IN THE KITCHEN is a monthly inquiry into food and cooking — tastes, plates, reflections on food and creativity, and recipes. Bring these with you into your own mornings, days, evenings, kitchens, and pair these with a journal.

A storm rolls through on a Monday midday bringing green skies, threat of tornado, and walls of rain. Within hours, the sky cleared again, like tears that pass through, and bring relief in the way of their wake. When grief arrives it blows through suddenly, too, replete with a wash of feeling, eroding, for a moment, some sense of dry ground. As the storm and the shock clear, to a glass jar I add herbs, hot water, and time— patience laden with lemon balm, motherwort, tulsi and hibiscus.

Summer expands eager. Squash blossoms appear overnight, and leaves stretch wide, and we are asked to root down in strength so as to expand ourselves and grow higher. Vaster, too—as in the view seen from the endless lake, the sunset that stretches out peach-toned and bright. Take a bite of cucumber with dill, swirl potatoes to cool, rained down with ribbons of mint. Let the season’s taste be felt through you.

July came and coated the earth in rain. Smoke painted itself into lungs, minds, and horizons for a few days. To sit upright in life is to learn to be like all that grows, full in the sense of trust and stillness. From this still place the herbs, the fruit, the trees, and tender growing leaves take form, finding opening in the steadfastness of sun. Storms rise, peak, and fade—and still, endurance of sun comes, burning off clouds into clear skies. Below, a recipe for tea, a balm to hold the heart, and a chocolate coconut pudding.

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IN THE KITCHEN is a monthly inquiry into food and cooking — tastes, plates, reflections on food and creativity, and recipes. Bring these with you into your own mornings, days, evenings, kitchens, and pair these with a journal.

On the days when the jar of cardamom is open, the camphor fresh scent of wood and citrus herb embraces not just the kitchen, but what feels like the entire apartment. Waves of spice waft out the windows, travel down streets, into scent and breathing. Add to smell the texture of wind, and cooler days’ breeze for nearly all of the last month, the gift of windows wide without humidity, and the scent transforms from intimate tablespoons to a whole environment—one of insight, and comfort.

In Chicago the last few weeks of spring were cool, almost cold, some sweater laden days; June’s weeks were absent enough heat to encourage, some days, in firing the oven. To a large metal bowl, almost weekly, I poured a small mountain of oats, covered the mound in sesame seeds, then a layer of cardamom.

Spring seems to come and stir up whatever’s left of winter, infusing rain and eagerness into days and the ground. Take the spoon and swirl the oats around. Olive oil, in its expressions of earthy fruit, meets with maple, wrapped around the seeds and grains.

June was a month of finding rhythms, learning a new kitchen, and infusing light and spice into the walls, windows, atmosphere, and wooden floors of the apartment. To ground down, the sweet infusion of oats laden in cardamom, eaten in the quiet hours of morning. Below, the granola recipe for the courageous summer bakers, or those for whom the taste of sesame and cardamom is one you crave.

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IN THE KITCHEN is a monthly inquiry into food and cooking — tastes, plates, reflections on food and creativity, and recipes. Bring these with you into your own mornings, days, evenings, kitchens, and pair these with a journal.

It turns out time dissolves differently in the weeks leading up to moving. I did not intend to leave essays drafted or lingering, mentally, as threads, as much as I did not mean to leave the plantain, lone in the wicker basket, until it was ripe as night; both went on without my wishing. The good news in time as ingredient — and its inevitability, change — is it can become a balm of forgiveness, and the plantain became softer, more pliable, sweeter, at which point, it called out to me by its new name, a yearning to become bread.

May was spent spread as if the last cuts of butter across the canyons of two apartments. A fast trip to Los Angeles at the start of the month for work meant both mornings at a favorite bakery. Then time spun up and out like the whir of the world, plants pushing up through spring ground and opening; I whispered thanks into the grounding rhythm of of breakfasts between old home and new. Below, a plantain bread, (adapted from the buckwheat banana loaf from Mother Grains) the last bake in the old apartment’s oven, with a miso coffee glaze that roused us in its gentle sweetness for the act of moving.

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IN THE KITCHEN is a monthly inquiry into food and cooking — tastes, plates, reflections on food and creativity, and recipes. Bring these with you into your own mornings, days, evenings, kitchens, and pair these with a journal.

Let us imagine: somewhere dark is morning and it rolls over and gives way into the light; somewhere from the ripe, dark earth lettuce and ramp and herb push up from thawing ground. We wake; we rouse; we emerge, and we could be plant or person, either way, plenty. We lighten. We slough off the dense hold.

