, eating there, seeing the art, appreciating the history, and communing with the spirit of the people and the warmth of the land that I had heard and read so much about all my life. I had traveled around the world with Van Halen, visiting Japan, England, France, Spain, Germany, Sweden, Brazil, Venezuela, and Mexico. Somehow I had missed Italy. How did that happen?
Everyone has these kinds of holes in their life résumés. They get filled over time—when the time is right and we are ready. I was finally ready. I knew I had to go.
When I travel, I normally don’t do much planning other than picking a hotel. I usually go out of town for work, so things like transportation and meals are taken care of. It’s rare that I have time to slip out for a show or a museum, though I do like to wander around New York when I have the time and I try to find at least one good restaurant. Italy was different. Once Tom and I committed to the trip, I planned as if I were putting together a dinner party. The hotel was the table setting. The restaurants, museums, historical sites, and wineries I wanted to visit were the ingredients needed to make the various courses. I spoke with friends who had been there. I looked at books. We contacted a guide. We created a schedule with time left open for spur-of-the-moment adventure or indulgent afternoon naps. As with any vacation, I not only wanted to get away from myself, I also wanted to leave space to discover or rediscover parts of myself that I had neglected or ignored for far too long.
The long flight was more enjoyable than I expected. I had my bag of magazines, snacks, water, and the book I was reading at the time. I also scrolled through the available movies. But once we got past the initial anxiety of takeoff, I relished the hours I had of being disconnected from daily life. My phone wasn’t going to ring. I didn’t have any appointments. I wasn’t going to spend a minute in traffic or a second worrying that I was running late. It was as if I had packed up all the things that normally consume me and put them in the overhead storage bin.
I stared out the window at the clouds, something I don’t do often enough. It reminded me of when my mother, a wonderful artist, looked at a blank canvas before starting a new painting and thought about all the possibilities ahead of her. Eventually, the skies gave way to patches of land.
“That’s Europe,” Tom said.
“Where are we eating tonight?” I asked.
“Somewhere down there,” he said.
“Oh, you know what?” I smiled. “I made a reservation for two at this little place in Rome. Wanna go with me?”
* * *
Actually, I didn’t have reservations. Our hotel was located in the heart of Rome near the Spanish Steps. Although we arrived late at night, we were wide awake. Unlike LA, Rome seemed wide awake, too. After checking into our room, we hurried outside and joined the crowds on the sidewalk. It was the ten o’clock hour and people were just heading to dinner as we intended to. But first we wanted to find the Trevi Fountain.
As a water source, the Trevi Fountain dated back to 19 BC, but it didn’t become the ornate attraction we wanted to see until the mid-1700s. Unfortunately, we couldn’t find it. The streets confused us. Our GPS said we were close, closer, and eventually right on top of it, but we couldn’t see it. We kept getting more and more lost until finally, at the point we were ready to give up because the supposedly short walk felt more like fifteen miles and I was starving, we turned the corner and there it was.
So many travelers say that sometimes you have to get lost to find what you’re looking for, and I suppose that can be true. To me, our situation was more about working through frustrations, letting go of the stress, and sticking with the mission. It made looking for pizza afterward even more important than it already was, and the restaurant we stumbled into on our own, La Bruschetta, was so friggin’ good.
It was a little place right around the corner from our hotel. We had a simple caprese salad and two thin-crust pizzas that tasted unlike any pizzas I had ever had. I suppose that was because I was eating them in Rome. It was more than just the water. It was the city, the country, the magic of Italy. I had the most amazing night’s sleep. In the morning, after a leisurely coffee, we ventured back out into the city. In the daylight, Rome was even more remarkable and beautiful. The city’s complexion changed with the light. Yellows turned to gold, then to umber. It was like being in a movie.
The entire city was built on layers of history as we saw when we visited the Coliseum, the Pantheon, the Forum. The Borghese museum’s paintings provided a warm-up to the Vatican museums. I have never doubted that looking at great art can be a transcendent and spiritual experience, and Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel and works by Raphael, da Vinci, Caravaggio, Giotto, and others filled my soul. My neck hurt from constantly looking up and twisting around to make sure I didn’t miss anything.
