OUT OF THE FRYING PAN

Clark mixes kitchen gossip with single-parent guilt and tops it with a smattering of recipes.

“Cooking was the only thing that gave me that elusive feeling of accomplishment,” she discovered after leaving a stressful office job to start her own, just-as-stressful marketing firm. So Clark went to cooking school and initially dreamed of raising fatted geese on a Virginia farm. She quickly changed her plans after jettisoning an alcoholic husband. As the sole provider for two young daughters, Clark didn’t have the luxury of starting off as a line cook and working her way up. Instead, she took a position at a Charlottesville winery at $5 an hour, with a 160-mile commute. She soon left for the stylish Morrison-Clark Inn in Washington, D.C., rising to sous-chef after two years. From there she took a job as chef at Northern Virginia’s Evening Star Café. The restaurant’s new owners had big ideas but little cash; unable to reach a compromise with them, she handed in her notice and took a gig at Breadline, a fast-paced bakery and lunch spot in downtown D.C. This proved to be another poor fit, as did two subsequent gigs at the Broad Street Grill and Mrs. Simpson’s, “a dusty old place named for the Duchess of Windsor.” Clark ultimately quit all three kitchens, though these were not easy decisions when her personal life was also in crisis: Her elder daughter was failing elementary school, and her younger was dangerously thin, refusing to eat. Clark opened her own Colorado Kitchen in 2001, and things have been better.

Not your typical chef’s memoir, for sure, but more a litany of problems than a satisfying appraisal of either a life or a profession.