Fruit From Her Garden

Cooking has been a passion of mine for as long as I can remember, as I’m sure is the case for most people with passions that run to the very depths of their souls. For me, the idea of being able to take these ingredients, these things that come from the earth and sea, and create something delicious is simply magical. There are few things that bring me more joy than watching the face of a loved one when I make them something they will go on to favor and adore all of their own.

Cooking stops time.

In the moments that you are slicing, dicing, and frying, it’s almost as if you’re untouchable and the only thing that matters is what you’re able to create and how it can impact the mouths around you. The scents that fill up the room linger like memories and the times that you share with the people you call your family, your friends, and your tribe.

For me, my passion started because of my mother. I can remember vividly being perhaps ten years old, lying cozily in her bed, the thick comforters wrapped around us both on a typical Saturday morning. I could always see that even though her eyes were heavy with exhaustion from the work-week of a single mother with two jobs, she still made time for me. We were watching Paula’s Home Cooking. Paula had grown to be a favorite of mine ever since I had laid eyes on her. With her funny and warm southern charm, she reminded me a bit of the women I’d see every Sunday when Mama took me to church.

“That’s too much salt,” My mother criticized disdainfully, scrunching her nose up. “That’s how you get high blood pressure.” She chuckled, almost to herself, and pulled me closer to her. “Do you want to learn how to make biscuits?” She had asked me, kissing my face.

My eyes widened. It was, after all, the first time we were going to make something from scratch. At this point in my life, I could make my own cereal, boil my own hot dogs and ramen noodles and make my own sandwiches. But we never had explored the depths of taking nothing but a few ingredients and turning them into something amazing, and special for us both.

So we set off into the chill of our kitchen. My mother turned on the lights, pre-heated our oven, and pulled out everything we needed. “Don’t we need a recipe?” I asked.

“I’ve never used one.” She shrugged, handing me the kind of old-fashioned sifter I see no one but grandmothers using today. “Just pay attention.”

She probably hadn’t known it then, but my mother had just given me one of my life’s most authentic lessons. Just pay attention.

Since then, in my adulthood, I try my best to just... pay attention. To be in the moment. To be present. To observe the things people don’t say as much of the things that they do. She taught me that moments are fleeting and that it's important to immortalize them as much as you can in your heart. Mama probably thought she was just giving a lesson in making biscuits but that cold Saturday morning, she taught me empathy and the power of love through food.

In the summers, Mama had a small garden on the side of our big, yellow house and she kept to it religiously. She would always come in on those hot afternoons, face smudged with black from her soil, and asking me to pour her some of the freshly made lemonade we would make that morning. I always had the most fun rolling out the lemons. Mama said it’s to get the juice out, but I just always found it fun to make them go from hard to soft and tender with just a bit of rolling. One day later into the summer, Mama came back in gleaming with pride. In her hands were two giant, green tomatoes in her hands. “Look at these, baby!”

I didn’t understand. “Those aren’t ready,” I said. “Aren’t they supposed to be red?”

“Those aren’t ripe,” I can remember her correcting me. “And they can be. I got a taste for some fried green tomatoes. You want some?”

I was confused. “We can eat raw food?”

“You can do whatever you want when it’s your food and it’s your kitchen.” She laughed, not even knowing how she, again, had impacted me. That one sentence, ingrained in my brain, is what started the journey to culinary experimentation.

I’m not a picky eater by any means. In fact, I am quite the opposite. One of the most exciting things for me is to try new foods, learn new flavor pairings, and trying new food combinations. She gave me the freedom to understand the controlled release of uncontrolled creativity. I can do whatever I want when it’s my food and my kitchen. As a teen, I was the typical nerd, loving video games and anime, which led me to a love of Japanese food. In my late teens, I spent exploring the rest of East Asian cuisine, and by my twenties, I was cooking food from Italy, Venezuela, Thailand, and Ethiopia before settling back into my southern soul food roots. If it’s one thing I’ve learned from my decade-long journey is this: We are not as different as the world and our opinions make us out to be. We all have our comfort foods, we all have our guilty pleasures, and we all have love in every bite.

My palate and my imagination had been stretched further than the little girl trying fried green tomatoes for the first time knew could be possible, and now, nearing thirty years old I’ve learned more valuable lessons on my journey than I’ve learned anywhere else in my life. My biggest lesson is this: every day is a new adventure, and an opportunity to open your heart, and mouth, to something you never had before.

Often times, we fall into the pattern of eating our comfortable favorites and cooking meals that are “safe” to us. As an adult, I learned that a lot of my friends and colleagues weren’t blessed with the wealth of wisdom and imagination my mother gifted to me. They often thought of cooking as something that was intimidating, some would even call it hard. For me, I was taught that cooking was not only fun, it was a way to bridge the differences between bickering family members, the distance between distant lovers and friends, and an opportunity for true human connection.

I want to teach people these pillars of my philosophy through recipes that are simple to read and execute, bursting with flavor, rich in culture, and most importantly, ingrained with this one simple notion: Your plate is a canvas, go and paint a memory. My recipes are as quick as they are comforting, and I think it's a beautiful thing when people remove the elitist, posh ideology of food and take themselves back to their family’s dinner table, or their friend’s favorite brunch spot and remember how those moments make them feel.

My mother passed away two years ago, but her garden is still rich in soil and abundant in fruit. Every so often, when I seem to miss her a little more than usual, she drops a tomato of wisdom from her heavenly vines and reminds me just how important it is to stay connected to everything that you love, and to everything that makes life feel just a little bit longer, and a lot of bit brighter.

Food in itself is a love language, one that’s easy to forget how to speak. The opportunity to teach this language, to assist people in becoming fluent in it, has been a long standing dream of mine.

I think it’s time for people to remember that life is short, and the differences you share with the ones you bicker with, aren’t that different at all. I think it’s time for people to learn recipes that make you want to sit down with your distant siblings, your long-lost friends and slow the very ticking of life’s clock.

After all, cooking does stop time.