<

It wasn't a sudden decision. For months, my contempt for this job has been growing for a myriad of reasons that all boil down to one thing: I'm not getting enough out of the job compared to what I put into it. It doesn't bring in enough money to make daycare worthwhile, so I have to work around Clara Jane's schedule, which means what should be a one-day-a-week job gets drug out over Sunday, Monday and Tuesday every week. It's an exhausting hassle that's leading to something I swore I would never let happen: it's making me dislike cooking.

The professional foodie biz was actually my second career. In my previous life I spent five years working in educational video production with a brief forray into commercial broadcasting. About two years into that part of my life, I was 23 years old and at a bit of a crossroads. I was up for a promotion. While I enjoyed what I was doing, I was starting to realize that it wasn't exactly what I envisioned doing for the rest of my professional life. I made a deal with myself: if I got the promotion, I'd stay put. If I didn't get the promotion, I was off to the Chef John Folse Culinary Institute in Thibodaux, Louisiana (hi, Jules).

I got the promotion.

Cooking wasn't something I'd ever thought about doing professionally. I didn't actually learn to cook until I was a sophomore in college, living in my first hovel swinging pad. Neverminid that, when I was ten years old I spent an unusual amount of time reading and clipping recipes. The desire to cook was always there, but I just never considered it as a career. I was a smart girl destined for college and Great Things. Cooking seemed entirely too vocational.

But then I found myself cooking all the time for my roommates, and eventually for myself. I'd cook even if I wasn't hungry, which meant a lot of leftovers went into the trash or got pawned off on my co-workers. And then there were the wonderful dinners with Big Daddy B. He'd bring the wine, I'd do the cooking and we'd both wind up happily drunk and full. Great nights. This was around the time of the promotion and the realization that I was incredibly happy in the kitchen.

Fast forward three years. I left my video production job and moved to St. Louis to be with B. Clean slate. I could do anything I wanted with my life, and I had every kind of support necessary from my cute-as-a-button B. While it wasn't the Culinary Institute of America, it was still culinary school, and I loved it.

By fall, 2001, I was finished with school and had landed my dream job - I had a regular column with a food magazine. Just a little local start-up with shitty pay and no benefits, but I loved it. It was the perfect combination of the two things I enjoyed most - writing and food. If they'd let me write the occasional music review, I probably would have paid them to work there.

Eventually the exposure from the column lead to the occasional arts center culinary teaching gig, which led to the occasional catering gig. By the time I got pregnant in May, 2003, I found myself with a growing, multifaceted business on my hands. And I loved it. I had it all figured out: once the baby was born I'd just plop her on my hip and keep cooking. As soon as she was big enough to hold a spoon, I was putting her to work. Child labor laws don't apply when it's your kid.

While I'm not a religious person, there's a saying I absolutely love: Want to make God laugh? Make a plan. God laughed so hard at my plan that I think he wet Himself a little.

I taught my last class in October, 2003, with my rival chef in attendance. That was enough to make me decide that teaching was going to fall by the wayside in light of parenthood.

After Clara Jane's birth, I couldn't wait to get back to the magazine and catering. Returning to work (figuratively, since all my work was done at home with Clara Jane by my side) was a way for me to grasp some tiny bit of what my life had been before the birth, the depression, the anxiety and the utterly useless and hopeless feelings that dominated my life as a mother.

Things didn't really change until the beginning of this year. First, I left my magazine job in a huff, a move which I haven't even slightly regretted.

Since then, I've been stewing (insert *snort* here) about catering. I haven't enjoyed it for a long. So much so that it's sucked a lot of the joy out of all the cooking I do. A few weeks ago, in a catering-related fit, I told B., "When I'm done with this shit, I'm never cooking again. From here on out this family eats nothing but frozen chicken enchiladas from Trader Joe's!" And I meant it.

For my birthday party last month I drove myself batshit trying to make the menu, a task I usually love. It was a miserable process. "Just serve frozen pizza!" Kara suggested. To which I said, "Um, hello. My name is Robin. You obviously have never met me before. I could have sworn we met in March of 2001. It was at the art museum, after I'd spent the entire morning cranking out homemade sausages."

(Really, Kara, did you know that? The day we met, I had spent the morning making homemade sausage. Spicy chicken sausage patties and bratwurst, if memory serves. They would have been tasty while we were waiting three hours in line.)

But I digress, as usual.

Cooking has given me so much pleasure of the years. It's comforted me. When I was hating my video production job, I'd go home and cook. When I moved to St. Louis and didn't know anyone but B. and honestly thought I might curl up and rot from lonliness, I found company in baking loaf afer loaf of homemade bread and teaching myself to can. When Clara Jane was a baby, I redeemed my breastfeeding failures by making all of her babyfood.

A few days before my thirtieth birthday, I catered a luncheon attended by a restaurant critic from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. The same person who fired the previous caterer. I spent most of the luncheon outside, pacing and making nervous phone calls to B. and my mom, terrified of what I'd face when I re-entered the dining room.

Eventually, I had to slip back in to survey the wreckage of the buffet: smoked chicken served on warm biscuits speckled with fresh sage and spicy mayonnaise I made from scratch, a field green salad with fresh figs, Maytag blue cheese, Missouri black walnuts and a maple vinaigrette, and a curried apple-butternut squash soup. As I quietly began to clear the remains, the critic noticed my presence, stopped the meeting and stood.

"Excuse me," she announced. "We need to take a moment to recognize the chef. Brava." She began to clap. "Brava!"

I stood there, surely red-faced and stunned as each person applauded my work. Ever the cynic, my first thought was that it was sarcasm on a rather grand scale. But it wasn't.

Minutes later, as the meeting broke up, the critic approached me, "That soup was sublime," she said. "I can usually place every flavor in a dish, but you've stumped me. What's your secret?" I simply smiled and thanked her, divulging nothing.

That was my culinary triumph, the moment when I proved to myself that I could do what I had set out to do. I'm sure that will remain one of the proudest moments of my life, and I'm so glad to have had that experience. And while I know that won't be happening again, as I leave yet another chapter of my life, it's not even slightly bittersweet. I haven't thought about that catering job in a long time, or how amazing it felt to get that level of recognition. Especially since I did it all by myself. I never had any employees during my brief catering career. It was all me. And I did it.

For dinner tonight, I tossed some frozen Cajun chicken kebobs from Target into a pan, tore up a head of Boston lettuce and whipped up a pseudo-Caesar dressing of commercially-made mayo, white balsamic vinegar, garlic, Parmeasan cheese and olive oil. And for the first time in ages, I lingered in my kitchen, inhaling the pungency of my dressing as it spun in my blender, amazed that just last night, while doing what I didn't realize would be my last catering job, I was mentally begging the universe for a break from the kitchen. Little did I know that quitting would immediately give it back to me. I have missed it.