How I Became a Foodie Superhero

by Chef Rossi

There they are: my sheep, two hundred of them, at the Horowitz-Chang wedding. They kick back their chairs and smile, too full to do anything but sigh. It had been a grand affair in the turn-of-the-century, factory-cum-Soho-style loft in newly chic Long Island City.

Countless celebrities had flocked to the venue: Bill Cosby threw a birthday party for his wife in that loft. Donald Trump filmed The Apprentice there. The Sopranos used it to shoot scenes for its final season. And once, while combing through the warehouse’s lower floors for the perfect antique tray, I bumped into David Cassidy.

As the owner and executive chef of The Raging Skillet, a cutting-edge catering company based in New York City, I rarely get calls to cater mainstream halls. But a nightclub in Gowanus, a factory in Queens, an old synagogue turned goth party space in the Lower East Side? That’s where we hold court.

When I was a kid, I was the queen of nothing. My Orthodox parents kept a tight rein, preferring that I never left home except to marry a nice Jewish doctor, lawyer, or maybe a pharmacist.

These days, I marry lots of nice Jewish guys, sometimes to each other. And the occasional man does win my hand.

“Will you marry me?” a groom once asked, peering into the kitchen just as I sent out dessert. “Hmmm. Didn’t you just do that, oh, about five hours ago?” I deadpanned, while arranging a tray of rugelach. “Yes! But that salmon! You have stolen my heart!”

Moments later, the mother of the bride emerged, holding a shopping bag filled with plastic containers. “If you don’t mind,” she says in her thick Brooklyn accent, decades of cigarette smoke rasping her vocals, “everything was so good, I figured it would be even better tomorrow!”

As I spooned in enough leftovers to feed a football team, I looked down at her microwaveable bowls and started to laugh. Ah, the microwave, the contraption that started it all.

 

The Humble Beginnings of a Foodie Superhero

I can’t say we had a happy family, but we ambled along through mild discontent, with occasional bursts of joy and nausea. Dad was a teacher. Mom was a former teacher and mathematician. My brother, Matt, was laying the foundation for his excruciatingly ordered life as an accountant and yes, a teacher. Sister Lily was perfecting her private language based on sounds chickens make. And I, not yet Rossi, was all potential, no pizzazz.

In 1977 the Big M arrived. It seemed innocent at first, this television-ish appliance that warmed soup in seconds, but within days of owning that first microwave, my mom was obsessed. Gone was the beef goulash that simmered longer than most of my relationships; the overcooked roast chicken seasoned with black pepper, paprika, and guilt; the cabbage and noodle casseroles with enough butter for six heart attacks.

The shelves in the garage, which once stocked enough canned goods to feed Pittsburgh, now held only tiny square containers of microwaveable soup and popcorn. The freezer became a smorgasbord of items, once recognizable only to astronauts, waiting to be passed through the Big M and turned into the feasts promised on their seductive labels. Seductive, yes, because surely that’s what happened to my mom. She was seduced by an electrical lover, and the payback was far more rewarding than a measly marriage with children. The payback was time.

I was there for her first epiphany, the moment she suspiciously added water to a dry mix, plopped it in the microwave, pressed “2-0-0,” and out came a bowl of tomato soup. “It’s like magic!” she squealed. “Eat it! Eat it! Tell me if it’s good!” “It’s, umm, okay,” I said, scrounging for a handful of saltines to soak up the bland mush.“It only took two minutes!” she shrieked in delight. “Twoooooooominutessssss!”

She was reborn. No more slaving over vats of chicken soup. No more long hours traveling to the farthest kosher butcher for the cheapest veal. This thing, this tiny box, was her salvation. But it also was the end of food as we knew it.

There had always been an intangible price tag on my mother’s cooking. We were supposed to do something more than say thank you; we were supposed to gorge ourselves as though this were our last meal on Earth. Getting fat was the least we could do. I handled this task nicely, except I preferred to think of myself as big boned. “Look at my wrists! I’m big boned!” I’d announced to the bully at school who called me “fatty.” Mom was big boned, too.

At five feet tall, weighing in at 295 pounds, she had bones that could fill out a muumuu like nobody’s business. When the Big M arrived, we figured that if Mom didn’t have to spend so much time simmering stews into oblivion, we wouldn’t have to be quite so grateful. We might even be able to get away without having thirds . . .

What we should have done was smash the microwave with the nearest sledgehammer or cooled-off meatloaf. That box turned lima beans into linoleum and pizza into paste. The Big “M” was for murder; the victim, supper. But the nuker was something else that it took me years to recognize. It was my call to arms.

At the grand age of thirteen and a half, I recognized it was up to me—the girl in the Sex Pistols T-shirt with Janis Joplin hair, who couldn’t even make instant coffee—to save my family. I answered the call with a secret missile aimed right for the heart, a little ditty I pull out to this day when the going gets tough. I call it mozzarella.

There they were, sitting in the living room, dull eyes fixed on Happy Days reruns, my heartsick family with rumbling stomachs and bored souls. They were so lost, they didn’t even know what they were missing.

