If Food is Love, Then I am Aphrodite

  

What is there left to say about love? If we had the time and access to everything ever written about love throughout time, there would simply be no more original things to say. Love has been incessantly written, sung, and preached about. Love has been dissected, studied, and passionately obsessed over. From the different types of love-eight, to be exact-to our endless thoughts and interpretations of love, it will forever be a universal topic of conversation and frustration. For me? I think without love, there is no quality of life at all.

I'm eager to avoid the standard topics of love...romance, family, friends, and all that beautiful and brilliant stuff. Me? I love people, sure, but what I love is food. Not just eating it, although I excel at that, but how I adore cooking and sharing food. I love everything about the art and affair of cuisine, from planning a meal to putting the dishes away when the feast is over. It is incredibly satisfying to engage in the ritual of cooking a meal or preparing a dish from start to finish.

 
I fucking love it. I collect recipes, cookbooks, and cooking implements with fetish-like fervor. My email is plump with correspondence from cooking sites. I own more cutting boards than I do pairs of shoes, and I am proud of it and desire more. I am by no means a chef. I can, however, hold my own with a knife and am known for my nearly flawless ability to get all the courses of a dinner done simultaneously. I am a meticulous meal planner and am obsessed with food. I love, love, love food!

                "People who love to eat are always the best people." Julia Child

Admittedly, my love affair with food started when I was young. My earliest memory was at two years old when I was reluctant to wake my mom (the ultimate "good cook") to ask her to make me breakfast. Instead, I used some pretty badass, super dangerous little kid skills to commence making my morning repast. I found a frying pan, then pushed a vinyl-covered chair to the stove and climbed onto it. I cranked the gas burner into a blossom of blue flames and hopped off the chair. I then shuffled to the fridge, grabbed some eggs, and got to it. By the time my mom walked in, I'd poured olive oil into the pan, cracked the eggs into it, and was perilously close to setting my curly hair and frilly, mustard-yellow jammies on fire.

"Domenica!" she yelled, swiping me off the chair to safety. "What are you doing?" I calmly kissed her face and replied, "I'm just cooking, mama."

These days, you can find me (safely) in my home kitchen oasis, in sacred concert with vegetables, herbs, and meats. I relish the sound of crisp, crackling onion peels shedding as my fingers and sharp knife expose their pungent inner flesh. Oh, how my soul ripples with anticipation as I toss the freshly chopped onion into the glistening, heated olive oil. The sharp, sizzling sound as the onions hit the oil. My wooden spoon swirls around as they soften and caramelize. Now, I add the minced garlic, and the smells wafting through the house bring my family to me, one by one, like rats to the Pied Piper. They want to know what my love for them will look like as my kitchen concert crescendos to a finish. They know I cook with a lot of love, and I love to cook for them.

My mom, as I said before, is the ultimate cook. She was born and raised in a small mountain village in Italy during the ravages of World War II. She learned how to cook in rusty pots over an open fire. She learned how to survive on meager supplies and often begged for food for herself, her mother, and seven younger siblings. She's shared stories of digging up greens on the side of mountain roads as they followed German soldiers to an unknown fate. She learned how to do much with very little, and after she arrived in America at age 15, she worked multiple jobs in restaurants in Detroit to bring money home to her folks. Her knowledge of the commercial kitchen from her experiences in them at a young age is impressive. Me? I am in awe that she spoke almost no English and held her own with people twice her age doing things she was learning without any prior classical training.

By the time I was born into our family of seven, my mom had cooked every day since she was roughly five years old. She possessed the tenacious, scrappy skills of the Italian peasant cook and the knack of the commercial cook. We were poor, consistently poor financially, as a family born of two immigrants with limited education. We did, however, eat incredibly well as my father was a gifted gardener, and my mother was a creative cook. (Her creativity was born of need as well as skill.) We knew love because of the way our folks made sure we had food. We felt love because of how our mom tried to make it special.

Even though I am a cook born from a cook, my mom didn't teach her kids about cooking so much as she used us as kitchen staff. (To be fair, she did 93% of all the household chores and had an obsessive cleaning style.) She taught me a lot about how not to be because when I had kids, I wanted them to love the preparation and satisfaction of preparing food for others, not just the pleasure of eating the prepared food. When my oldest son could hold a utensil, I put him at the counter with me. We would sing while washing our produce. We would dance with spoons in hand and count as we put ingredients in bowls. As I was blessed with three more sons, I often had four little humans helping me in the kitchen. My kitchen became a temple of love; years later, all of my sons cooked one meal a week for our household. There is so much love in that simple act.

I love food. I dream of it: night and day. Most of my time at home is in the kitchen or kitchen adjacent to food on the brain. I talk about it like a devoted lover and have no shame in it (at least anymore) at all. I derive limitless pleasure in thinking about food, planning to make, making, eating, and, best of all, sharing food. I adore serving a dish to loved ones, watching their eyes light up, and seeing their face express pleasure in experiencing it. I love that my friends and family are excited to eat the food I make and that they know I am as excited to eat the food they prepare for me. I simply love food and all the beauty and art inherent in it. If food is love, then I assure you, I am Aphrodite.

Stay tuned for next week! We'll be welcoming our FIRST guest blogger to the Boundless Collaborative!

If you are a writer or have a story to tell, please email us at Boundlesscollaborative@gmail.com. We welcome women guest bloggers.