Cooking is an act of love

Today I saw a great question about cooking on Twitter from Shauna James Ahern, also known as Gluten-Free Girl.  She asked: "What's the first dish you ever learned to cook? How did it make you feel to cook it?"

A memory immediately surfaced of me in the kitchen with my Grandma Mildred.  I was 4 years old.  I stood on a stepstool in front of the stove, while she showed me how to make scrambled eggs.  I felt very grown-up to be able to prepare my own food!

My memories of my paternal grandparents are inextricably connected to food.  Grandma wasn't the gourmand my grandfather was, but I connect her to my earliest memories of being in the kitchen.  I still make her zucchini simmered in tomato sauce with onions.  She made an amazing Manhattan clam chowder from scratch, the likes of which I have never tasted since.  The recipe is lost to us, but the memory is not.

Grandpa had the passionate love affair with food.  He loved talking about, growing, preparing and eating food.  Grandpa even made his own mayonnaise from scratch.  A recipe in his handwriting is still taped to the inside of the kitchen cabinet in my parents' house.  And he owned two Kitchen-Aid mixers! The delight with which Grandpa presided over the turkey at Thanksgiving still makes the holiday a bittersweet one for my family.  It was a tragic irony that he passed away the day after Thanksgiving when I was 15.  He is spiritually a part of every Thanksgiving meal I prepare.

My own abiding interest in gardening is a result of those early experiences watching vegetables come straight out of their garden and onto our plate.  We lived in the middle of densely-populated Queens, but their little backyard was an oasis with a vegetable garden and a flowering crabapple tree (yes, I ate those sour little apples too!) My grandparents also did a version of High Tea every afternoon.  They weren't of British descent, but my grandfather enjoyed the daily ritual of loose tea steeped in a mesh strainer (I still have his, tucked away) and other "noshes." 

Preparing and sharing food was an act of love for my grandparents.  It was never just about sustenance.  The more I refine my understanding of good nutrition and feed myself and my family nourishing food, the more cooking becomes an act of love for me too.  It's one of the reasons why, even on a late night, I insist we all sit down at the kitchen table to eat together.  We don't even have to talk. We just have to be together, sharing a freshly cooked meal. 

I know there's love embedded in every bite.

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