The Art of Eating In - Cathy Erway [139]
In any case, that Easter, when Jo-Jo and I were riding back from New Jersey, he had asked me whether it was time for me to move on. We had just eaten a meal of rack of lamb, which I had meticulously roasted with fresh rosemary and served with a red-wine reduction sauce.
“How long are you going to continue this?” he asked, referring to “Not Eating Out in New York”—the blog, the strict diet, or both. I wasn’t sure. This question had been put to me so frequently in the past year or so by others that it almost reverberated in my ears without having an impact.
I shrugged. Jo-Jo nodded slowly, keeping his gaze leveled at my eyes as if searching for clues.
“How do you know when it will be time?” he asked.
I was tempted to give another shrug, as I would have done if he were anyone else. But I thought for a moment.
“I think I will know. I just don’t think it’s done yet; there’s more stuff I want to do,” I’d told him. “I don’t think it’s run its course yet. ”
“Okay ... okay,” he said. He kept staring for a long while, and I thought he was about to say something the whole time, and he probably thought the same of me.
He suddenly broke the silence. “But you have to explore, right? Don’t you want to try new food and explore it? You’re going like this, holding in.” Jo-Jo hugged his arms around his shoulders and folded his torso into a ball.
I couldn’t stay this way forever, I thought. In no way would that be comfortable. Not eating out in New York ... it was a lot of fun, and a good exercise for me personally in saving money and learning how to make a lot of different foods. But I sensed I was beginning to grow out of its shoes.
The same flatware image glared from the monitor in my cubicle. I opened up a Word document and started to take notes on its features. Now, it may sound nuts to some, but I had a real fondness for my work, for creating memorable sentences about fine dinnerware that would drive a reader to hit the button and purchase what was on the screen. I also had a huge passion for cooking and for writing about it. Yet as I sat there at my computer screen, staring at the photo, I just wanted to crumple over on my desk and disappear. It wasn’t because I couldn’t force myself to write something pretty about the flatware set—no, I quickly straightened and let my hands amble across the keyboard, typing up some prose about their luminous stainless steel and stamped pattern. I could do it in my sleep.
Perhaps that was just it: I could do it in my sleep. This was the way I operated in my day-to-day eating routine, too. Sure, there were bursts of creativity, when cooking with new ingredients, or creating an elaborate original recipe for a pie cook-off, perhaps. But for the daily grind, eating in had become something I had once so despised about food—monotonous, ritual, with little thought or care. Jo-Jo had instilled in me a sense that if I was going to do anything, it should be with genuine, uncontrollable verve. I was running out of this type of steam for the concept of not eating out, I began to sense. And I had been genuinely, uncontrollably compelled to eat at the Korean restaurant with my mom and uncle that day.
That week, I did a lot of thinking about the future of my blog and of my eating habits. On the one hand, my readership had been steadily increasing all summer. How would it look to both new readers as well as loyal followers if I were to announce I was not not eating out anymore? Above all, this was the most difficult question in my head. My blog meant everything to me by then—it had turned into my “real” career, as opposed to my copywriting day job. The last thing on earth I wanted to do was to stop writing it. On