'It always gets weird': Our kitchen's off-the-record conversations

Short Statured on C Street is a brief podcast about flatting with a disability by Umi Asaka and Jacq Ruth. Below is a transcript of part four 'It always gets weird': Our kitchen's off-the-record conversations.

Umi: Welcome Short Statured on C Street with Jacq and Umi.

Olivia: Kia ora my name is Olivia. I'm the editor at The D*List, and in this episode of flatting with a disability we're going to be in the kitchen. The kitchen is like one of my favourite parts of a house. It's where lots of delicious food is made, and I'm sure you too make some delicious treats from the kitchen. Tell me about the space and how cooking works in your flat.

Umi: It's my favourite place in the house as well. It feels relaxed, and I like just cooking after coming home from work, and just turning the brain off. And our kitchen is full of plants and jars, and it just feels very cozy.

Jacq: Yeah, I'm the opposite. Cooking stresses me out. I don't have a lot of confidence in my cooking ability. So the idea of coming home from work and cooking is not my cup of tea. But we are getting there. I am keeping a little bit more faith in my cooking abilities. 

Umi: And we also have the opposite cooking style. 

Jacq: I follow recipes. 

Umi: You like the measuring cup and the measuring machine.

Jacq: Like measuring spoons and I use exact amounts. 

Umi: I’ve never really followed recipes. 

Jacq: No you don’t, it's really fun when she does that for baking.

Umi: Yeah with baking you can’t get away with it.

Olivia: Do you have a cooking roster? How does that all work? 

Umi: Yes, so we have four people living in the house, and there's seven days. So we all cook once a week. And Jacq and I tend to cook twice a week.

Jacq: Yeah. And we have our support workers for most of it, for our cooking days, coming to support us. We also probably cook a little bit differently to our flatmates. Umi has a chair that she uses.

Olivia: Tell us about your cooking chair.

Umi: So I can't stand and cook. But the kitchen, as we talked about, is quite small for my wheelchair to fit in. So I found this chair on Trade Me, which used to be used for a tattoo shop. And so it's like a rolling a chair that has four small wheels at the bottom, and it's like a circle chair. And it moves very easily. So I sit on that and then I can just roll myself by holding on to the edges of the kitchen. So it's not the most safest thing to do, but I can adjust the height, and it's pretty tall, so it works well for me. But the back, like the back support of it came out because it's too old. I've had it for four years, so I think I need to buy a new one soon, but it was only like $70 from Trade Me. I used to cook in an office chair in my previous flat so this is a slightly better upgrade because of the height. So yeah, when my wheelchair can't fit in the kitchen, these chairs are a really good alternative, especially because of the four wheels, and like being able to move in all the different directions, because my chair can only go back and forth. It doesn't move sideways, so that's the most important part of the cooking chair.

Olivia: Yeah, that's so interesting. It'd be a rare thing to find another tattoo chair. And so how about food? Tell me, what are your favourite things to cook, favourite things to eat.

Umi: I'm vegan most of the time. When I'm at home, I’m vegan most of the time, except sometimes I eat eggs, and sometimes I do use a little bit of fish flakes that my grandma sends me from Japan, so maybe I shouldn’t call myself vegan. But I mostly cook Japanese food, and lots of vegetables and stir fries and soups and different seaweed and grains. 

Jacq: It's good. She is a very good cook, to be sappy, to me that's part of this place feeling like home is your cooking. It’s really good cooking.

Olivia: How about you Jacq, you said cooking is not your favourite?

Umi: But Jacq is good at cooking too, we like her food.

Jacq: It’s a mixture. I find the recipes. And then we work through it. And the support workers because we share support workers have had to adjust to. And me being like, yeah, about that much will do. Here you go. And then I'm like, right, this is the recipe. We're following it. And they’re like, Oh, okay, let's go and that's been quite funny. I would say, I'm vegetarian-ish. And then it turns out I might actually have to go on this diet for 6 weeks, called Fodmap.

Olivia: That’s hard, no garlic and onion? No taste.

Jacq: So no no joy for 6 weeks. I'm being realistic and probably do that after Christmas, cause that's gonna be a challenge. 

Olivia: How about other hacks in the kitchen that you've adapted? Or, you know, things set up a particular way to make it accessible.

