The table was set when I arrived. Two crisp white square plates, significant silverware on either side. A salad of mixed greens with deep purple beets warm from roasting, sliced thick.

 

A white rectangular plate held colorful divisions of vegetables: thick cucumber chunks, soft ripe tomato halves, slithery sweet roasted red peppers, tangy olives and neat white chunks of hearts of palm, drizzled with a balsamic homemade vinaigrette.

There were two other plates – one with four neat symmetrical curry-meat pies wrapped in homemade soft dough and another filled with round fried potato chop balls – exquisite mixtures of the best meat ground by hand at home and Idaho potatoes cooked soft with parsley, salt and pepper for flavor.

 

We sat. We talked. We ate. Our flavors combined and intertwined, our backgrounds similar but different.

           

It was a Saturday in fall and I sat at the round table in Samira Cholagh’s home. The “Chaldean Martha Stewart,” as she is known by friends and family, had concocted the most delectable and gorgeous lunch I’d had in a long time. And the conversation was true.

           

She told me of growing up in Iraq, of earning her degree in agricultural engineering at the

University of

Baghdad. She told me how she moved to

America in 1980 and two weeks after arriving, gave birth to her first son.

 

She told me how she tested soil as a career while raising three children as Americans with the rich cultural legacy she’d brought from Iraq and she told me how every inch of her house, her pantry, the clothes hanging in her closet, the drapes adorning her windows – were devised by her eye and her hand.

           

And now, years later, as her children are grown and she works in the schools, Samira has compiled her hand-hewn recipes into a cookbook for everyone to enjoy.

 

American-born Chaldean brides get the book as a wedding gift so they can recreate the flavors of their ancestry. Her Arabic-language cookbook was created lovingly so that non-English-speaking emigrants can learn the recipes their children request.

 

With every dish, she is bridging cultures and making a name for herself in the world of food.

 

“My kitchen was a lab,” she says of the journey she has almost finished, creating her third cookbook. The photographs for this book were taken by Jewish photographer

Ally Cohen. “I used my math – I am an engineer.”

 

The key to Samira’s food is its simplicity. “It’s always flavorful because we don’t play with it so much,” she says, pointing to recipes with a handful of ingredients – mostly vegetables and herbs.

 

Before I left, Samira placed a thick piece of buttery cake on a glass plate and poured me a hot cup of tea. I slipped the fork into the creamy heft and extracted bites of candied lemon peels (homemade, of course) and pistachio hunks.

 

We are a generation apart but we are living the same story. “The children will leave you,” she said. “They will go on to their own lives. To this day, I still worry for mine. And I am about to be a grandmother.”

 

Starting Oct. 6, you’ll find several of Samira’s recipes at Hiller’s Markets in the prepared foods department. 100% of profits from sales of her dishes will go to the Chaldean Foundation’s Refugee program.

 

It takes a community to build a life.

It was a lovely early summer night, on the cool side, and I sat in the garden patio at The Whitney, an old elegant mansion-turned-restaurant in downtown Detroit. Stephanie Mills walked between the ten-or-so tables, explaining the process of several labels of Courvoisier cognac and inviting us to sip each different brew.

My friend Jan sat beside me and to my left were three men I’d only just met that night: the first, whose name I didn’t catch, I’ll call Nimble. A skinny man with long hair that shook as he spoke and an accent I thought to be Italian but which I later learned was Iraqi-Chaldean. “I own a wine store and an alarm company,” he said. Sweet man. Divorced, mid-40s or older, two children he never sees.

To his left sat Claiton, a man from mid-state with a teddy-bear body who threw Yiddish words around like he knew what he was talking about. Three years younger than I, a divorce attorney, lots to say but charming in his own way. And to his left was Eduardo, the half Mexican, half Chinese owner of several elegant restaurants. My age, divorced, with one teenage daughter.

