9 x 12: The Prologue

9 pm, December 4th, 2017

“Mum, we’re coming home early.” My son Alexandre called me sounding anxious.
“Why?” I asked.
“There’s a fire in Ventura. Rehearsal has stopped. Some of the choir members may have to evacuate. We’re in the car. We can see the flames!” He hung up.

During the tense forty minutes it took him to get home, I got online and searched local fires. Alerts popped up for the newly named Thomas Fire. Those four letters F.I.R.E. send chills down the spine of anyone who lives here. Over the previous decade we had, unfortunately, become well versed in evacuation protocols. Nothing, however, prepared us for what followed over the next five weeks.

Santa Barbara, a beautiful, usually sun-drenched coastal city, Mediterranean in style, known for its white stucco, red tiled roof buildings, sits nestled between the Pacific Ocean and the steeply rising, chaparral covered Santa Ynez mountains. It is aptly known as the American Riviera and the place I’ve called home for the past 25 years. After more than a decade working in the urban jungle that is Los Angeles, moving to this community was literally a breath of fresh air, except during fire season.

The word ‘season’ is now a misnomer as most fire crews will tell you. Historically it ran from May through October, however, after years of drought the local mountains in December 2017 were tinder dry. I should probably mention at this point that I have a particular fear of hearing about, or worse still smelling fire in the air. As a child growing up in London, we lost much of our family home to a house fire. The memory of walking and sifting through its charred remains and smelling the acrid odor of the melted-blackened debris of our lives is fixed like an ink stain on my mind.

Having also lived through more than a dozen major fires in Santa Barbara County in the previous decade, we knew the drill. Managing one’s reactions to fires is about risk assessment, being prepared and getting accurate information. ‘Thomas’, we heard, was growing at an alarming rate, consuming thousands of acres in hours. Then, fueled by strong winds and an endless supply of bone-dry countryside it charged up the coast towards Santa Barbara, encircling all of Ojai in the process. In a matter of days, it became the largest fire in California’s history. The Perfect Firestorm: The Thomas Fire Story Documentary on Vimeo

The beautiful scenery that normally surrounds us morphed into a gauzy ghostly landscape, everything coated in a layer of eerie toxic snowy ash, and the sky the color of Mars. We scrambled to find N95s (who knew then how important these were to become just 24 months later) just to go outside. Our phones blared repeatedly with emergency alerts, each shrill reminder urging us to verify the ever-growing evacuation zones. Friends moved in with friends, everyone pitching in to help house those displaced. Family and friends gathered on a nightly basis to make plans, packing up essential documents, on standby to make our escape in case the fire came too close. We cooked and ate together, never venturing far from home base. As the days and fire wore on, the town shut down, everyone retreated indoors. For those of us in the food and service industry we watched with growing trepidation as December sales disintegrated.  Events across the county were cancelled. Orders upon orders cancelled. In the face of it saving our cashflow seemed unimportant when faced with losing one’s home, yet for many businesses, mine included, December sales were vital as they carried us through the usually lean first quarter of the following year.

The fire ebbed as the year ended. The valiant efforts of the brave firefighters paid dividends and we collectively breathed a little easier thinking that the worst was behind us. I took stock of the financial impact ‘Thomas’ made on my business.

January 3rd, 2018

There is a one-word notation in my diary. It’s not very polite and written after I reviewed the end of year sales figures. They made for grim reading. I was down over 40% for December. Local sales had evaporated, online sales were down too. With some serious belt tightening I’d make it through the next three months. I reworked my upcoming newsletter, to be released on January 10th, announcing a new cooking class program, events and a book tour.

My new book Les Légumes: Vegetable Recipes from the Market Table (pascaleskitchen.com) had (frustratingly as it turns out) just been released in time for the holiday season. Sadly, we had to cancel some of the launch events, but on the positive side the book tour, filled with local demos, tastings, and signings from February to April was ready to go. I felt cautiously optimistic that my company would weather the storm, and that the book’s debut could be salvaged. No one however planned for the apocalypse.

January 8th, 2018

The terrain along much of our coastline was by now a charred, blackened lunar landscape, still smoldering in places when the weather service announced the first of the big winter storms. They issued dire warnings about its magnitude. Everyone held their collective breaths and hoped we would all survive the deluge. Our jangled nerves started rattling again as incessant safety alerts bleated on our phones, and quite frankly everyone was tired: tired of repeated evacuations, tired of coughs, masks, of the ash that crept into every single nook and cranny, and the stress of the unknown. I went to sleep that night keeping my fingers and toes crossed for all my friends who lived beneath the burn areas. Some had re-evacuated, some had not.

