The Weekly Recap #107

We are selling our house...

Jul 10, 2022

…and we are in escrow. It hit the market Friday, our realtor showed it while we were out of town this weekend, and we accepted an offer last night.

Also, we are moving…back to California…Los Angeles to be specific. A city I love, and hate, but mostly love. My hometown, Marco’s hometown, and the land of always perfect produce.

Wow, that feels good to get off my chest. I am oddly very superstitious and tend to not share things until they come to fruition. After many months of talking, the decision to move was made official back in May and since then it has consumed our lives entirely. Not sharing it was a challenge. What do I post on Instagram when I am cleaning the house for photos and not cooking? What do I write about when I am in LA looking at houses and not cooking?! I feel best when I am being honest and it feels great to share this exciting news.

Our move to Kansas City was always meant to be temporary. Back in 2018 we were both over LA and looking for a change. ChowNow had announced they were opening a new regional headquarters and Marco was strongly encouraged to take this leap for his career. We visited once, in the dead of winter, and decided why the hell not?! Five years is what we agreed to give it and here we are three and a half years later. I’ll take it.

This move has been wonderful in so many ways. Taking the jump to help establish the Kansas City office did help Marco’s career and in these three years he has had exponential growth. We were able to purchase a home…at 25…which is very hard to do at any age back in LA. The ginormous kitchen in our home gave me a space to create Marcella Cooking Stuff and do everything I do now. We were able to ride out the pandemic in our little slice of heaven with the woods behind us and a lot more space than we had in our previous 500 sq ft apartment.

Whenever we are asked how we like Kansas City our response is always the same: “We absolutely love our house, our neighborhood is so wonderful to live in, but we are not in love with the city itself.”

Two months before moving here we had backed out of buying house number one, had an offer rejected on a second option, and didn’t know where we would live. We flew out to KC for the weekend to search and we saw everything possible. Our home was the first house we walked into during our long day of searching. It was a dirty man cave that was not ready to be shown and everything outside was brown and icy. There were big vaulted ceilings, exposed brick, the kitchen had an island, flooding light from the skylights, and THE YARD! This house has always had good energy and we ended the day knowing it was the one.

This home became our pandemic sanctuary. It was the only place we were safe just the two of us. On countless nights during the quarantine days we would make a cocktail, turn on music, and dance around the living room for hours. We have stared at the squiggly textured 70s wallpaper, now painted white, for hours and wondered about the years of stories it could tell. Card games, movies, dinners, tears, laughter, Christmas…everything for the last three years was done under this roof. Just Marco and me.

I love this house deeply. I don’t know if it is a normal amount of adoration or if it has an extra special place because of what we went through together but I am very sad to leave it. I’m equal parts beyond ready for a change and heartbroken that this won’t be ours anymore. It’s a weird feeling that had me bawling in the St. Louis airport last night when we accepted an offer and shit got real.

No one really mentioned to us before we uprooted our entire life how unbelievably hard that is!! Living somewhere where you don’t know a single person brings a lot of challenges. From the obvious task of making friends and a community to finding reliable plumbers and electricians. I wasn’t prepared for the challenges of living somewhere without a safety net of people and I am really proud of us. Like with everything in life, we figured it out. We have learned a lot about other people and have both grown from it. This is an experience most people won’t have and I think we are the lucky ones.

Another thing I quickly learned is that California is a bubble and Los Angeles is a bubble inside of that bubble. From day one, I faced interesting obstacles around how I was treated as a woman in the midwest. The first encounter was when I was asked by a service company if I would like him to “call my husband to handle payment.” No sir, that’s my name on the credit card, I’m fully capable of paying you, and my husband doesn't want to hear from you anyway. Another was when Marco and I went to purchase my Big Green Egg and the salesman didn’t look at me once assuming Marco would be the one grilling. It wasn’t until the end of their 45-minute conversation when Marco was finally able to say “I have no clue what any of this means, my wife is the one who does the grilling.” These are weekly occurrences for me, as a woman, that I rarely encountered before we moved here. Sexism is real and more prevalent out here. I won’t miss it.

We were dealt other interesting cards while we were here too. The most obvious was the pandemic. Every day I was grateful to be in this spacious house and not the tiny apartment but I also experienced complete isolation from my entire family for the first time ever. Living away from them didn’t seem bad when anyone could hop on a plane to visit. When the ability to do that was taken away I felt trapped. I couldn’t drive by my grandparent's house and wave out the window to see their faces. Or have a picnic with my mom outside. For a long time, Marco and I felt completely isolated from everyone we know. It really showed me how much I value being close to family, at least a car ride away instead of a flight.

Politics were something I never thought much about (LOL) until living here during a time when it was unescapable. Our beliefs don’t align with where we are and it has been tough. Through the election, vaccines, BLM movement, women's rights, voting laws…the list goes on. I’ll just say this, Missouri is a red state with very very small pockets of blue. We both would like to live somewhere where our community agrees with basic human rights.

Anyways, not a day goes by that I am not grateful. Grateful for our home, the grounding nature we get to live in, our health, and this amazing life Marco and I get to live together. These three years have been really challenging in many ways but really freaking great. If you are thinking about trying something new, absolutely do it. We are lucky to have this experience and the growth we have from getting outside of our comfort zone. Everything is temporary and now we are ready for the next chapter.

We don’t know if LA will be forever, and as we said with KC, we’ll give it five years. I can’t begin to tell you how excited I am to be close to my family and friends again. I don’t want to do another Thanksgiving or Christmas alone ever! Hopefully, our new home will be full of people often for birthdays, BBQs, and Friday night dinners.

Right behind family and friends, I’m excited to be back on the west coast where I can indulge in year-round produce baby! This may seem ridiculous to some, but my world revolves around food, and it is so much more than just a meal. It’s the connection, restoring our land and supporting farmers, nourishing our bodies, it’s creativity, comfort, and joy! The restaurant scene has changed since I lived in LA and I have a lot to explore. The act of dining out is one of my favorite activities and I have missed living in a city with a killer restaurant scene tremendously. I have always felt held back by being in KC. The lack of accessibility is real, seasonal access is real, and the difference in taste is real! My gut tells me this next chapter will be really good for me. Hopefully, I’ll be able to flourish in my creative food career and take everything I’m doing up a notch. Or seven notches.

That’s the update! Life is going to be insane for a little bit but good things are coming, they always do. If you were wondering about Marco and his career, he will keep going down the path he is on working from the LA headquarters again. Thanks for reading today, and always! I’m excited to have you along this journey with me. Next, we hunt for a house in LA 🤞🏼🥲.

What Kitchen Club subscribers made this week…

He became a chef at 13. Ten years later, Flynn McGarry is done being a prodigy.
The Best Cheese for Cheeseburgers, Period
In Defense of Prunes *I am a die hard prune fan.
Why Is This Interesting? - The Plastic Food Edition
Where to Actually Eat on Catalina Island This Summer *My friends and I have been talking about taking a weekend trip to Catalina. I haven’t been since I went to marine biology camp in high school.

Drooooooling over these soup dumplings.

We didn’t do a ton of eating in Columbus but we got breakfast at Northstar Cafe. The ricotta pancakes were so good I made us go back the next day so I could get them again. And, hello, this cookie!