Vanessa Miller's kitchen is an oasis.
Framed by skyscraping snow banks that reach the second story — probably to catch a glimpse of what smells so delicious inside — the kitchen is a stainless-steel haven on the middle floor of a quaint domain nearly two miles from campus, hardly the typical setting in which a second-semester college senior resides. The wine is poured from bottles arranged neatly on a metal rack, not out of plastic spigots on cardboard boxes. Sitting on the dining table is "The Flavor Bible: The Essential Guide to Culinary Creativity." The chef is a bookworm these days: the only worm in sight.
Next to the stove, which will soon host a skillet shrimp appetizer with lemon juice, white wine and butter paired with homemade fried rice, are the ingredients, laid out in bowls and on plates, sans measuring devices. Exact measurements are useless; Miller's palate is the judge of this chef's culinary court.
Here, in the home with a giant heart framing the peephole on the front door and with the chef wearing a heart-shaped necklace, to cook is to love.
Allowing destiny to take over
Vanessa Miller doesn't pretend that cooking has been a passion throughout her 22 years on this planet. She was an unbearably picky eater as a child, like the month-long period when she refused to eat anything else but Hebrew National hot dogs. And they had to be Hebrew National. Nothing else would do for the 4-foot-8, 80-pound girl from Cincinnati.
Since those days of limited menus, Miller has grown up. She's slightly taller now — about 5 feet 2 inches, but still needs her housemate to reach the pots and pans on the highest shelves — and has branched out, no longer limiting her diet to packaged ballpark franks. More importantly, she has developed an uncanny talent for cooking, one that she hopes to parlay into a career as a chef and, eventually, a restaurateur.
The evolution began at age 16 when she started working front-of-the-house gigs in Ohio. Once she arrived at Tufts, Miller résumé-bombed Harvard Square eateries, eventually landing a job at Grafton Street Pub on Mass. Avenue.
"The guy who hired me looked at my résumé and said, ‘You're grossly under-qualified for this waitressing job; you'll probably only be training for a month and we'll let you go. But good luck,'" Miller said. "And that was my introduction to Grafton Street."
From there, she paid her dues as a waitress before taking a chance last April at an open position in the kitchen, working prep and eventually cooking on the line. On the verge of graduation, Miller is now ready for the next step, whether that involves attending culinary school or hopping right back into a professional kitchen.
"I joke around with her about possibly opening a restaurant one day with her," Kim Moynihan (LA '09), Miller's current housemate and former teammate with the Jumbos, said. "It's mostly a way for me to tip my hat to her and tell her that she's doing something that's really worthwhile.
"I've learned to really value gym time," she added. "Because whenever I'm home I'm going to be eating something delicious."
Back at her house, Miller stands over the sizzling skillet, hands darting like she's back on the basketball court swiping away errant passes. With sleeves carefully rolled up, hair tied in a bun and a towel draped out of her back pocket, her voice fills with excitement, making the conclusion to her story obvious.
Cooking is what Vanessa Miller is meant to do.
The meerkat mannerisms
Her nickname is Van, which makes sense until you see her operate like a sports car.
Whether on the basketball court or in the kitchen, Miller has always relied on top-notch speed and precision to set her apart. Watch Miller suit up for the Jumbos at Cousens Gym and you'll inevitably be treated to a whirlwind of deflections and help defense. She performs the unnoticed kind of perfection, where the only tangible part is the finished product — the two points added to Tufts' score or the plate of savory heaven placed on the table. What you don't see is Miller, who made it all happen from the beginning.
Probably because you blinked once and missed everything.
"She operates like a crazy person, which is just normal Van," senior tri-captain Lindsay Weiner said.
"Everybody on the team actually refers to it as my ‘meerkat mannerisms,' because they think that I resemble a meerkat in the way that I move and look, which I really appreciate," Miller said with a twinge of sarcasm in her voice. "Those come out in the kitchen too; I'm darting around everywhere."
The uncanny comparison — "They're my cousins!" Miller says — extends to her height, or lack thereof. At just a shade above 5 feet, she often draws comments in the kitchen, sometimes for her inability to reach the top shelf and sometimes for her oversized chef's outfit.
"Every time I worked with her, we always had a good time," Weiner, who worked as a waitress at Grafton Street last summer, said. "I made fun of how she's pretty short, which you think would be a detriment, but it's not. It was always fun trying to watch her jump up high to get the pots and pans on the top shelf … and her outfit made her look like a ninja."
Regardless of the comparison, be it meerkat or ninja, the statistics eventually emerged thanks to her claustrophobia-inducing defense. In 2009-10, Miller was named the NESCAC Defensive Player of the Year when she led the league with 3.15 steals per game and 85 overall. This season, she's first with three per game in conference play, and would be fourth overall had she played in enough games to qualify. Her 181 career steals ranks her sixth in program history.
Miller's career was recently punctuated by an offensive surge in late January. With senior Colleen Hart and junior Kate Barnosky, both tri-captains, sidelined, Miller averaged 15.6 points, 8.3 rebounds, 4.0 assists and 6.0 steals over a three-game span, earning her NESCAC Player of the Week honors just three weeks into the season.
Sitting in her office with praise flooding out, women's basketball coach Carla Berube sounds like a scratched record when asked to describe Miller's playing style, repeating the word "defense" over and over again.
"I've never coached a better defensive player," Berube, in her ninth season with the Jumbos, five of which have included Miller, said. "I haven't seen anyone able to lock down players the way she can, while also helping her teammates out, while also grabbing eight rebounds and deflecting balls. I haven't seen that ever."
On burns and bruises
Operating at full speed all the time will inevitably result in a few crashes along the way, and Miller has the scars to prove it.