3 am, January 9th, 2018

I woke up suddenly to the deafening noise of rain pounding on the roof. We all hoped for a gentle soaking, instead came a torrent of water. No sooner had I got up to check that water was not seeping into the house, when the emergency alerts blared on our phone announcing flash flood warnings, and to take protective action. What does that actually mean in the face of water in unimaginable proportions? Taking protective action would be like trying to bail out a supertanker with a teacup. I made sure the meager measures we had put in place were holding. Soaked to the skin in seconds, I went back upstairs, sending up a collective prayer to the universe that everyone was safe.

At daybreak the devastating and heartrending truth emerged. A few miles from our home, gargantuan walls of fast flowing mud had obliterated more than 100 homes and took 23 lives. The entire community was in shock. Helicopters repeatedly plucked trapped people out of the debris flows, the whump whump staccato of their blades punctuating the air like a deathly drumbeat. We scrambled to find news of friends. Full Documentary: The Night It Rained Boulders - YouTube

That first night as my family gathered in our thankfully dry kitchen, displaced friends arrived with their harrowing tales of lives and homes lost, escaping only with the clothes on their backs. We did what many people did that night, we cooked for them. Comfort food, lashings of it. Roast chickens, stews, tagines, gratins, hearty soups and chunks of freshly baked bread. Food to warm you through, rib sticking and soothing. We made crumbles, banana bread and cups of tea. Over the next few weeks this became our evening ritual. I cooked more food, more friends arrived, a bottle (or two) of wine was opened, we would nibble on some cheese, then sit down, eat, review the day, and make plans for the next.

As we communed together, we found our collective strength. As I wrote in Time To Gather Around The Table (pascaleskitchen.com) I was profoundly grateful for the sense of community that emerged during these apocalyptic weeks as I realized this catastrophe triggered a visceral reaction in me. Sudden memories popped up at the most unexpected times, reminding me of past natural and not-so-natural disasters that I had lived through, all of them, oddly, occurring in the middle of the night. From fires to earthquakes to intruders, these unsettling events prompted a desire to be with friends and family, to see and physically hold them, and to draw solace from our common experience. I was so grateful that we, as a family, still had a roof over our heads, but starkly aware that our community had been fragmented and our local economy had taken a thrashing.

I never sent the planned newsletter, and cancelled classes first for January, then all of February and into late March. The book tour delayed. As the extent of the damage emerged and the gargantuan task of clearing the debris began, it was obvious that the last thing on anyone’s mind, at least locally, was a cooking class or attending a cookbook signing. More than once I seriously questioned my choice of career thinking that I should have opted for something less prone to the sensitivities of a sudden economic downtown. My long-ago accountancy professor’s words echoed in my mind, “always choose a profession where someone depends on you.” I have a background in commercial property development, should I have stuck to that?  

April 1st, 2018

April Fool’s Day. I wasn’t laughing. Pascale’s Kitchen was down more than NINETY percent for the first quarter. I revised the figures for the rest of the year and those projections were dire. Realistically I had to reduce business and living expenses by nearly fifty percent to just tread water and keep the proverbial doors open. After four months of no classes and abysmal sales my cashflow reserves were effectively exhausted. Evidently drastic decisions had to be made. Despite everyone on local social media championing ‘buy local, shop local, stay local’ the grim reality meant some businesses did not survive. I watched friends downsize and relocate or shutter their shops. I knew I was dragging my feet. No wallowing in self-pity I thought, this was time to act, though I dreaded the upheaval. I couldn’t help feeling that somehow, I had let not just myself but my family down. I realized, as more than one friend pointed out, that I was not responsible for the aftermath of Thomas but felt that I should have done more to be prepared in case of an emergency. How could one forecast this though?

My lovely mum, Monique Fay – Healing Arts (moniquefayhealingarts.com) who also lived and worked in Santa Barbara lost more than half her clientele in the aftermath of Thomas. She’s always had the enviable ability to ‘go with the flow’, and once her mind was made up, she too decided to move.  In a matter of weeks, she was decamping out of state, business included. I felt as though the storm that had blown through our town was scattering us thousands of miles apart in the contrails of its winds. Where once the hub of our family pivoted around Santa Barbara, suddenly I felt a little unmoored as my daughter announced that she was leaving as well.  Personally, I NEED to feel anchored, my feet firmly planted in the ground, secure in my surroundings. Mum, trusting her instincts, told me to ‘have faith and everything will be ok!’. 