We sipped cognac, and then Nimble ordered a bottle of red wine and we laughed and played at conversation and tried to figure everyone out. When Stephanie joined our table, she spoke about versatility and how people like options and how every city has its unique wonderful qualities. A consummate politician working for a high-end luxury cocktail company.

I’ll tell you first that I didn’t like the VSOP but the Exclusif went down smoothly and I sipped at the XO. I’d never drunk Courvoisier though I’d learned the word in high school French class when a student named Brandy was searching for the French version of her name. The brand rolls off the tongue, a fun word to toss around, and it turns out that I, a lightweight drinker with an affection for smooth, refined tastes, actually liked two of three versions of this cognac.

In any case. Stephanie sat with us in her to-the-floor flowing summer dress (which was beautiful) and a black amorphous wrap (it was a cool night) and her shock of hair like a beautiful bird’s defining characteristic. I asked her how she came to have this position as National Courvoisier Ambassador. “Destiny met opportunity,” she said.

And she told me how a friend mentioned the job posting and she pursued it, really not aware of what it entailed. “They flew me to their headquarters in Chicago and asked me to present something I was passionate about,” she said. Stephanie led a tasting of Chimay, a Belgian beer that elicited passion in this New York girl, and because she was speaking of something she knew intimately and loved, she got the job, 1 of 300 applicants.

Stephanie travels throughout North America hosting cognac tastings and marketing Courvoisier.

At our table, she said things like this:

“I think we have to evolve to take into consideration anybody’s taste.”

“You have to be creative in growing your business.”

“It’s about being in the right place at the right time and being open to opportunity.”

As Jan and I waited on the cobblestones for her blue two-door BMW, I asked her what her impression had been. I’d learned in the night that she liked her beef tenderloin well-done while I prefer mine bloody. The twice-baked potato was smooth, the green beans buttery. The layer cake and coffee were delightful afterthoughts.

Jan, who was laid-off recently from her executive automotive engineering position and has been interviewing relentlessly for a new post, took this away from the night: “I think Stephanie is a great example of a woman who beat the odds and landed a fabulous job that she loves.”

Interesting, I said. Colored by Jan’s current employment situation, she gleaned a different meaning from the same conversation.

And me, a former journalist and current marketing and public relations maven, I saw an earnest, high-end, unnecessary luxury brand vying for its very survival in an economic downturn. I saw a massive marketing campaign to attract new customers, a zealous and sincere effort to spread the word about a product that probably previously didn’t need such a push.

I took away the notion that as smooth as the cognac went down, it is an unnecessary product in a time when even the necessary comes under scrutiny. And Stephanie’s job has become that of politician and diplomat along with marketing director.

However, I now know a lot more about Courvoisier and cognac than I did before the night began. So perhaps I have become a potential customer.

I will say also that on its website, Courvoisier’s clever tagline is find greatness within. An awfully karmic directive for a luxury drink company.

Maybe what I took away in the end supports my whole business model. That face-to-face conversation, that relationship-building, can sell and promote and further a brand better than just about any other strategy.

Last Sunday, I listened to Lynne Rosetto Kasper’s Splendid Table show and heard things I’d never heard before. Maybe it had always been there or maybe it was new, but the subtitle caught my ear: the show about life’s appetites.

To crave, to have room for, to create space to fill with flavorful bites. Appetite has the typical food connotation but of course we encounter many different appetites through the course of a day, a week, a life and this moniker expands the show beyond a mere food conversation.

Life’s appetites. A desire for quiet in the early morning and the opportunity to relish an early sunrise. The way a new day arrives without announcement or question, the light filtering through the bamboo shades, a gentle nudge awake like a loving finger stroke of someone beside you.

A craving for foods sweet, salty and with exquisite crunch or something not tasted in too long. A desire to be out on the open water without care or concern, no deadline to meet, nowhere to be, no one to worry about as the sun works its way in an arc overhead until it can rest as you do.

