Cut-Up Hot Dogs
written by Aeryn Santillan
2019 GLFCAM Kelly Livingston and Ron Samuels Fellow, Cycle 11
When I was growing up, my mom never liked cooking, so in time, neither did I. My grandma —She cooked. She often cooked for us as we sat in her kitchen, her small TV playing Univision or Telemundo. I watched her quickly make a meal, and never thought I’d have the skills to handle a knife the way she does. If not for her, I don’t know how many more cut-up hot dogs or McDonald’s I would’ve ended up eating.
I don’t blame my mom, how could I? She was working at least two jobs for as long as I could remember. As I got older, I understood how much easier it was to go to the corner and buy a couple tacos.
I moved out 2013. A soft move out into my grandpa’s building with a friend. I learned to cook more things. Simple things like eggs, chili, and chicken breast. I still didn’t like cooking but I knew I needed to do it. I couldn’t eat out all the time. I couldn’t keep eating frozen chicken wings and nuggets. I was approaching my mid twenties. I could feel my body changing. Cheese began to feel a little like poison and I was gaining weight.
I knew I had to change something so I decided to stop eating meat — an extreme change in my diet at the time. I took away my crutch of easy meals. It was hard in the beginning. Being a shitty cook with beginner skills and now, no recipes but eggs? Sandwiches? A self-imposed struggle.
Around this time, I met my partner. We were in the very beginning of our relationship. Fallon was vegetarian at the time. In a few years, she would transition to a vegan diet. I had failed at being vegetarian multiple times by this point. I didn’t know how to hang. I didn’t know how to eat a proper meal without meat.
When we started dating, I jokingly called her food “Peter Pan food” because I never felt full after eating it. One day we cooked together. We made vegan lasagna. It. Was. So. Good. I learned to cook some more things. I learned to cook vegetarian versions of things I used to like. I became vegetarian. I fell in love with Soyrizo and wanted to make the best vegetarian tacos.
We moved to Brooklyn. I was in grad school and I hated cooking again. Here I was, spoiled with so many vegetarian options. I didn’t go back to eating meat. I sustained myself with pizza and coffee the first year. We made new friends. We had Friendsgiving. We cooked and I complained but deep down, I knew I was having a little more fun cooking with my partner.
Eventually, I went off to my first round at the Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music, a Fellow in Cycle 4 with the Del Sol String Quartet. David Fetherolf from G. Schirmer and Sid Richardson taught me how to hold a knife properly and how to angle the veggie that I was trying to cut. I thanked them sincerely and I clumsily enjoyed this newfound skill. I came home after and was so excited to show my partner. I helped chop all veggies when we cooked. I admitted defeat to my lactose intolerance. I became vegan.
The next festival I went to was the Toronto Creative Music Lab, another community-based music fest with a cooking shift. I dreaded the cooking shift, but I knew I could at least cut some things and follow a recipe a bit. We had a seminar and we learned the importance of providing each other with food. Even just being able to offer others access to water. Free water, such an easy way to provide for others. Cooking for others took on new meaning.
Creating together to feed a community. I began to see the parallels between cooking and making music with others: Working with my hands, collaboration, listening, waiting, creating.
This last visit to Boonville as a veteran Fellow in Cycle 11 with mentors Tony Arnold and Manuel Barrueco, I had the pleasure of cooking with Chef Stephen and Adel Faizullina. Chef poked fun at me for putting too much chocolate dusting on the persimmons. It was on too thick and uneven. I was secretly excited for the chocolatey ones. We listened to music, we chatted. A chance to get to know each other better.
Chef had us smell the ingredients. We took in the smell of everything we were working with. We washed, chopped, peeled, and drank coffee. I packed veggies into parchment paper. We split the leftover smoked tofu and cleaned up the kitchen. Excited for the delicious smells coming from the stove and hanging out with Chef and Adel, I realized that I had come to love cooking.
After I came home, I was excited to share what I learned with my partner. Cooking at GLFCAM taught me how to be more present. To stop and smell and appreciate the food and time we share with others.
Aeryn Santillan (b. 1990, Chicago) is a Brooklyn based composer and guitarist. Aeryn’s music is heavily influenced by the DIY punk scene and actively aims to blur the lines between band/ensemble and song/composition. Learn more from Aeryn’s bio page.