Realizing I had to move home and business, I did what both my parents admonished me to do, ‘pull your socks up and get on with it.’ Is it me or is it a little galling when at five decades plus in age, one is still being admonished by one’s parents?! In retrospect, they were right of course.

As it happened the house mum was moving out of was the perfect base for me to relocate to. Perfect that is, with one significant exception, the new kitchen’s footprint, 9 x 12, was one third of the size of the one I was leaving.  As a cookbook author, food writer/stylist/photographer, cooking school and online culinary store owner, I have a LOT of cooking equipment (some family members who shall remain nameless would say too much), to say nothing of the books..… A flurry of questions whirled around my mind; How the hell would it fit? How could I host events and classes in 100 square feet? How would we pack up two houses, two businesses and orchestrate three moves in eight weeks? Recognizing that we would also loose the location for the Pascale's Kitchen - YouTube channel we shot as many videos as we could in the final weeks before we decamped. Could we still maintain the channel? This was not the most pressing question, more importantly, what would happen to my business? Would we be able to stay in town?

We had one last big feast in the old house, part send off for Mum and my daughter, part acknowledgement of the end of an era. Unsettled as I prepared the meal, I realized that we didn’t know when we would all be around the same table again. Mum’s words in her lovely lilting French accent echoed in my mind, ‘have faith and everything will be ok!’.  I took a deep breath and kept chopping. We ate slow roasted citrus salmon, early summer tomatoes with burrata, mixed greens salads with herbs and a mustardy vinaigrette. The menu was lively and fresh, full of the promise of a new season. I repeated the mantra ‘everything will be ok’ as I made one of their favorite desserts, an apricot clafoutis. We laughed, talked stories, clinked rosé filled glasses as toasts were made to the future and promised visits to their new homes. Mum flew off the next day. A lump sat heavily in my throat. 

Reality set in. A blizzard of packing ensued. Our lovely dog Sasha, veteran of two previous moves hid in the garden to avoid the screech-slap sound of the packing tape that made her shake.  We culled books, furniture, plants, garden tools, books, sports equipment, bikes, toys, clothes, and yet more books. My goal was to move with a clean slate, no more accumulated detritus of life that we had schlepped from house to house. Why do we do that by the way? There are still two boxes with ancient musings that I can’t quite seem to give up. No one but me will ever look at them, nor care what I thought about as an angst-ridden teen in London, will they? Will my kids ever want to look at my school reports? Despite what I thought was a serious purge, the mountain of boxes to be moved piled up in alarming numbers.

Moving day loomed. My daughter drove off to her new adventures. Another lump sat in my throat as her car disappeared at the end of the road. My son and I looked at each other, the only two left behind. A new adventure began as the moving van arrived early the next morning. Would this work? More pressing at that particular moment would it all fit?

THE PLAYLIST: 9 x 12 - Prologue - YouTube

Idina Menzel - Bridge Over Troubled Water
Bill Withers - Lean on Me
Dave Brubeck - Take Five
Ben E. King - Stand by Me
Eric Clapton - Change the World
The Beatles - Here Comes the Sun
Cher and Christina Aguilera - You Haven't Seen the Last of Me
Elton John - I'm Still Standing

THE MENU

ARUGULA, ASPARAGUS AND BASIL SALAD

This salad has raw asparagus in it, that’s not a type-o. They’re delicious, crunchy, earthy and herbaceous as the same time. If you don’t fancy completely raw stalks, just pop them into a shallow pan of boiling water for just a couple of minutes to barely cook them. Either way you will have a lovely refreshing salad to serve either as a first course, or alongside the roast chicken that follows.

Serves 4 people

For the salad:
4 ounces (113 grams) baby arugula
2-3 radishes — very thinly sliced
2 medium sized carrots — peeled, then very thinly sliced
2/3 cup (15 grams) packed basil leaves
¼ cup (36 grams) toasted almonds
8 ounces (227 grams) raw asparagus stalks — woody ends trimmed away
2 ounces (65 grams) sliced goat cheese

For the vinaigrette:
1 tablespoon mustard
¼ cup (60 ml) olive oil
1 tablespoon white wine vinegar or white balsamic vinegar
Pinch of salt
4-5 grinds black pepper

1.    Scatter the arugula, radishes, carrots, basil leaves and almonds over a medium to large serving platter or arrange them in a shallow bowl. Intersperse the asparagus stalks and sliced goat cheese into the assorted greens. 