The exhilaration of a solo hike in mountains you’ve never known and the sound of a waterfall beyond the thicket of branches that you can’t see but know is beckoning. The anticipation of someone you have yet to meet. A remembered touch. A desire yet unmet.

Life’s appetites. There are so many in this complex web of streets, arteries through our days, clear-cutting across open field and obscured views. We judge ourselves too harshly.

In the quiet of a soft couch, in an evening padded with cool breezes, there was a horse bucking its feet against the dirt, kicking it up in waves and clouds. The horse represented freedom, a desire, a need, to run free from the chains of a previous week or an expectation.

There were jungle images, cowboys stuttering around a blackened campfire, men clawing at the fence and begging for entry. There were lions and donkeys and then, another horse, this one unbridled, bucking off any rider who attempted to mount.

It’s about the wilds, the teacher’s careful voice interpreted. You are seeking your freedom. Do not judge the emotions; it’s all perfect. You are where you need to be.

Life’s appetites. That’s what it’s all about.

As the sun crests over the treetops each morning, bakers arrive at my favorite grocery store, Hiller’s Market, to create something from nothing. It is the oldest of tasks, and the most basic. To bake bread is an element of independence that so many of us are just not familiar with, so accustomed are we to rushing through the aisles and purchasing items ready to eat this very minute.               

I did not grow up in a house where bread was whisked from flour, water and yeast, then left to rise in the mid-day sun. I did not as a child have the experience of standing at my mother’s kitchen counter and pummeling an elastic-soft mound of dough. I have made it one of my most important missions of motherhood to spend time shaping loaves with my bare hands and introducing my children to the art of living by the work of our hands.               

I have come to believe bread is the foundation of the family table – if only because in most parts of the world, it is the staple, the elemental expectation of a meal. In our country, we have loved and been tormented by bread – whether because we believed it to be the source of our fattening or a soft, smooth indulgence to be ingested over a low-lit table with people we cherish.               

A hundred years ago, the Pillsbury Company issued A Book for a Cook with the following quote: “Good bread is the great need in poor homes, and oftentimes the best appreciated luxury in the homes of the very rich.”               

It’s true. And so when I am still asleep and the artful bakers rise from their night-dusted homes to travel to bakeries, I am grateful. It is a seamless operation, this creating something from nothing. It is a simple pleasure to indulge in a fresh loaf of just-baked bread or a small pastry dripping with decadence. In these times, when we are sitting at the edges of our comfort and hoping for better times ahead, a small affordable indulgence is exactly what it takes to surmount one difficult moment.               

Into the industrial mixer goes flour, water, yeast that has bubbled to frothing. Sometimes eggs, sometimes butter, sugar, nuts and spices, fruits and onions and seeds. When the implements have finished their repetitive pounding, it is time for human hands to turn the mass of elastic dough onto a flour-dusted counter and massage it into rising.               

This task is not something that can be wholly automated; it requires tending by human eyes and guidance by time-worn fingers to reach perfection. It is a reminder that each of us is and will always be necessary to the day, even as we worry that automation will make our blood-born skills obsolete.               

Bread dough rises on racks and in pans and eventually makes it into shapes and forms and into the standing oven for timed baking. This process occurs again and again to satisfy shopper requests for freshness. Bakery shelves hold the oven-nurtured flavor of something made by hand and with heart.                

A fresh-made loaf of bread is a packaged promise of taste, aroma and texture, a gift to the senses, an attempt to satiate the soul, and the starting and ending point for many tables.               

This kitchen staple juxtaposes the all-important opposites of crumb and crust. It is a food eaten with grace or animalistically torn by the hands. It is one of the world’s oldest prepared foods and perhaps one of the only commonalities between many world cultures. In slang, bread or dough refers to money, giving a universal connotation to this humble creation.               

And it has religious significance, too. In churches, the sacrament of the daily bread represents a fusing of holy and mundane. When it says in The Lord’s Prayer, “Give us today our daily bread,” that means more than a bite to eat – it means the very necessities of life.In synagogues, bread launches holiday meals and also indicates travails, as when it becomes the focal point of the Passover holiday.               

