Fires destroyed their kitchens. ‘But you can’t take away the spirit of the cook’
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Molly Baz wanted to stop feeling sorry for herself. A couple of weeks after the Eaton fire burned down her house, the cookbook author, recipe developer and “Hit the Kitch” video host said she “had to do something that didn’t involve my own misery but instead focused on helping other people.”
The idea to create a grocery pop-up for people who lost everything in the Palisades and Eaton fires, called Stock That Pantry, came to her after she temporarily moved to her friend’s parents’ home in Marina del Rey.
“I took a look around the kitchen and realized I had none of my things,” Baz said in a phone interview. “I’ve been building my pantry for my whole career as a cook. ... When you look behind someone’s cabinets and in their drawers, you get a real sense of who they are as a cook and an eater.
“I was, ‘Where are all my things? Where are all the levers that I used to pull to make things taste like me?’ It was super disorienting to have to think about building that all up from scratch, and it was just one of the many losses that really hurt the most for me. It was my pantry. I feel intrinsically tied to it.”
Restocking their pantries with hope
Baz said she figured that others were struggling with the same challenge, not to mention the financial hurdle that comes with the cost of groceries. Several weeks after the fires that began Jan. 7 and destroyed more than 16,000 homes and businesses, some are finding semipermanent places to live and rebuilding parts of their day-to-day lives.
“In the first few weeks, people were like, ‘I need clothes, I need toiletries,’” Baz said. “Now it’s, ‘I need everything else.’ For me, food and cooking is such an important part of the joy of my life. It felt like a great place for me to sort of leverage my power to get pantries stocked across the city.”
So Baz mobilized to launch Stock That Pantry on Feb. 1 at an Echo Park strip mall, where nearly 800 people “shopped” in shifts at the free grocery store offering a selection of more than 30,000 products.
Shami and André Freeman — who, like Baz, lost their home in the Eaton fire — perused the shelves filled with Rancho Gordo beans, Rustichella d’Abruzzo spaghetti, Ciao Pappy marinara, Fly by Jing chili crisp, Moiré chocolate, Seed + Mill tahini and other items. Baz said she reached out to any brands she had ever worked with, emailed or accepted PR packages from, and asked them to donate goods.
André Freeman prepares chicken for banh mi sandwiches in his kitchen in Altadena before the Eaton fire destroyed his home. André Freeman’s organized spice cabinet in his Altadena kitchen before the Eaton fire burned his home. (André and Shami Freeman)
“There was a resounding yes from 99% of them,” no sponsorship or influencer strings attached, Baz said.
I asked the Freemans what they missed most about their kitchen.
Shami turned to André and said, “Do you have pictures of the cabinets with everything you organized and labeled?
“I miss his alphabetized organic spices where I could just go in and see ‘F’ for fennel. It’s so amazing what he had done.”
André said the last dish he made before the couple evacuated was asparagus and butter bean soup with leeks and potatoes.
“We had a couple bowls, but we didn’t get to enjoy all of it. When we get a new place more established with a kitchen, that’ll be the first dish we make.
“You know, there was a special Japanese cutting board that I had just bought and never even had a chance to use,” he added. “I never made a single cut on it.”
The Freemans recently discovered that their donabe — a Japanese clay pot used for cooking rice, soups and stews — and a few other ceramics had survived the fire.
Starting from nothing
Others are helping those affected by the fires start piecing together their kitchens. Earlier this week cookbook authors Natasha Feldman Bauch and Jess Damuck packed up 75 cardboard moving boxes, filling each with nearly $1,000 of new kitchenware and staples.
In the wake of the fires, Feldman Bauch and Damuck had the same idea to find brand-new kitchen equipment for people who lost their homes. They teamed up to reach out to retailers and manufacturers for donations for L.A. Kitchen Kits.
When a sign-up list for L.A. Kitchen Kits was announced via social media, all were claimed within minutes. The waitlist reached nearly 300 in an hour.
“The need and demand is overwhelming,” Damuck said. “I can’t imagine starting from nothing. The kitchen is a place where cooking brings a little comfort, makes things feel a little bit normal in times of chaos.”
On Wednesday, she and Feldman Bauch set up an ad hoc one-day distribution center in a back room of textiles maker Block Shop in Atwater Village. Those who had signed up for kitchen kits arrived throughout the afternoon to pick up boxes that each included an Our Place pan, Misen and Prep & Rally knives, Fable coffee mugs, Nordicware baking sheets, Holcomb Studios pepper mill and salt cellar, a Microplane grater and other equipment, as well as spices, coffee, tinned fish, dates and Dandelion chocolates.
What’s important?
Food writer Joan Zoloth walked in for her kitchen kit and started chatting with Feldman Bauch. Zoloth, her mother and her son lost their three respective homes in Malibu, and though the Venice apartment she’s moved into is furnished, the kitchen has one pot and one pan.
“When you evacuate you don’t think about these things. What’s important?” said Zoloth, who used to be the Oakland Tribune’s restaurant critic. “What did I overlook? Maybe it’s a letter from your father. But the one that keeps hitting me over and over is the KitchenAid mixer.
“I had it before my kids were born. I made all their birthday cakes and their cookies and my grandson’s cookies.”
“Also they don’t make them the way they used to,” Feldman Bauch said.
“Right?” Zoloth said. “You’re so sad and you feel like a nut case. ‘One of the things you miss the most is a mixer?’”
The last recipe that Baz made in her Altadena home was the day of the fire, “a burnt Basque quiche, which is a savory take on a burnt Basque cheesecake with eggs and Gruyère, very simple, cooked at high heat.”
”When I pulled it out of the oven that day I was kind of disappointed because I wanted it to be darker. ... And I said the words to my family and my assistant and friend who was working with me: ‘Damn, I just kind of wish it was a little more burnt.’”
When she and her family evacuated she thought about taking it with them because they were going to a friend’s house for the night but then thought, “Nah, it’ll be better for lunch tomorrow so I’m gonna leave it.”
The quiche got a little more burnt. “It’s creepy and crazy and poignant and gave me some weird sense of resolve around it all,” said Baz.
She took nothing from her kitchen when she had to evacuate. She said the only things she and her husband took were computers, a pair of sweatpants and a plaster ornament with their baby’s handprint. “You never think it’s going to be you,” she said. “Even though we knew there was a fire and we had to evacuate, you always think, this isn’t gonna happen to us.
“There’s also a very weird thing that happens when you’re asked to evacuate. You have to assign a value to your belongings and you have to decide which things you will take and which you will leave and very quickly. It becomes paralyzing. ... There’s no singular item or collection of things that is more important to me than the whole that represents and creates a life. It feels very strange to start to grab pots or pans. I wouldn’t even know where to begin. So as a result you end up taking nothing.”
In the days after the fires she posted a long message to her Instagram account. “The hardest part of thinking about rebuilding is knowing that all the magic that it once possessed is now gone — a pile of embers and rubble — and I will never again stand in that kitchen that Ben [my husband] made me and do what I do best: cook.
“But here’s the thing about the joy of cooking: You can take away the physical kitchen but you can’t take away the spirit of the cook.”
Even so, it wasn’t until recently that Baz said she started to find the motivation to cook. This week she moved into a new temporary home in Echo Park and cooked her recipe for miso chicken au poivre sauce with lots of black peppercorns, miso and crème fraîche, along with a Castelvetrano olive, fennel and Castelfranco radicchio salad with some of the oils and vinegars that she got from the Stock That Pantry event.
“For me it’s more about finding my comfort in my kitchen again and a desire to be there that I am looking forward to,” she said, “and I think I saw a glimmer of that last night.”
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