To lighten up after the density of winter, I think, is to give over to the delicate nature of new things. It is the exhale after a deep full of breath in the lungs breathing. It is to wipe clean all the cold has accumulated. Inside, kitchen mirrors landscape outside. I watched as dandelions pushed through nearby hillside, pops of bright against the new tender grass green.

April, in its in between was less oven, less heat, more emphasis on foods that breathe brevity, clarity, the upward movement of this season. A delight was more light in the day; a taste of longer, eager hours. A delight: bright yellow turmeric in a batch of granola, with ample coconut. Another: one Saturday’s late morning bagels, toasted, with romaine, cucumber, and ramp cream cheese.

Spring does not hold back, and “joy is not made to be a crumb1,” Mary Oliver writes. “If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don’t hesitate. Give in to it,” the piece begins. Everywhere I look I see beginnings: the start of songbird, leaves, salad greens.

April was ample in generous, steady dedication. Below, a balancing dinner of brown rice, broccoli, and chickpea salad with a lemon anchovy miso dressing, plus a few more meals and notes to denote the season. This salad, generous in its joy, is one I cannot stop thinking of since we divided it into bowls and ate it, eager, with brown rice. This salad, somewhere between cool and warm, somewhere between winter, spring, and summer coming, is a bright, grounded joy in every bite.

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IN THE KITCHEN is a monthly inquiry into food and cooking — tastes, plates, reflections on food and creativity, and recipes. Bring these with you into your own mornings, days, evenings, kitchens, and pair these with a journal.

Like first hints of warm sun and the affirmation of growing in grass, some of life’s bliss bites, I think, are a well-balanced dance between temperature and texture, and the taste of a hot, buttered potato. Top with vegetables, flaked salt, and hazelnuts, and the meal grows in its nourishment and form.

A meal is a conversation. We converse between our inner worlds and the outer edges of life; we evoke the seasons, say, in how we choose (thoughts, plates, tastes or how we live our days. Soon asparagus, soon greens, once stuck in the soil, emerge out, filling market stands and homes and hands with their forward, onward abundance.

"One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well,” writes Virginia Woolf1. I agree. March was a month of nourishing the in-between: meals to ground down, to endure the not-yet-warm; days to let go — of heaviness, of brooding winter, of the force of air and heat. Below, a baked potato, dressed up, emerging to tend to bodies, minds, and the burgeoning spring.

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IN THE KITCHEN is a monthly inquiry into food and cooking — tastes, plates, reflections on food and creativity, and recipes. Bring these with you into your own mornings, days, evenings, kitchens, and pair these with a journal.

In a reminder toward the tender, Dōgen Zenji writes to consider all ingredients, all matters of cooking, preciously, “as if they were your own eyes.”

You are in the kitchen, and all of your life; your task is to take care. These instructions, of course, are to the tenzo, the cook; Dōgen is speaking to the life of a monastic. These forms inform the kitchen and all its ingredients and yet they are a metaphor, expanded into invitation into presence into the awareness of the preciousness of all matters of living — not solely in the realms of cooking. In a Zen kitchen, all is considered, all noted, all respected: you hold a tomato, a green, a spoon handle, and every seed, and each grain of rice, and each other, with tenderness, and move through your life and the kitchen, with respect, with two hands, carefully.

“Never feel aversion toward plain ingredients,” the text continues1. To Dōgen, a 13th century monk, the idea of cooking means the whole of your life, the tending of which is comprised of everything — considering your whole life as ingredients. “Without worrying about their quality, simply make the best of what you have,” the text continues.

February spoke in bowls, plates, and tastes of grounding, of which each plate, taste, and bowl I am deeply grateful. The month was colored in apples, in carrots, in root vegetables, shaped by warming, softening, simply made things: a cabbage lasted throughout the month, looming over the kitchen as if a globe; buckwheat noodles with miso, and several simmering pots of adzuki beans, below.

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IN THE KITCHEN is a monthly inquiry into food and cooking — tastes, plates, reflections on food and creativity, and recipes. Bring these with you into your own mornings, days, evenings, kitchens, and pair these with a journal.

In celebration of the humble root, MFK Fisher reminds: “It’s easy to think of potatoes.”1

Tamar Adler, later — in an ode to Fisher’s How to Cook A Wolf — uplifts the humble root, too: “We distain potatoes,” she asserts. “But where potatoes are prized, dishes made from them are appropriately located at the intersection between the rooted and the divine.”2

I find myself in what you could say is a similar in between, rooted here on earth of my kitchen, following the guide of a similar mantra or chorus yielding way to some momentary divine: as the water boils, and bubbles dot the top of the pot, I make soup. It is winter, cold, snow, middle of the week.

“Cabbages,” Adler continues, “do not grow underground but they are terribly neglected.” Potatoes and cabbage and some hint of earthy and divine, the soup below contains both.

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