Umi: I think one trick that Jacq said she learned from me, or I think both of us, when I am on that rolling  chair it's not easy to go and get more ingredients. So before I start cooking, I tend to get everything ready next to me, so I don't have to move around too much and think that’s a key thing that makes cooking easier. 

Jacq: Same for the step stool. So if I'm using the step stool for the stove, and let's say I'm cooking something. I will get all the sauces, all the spices, everything ready to go next to it before I start cooking, so I don't have to go up and down my step stool as much as possible. I've also learnt from Umi, we use our dining table for veggie prep and sit down for it, and that has made cooking a lot less tiring is to actually sit down as much as possible for said cooking and that's been really nice.

Olivia: Yeah, that's a really good tip.So you share cooking and stuff and do flat dinners. And what are they like?

Umi: Yeah, we eat almost every evening together. Sometimes people miss dinners because we have other things on. But that's been, I think that's been the important part in the house, and we check in about each other's days, and somehow the conversation always ends up in very interesting places.

Jacq: It always gets weird.

Umi: Some of the things we can’t say on the recording.

Olivia: Hey you’re living together, you will get to know each other very, very well. I know way too much about other flatmates as well.

Jacq: They are really special. And the dining table that we have I bought off Trade Me. I sanded down myself and revarnished it, and I remember it was while your mum was visiting, and she was telling me off for not asking for help more and so I asked her support worker that she brought with her to help me carry this six-seater dining table out to the patio for me to sand down. And I was like, look Yuho I asked for help, and she was not impressed with me. But I really like our dining table as well.

Olivia: Yeah dining tables are an important part of the house. So to wrap up, last question is, what would your advice be to other disabled people who are thinking about flatting or just starting that process?

Jacq: It's worth it. It's awesome to be able to branch out and try something different. And to take your time to make sure you're in a place that's the right fit and also to figure out all the admin that's associated with having different access needs and trying to navigate houses that actually work for you. It's going to take a while, and it's going to take time and effort. And it's worth it, just trying to focus on one step at a time.

Umi: As I shared, I've always had flatmates in my life, and I can't see any other ways of living, because coming home and being able to have people who you trust and feel safe and want to talk about your day, or what's going on, is for me, it's really important and think it adds to security, it adds to the safety in life and also practical safety. I break my bones easily, so I don't want to live by myself where I might have a broken bone without anyone around me. So for me, living with other people has lots of different meanings and importance. I hear lots of horror stories about flatting, and I've been super lucky because I haven't had flatting horror stories myself. And living with people you trust. One thing I haven't done is like living with total strangers so maybe I should try that one day. 

Olivia: No you’ll be moving out of your dream accessible house. You two obviously know each other so well, you know each other's habits really well. And I think of the things I learnt was, oh people didn't grow up the same as I did like, people have these different habits and ways of doing things, and they're not necessarily better or worse. But it's just different. And I think, yeah, it's really interesting to learn.

Umi: So I guess the advice could be to be open minded and be open to adjusting like, sometimes it takes time to adjust, and I think Jacq and I both can be frustrated at each other. But knowing that it's also okay to be frustrated at each other, and being able to talk about it, or be like, Hey, are you annoyed at me, I ask that to, Jacq often because I don’t know if Jacq is annoyed with me. So, being able to talk about that is important.

Jacq: Not all of the friends you have are friends that you can live with. There's a different group of people that you can be friends and live with, because you get to know all of them and their quirks, and whether they're a night owl or a morning person or how social they are versus you, and a big thing that's really helpful if you are living with a friend is to have that underlying foundational kind of respect and love for each other. So that yeah, if you do get frustrated, or it's not the end of the world, because underneath the ‘Umi!’ you still love each other, no matter what. So you're safe to be frustrated with each other. And that's really helpful.

Olivia: Cool. Well, thank you so much for sharing your life with us about being flat mates living in Dunedin, and how all that works. Because I know our audience will be really interested in that, but let's wrap things up. Thanks for your time, and we’ll end things here. See you later.

Jacq: Awesome

Umi: See you later, thanks for listening!

*Editor’s note: This podcast series was originally recorded in December 2023. A huge shoutout to Umi and Jacq for coming up with the concept for this podcast and their patience with us!