Bread has even been the focus of political campaigns – it was central to the Bolshevik platform – “Peace, Land and Bread”; the undercurrent of Indian everyday lives – “roti, kapda aur makan” (bread, cloth and house). Bread was the central topic to free trade debates in 19^th century Britain and it played a starring role in the Magna Carta.               

But it is a food and not even a decadent one! Bread – so basic, so inconsequential, so essential. It is basic chemistry, mere sustenance. It is art and it is endeavor, backbone and accessory.

When I bought my first serious heavy sharp kitchen cleaver, I felt like I could conquer the world. So, too, when I baked my first loaf of bread, I experienced a certain power over my destiny and my family’s salvation that I had not known prior.

The culinary expert M.F.K. Fisher once said, “The smell of good bread baking, like the sound of lightly flowing water, is indescribable in its evocation of innocence and delight.”

I see it in much the same way. We’re all contemplating back to basics these days because that’s where everything begins. It is the end of

Michigan as we’ve known it but the beginning of a new frontier, one where we can and will conquer the insecurities of the day, if only we have the patience to let the yeast ferment and allow the dough enough space, time and warmth to rise.

When Asher was 3, he learned to fish. Ok, it was at the fishing expo in a big warehouse in the Michigan winter and the trout pond was stocked and still so there was almost no way to NOT catch a fish.

Still, when the Novi News photographer snapped a picture of my curly-haired little boy grinning big and holding a floppy fish that he would minutes later toss back into the still waters, it was a moment to savor.

We fished the next summer in northern Michigan but again, it was an orchestrated affair - a stocked pond managed by some shady-looking characters who eagerly beheaded and cleaned the fish that he and Eliana caught. I remember two things from that escapade:

* not-quite-2 Eliana dangling over the bucket of caught fish, the ends of her long silky blond hair bobbing into the murky water as her little hands massaged the slippery fish; and,

* the stiffness of recent rigor mortis setting in to the fish as I dusted them with herbs and butter and wrapped them in foil to cook in the oven.

They tasted good, you know, but I felt queasy eating something so recently alive.

Perhaps it would be more exhilarating and full of taste if we lingered by the bank of an active river and took our chances wading in the shallows, casting a line until something caught. Perhaps the finger-prick of blood from a sloppy worm would make the catch all the more rewarding, all the more tasty on our table.

A single mother of three must invite those opportunities rather than run from them. Last year I said, “This summer…” with every intention of meaning it. We never fished, though, and Up North was a carefully-prepared vacation with all the remove of people who don’t much like to sit in the dirt.

And so I will say today, while it is still cold and March and not quite nearing the summeritme, “This summer, definitely…” Asher is almost 7 so he could reasonably thread the hook himself now. Even Shaya can hold the reel, with my hands at the back to steady. I wonder if Eliana will still be interested in the murky water.

Read this.

A picnic for the senses, an invitation to taste daily authenticity…

That’s the promise of a lead article on the new National Geographic Foods of the World website.

What a gift! A beautiful pictoral representation of the way basic sustenance has expanded beyond mere food to become the cornerstone for tradition and connection, community and ancestry.

Some of my favorite memories come in pictures:

* My family around a long rectangular table laid with my grandparents’ fine china, my grandfather seated on three pillows in traditional Passover seder fashion;

* My mother and six of her friends in our kitchen, melting chocolate in a double-burner and pouring the luscious velvet into molds the shape of records, favors for my music-themed bat mitzvah;

* A silver Jacobson’s box filled with my grandmother’s double-chocolate brownies, brought by UPS to my Manhattan doorman building, then toted to my office for my American Metal Market co-workers to share all day long;

* Standing at my kitchen counter with my college-age cousin Kyle, rolling hot, wet lasagna noodles around a ricotta-spinach feeling and nestling in a bechamel bath, as we talked, and talked.