Five games into her freshman season back in 2006, Miller went down with a season-ending injury. A six-month recovery ended up taking 13 months, and one surgery turned into two, cutting her sophomore season by nearly a semester. The current list of maladies includes injuries to her back, elbow, ankle and quadriceps, as well as a bout with Lyme disease.
Sprinting around a kitchen, worrying about serving the dinner rush of 500 — sometimes more during Sunday brunch — has its pitfalls as well. After skimming over her basketball-related injuries, Miller pulls up her sleeve to reveal a host of badges of honor from working the line.
"We had a cook who just took the fry basket out of the oil, and I was coming around the corner and hit my arm on it," says Miller, pointing to her elbow before flashing another set of burns on her thumb. "This scar right here was from when I was shucking oysters this summer, and the oyster broke and the knife went right through."
Injury-prone is an understatement for someone who spends her days diving on the floor for loose balls and her nights hunched over open flames. Then again, Miller has taken her injuries all in stride.
"Looking back on it, it's definitely made me the player I am," she said. "If I could change it, I guess I wouldn't, because I've been lucky enough to get a fifth year that's been going well so far."
One more run at glory
Her past injuries allowed Miller to return this spring to use up her final semester of eligibility. In her fifth year at Tufts, she's taking only one class and can focus almost exclusively on basketball.
During the fall semester, despite pulling late shifts at Grafton Street, Miller was constantly in the gym to improve her game. But she couldn't practice with the team and had to sit in the stands during games, waiting until 2011 rolled around.
"She's resilient," Berube said. "She works hard at everything she believes in. And the same thing, with wanting to be a chef, she's going to do it the right way and she's going to go the right route. When she talks about basketball or when she talks about being in the kitchen and preparing or learning a new dish, it's the same sort of passion in her eyes."
Miller arrived at Tufts in 2006 as a walk-on, nervous about how she would measure up within the program.
"After the first open gym at Tufts my freshman year, I remember my dad called and asked how it went. I said, ‘I had a good time, I'm not sure if I'm good enough," said Miller, who pauses before delivering the conclusion with a sheepish grin. "But I guess I ended up being good enough."
But all has since worked out; Miller, who originally backed up Colleen Hart, now plays alongside the program's most prolific scorer, and the two have competed in eight NCAA Tournament games as an electrifying tandem, and help comprise what Miller calls one of the best backcourts in the nation.
Even with the injuries and the semester relatively detached from the team — especially given that she lives nearly two miles from campus — a sustainable passion has kept Miller going. Now, she is one of the most experienced players in Div. III's top conference.
Of course, there are some days when Miller feels like the elder states(wo)man, like when the Jumbos went to a high school practice for a day, and she realized that she was nearly 10 years older than the high school first-years.
"Yes, I feel old," she said. "But it's kind of a fun feeling walking onto the court now and knowing that I have more experience than any other person out there on the court."
A freshman all over again
The veteran status earned on the court got flipped when Miller first entered the kitchen at Grafton Street, a place primarily dominated by males and non-English-speakers, as the first person at the restaurant to ever go from the front of the house to the back.
"I remember the first time I picked up a knife, and it's this 8-inch chef's knife," she said. "I'm comfortable with it, but they're all looking at me like, ‘She's going to cut her finger off.'"
The intensity in the kitchen can reach near-unbearable levels, with the 100-degree temperatures or the constant shouting, which Miller says her athletic background helped prepare her for.
"Growing up around sports and stuff, I thrive under pressure," she said. "I think a lot of the reasons I've really enjoyed cooking is that since I've realized that my basketball career is coming to an end, I'm looking for that in other things besides sports."
One time, she didn't make enough cookies for service, and the restaurant ran out a little early in the night.
"I got yelled at like I've never been yelled at before for cookies, which seems like the most mundane thing possible to be yelled at for," Miller said. "Part of me wanted to go back and nurse my bruised ego. But when push comes to shove, you just have to go back and make more."
Starting over in a new environment, however, proved invaluable for Miller's development as a chef.
"I think you sometimes forget what it's like to be a so-called ‘rookie,'" she said. "It's good to have that juxtaposition in my life right now, because I think you need a little bit of that swagger and confidence that seniority brings, but you also need that excitement that being new to something gives."
An unparalleled rush
Dining with Vanessa Miller is like dining with a hostess, waitress and chef all rolled into one, if that person were blessed with the super-speed of The Flash. After serving dinner, she tosses her towel onto the table and saunters over to the refrigerator to pop open a Diet Dr. Pepper, finally slowing down to a human level.
Make no mistake; underneath the collected demeanor, she is beaming. That much is clear from the subtle smiles that emerge whenever she discusses new recipes, or the giggles that surface when recounting tales from the line.
"It was like a light bulb went off in my head," she said. "After the first weekend, I was like ‘Wow, this is exactly what I want.' I worked my first Friday night, and the only time I had anywhere near the kind of adrenaline rush that I get on the basketball court while playing basketball."
he clear parallels between cooking and hoops consistently reappear. There's the teamwork necessary to cook for 500 people, similar to a five-man weave up the floor in transition, or the collective satisfaction inherent with achieving a mutual goal, like completing the dinner rush unscathed or reaching NCAAs.
Looking into the future can be a mystifying task for seniors, especially those struggling to figure out long-term plans. Lucky for Miller, she's confident about exactly where she wants to go.
"I'm sure it will be," said Miller, when asked if opening her own restaurant will be the biggest challenge she'll ever face. "Basketball has been a huge part of my life for the last five years, but it's just a five-year thing. This is a chosen path for the rest of my life. The stakes are a little bit higher, which is exciting."
Knowing her, she'll get there fast.
Meerkat fast.
