The Little White Kitchen

WHEN I BOUGHT the Harvest House, the kitchen was probably the room I cared about the least. It is little—like a few steps in each direction and you can walk the whole thing little—and all the walls and cabinets are a bright, beautiful shade of white. Even the ceiling is painted white. Above the sink I’ve hung a sign that says GOOD THINGS ARE COMING. And above the stove, I put a beautiful framed illustration of the Edinburgh skyline with buildings and hot-air balloons. The counters are fake marble but speckled like crazy, which I love. And bizarrely, among all the white cabinets, there is only one with a glass-paneled door. I will never understand why, but I’m also not taking the time or money to change it. The kitchen is lovely and very usable but very small. When I first gave tours of this house to friends, I usually told them, “The kitchen is perfectly Annie-sized—just big enough to reheat something.”

I used to like cooking more, back when I made casseroles and soups and full-on meals. But that’s when I could eat and serve everything with no concerns about ingredients. That isn’t the case anymore.

I’m allergic to cow’s milk and cow’s milk products. It happened in 2013, my adult-onset allergy’s debut appearance, so I had already lived three decades eating cheese dip and pizza and yogurt and ice cream and all the best parts of the world before they were taken away from me.

It’s part of having PCOS, polycystic ovary syndrome. Women with this particular disease have to be careful about what they eat, specifically limiting many of the most processed and most delicious things. Something I tell women or married couples often when they talk to me about their own journey with PCOS is that we are actually the lucky ones. Many people are diagnosed with diseases they cannot control, but this one, in many ways, can be controlled by how we treat our bodies.

But listen. It is not fun.

And in a bizarrely devastating way, I’ve discovered that my body doesn’t really like wheat either. I can tell a difference in my shape and my brain and my energy level when I am full of wheat.

But ugh. Bread is fun. It just is. And I’m frustrated.

I’m frustrated about my body’s lack of natural health and resilience when it comes to allergies. I’m grateful for a tough immune system and strong bones, but I’m so annoyed at PCOS and annoyed at my reproductive system and annoyed at how some foods cause my body to react negatively.

I’ve been less disciplined about my wheat intake in the last few months. You want me to get real honest with you? I was super disciplined about wheat when the allergies started in 2013, and I gave it up with a bigger dream in mind. I treated my body really well because it matters a lot for women with PCOS who want to get pregnant. So I lived and ate like a woman on a faith mission. I would do what it took to get my body in tip-top shape for the possibility of babies. But in the last year, I’ve slacked. I’ve slacked because I’m older than I was in 2013, and I’m still not married and not interested in having a baby without a spouse. I’ve slacked because maybe I’m making the choice at this point not to birth a baby myself even though I thought that was something I always wanted. I started eating wheat pretty regularly a few months ago because I got tired of caring about something that may not come to be.

In my most honest moment, I would say living by faith has stopped being fun but eating bread is a lot of fun. And my body is screaming about it. Sometimes God sounds like words and sometimes God sounds like an allergic reaction. Sometimes hearing Him is hearing what my body is saying to me. (I’m not being heretical; I’m just saying I can hear God leading me as I trust what I’m experiencing in my body.)

And I’m new to that. I’m an amateur at that. It isn’t fun for me. I’m new at trusting that my body is telling me something and trusting that God wants me to notice too.

The thing I have to decide today (and decide again tomorrow and every day after) is if I love my future more than I love my present. Can I think past where we are this minute, the fun that would come from food RIGHT NOW, and think about my future?

WE DON’T TALK about body stuff on the podcast much. That’s partly because it tends to feel so deeply personal to me but also because I really don’t want to do anything, or host any conversation, that would lead a man or a woman to believe that their body is wrong. We get pitched so many diet books, food books, fitness coaches, all of it, and I almost always say no.

Because I don’t want to have conversations that make my friends on the other side of the recording, the listeners on their commute or folding their laundry or on their treadmill, wonder if they should feel shame for how they are living when it comes to their own body. That’s not my job, that’s not my goal, and I don’t want to be a part of anyone feeling any level of shame.

In fact, my listeners probably hear me talk more about loving your body right here, right now than anything else. I want to have conversations like the one I had with Mandisa (episode 171). I want to sit and talk about how we feel about our bodies, how we are handling our feelings and our time of exercise and the loud things we hear in our heads. I want THOSE conversations, not a coach telling me that I need to count something or buy some new tool or measuring cup. I’m just not here for that.

And I want to have conversations with chefs. I love people who love food, who think about their meal before they make it, who use the exact right ingredients and create recipes for us.

I love Food Network shows, but I’ve never been a huge fan of those cooking competitions that everyone else loves. Mostly because—again, thanks, dairy allergy—I know I’m not going to try to make any of the foods they make on the shows. And I’ll never get to be a judge, though I think it would be incredibly fun. And I’m jealous I can’t cream together butter and sugar and mix it with a pile of flour in my own kitchen, if I’m being honest. But for some reason, I got hooked on Food Network’s Spring Baking Championship. It was on television when I was on bed rest for the migraines, so I pretty much fell in love with it. But there was one particular chef I liked the most. Cory Barrett.

There was always something about the way Chef Cory baked that felt deeper and more profound than just the making of cakes and candies. That may sound silly, but that’s how it felt. Like every dessert he made, everything he baked, wasn’t enough to him if it looked good or tasted good. It had to be precise, it had to be beautiful, it had to have meaning and bring him as much joy making it as it would bring the judges when they were eating it. I think it just always felt like he was having fun. Pretty early in the competition, I found myself rooting for Chef Cory. He was the tallest contestant, he had a very good mustache, and he always talked about his wife and kids. He seemed like the kind of guy I would want to be friends with, or the kind of guy I would like to tell people about, saying, “Yeah, we were friends in college. I’m so excited for where his life has gone.” Know what I mean?

