Wyoming News

New West Essay

How A Wyoming Foodie Learned To Improvise In The Kitchen

By Shauna Stephenson, 4-14-11

A perfect pizza made in a small-town kitchen. Photo by Shauna Stephenson.

It’s 6:30 in the morning and the mixer is already going in my kitchen.

Somewhere over the course of the last year, my husband, Cole, has developed a fanatical obsession to make the best pizza… ever. His words, not mine. Pretty soon he was that dude sniffing pizza crusts in the corner of restaurants, the guy Googling ways to jerry-rig the oven so he could get it up to 800 degrees.

Flour flies all over the counter as he prepares the next batch of dough.

On any given day, we have multiple cultures of yeast growing in a Styrofoam cooler rigged with heat lamp and meat thermometer – his homemade thermo-regulated container. At some point sweet basil will be clipped from the pots that sit at our living room window. Sauce will be made, and crust will brown on a searing hot pizza stone.

Never being one to turn down a meal, I have done nothing but encourage this behavior, joining the conversations on the attributes of various kinds of cheese. This is the kind of talk that makes more intelligent people glaze over with boredom.

In practice it sounds benign enough, but in reality it underlines one horrifying affirmation: We have become total food snobs.

This wouldn’t be a bad thing if we lived in a place that could support such a habit. Like being a drug addict with no drug dealer, it seems an illogical choice of obsession. Living in a small town in Wyoming, one discovers there is a gap between what you want and what you can actually get when it comes to good ingredients.

So when tomatoes, imported from the fields of Italy, started showing up in boxes on our front door step, I knew we were crossing a line we could never come back to. We had ventured onto a whole new plateau of cooking in this humble little house.

I live in a place where the height of exciting cuisine is taco Tuesday at Taco John’s. And for the most part, the people in this place prefer it that way.

None of this is to say I consider myself a member of the hoity-toity echelons of cultured epicureans. I have been known to eat cold beans out of a can for days on end. Those forays mainly stemmed from the time I lived in low-income housing with a man we called Dungeon Dave, a hermit who only surfaced from his basement hovel to microwave burritos and walk around in his underpants.

Nevertheless, it taught me to appreciate good food, and I would like to think that my taste has matured since then - in terms of both food and house company.

But it’s hard being a food lover in a small town. These days we have access to more ideas, more gadgets, more cultures, more refined gastronomic tastes than we ever have in the past. And it’s torture. Flip through a television lineup and you can find any number of ideas that just aren’t possible in a small town—Julia Child pounding the crap out of some small bird you’d never find in the meat department, Anthony Bourdain pontificating on the pleasures of pork belly, or Rachel Ray pushing her affinity for arugula.

Just this month, the cover of food magazine Bon Appetit features at least three different “can’t miss” dishes made from ingredients I would have to drive a minimum of 70 miles to find. Lamb chops? Lobster rolls? Prosciutto? Cherry peppers? Cipollini onions? We’re lucky to get lettuce that isn’t already wilted.

Living in a small town should not mean you are condemned to a life of meatloafs and pot roasts. But breaking that mold sometimes requires even craftier engineering than the Food Network uses to keep Giada de Laurentiis’ boobs in her shirt. Living in a small town means you have to work with what you have. You improvise, even if it means using the plastic bottle of fake lemon juice when what you really need is lemon grass. You learn that the best meals you will eat are those made at home.

Monday night tacos become seared beef with a spicy balsamic glaze, topped with a mess of cilantro, red onion and tart apples. Wednesday night chicken gets rubbed in turmeric, cumin, cardamom and cinnamon, then slow-cooked with onions and chopped dates until it literally falls off the bone. Friday night pork becomes a pork loin on a charcoal grill, seared then slow-roasted and topped with a homemade barbecue sauce.

Meals like these mean I can still relate to the Julia Childs and Anthony Bourdains of the world—that life in a small town is not necessarily uncultured or isolated and the bounds of food are only as limited as your ability to type “substitute for…” into a search engine.

Good food is not good because it comes with fancy names. Good food is good because someone makes it with love – love for the ingredients, love for the act of cooking, and love for the end result. A pizza made with such care? It can be called nothing but perfect.

This, I know, as the mixer begins to whir and a man in boxer shorts runs around the house, shouting fake Italian words.Life has changed since the days when I shared a place with Dungeon Dave. As another batch of pizza dough begins its transformation into a golden sphere of bubbling mozzarella, tomatoes and basil—a moment I think of with a slight gasp even now—I can definitely say the food is better.

Shauna Stephenson lives in Wheatland, Wyoming.

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