2.    Combine the vinaigrette ingredients in a small bowl and whisk together to form a thick emulsion. When ready to serve drizzle over the salad and toss to combine.

ROAST CHICKEN ON A BED OF POTATOES

One of my earliest memories is of big Sunday lunches at home in London where I grew up. Mum would make roast chickens, potatoes of some kind, big bowls of salads and some fruity dessert. We usually went for huge, long walks across the heath in the morning, often in bitingly cold wind and drizzle, happy in the knowledge that we’d tuck into a warming, comforting, soothing meal once we made it back home. These were cozy, languorous afternoons, the meal lasting hours, peppered with laughter and good conversations, friends taking occasional naps on the ancient chesterfield as they fell into post lunch stupor. They’d be revived with cups of piping hot tea and other helping of dessert. This was comfort in all its guises. This is the meal we always make when we need the comfort of home.

Serves 4 people generously

Olive oil
1 large yellow onion – peeled and finely sliced
1 pound (450 grams) small yellow or red potatoes, or fingerling potatoes
8 ounces (225 grams) carrots — peeled and thinly sliced
1 chicken (3.5-4 pounds/1.5-1.8 kilos) organic if possible
1 tablespoon Herbes de Provence
Coarse sea salt
Black pepper

1. Preheat the oven to 400°F (205°C).

2. Pour a little olive oil into a roasting pan that is large enough to hold the chicken and vegetables without crowding them too much. Add the sliced onions, potatoes and carrots, and shake the pan backwards and forwards a few times to lightly coat the vegetables.

3. Nestle the chicken on top of the onions. Drizzle a little olive oil over the chicken. Sprinkle the Herbes de Provence over the chicken and the vegetables. Scatter a pinch of salt over the chicken and add 5-6 grinds of pepper.

4. Roast in the middle of the oven for 15 minutes and then lower the temperature to 375°F (190°C) and roast for a further 1hr 15 minutes. When the chicken is cooked, let it rest for 5-10 minutes before carving, loosely covered with foil.

WARM HARM HARICOTS VERTS SALAD

Serves 4 people

2 teaspoons Dijon mustard
3 tablespoons olive oil
1 tablespoon white wine vinegar or tarragon vinegar
1 pound (453 grams) haricots verts (assorted varieties if you can find them) — ends trimmed
¼ teaspoon coarse sea salt or flaked salt
6 grinds black pepper
2 tablespoons finely chopped chives
1 tablespoon toasted sliced almonds

1. Combine the mustard, olive oil and vinegar in a salad bowl and whisk together to create an emulsion.

2. Place the haricots verts in a steamer and cook for 5-7 minutes. The haricots verts should still be bright green and yellow and al dente. As soon as they are cooked, remove them from the steamer and add to the salad bowl.

3. Scatter the salt, pepper, chives, and almonds over the top and toss well to combine.

APRIUM CLAFOUTIS Click here for the Clafoutis video

Eating clafoutis is like being bundled up in a warm duvet. It’s cozy and comforting. Traditionally made with cherries, this version uses apriums (an apricot-plum hybrid fruit) that have the beautiful golden color of apricots and the juiciness of plums. If you can’t find them, try a mix of any stone fruit, and if it’s not stone fruit season, pear clafoutis is equally delicious. Just use the same weight of fruit. If there’s any leftover it is excellent for breakfast too!

Serves 6-8 people

2 pounds (910 grams) assorted apriums (or apricots) — pitted and chopped
Zest of 2 lemons
3 cups (710 ml) milk
8 ounces sugar (1 cup/454 grams)
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract or vanilla paste
3 ounces (2/3 cup/85 grams) unbleached all-purpose flour
5 large eggs

1. Preheat oven to 400°F (205°C).

2. Place the fruit in a large shallow 12-inch (30 cm) round or oval baking dish. Add the lemon zest and stir to combine.

3. In a medium sized saucepan heat the milk with the sugar and the vanilla. Stir until the sugar has completely dissolved. Remove from the heat.

4. Place the flour in a medium-sized bowl and whisk in one egg at a time. Stir vigorously until you have a completely smooth batter, then slowly whisk in the milk mixture. The batter should be thin and free of any lumps. Pour the batter over the fruit.

5. Place in the center of the oven and bake for 40-45 minutes. The clafoutis is done when you shake the pan a little, the surface of the clafoutis will just giggle. The top should appear golden. It will continue to cook a little bit more once out of the oven. Serve at room temperature.

9 X12 The Prologue Menu

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