So many memories, conversations, relationships are secured over food. When I started this blog, I intended to make it about how we nourish ourselves, intending to use food as a metaphor for all the ways in which we care for ourselves and others.

I’ve done that in part. But this new National Geographic effort is so vibrant and right on the mark.

This afternoon, Shaya and I leaned against a heft of pillows on my bed, tuning out the TV and eating ice cream and M&Ms. I don’t pretend to think we shared a meaningful moment, but we shared something, certainly. He can feed himself, but we had great fun as I spooned melty neapolitan ice cream into his little mouth. He smiled, I smiled. That’s what I mean.

To wake one eye at a time, breath deepening. Absolute quiet all around. Years ago, I would’ve reached for the radio or the phone, just to escape the silence. Now, I relish it.

A life is a series of moments. One builds upon the last and the next, juicy as a late-summer peach. Little steps, appreciation building like my little boy’s blocks on the family room floor.

I used to race through the moments, my eye on the distant horizon. Now I know that you never reach the horizon and so I stop to taste the moments because they are all we ever hold.

To truly love is to not hold too tight, to not fear the leaving, to not abdicate control but to see, fully, those who stand beside us, in all their fullness. Never hoping to enfold them, to consume them, to conquer. Just to taste them for a minute, maybe another minute will follow.

Today is humid, the air heavy. All around me is a haze but I am so clear.

Beauty everywhere. Feelings dancing under my skin. This much emotion, how lucky I am to feel it.

I write words that make me cringe. Beauty everywhere? What is that? My grad school profs would be devastated and red-pen away.

Maybe living this fully escapes explanation. Maybe there are no words for this, maybe I am doing, so I cannot write it. Is that possible?

On my iTunes, Joshua Radin. Jason Mraz. John Mayer. Every song sweet as lovemaking.

There are flavors in my kitchen - eggplant roasted with garlic and farmers market tomatoes; lychees bursting on my tongue; that familiar milk-lightened coffee from Israel that always takes me back to the pink stones and the strong people on every street.

A new day dawning in every minute. I am lucky, I tell you. Supremely lucky.

A distant roll of thunder did not dissuade them. They bumped along the rutted road, past the white-boxed beehives, through mud kicking up at the tractor’s wheels and alongside the low raspberry plants, where people bent in crouches, freeing soft furry berries from the sharp tack of the bush.

Far along at the back of the grove, they rolled to a stop. The older children climbed down. The mother stepped off, reached for the baby at the top of the steps. He went to her in the way that children have of fully trusting the most familiar person. Like water’s easy flow down a forest ravine, coursing from source to source.

The tractor rolled away, completing its circle. The people ambled between rows of bushes tall enough to muffle sound from the next row.

Each child swayed a white plastic bucket. The grass underfoot was wet. “Pick the blue ones,” the mother told the baby. “Not the green ones.” The baby reached for a low branch, slid a just-picked blueberry into his mouth. None dropped into his bucket.

In the distance, more thunder grumbled its call. Another mother looked at the gray sky. She listened for another tractor but the road was still. “We could walk back,” one of the older boys suggested.

“If we get wet, we’ll have a story to tell,” the young mother told her children. And they were comforted by her voice.

Around the kitchen table later, their small hands reached into the bowl for taste-popping berries they had just picked in the quiet orchard. The kitchen was silent. Outside, the rush of the highway traffic a mile away sounded like a fast river the mother remembered from Wyoming.

The taste of summer on their tongues. A forever imprint.

It’s farmers market season again in these parts, one of my favorite details about summer. The kids are waiting for me to take them strawberry picking, then to the blueberry orchards, then apples, peaches, raspberries - whatever Michigan fruit is ripe enough to slide off the vines or bushes or low-growing trees and take a quick, juicy bite.

This morning sounds like I remember the orchards. My office window is open enough so that I can feel the cool sunrise air kiss my fingers. The white noise of nearby highways sounds almost like a river. I’ve seen the sky go from hazy-lavender to morning blue to streaks of pink to sunrise.

