Calm Between the Storms

Calm Between the Storms

The weather is crisp and Thanksgiving has come and gone. It’s the calm between storms. The first round of marathon cooking is behind us, and the next round is about to begin. When I was growing up, I would help my mother in the kitchen to have something to do. I enjoyed the flurry of activity: the chopping, the stirring, the mixing. My mother always made interesting dishes. She lived in Morocco for her early years, so I was exposed to things like couscous and stuffed grape leaves and pomegranates at an early age. One of my favorite desserts is homemade baklava. The honey and pistachios combined in phyllo dough blend together perfectly.

Helping in the kitchen as a boy instilled in me a love of great food. Through the years many of my close friends have studied the culinary arts. Each one has passed on various bits of knowledge and inspired me to be creative in the kitchen. I’ve learned how to make homemade sushi, pasta, tamales, and baklava. All are well worth the effort, but my favorite foods are the simple ones—a tomato picked from the vine, grilled zucchini straight from the garden, blueberries right from the bush.

Food for me is about pleasure—mmmm, bacon—as well as sustenance. Too much of a good thing can be bad. I’m into moderation and real foods. My grandmother always cooked with margarine, but I prefer butter. My mother-in-law uses Splenda, but I like to use raw sugar. I’m always leery of products with too many unrecognizable ingredients and like to use foods with ingredients that don’t come from a laboratory. I like my animals to have had a relatively enjoyable existence and prefer to stay away from ingesting too many antibiotics and hormones and genetically modified foods—a task that is becoming increasingly difficult if you shop at a store. It just seems like common sense to me.

As I gear up for another round of marathon kitchen aerobics, I’ll be enjoying a handful of pomegranate seeds as I make homemade peppermint bark, chocolate macaroons, and pistachio biscotti. It’s a wonderful time of year.

Geoff