“Do you have a signature dish?”  That was one of the first questions my soon-to-be wife asked me when we were starting to date.

I didn’t.  All through my bachelor twenties, I ate out—fun, cheap ethnic foods.  Tacos, ramen, pad thai–they are plentiful in my hometown Los Angeles where they’re considered unremarkable go-to mainstays.  In Los Angeles, there’s no shortage of the exotic:  sea urchin spaghetti; spicy intestine stew; pig’s blood soup; steamed chicken feet—if a newbie friend (some adventurous meat-and-potatoes Midwesterner) were to ask me to help them explore the gustatory riches of my hometown, those dishes–still rather tame–would serve as the gateways to some of the outlandish delights that come from a port city with a history of heavy influxes of immigrants, refugees, tourists from around the world.  That’s the stuff I would suggest simply to get their feet wet.

My go-to lunch dish—a combo–came from my favorite Japanese restaurant, Mishima: black cod, seared with a glisten of ponzu glaze.  It was accompanied by artfully arranged vegetables, steamed tender, and a bowl of soba noodles–purple-brown–that my expatriate Tokyo friends swore was just like home.

I ate this literally every other day.

Maybe you think this could turn out to be an expensive habit–that I’m some kind of trustafarian–but nothing could be further from the truth:  as a grad student living on a shoe-string stipend that put me in a monetary marshland between the distant beachhead of caviar dinners and the riptide of yellow, government cheese poverty, I found this one fact to be a lifesaver I could cling to:  even the poorest among us grad students could always scrape up the couch-cushion change to eat out.

Then, catastrophe struck:  I moved to a small town in the middle of Iowa where salsa was ketchup.  Chinese food involved two categories:  brown sauce and white sauce.  I had to drive an hour to get a bowl of slippery, wet Vietnamese noodles (which I did every week-end) trekking to the exotic armpit that is Des Moines.  Chicago—six hours away and always a small place in my West Coast eyes—suddenly glimmered like Coney Island.

Ironically, Iowa was where I began the adventure that was my culinary education—a place where I developed a close relationship with a butcher who hand-selected his animals and looked down on “box meat.”  True full service butchers are called meat lockers in Iowa and this one, tucked into the countryside, displayed rows of pink ribbons from years of first place finishes at the Iowa State fair–the country’s biggest–where you can get a corn dog so big it can only be described as pornographic.

Iowa was where I cut my teeth on the homemade.  It was where I ended up with not only a deep freeze but, also, a special refrigeration unit designed just to house kimchee—that stinky, fermented cabbage that is the mainstay of my wife’s people.  Iowa was where I learned to pickle farm-fresh veggies with fast vinegar concoctions or with slow, probiotic brines.  Iowa was where I discovered the thrill of the Foodsaver.

Of course, writers always think about feeding themselves.  There is a long tradition of food—opulent descriptions of repasts of pheasant under glass—that are lovingly described by those aristocrats of fiction (towering giants like Proust) in whose company I quail.

Scribblers can describe food too well.  This is most probably because food is something they are on the verge of not-having.  Every food description is also an act of wish-fulfillment–the longing for that which you can only dream of having, a girl you see fleetingly (an apparition of true loveliness) through the plate glass barrier across the way on the metro, seated demurely in an A-line skirt on a train going the opposite direction to a destiny that will never be yours to share.

It was at Prairie Lights—the bookstore associated with the famed Iowa Writer’s Workshop– that I came across a book of recipes made by high profile writers who had briefly touched down on this corner of the heartland.

These were not culinary wonders nor feats of technique.  These were not vegan extravaganzas designed to make one feel ashamed about the levels of pesticides and cruelty in one’s food.  These were not mere exercises in food pornography that prevaricate on the divide that separates the one percent from the Kraft Macaroni and Cheese set.

These were straightforward, homely recipes—one pot wonders—that will keep you going, sustained, not only for a night but several days, like candles that never cease to burn.  These were also parodies of the kinds of recipes that writers have to eat–tongue-in-cheek renditions of the hand-to-mouth.

In his memoir (written while he was hopped up on painkillers) one of my favorite auteurs, John Irving, muses about sitting in his kitchen tending a stock pot as he pens those crazy, thick books of his:  Cider House Rules,  The World According to Garp, New Hampshire Hotel. Writing is just like fussing over a pot of bubbling bones whose essence reduce; and the writing life, it is just like the kind of fussing that is necessary to keep a stock clean and white and bright.

When I tell friends this factoid, they find it hard to believe…because a writer is imagined as a suffering, turtleneck genius that sits in a room, toute-seule, and pulls beautiful geometries like cat’s cradles from the dense molecules of the air, arranging them—and rearranging them–on the gallery wall that is the white space of the page.

Most people don’t realize that writers are truly, to borrow a phrase from Kafka, “hunger artists”–their appetites whetted by oysters they can never have, morsels they braise in their imaginations, and fine cuts of meat they turn over and over in their mind.

Me:  I have left Iowa and returned as a solid home cook who spends as much time looking up the arcana of recipes, as I do sitting at my desk, sharpening pencils as I do my prose.  My protagonist, on the other hand, never left LA; he remains singularly underdeveloped in this capacity–parochial in every sense–and only knows how to make a hotpocket in a toaster; he is a native son who will always be able to order his favorite dish for lunch:  a Vietnamese Sandwich Number 3, extra spicey.

Of his deficiency and his dumb luck, he is none the wiser.