If I was out of town when a new episode released, it would be the first thing I’d watch when I got home. And I was constantly cheering for Chef Cory. He stressed me out once when he got in the bottom three, but don’t worry—he didn’t get eliminated that week. In fact, he never got eliminated. Sorry to spoil it for you, but he won. The guy I had been cheering for from day one was the winner of season five’s Spring Baking Championship.

I cheered. I literally stood up in front of my television during the final judging and had my arms crossed like my favorite football team was on the three-yard line about to score a touchdown. Then when he won, I cheered like a crazy person in my own home.

A few days later, I got real brave and tweeted at Chef Cory. I asked him if he would be willing to come on the podcast and talk about winning. (Listen, I’m never going to be the one who says no for someone else. I’ll always let them say no for themselves.) But a bit to my surprise, he responded and said he’d love to be on the show.

We went back and forth trying to find a recording date and finally got it locked in. And then I panicked. What would I even ask him?!? “Uh, great job winning that contest. . . . Was it cool?” I could just totally see myself bombing this interview. But you know the show rules—the only guests welcome are friends and people I wish I were friends with, so I switched my mindset. This wasn’t just a guy I’m a huge fan of, this was a guy whom I already thought would be fun to be friends with. The interview was a chance to give it a go.

Chef Cory’s episode (episode 146) will long remain one of my favorites. He was exactly the same guy in our conversation as he was on the show. To me, that’s the highest sign of integrity—when you experience the same person being the same person in multiple environments. Chef Cory was just as fun as I figured he would be. We learned all about the behind-the-scenes details of the competition and how he got into cooking and baking, and then he said a sentence that I have repeated multiple times and that has stuck with me personally. “Lots of people say food is medicine, but I would say cooking is medicine.”

Wow. I needed to hear that.

Even though he didn’t mean to and couldn’t have known me well enough to know how much I needed to hear that, Chef Cory was preaching something important to me.

I have been living for years with the mantra “food is medicine.” I’ve said it to others and to myself ad nauseam. Food will heal, food will heal, food will heal. Eat the right foods and your body will heal. But cooking as medicine? Maybe that’s an Eden I didn’t know I had lost. But when I heard it existed, I missed it.

So I started cooking a little bit more. (Don’t get it twisted, I’m not your new favorite food blogger, but I am using my kitchen for more than reheating these days.) I pulled out all of Danielle Walker’s cookbooks, the family cookbook my mom put together a few years ago, and a few others I had stacked around the house. And I began to make soup. Lots of different soups and stews. It’s my favorite method of getting meat and vegetables into my body. I used the stove and the Crock-Pot and the Instant Pot. I made small one-person servings of soup and big pots that ended up in my freezer and fridge and in a few containers delivered to friends’ houses as well. I made soups that went great and one that was far too spicy for me so it all got delivered elsewhere.

Then the fun started as I began to experiment with changing up the recipes a bit to fit my own taste. Would I like this one better if the vegetables were roasted first? What if I swapped out sweet potato for white potato? (Amateur tip: don’t.) I’ve now perfected a few soups for myself that stay in a pretty constant rotation in my fridge and freezer. (The leftover roasted chicken and vegetable soup from Danielle Walker1 and the one-pot pumpkin black bean soup from Minimalist Baker are two I make on repeat.2 But I make them without the peppers because SPICY. You’ve been warned.)

And in a way that I don’t know how to explain to you just like I didn’t know how to explain it to my counselor, cooking started to heal me. It didn’t heal or change my body, but after weeks of cooking in my kitchen, the way I talked about and thought about and looked at my own body changed drastically. It’s like everything just settled. The waves of self-hate that had been crashing on my shore at a high-tide pace went back out to sea as I stirred and chopped and roasted and waited. Love grew as I waited—love for my kitchen and for my house and for myself and for the way God made food for us to eat. What I thought I was gaining in better food and faster service by eating out and having food delivered, I was losing all along in healing.

So I’m usually in my kitchen two nights a week or so, making one thing or another. (Well, until an unforeseen global pandemic struck the world, closing all restaurants and canceling all dinners with friends. COVID-19 had me in my kitchen EVERY night.) Sometimes it’s a soup if my stash is running low. Though, to be honest, it never runs low. When I get down to about two servings left in the freezer, I get to scheming which soup will be next. But I’ve also gotten in the habit of making egg salad, a mixture that you either love or hate, and if you love it, you love it a very certain way. I made up my recipe—six eggs, about 1/3 cup of mayonnaise, 1/4 cup of mustard, 1 tablespoon of dried dill, and one chopped pickle. You will probably hate that particular recipe, so adjust it to what you want. But I keep a container of this deliciousness around most of the time. (This book has literally been fueled by Pamplemousse La Croix, egg salad, and sporting events on television in the background.) I also made an attempt at boiled peanuts in my Instant Pot this week, but they were subpar for sure. I’ll give it another go soon enough.

But the point is, I’m having fun in my kitchen—something that hasn’t happened in a long time. Since the days of baking cakes and making chicken and dumplings and doing all the southern cooking that includes all the dairy and all the wheat. I am being healed. Cooking is fun and cooking is the medicine that is bringing me back to a pure love I haven’t known in a long time.