My favorite spot in the Vatican was the Gallery of Maps. The room is filled with frescos showing the Italian peninsula. I thought about all the people who must have walked around, taken measurements, and made sketches, and I realized that I was, along with everyone else, participating in this timeless, endless search for direction. I had left home having just been cast in a new TV series called Hot in Cleveland, so I wasn’t consciously wondering about a next job, where my career was going, whether I was still viable in Hollywood at fifty years old, or if I wanted to do something else with my life—the things that sometimes popped up when I went too long between jobs.
Was there ever going to be a new chapter?
Was I doing what I was supposed to do? I remembered reading a story about an actress who gave up her career to become a nun. I was intrigued by someone who felt such a strong calling. Ed was that way with music. A piano prodigy as a child, he had switched to guitar by age twelve and his relationship with his instrument and music in general only deepened as he got older. It poured out of him. He couldn’t not play.
I can’t say that I felt the same way about acting. The process made me anxious and I never felt like I was that good at it. I occasionally wondered if I was supposed to do it my entire life. Maybe something else would enrich my life in ways acting didn’t. Statistics show that most people change careers a handful of times during their working lives. My father changed jobs but not careers. Ed had only one job. Giada and Alex had numerous jobs, but they were all related to the same passion, cooking. But my friend and former costar Mackenzie Phillips, who struggled with drug addiction much of her life, has spent at least ten years saving lives as a substance-abuse counselor.
All the clichés are true, I suppose. You do what makes you happy, and what makes you happy is generally something you love.
Do I love acting? I don’t know. Sometimes.
When it’s the right part, yes, I do. I love it.
At that moment, I was in Italy and I knew two things for sure: I loved food, and I was hungry.
For lunch, our guide took us to a little place he knew. My heart sank when we got there and found that the door was locked. I saw it was about two-thirty, so we were arriving when this city takes an afternoon break or riposo. Our guide put his hand up. Not to worry. He rapped on the door. The older woman who ran the restaurant peeked out the window, unlocked the door, greeted him with a hug and kisses, and motioned us inside.
It was like walking into my grandmother’s house. It smelled like her house after she had been cooking all day. The rich aroma of butter and garlic is a language all its own, one that’s universally understood. When I die, I want to be hermetically sealed in this fragrance, Profumo di Italian Cooking.
The lunch was amazing. We had pasta e fagioli, pasta carbonara, and a plain green salad. Afterward, while on our way to the Forum, we stopped for a coffee. I ordered a cappuccino with a shot on the side, like I do at home. The barista remained motionless except for a slight shake of his head, telling me no—no cappuccino. In the afternoon, custom called for a single espresso or, more appropriately, a caffè.
The next night’s dinner fell short of expectations and it was a serious bummer. We ate at a Michelin-starred restaurant that was highly recommended. It was our one big splurge the entire trip and my pasta alle vongole was a bust. This is a dish for which Italy is renowned and a favorite of mine. It’s simple: butter, garlic, chili, white wine, tomatoes, clams, and pasta. What’s not so simple is the deft touch that turns these simmering ingredients into a delicate ballet of briny, buttery, garlicky perfection when they hit the tongue.
So I was disappointed. I said something like, “This can’t be happening,” which admittedly was bratty on my part. But my expectations were very high for the ten days we were going to be in Italy.
“It’s okay,” Tom said. “We’ll eat again tomorrow.”
“I know, I know,” I said. “But you only get so many meals in life—and in Italy. Make them all good.”
As those words came out of my mouth, they sounded funny and childish. They also reminded me of Ed, who once told me, “You only get so many bottles of liquor in life and I’ve already gone through mine.”
* * *
After bidding goodbye to our favorite waiter at La Bruschetta, the little pizza place we went to the first night and returned to twice more before departing Rome, we ventured to Florence. We began our visit with the Uffizi and the Accademia, taking in Michelangelo’s David and Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise, and more from da Vinci and Raphael and other all-stars of the Renaissance until finally I was overwhelmed by all these miracles of human artistry.
After hours of sharing my appreciation for these works of art, I literally ran out of words and decided it was okay to express my reverence with a sated quiet. I even got a little misty eyed from everything I had seen. At that point, we were in the Piazza del Duomo. I couldn’t go one step farther and sat down. I needed to catch my breath, rest my legs, drink some water, and feel the sun on my face.
