Laura wanted to let her readers know that last night she cooked. She made French Onion Soup using a recipe from, who else, The Barefoot Contessa. And it was really good. Laura felt the need to tell people that she can cook when she puts her mind to it, and that she is actually a good cook when she does cook.

Laura knows this probably will sound strange, but she actually plans on trying to cook more. Really. She’s said this before — along with things like she’s going to lose weight, or she’s going to exercise every single day no matter what — and has never kept her promise, but this time she’s serious. Seriously. She wants to do better. She wants to aspire to some small degree of homemaker-ness. She wants her son to come home and smell food cooking that isn’t only being cooked by his father. She knows that might sound rather un-PC, but Laura believes that homemaking transcends gender. In other words, it doesn’t matter whether you’re the husband or wife, mother or father, mother and mother, or father and father, you should try to make your house a home.

In fact, Laura’s feeling pretty conflicted about the whole topic. Which is why she felt the need to “confess” her cooking. She doesn’t want people to think she’s lying about her fear of cooking since it was pretty weird the way the minute she posted her “Fear of Cooking” post she cooked dinner. Maybe that’s why she cooked — she was filled with shame and guilt about her lack of cooking and felt the need to “cook” her way out of the black hole of self-condemnation she’d fallen in to.

Laura didn’t cook tonight — another apologetic confession — there was no school today because of the snow so both Benji and Brendan were home and Laura couldn’t exactly drive around in the snow and slush and sleet and rain — but she hopes to cook tomorrow. The minute she figures out what she’s going to make rest assured that she’ll confess to it.

*

Laura often refers to herself as a Recovering Publicist, given the fact that her early training as a highly-neurotic trained-anticipator-of-all-bad-things-that- could-possibly-happen-to-make-anyone-late-for-anything (i.e., traffic, weather) and creator-of-endless-suggested-back-up-plans (i.e., leaving an hour earlier; leaving 8 hours earlier; leaving the day before; why not just move there so we’ll already live there when we have to be there, etc.) has been very hard to shake.

OK, let’s be frank. Laura was so traumatized by her job and her subsequent cold-turkey quitting of it that in the process of recovery she had “blocked out” many disturbing work-related memories (which, at the time, accounted for most of her frontal lobe’s memory bank).
And so it was when she recently started to undergo deep psychiatric brantalysis (branting four to five times weekly in a stream-of-consciousness way) that some of those “bad memories” were “recovered.” Additional memory-jogging was achieved in other ways — in this particular case by Laura coming upon some (copyright infringementable) photos of Ina Garten at a recent book signing.

Laura posts these photos to see if any of her readers can figure out exactly what she finds so amazing about the moments captured in these snapshots. But actually Laura doesn’t want to wait to post her question, then have a few people read it — all of whom, definitely would, even if they knew the answer, be too shy to post a comment. So Laura’s going to make that a rhetorical question to save herself and everyone else a whole lot of waiting and expectation and inevitable disappointment — in other words, The Weight of Oppressive Expectation (WOE) — and go straight to why she lit upon these photos of Ina Garten’s booksignings as being so fucking unbelievable remarkable:

?

Because Ina Garten and her book-buying fans seem to be relaxed and enjoying themselves and having a lovely lovely time and the author is not screaming at her publicist for that publicist to shut up or to move it or to get with it!

Laura’s particularly impressed by the top photo where clearly someone - a bookstore employee probably (she’s wearing some sort of pin) — is standing next to the signing table and she is not sweating and shaking and looking incredibly stressed out and miserable and harried and tormented. In fact, that (probable) bookstore employee looks incredibly relaxed, as if a really nice person(Ina Garten) has offered to do the bookstore and a few hundred people a big favor (sign their books) in return for the big favor this bookstore and these few hundred people have done for her: buy her book(s)!

Laura assumes that everyone assumes that that’s how all booksignings are — fun — and certainly Laura hopes that her own personal booksignings are like that — but what people perhaps don’t realize is that most big booksignings like those for the Barefoot Contessa where hundreds and hundreds of devoted fans wait in a line that snakes out the door of the store and down the street are incredibly tense and stressful and full of anxiety. Laura writes in her latest book (caution: shameless self-promotion coming!) Piece of Work about how the recently back-to-work Julia Einstein feels like she’s going to die everytime she has to be with the angry bitter former-star-of-stage-and-screen has-been Mary Ford at one of her celebrity fragrance in-store events because Mary is always screaming at her to either move faster or move slower, talk louder or talk softer, and to move the perfume boxes she’s trying to sign for each customer/fan at some mysteriously perfect pace which will finally make Mary shut the fuck up for a minute or two.

Now, Laura doesn’t want to imply that all the famous-author booksignings she supervised as a publicist were as bad as the one described above and (oops! cheesy cliche here!) that was woven into the fabric of her novel, though the one described above is sort of how a lot of the ones Laura supervised went. Especially the ones with the author on whom (faction alert!) she based her Mary Ford character on.

In her next post Laura The Former Publicist will tell a funny story about spending a week with Julia Child in Washington DC helping Julia Child promote one of her cookbooks. The story itself isn’t what’s so “funny” — it’s what happened after that week she spent with Julia Child…

*

Though she’s never branted about this, Laura tends to get crushes on people. It’s a long story which Laura The Reluctant Branter will someday tell, but for now she’s going to cut to the chase and get right to the heart (if you’ll pardon the pun) of the issue:

Laura has a new crush.

After spending almost two months recuperating from surgery in bed flipping channels, she ended up, oddly enough, tiring of her usual favorites — true-crime-forensic-into-the-mind-of-a serial-killer-documentaries leavened-by-grotesque-and-annoying [because of Vincent D’Onofrio] “Law and Order: Criminal Intent”-reruns — and instead watching the Food Network. It took only a day or two (let’s be frank — it actually only took a few minutes) for Laura to get deeply bothered by most of the Celebrity Chef Line-Up — Emeril (annoying); Rachel Ray (too chatty and gabby = annoying), Nigella Lawson (too bosomy), Giada De Laurentis (too thin); Michael Chiarello (too lounge-lizardy); Paula Deen (frightening), and the worst of all, Sandra Lee’s “Semi-Homemade Cooking” (extremely frightening). But just as she was about to give up on the TV Food Network and grab the remote she fell in love:

With Ina Garten. Otherwise known as The Barefoot Contessa.

The minute Laura first happened upon the Barefoot Contessa show, she was hooked. She loved everything about Ina Garten and her show (which has been on for a long time and which clearly shows Laura to be a little slow on the uptake and quite the opposite of a trend-setter). She loves how good and simple Ina’s food is and how Laura thinks that even she, if she wants to, could make it herself. She loves Ina’s enormous shingled house in East Hampton. She loves Ina’s terrific sense of humor. She loves her plumpness and her frequent acknowledgement of using too much butter (“Why does eveything always start with a half a pound of butter? I’m getting a bad reputation…”) but how she uses it anyway (“I know it’s a lot of butter but it’s a lot of pecan squares”). She loves her shiny hair and her black coat and green scarf she wears to go shopping in town. She loves her key phrases — “How easy is that?” and “How fabulous is that?” and can’t get enough of her perfect mixture of sophistication and self-deprecation. And she loves that it makes her slightly uncomfortable and grossed out to see how adoring she is of her husband Jeffrey.

[Jeffrey Garten promotional/press photo.]