For chef Gillian Clark, cooking is love. It means the family is safe and sustained.
But it also meant that when her daughter climbed the jungle gym at school, her hands greasy from the delicious cube-steak sandwich Mom had packed, she slipped and broke her arm.
There have been glorious days, too, for Clark, chef-owner of Colorado Kitchen, on Colorado Avenue in Washington, D.C. The restaurant is proof that she could leave a cushy job in marketing, have her husband walk out, raise two daughters alone and live her passion.
Easier said than done, of course, and Clark lays out the rocky, winding path in her new book, Out of the Frying Pan (St. Martin's, $23.95).
''I was a stalwart because I had a belief. I had to see it through, see how far I could go,'' Clark said in a telephone interview. ``I made it hard on myself, but I think that made sense to me. Also, my daughters were, to a great degree, behind me.''
That would be Magalee, now 18, and Sian, 14.
``They were into it, never rolling their eyes.''
Cooking for a living isn't for sissies. Clark plunged ahead, attending culinary school. Her daughters survived a revolving cast of baby sitters. And Clark was fired or resigned from four restaurants in four years. Still, critics loved her food, no matter where she was cooking.
At Colorado Kitchen, she strives to ``represent the food that came from the days of the creation of this country.
``. . . There was conflict with Native Americans and with slavery. People were struggling to take all the stuff they knew about food and make something they could call American cuisine.
``. . . We give it a shinier stage. We do meatloaf all the time. I will do classic meatloaf with a red-eye gravy -- or a black truffle sauce.''
Her brand of mothering is classic, too.
''I was concerned that I pushed them too hard. I wanted them to be more and be at the top of their class. What's so wrong about being valedictorian?'' Clark asks.
''Pushing them was to help them find themselves and to be happy for themselves,'' she says. ``Hopefully my life path has helped them, not hurt them. And we're not really done yet -- there's a lot more to come.''
Nancy Ancrum writes biweekly about the culinary legacy of the African diaspora.