I knew I was reviving when I began to calculate what time we would return to our hotel so I could order an Aperol Spritz, my late-afternoon reward for hiking thousands of miles through museums. After checking my watch, I looked over at Tom and asked the most pressing question of the day: “Where are we eating tonight?”
We ended up at Sostanza, an old trattoria—and by old, I mean it opened in 1869—where we ate—no, make that devoured—their signature dish, butter chicken. It sounds even better in Italian: petti di pollo al burro. One bite was all it took for me to pronounce it deserving of its fame and amazing in every sense of the word. It was also deceptively simple to prepare: two chicken breasts are dredged in flour and braised in butter. Mmm, just divine.
We ordered more off the menu, but my brain went blotto after the chicken. It was like getting high thirty years earlier. I saw cosmic significance in the taste. I wanted to know if it was wrong to compare it to David. Both left me awestruck.
The next day we visited a winery in San Gimignano before returning to Florence for one more day of exploration. Then we headed to Venice. I wanted to go there for a few reasons, starting with the most obvious: Why not go? It’s Venice. It’s stunning, historic, romantic, and a place where you arrive and immediately know it’s special and unique. The other reason I wanted to go was personal. My parents had visited there, and I had grown up hearing their adoring reminiscences of that trip. Already in love, it was the place where they fell in love again.
I adored Venice from the moment I cast my eyes on this waterlogged city. I understood why people said that it seemed to float. The city gave me the sense of not just stepping back in time but also of being magically cast inside a canvas where the foreground of people was constantly being updated against a background painted by the Old Masters. We hopped on a water bus, meandered along the canals, and ended up in St. Mark’s Square, where I had the most startling and liberating thought of the trip. After nearly an entire week in Italy, no one had recognized me.
I had spent practically my whole life walking around with blinders on because everyone seemed to know me. But I was anonymous here. I had removed the blinders and was enjoying where I was, and taking everything in, and not feeling like I had to hide. Unlike I did back home, I wasn’t missing anything.
It made me wonder how much of my reality was skewed or just plain wrong because of all the things I had blocked out and how much of it was colored by the limited view I permitted myself to see.
* * *
I fell in love with Venice all over again the next day because of something that happened to us every time we stepped outside. Whether we were on our way to St. Mark’s Campanile, the Rialto Bridge, or lunch, we got lost. We had a map, but we had no idea where we were going. There seemed to be two directions in Venice—up and water. Everything else was open to debate. Our hotel concierge assured us that this was normal, even desired; he sounded like a therapist when he said, “Don’t worry about going anywhere. Just wander and have fun.”
Was that where the word “wanderlust” came from—the love of wandering?
We took his advice and promptly had no idea where we were. And that’s when I concluded that no one else did, either. Nearly everyone I saw was either lost or holding a map and trying to figure out which way to go on those crazy, confusing Venetian streets. Our fellow travelers were like us, casting about for nonexistent signs while expressing cautious hopefulness. Maybe we were going in the right direction. But if not, who cares, we’re in Venice.
People stopped strangers and asked for help. Locals, seeing people struggling with their maps, paused and offered advice and directions. I thought this was incredible to experience, because I am one of those people who can’t bring myself to ask for help. I have to be past the point of desperation to wave the white flag, which is stupid, and even then, I have trouble asking for assistance. I think a lot of people are like this—lost, confused, and looking for directions but too scared or embarrassed or ashamed to ask for help.
But in Venice, everyone had granted themselves permission to be confused, even lost. They didn’t get all wound up about not knowing all the answers and take their frustrations out on other people. It was okay. All of us eventually found where we wanted to go or we stumbled on something else equally good . . . or even better.
That’s how Tom and I ended up having the best dinner of our entire trip. On our second day in Venice, we had gotten lost while meandering through side streets and around canals to look for the perfect out-of-the-way place for lunch. Nothing grabbed us until we spotted a plate of cannoli in the window of a tiny restaurant down an alley. I wasn’t even sure it was a restaurant. It might have been a bakery.
We walked in and saw three people eating lunch at a table. They were the only people in the room: two Sicilian guys—the chef and his brother—and a woman, the waitress, who was their friend.
The brother got up and greeted us. I asked if we could get lunch.
“No, no, apologies,” he said in heavily accented English. “We are closed.”
“But the cannolis,” I said, pointing to the window. “I saw them. They look amazing.”
