Work all night, cook all day

It was 2 a.m. and Victoria Haffner’s day had just begun. She headed over to the kitchen area of CNN headquarters and pulled out her breakfast from the bottom right-hand corner of a lower shelf in the communal refrigerator, her designated space. Her morning meal today was an Italian pork sausage and beef, ground up into a pesto burger with mozzarella cheese, something she had whipped up the night before, which was afternoon for everyone else.

“I prepared all of this at 3 p.m. last night,” she said, heating up the hamburger in the microwave. “I made a week’s worth of hamburgers.”

Haffner has a habit of making four or five servings of a meal in advance, usually on Monday afternoons before going to bed, which she does at around 5 p.m. Along with the hamburger, she had a small lettuce salad and fresh grapes and a small piece of bread, each in a separate plastic container.

It’s hard to find take-out in the middle of the night. “There’s only a few options this early,” she said of her two a.m. meal break. “There’s one diner that we order from sometimes. I usually bring something from home.”

Haffner’s other options included Duane Reade and Subway, neither of which was very appealing for her.

Once the meat was heated up, she grabbed all the containers and headed back to her desk in the newsroom. This early in the morning, the CNN newsroom at Columbus Circle is usually a little quiet. There’s murmured discussion sprouting here and there, and the constant playback of the CNN Live newscast echoing in the background.

Haffner set her meal next to the two bottles of water that were already waiting on her table. She dumped the hamburger onto the salad and started to eat, all the while clicking away on her screen to do some work at the same time.

She pushed back her chin-length strawberry blonde hair and started to type away on her screen. Occasionally, she stopped to chat with her co-workers, all of whom seemed just as well-adjusted to the early mornings as she was. The 24-year-old production assistant, who specializes in graphics, has been working in this office since August 2013. The interior of the office has no windows, and according to Haffner, it’s hard to keep track of whether it is night or day. Suddenly, a loud alarm went off — but none of them reacted.

“That’s nothing, just testing the system,” she said, with a shrug and a laugh.  “They do that because they think no one’s here. No one cares about us.” 

At this point, Haffner has a pretty good grasp on her schedule. After working on Monday until 9 a.m., she hopped on the A train to the lower east side, where she lives. Her first stop was a small fruit stand, where she examined the produce carefully before picking out a bag of grapes.

She made her way back to her ground-floor apartment in Alphabet City, where she keeps a small garden in a little square yard. “I usually try to plant things like basil and rosemary,” she said. “Not anything too big, usually just spices.” 

After dropping off her work things, Haffner picked up two reuseable bags and headed off to do some grocery shopping. “I go to a couple of places,” she explained, “based on what I want to cook. And I’ll to go Trader Joe’s if I’m feeling fancy!”

Today, Haffner visited C-Town. She had decided to make peanut-butter chicken tonight — one of her favorites.

“There’s no sales on chicken,” Haffner said, disappointed. “That’s usually my first choice!” She looked carefully at the rows of different cuts of chicken meat, and finally picked up a four-pack of chicken cutlets, as well as vegetable oil and sugar. For her, food is about the savings as much as it is about maintaining a healthy lifestyle.

Her unusual work hours almost make it easier for her. “It was hard to cook for myself in school,” she said. “But now that I have the time, I can cook, I can work out. It’s different when you have a job. And I kind of like that I can do things during the day. After work I can just chill out at a park for hours!”

She walked back to her small studio  apartment and unpacked her groceries, opened the door to her miniature fridge and dug around for more ingredients.

“I try to use everything,” she said. “The benefits of having a small fridge — I have to eat everything.” She pulled out some leftover string beans and frozen ginger and then stopped for a moment to plan out her timeline. Haffner tries to go to a workout session three or four times a week, and today was a workout day.

She figured she had time to blanch the string beans before heading out, so she took a lighter and started the gas manually. As soon as the burner caught fire, she started to boil water in a small pot. As she waited, she pulled out the recipes on her iPad. She had found the recipe for garlic string beans in The New York Times, and the peanut butter chicken on myrecipes.com.

She worked at her small dining table, ripping off the ends of the string beans. “There’s not much counter space, so I have to utilize everything,” she said. “A lot of times I’ll search based on what I have in my kitchen. Sometimes I look in my big book,” she said, referring to a large scrapbook of cooking recipes that she had received as a gift from her aunt.

Haffner, a Long Island native, discovered cooking as a college student in New Jersey. While she lived at home, it was hard to ask her dad to buy specific ingredients that she wanted to use — and no one in her family cooked all that much. Her mom cooked a little bit, but her parents preferred to eat out. She also worked overnight shifts at the school’s radio station, and that late-night schedule has become somewhat of a lifestyle. 

“Happy hour after work for us is usually 10 a.m.,” she said cheerfully, and she means it literally: She and her friends have been known to have an after-work drink while other people head out for a mid-morning coffee break. “People look at us like we’re crazy!”

As soon as she finished blanching the string beans, she changed into her workout clothes and went to a training session for an hour at a community center a few blocks away, a rigorous session consisting of constant planks, pushups and fast-paced jogging. After the workout, she took a quick shower and began to cook the rest of the meal.

“I don’t like to wing it,” she said, as she carefully chopped up the exact amount of ginger and garlic. “I’m still learning so I measure everything.” She measured two tablespoons of vegetable oil and poured it into the pan, along with the ginger, garlic, and string beans.

The string beans cooked quickly, and then it was time for her to prepare the chicken. She plugged in her George Foreman grill and measured the peanut butter, which went into a pot along with small doses of chili pepper flakes, sugar, soy sauce and water. While the sauce was in the works, she grilled the four pieces of chicken on the grill — the rest would be her 2 a.m. meals at work for the rest of the week.

Her finished plate consisted of the peanut butter chicken slathered in sauce, the string beans with some kale tossed in and a small loaf of pita bread.

Victoria Haffner sat down at her table, ready to eat her dinner. It was 2 p.m., right on schedule.

Tags: CNN, day-dinner, healthy food, new york, NEW YORK CITY, New Yorker, overnight