May 22nd is National Strawberry and Cream day. Many of the food writers that I enjoy reading had written about how they were using strawberries. I have always loved strawberries. When I was a little girl, I used to call them heart berries because to me they were shaped like little hearts. We used to grow them in our backyard and my mom would send me out to pick a basket of love. When I began dating, I used to find it incredibly romantic when my partner at the time would feed me strawberries. I have always had a passion for my “heart berries” because they always reminded me of love. Being able to share strawberries with someone special was about sharing my “heart” with them. Little did I know my theology of strawberries had a history that “stemmed” back to an early creation story from the Cherokee Indians called The Strawberry Legend. So this week, I thought I would just share this legend with you. When you are done, you may feel the need to feed strawberries to the ones you love.
Read moreYour basic vegetable stock – nothing more, nothing less.
I was talking to my brother this afternoon about cancer and how it has affected his life, the lives of friends, and now my partner who was recently diagnosed with breast cancer. One of the things her diagnosis made me think more consciously about was the impact of the food we eat and what it does in our system. I am not a super health freak. I am what my doctor would say “morbidly obese.” I have more excuses about why I cannot or do not exercise then Hasbro has games and Carter has pills, possibly combined. With a hectic life, I have enjoyed the convenience of packaged and processed foods. However, the last couple of months have catapulted me to this place of rethinking what I cook for my partner and I. So for the last two months, I have been trying to be more mindful about what goes in my body and working at making everything from scratch.
Read moreGod is in the details
Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe, a German architect, once said, “God is in the details” and Maezumi Roshi, a Zen monk said “details are all there are.” so what does that have to do with cooking. Creating in the kitchen is a process; it is like the story in the Hebrew Bible of how God created the earth. God would create something, look at it, and think it was good, but then the next day, God would create something else to go into this creation and so forth and so on. The creation was not a one time instant creation, it was an ongoing process of paying attention to the details, and tweaking it until it had become what was sought after at that moment.
Creating in the kitchen is also about the details.
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