“Come back,” he said.
“Tonight?”
“Yes, come back tonight.” He smiled.
“Eight o’clock?” I said.
“We will see you then.”
We managed to somehow find the restaurant again and show up on time. The place was crowded. It was filled with the thick aroma of an Italian kitchen. I knew we were in the right place. I saw that there was a small front room and a slightly larger room in back. I also glimpsed the kitchen, which was minuscule; it looked barely large enough for the chef to move around in. The chef’s brother greeted us warmly and showed us to a table. We ordered wine, and I said, “I want to try your pasta alle vongole. Other than that, please bring us anything you want to make.”
For the next two and a half hours, they kept bringing the most amazing things to eat and taste. Between bites, we learned their stories: the two brothers dreamed of opening a restaurant in Venice and moved from their home in Sicily. I didn’t dare ask why they picked this sinking city; it seemed obvious. One of them had a gift for cooking, the other knew business, and both of them had inherited their mother’s passion for feeding people. They found this little place and brought their friend to serve the food.
While we were there, I never saw them stop smiling. I told them about my Italian roots, my Nonnie’s pasta, and my Aunt Adeline’s cappelletti in brodo that inspired this trip. It was clear that food was important to all of us, including me. But we weren’t talking about eating it as much as we were discussing how to prepare it, and I didn’t mention a word about the thing that connected me to food back home: my Jenny Craig diet. I was in the midst of that diet before our trip, but here in Italy, I set it aside and actually forgot about it. I traded restriction for enjoyment.
We sipped some deliciously strong grappa and traded thoughts about choosing ingredients, preparing, and eventually serving the food—the best part, they said, as the brother who was the chef patted his heart.
“Real cooking is about love,” I said.
We toasted to amore.
* * *
To be honest, I may have felt like I had some wiggle room to eat while I was in Italy because of all the weight I had lost on Jenny Craig, but once I was back home, I came to another conclusion: I loved food and, more important, I was allowed to love it. I had just experienced ten days where it was okay to enjoy meals.
I tried to figure out why I had been able to not just enjoy my meals and love food but also eat whatever I wanted without getting on a scale once and still feel comfortable not just in my clothes but also in my skin. I didn’t weigh myself until I got home. I was shocked that I hadn’t gained any weight during the entire trip. What was actually more shocking was that I hadn’t spent every day in Italy obsessing about what I ate. I hadn’t spent my days stalking the pantry or the refrigerator in a constant test of my self-control, then browbeating myself when my blood sugar plummeted and my willpower inevitably followed.
In Italy, we walked everywhere. I didn’t snack. I didn’t sit in front of the TV with a bag of junk food because I was bored or angry or frustrated. I ate meals. I enjoyed those meals. I didn’t once sit down and think, This will be my cheat day. I savored every bite that went into my mouth. In the weeks that passed after we were back home, I frequently thought of the two brothers who ran their little restaurant in Venice and the way they smiled throughout their busy night. I sensed that this joy came from someplace deep inside them, and I wanted that for myself.
It took me another decade of fighting myself to truly understand what that meant and how to try to find that joy within myself, but a spark was lit. I wanted to cook. I had always loved cooking for Ed and Wolfie, and learning new recipes from my mom and Mrs. Van Halen and my group of close women friends. At the time, we were all talking about The Silver Palate Cookbook. It had come out in the late eighties, I think, but it was enjoying a resurgence of popularity.
When my manager asked what I wanted to do next, I answered impulsively—or maybe intuitively. Regardless, it was real.
“I would love to do a cookbook,” I said, thinking about how much I enjoyed being in the kitchen.
There was no guarantee that I could do it or that anyone would want a book of recipes from me, but I knew I had to try. I mentioned it to my parents. My mom sent me some of her tried-and-true recipes—favorites of mine and Wolfie’s. Then one day a package arrived in the mail. Inside was a rolling pin and a card from my father: “This belonged to your grandmother. She used it to roll out her pasta dough when you were a little girl and even when I was a little boy. Now, sweetheart, it’s your turn.”
It turned out that my Nonnie’s rolling pin had been in my mom’s kitchen. When I asked why no one had offered it to me before, my mom matter-of-factly said that she never thought I needed it until now. Oddly enough, she was right. Her timing was impeccable.