Yesterday I spent a few hours talking about Cooking in Heels...

Yesterday I spent a few hours talking about Cooking in Heels with Ceyenne and a longtime friend of hers, Jack (aka Flawless Sabrina), in the Upper East Side apartment where he has lived since the late 1960s. The apartment has lots of gorgeous antiques, and is cluttered with the objects that symbolize a life well celebrated: photos, newspaper clippings, wigs, a first edition of John Rechy’s City of Night. We talked about how things have changed and how they haven’t, about police violence and fabulous parties - and of course, we ate. Jack has been immensely important to Ceyenne over the years, offering refuge, support, and kindness to her when those things ran in short supply in her life. We showed him our Kickstarter video and he shed some tears and then clapped in glee at the end. There’s a dish in the book named after him, but he doesn’t know that yet.

Ceyenne prepared her signature quiche - in the Kickstarter video she talks about the first time she prepared it for her family. In her youth, Ceyenne’s quiche made her safe. Her parents were less abusive whenever she was cooking, because they needed her - and damn is she good at it. I stood in Jack’s kitchen with Ceyenne as she prepared the food, and took this shot of her kneading the dough for the quiche crust. 

Secret ingredient: pancake mix. The final product was fluffy and cheesy and amazing.

We told Jack about the success we’re having with the Kickstarter campaign and told him about our hopes for making a book with color photos of 5-10 dishes. That’s looking more and more like the reality of this project, as we steadily climb to $8000 in pledges, and beyond. Can we raise $10,000? Maybe $12,000? That would make it possible for us to produce episodes of Ceyenne’s dream online cooking show, which would be the same great quality as the video we produced for this campaign. 

So, please keep spreading the word! We’ve got just over two weeks left to see how big we can make this.