A very personal story about food

Who's cutting onions?

Aly and I met in April of 2011. She had blonde hair and was wearing denim overalls with pastel floral patches. I was wearing black, head to toe. I later learned that after this first meeting, she told her mom that we would be best friends. I was more like, who is this chick from Florida. 

Aly and I were the two lead hosts at The Dutch, the restaurant that kicked off our collective next-level obsession with restaurants (trust me). We rarely worked the same shift, so our friendship developed over the phone, ranting and raving about our nights after we got off from work. Eventually our jobs and schedules changed, so we actually got to hang out, and as soon as we did, our friendship exponentially grew. To this day, people never understand that Aly and I were friends because from the outside, we presented very differently. On the inside, we had the exact same core. We had both experienced shit in our childhoods and therefore had zero tolerance for BS in our adult lives. Like all great friendships, Aly and I talked to one another about all the stuff we couldn’t talk to other people about. I hope you all know that feeling. The, you never have to pretend, never have to sugar coat, just get to be your honest self, type of friendship. 

Aly and Patrick got married in 2014 (hi Patrick, love you), had twin boys in 2016, and moved down to Baltimore a year later. I visited them every couple of months and FaceTimed with Aly constantly. Somehow we grew even closer with the distance. In December 2018, Aly was diagnosed with stage four cancer. She settled on a treatment plan that involved Western medicine, Eastern medicine, diet and nutrition, prayer blankets, and crystals. Looking back, I would have done the exact same thing. 

Food was always an important part of Aly’s life. She and her husband were accomplished restaurant professionals for decades, and simply, they loved great food. Aly regularly made her kids’ baby food from scratch, and as they grew up, she cooked meals for them I was envious of. Her treatment plan required her to change her diet drastically. The easiest (although incomplete) way to describe her new diet was close to keto; no sugar, no carbs, high good fats. 

In the first year of her diagnosis, Aly never once complained about her diet or talked about missing the foods she couldn’t eat. I would visit Aly even more regularly during chemo to help out when her energy was especially low. Low energy for Aly was high energy for anyone else, but all of us around her encouraged her to take a beat every now and then. One day, in the midst of running around, doing everything a healthy person would be doing but actually fighting stage four cancer and enduring chemo, Aly looked at me and said “Lisa. I want a donut. So badly. Can you make me a donut?”. If Aly had asked me to carve a life-sized elephant out of butter I would have said yes, so this seemed small in comparison. But then it set in… how the fuck was I going to make a donut without sugar or flour. 

Oh, glorious internet. Here I go, searching the webs to understand (1) every specific detail of her diet and (2) the options for making a donut given those restrictions. This was the first time in my life cooking felt unfamiliar to me. I started my research (research? to cook? still sounds ridiculous) and eventually found my way to food as medicine food blogs, cancer-fighting diets, and keto evangelists. Within 48 hours I learned everything one could know about monk fruit sugar, erythritol, and stevia, and the glycemic index of tigernut flour vs. almond flour vs. cassava flour (to this day, I cannot believe Aly enjoyed the taste of stevia – both her husband and I despise it). 

I sourced metal pans that were as free of plastics and chemicals as humanly possible and then got to cooking. And holy crap, it worked. She loved them. The funny thing is, I could never taste those donuts because they were made with almond flour which I am allergic to. It felt very strange to (1) cook with ingredients I knew nothing about and (2) serve someone food I never tasted. For the first time in a long time, food brought her joy, and I was responsible for that. I’m not crying, you’re crying. 

Aly’s health deteriorated rapidly in Jan 2021. I was with her in those last weeks, and when I knew the sugar-free and gluten-free donuts weren’t going to help, I started cooking for the rest of her family. Honestly, I didn’t know what else to do. At that moment, I knew food wasn’t going to bring anyone joy, but it was going to sustain us, and that’s the only thing we could hope for. 

So… I made them pot roast. 

I had never made pot roast before, and although I probably ate it at some point, I don’t associate it with some loving, warm, family memory. At the time, it just felt like the right thing to do. 

Now, Patrick, his boys and I have a new tradition. Whenever I visit, I make them that pot roast. The first time we ate it, it was utterly devoid of joy. Even if our taste buds registered “wow, this is delicious,” there was no way to experience that pleasure under those circumstances. Now, we can indulge. We can taste. We can enjoy one another’s company. We can celebrate an outrageously beautiful person, and the time and love we were lucky enough to share with her. 

Those donuts and this pot roast are so much more than recipes. I don’t feel like I have to make some declarative statement here like “food connects us blah blah blah.” There’s no way you’ve read this without feeling something, and everyone has a story like this. These food stories are rarely about the “perfect bite” or “the reservation I woke up at 6am for.” 

Food is feeling-ful. Since we all feel something about food, we can connect with one another through the recognition of those emotions. Maybe it’s because while we’re eating, we’re doing little else, or because smell is the strongest sense tied to memory. I am sure someone has figured out the science behind it, but for me… I’d rather tell you my stories of donuts and pot roast, and leave it at that.