Just as Mom called us to the table to dine from microwave-safe bowls of a stew-like concoction that might have been noodles, I pounced. Darting behind her, I pulled out hot-from-the-oven (the oven!) pizza bagels studded with mushrooms and—gasp—oregano.

A hush fell over the room. Reluctantly, my brother sniffed at the round, gooey thing, broke off a small piece, and placed it on his tongue. His eyes grew wide with excitement, and he announced, “This doesn’t taste yucky!”

My dad tried one with a begrudging grunt. (Dad grunted his way through about ten years of my childhood, so I’d come to recognize this particular grunt as the “food good” grunt, not the “be quiet or I’ll crack you one” grunt.)

My sister grabbed one and started chewing away as she hummed along to one of the endless Partridge Family songs playing in her head. My mom seemed to frown and smile at once.“There’s no nutrition in that,” she screeched, but plopped a pizza bagel on her plate all the same.

My life was forever changed. My father began to ask me strange things like, “Do you mind if I change the channel?” More notably, he used human words, not grunts! My sister stopped sneaking into my bedroom to steal clean underwear. My brother began to call me by my name instead of . . . well, never mind.

From the moment I pulled that first batch of pizza bagels from the oven, I knew that food was magical. Never mind drugs, this was the stuff—a mind-altering mishmash of stimuli that I could meld into every imaginable shape and flavor. I could become a foodie superhero!

For years, my mom’s Hungarian recipes, handed down since the Ice Age, were the only things cooked in our home, but I wanted what my friends’ moms were making for dinner—pizza, mac and cheese, something a little more “now.”

Left to my own artistic wanderings, I came up with mad-scientist dishes like rice pilaf mixed with spaghetti. I gave my creations brash names like “rice-a-getti” or “meatloaf-aise.”

Nobody seemed to mind when I cut up Empire Kosher fried chicken and mixed it with macaroni, margarine, and peas. Try it, but use butter if you’re not kosher. Decades later, I have to say this is still pretty tasty, though today I skip the broken-corn-chip topping. That was overkill.

After I turned fourteen and started high school, anything left of my good-girl pretense dissipated in a cloud of Marlboro Lights, marijuana, cheap wine, and chocolate. I became the hostess of numerous after-school soirees. They were simple affairs. I waited for Mom to leave the house, then my derelict friends would come over and sit on the front porch listening to Led Zeppelin while I concocted a variety of dishes, with one ingredient in common: Snickers bars. It was haute cuisine for teens.

The sight of the sloppy, drooling faces of my somewhat-stoned friends devouring Snickers-and-potato-chip casserole to “Stairway to Heaven” was as good as it gets.

“Hey man! Rossi is, like, out-of-sight cool, man! She’s, like, the best, man!” came the chorus of the gang of high school students who spent more time in detention than they did in class. My status rocketed from weird, outsider chick to ruler of the planet.

In our family, each kid had jobs. Mine were taking out the garbage and, due to a lifelong habit of looking down when I walked, acting as doo-doo pointer. Neither made me feel truly needed. Then, suddenly, that elusive sensation of being the only one who could provide what everyone wanted was in my grasp, wedged between the kitchen mitts and the platter of cheese ravioli. It was a lesson I would never forget: Power is delicious. And so are pizza bagels.

 

Rossi’s Teen-Age Pizza Bagels

Serves up to 12 people

 

Ingredients:

12 bagels

1 coffee cup of your favorite tomato sauce (When I was a kid, I used Ragu.)

1 bag (about a pound) grated mozzarella

Dried oregano

Optional: 1 (8 oz.) can mushrooms

Cut one bagel in half for each family member or stoned friend present.

Spread your favorite tomato sauce on top of each half.

I always went for jarred marinara, but pizza sauce or whatever you have will do.

Top with enough grated mozzarella to cover the sauce.

I sprinkled dried oregano on top ’cause I was a fancy babe. I sometimes topped them with sliced canned mushrooms. This was years before I knew mushrooms came any other way.

Lay them in a baking pan and put in the oven at anywhere from 350 to 400 degrees—350 if, like me, you prefer soft and cheesy pizza. If you’re the crustier type, crank the oven up to 400.

Cook till the cheese is melted and it’s as crusty as you like it. About 8–10 minutes should do it.

When I started to cook professionally, I served these as kiddy delights at a bar mitzvah or three. I tried to jazz things up with bell peppers and onions and sautéed shiitake mushrooms on top, but the kids strongly preferred the original teen Rossi recipe. What can I say? Some things are meant to be left simple.

Excerpt from Chef Rossi New Book: The Raging Skillet

Meet Foodie Superhero Chef Rossi

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About the Author

Rossi is the owner and executive chef of The Raging Skillet, described as a “rebel anti-caterer” by the New York Times. Rossi has written for many publications, and is the host of a long-running radio show in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Writer, radio-personality, chef and caterer, this is a woman who loves to stir it up! Discover more at: http://www.theragingskillet.com/