Last night, Eliana came scurrying into my room, afraid of the pop and crack of the fireworks. “I can’t SLEEP!” she wailed. Neither could I, but that’s nothing new. For when, at the end of a bustling, interesting day, I finally lay my head against the pillow, it’s time alone with myself and I suppose I don’t quite want to rush through that.

My tender little girl spent most of last night in my bed, despite several attempts to return her to her pink room. Her blond bob tilted in my direction, her round cheeks soft as I lightly graced her face with my fingers. So sweet.

Last weekend, I strolled along the Portland Saturday Market, eyeing mountains of purple-green artichokes like cool sunbursts, a stack of carrot points, pints of delicately sweet Mt. Hood strawberries whose flavor bursts on the tongue. I stood in a long line for perhaps the best tart I’ve ever eaten - a creamy-smooth mix of gorgonzola cheese, spinach, and mushrooms, whipped with eggs and just the right spices into a beautifully formed crust. It was art.

Many budding restaurateurs begin their careers at Portland’s Saturday Market, like Mark Doxtader, who for eight years trucked a wood-fire oven there every Saturday morning to bake pizza, bread and rustic desserts - and later, hugely-popular wood-fired baked bagels.

Just last week, Doxtader opened a restaurant called Tastebud (www.tastebudfarm.com), so boosted was he by his rousing market success.

That doesn’t quite happen here.

Still, this Sunday I anticipate strolling among tables of chard, tomato and just-picked strawberries at the Birmingham Farmers Market, sipping a steaming cup of coffee, and watching the little stream trickle along behind the inevitable musician.

The children will be with their father, but if they were with me, Asher would sink his teeth into a tomato and let the juices trickle down his chin. Shaya would taste just about everything I let him put into his mouth. And they’d all demand a cup of fresh-squeezed orange juice mixed with fresh-made lemonade, take three sips, and render it finished.

Asher, Eliana, and Shaya would also help pick just the right everything for the coming week. Maybe one night after, we’d make pizza like we haven’t done in months - the children rolling out their portions of dough, lathering on their favorite Don Pepino pizza sauce, and sprinkling atop the various fixings we’d chopped, sliced, and diced.

The best thing about summer is the freshness of flavors. Everything budding, working its way toward ripe, the promise of long days and peaceful nights on the kiss of the wind.

No hurry to get anywhere fast.

The perfect touch of warm air on skin. The tickle of grass under bare feet. And long afternoons on the backyard swing, children squealing in and out of a spinning sprinkler, happiness like a ray of unbreakable light streaking across my world.

The sun rises over the hills early here, in streaks of pink and blue. Sometime before 5 a.m., though I awake only as the brush strokes are fattening. A rooster crows. Really. Birds are very chatty now. The fountain cycles through itself, but then it did all the night.

Yesterday was a day of wine. For a girl from the heartland, far from the slow growth of grapes on vines and more used to the buzz of traffic and grit, it was a pleasure to listen and sip.

“If you’re here, you must stop at these wineries,” a young passionate man told me at the Torii Mor tasting room. He pulled out a map and a pen, drew lines from here to there. “Tomorrow is my day off and I’m going there,” he said to endorse.

In the morning, I had been to three wineries before noon. A giggle escapes my lips. At the Dobbes Family Estate, the lovely young woman pouring my tastings told me about the glass topped bottles that will hold the next harvest and dispelled the myth that twist-off bottles don’t by definition contain swill.

Joe Dobbes, whose name is on the label, loves making wine. “He sees it as a perfect blend of science, passion and art,” she told me.

for your hands, smooth as grapes, writes Pablo Neruda in “So That You Will Hear Me”

from “The Blind Seer of Ambon,” W.S. Merwin:

I take a shell in my hand
new to itself and to me
I feel the thinness the warmth and the cold
I listen to the water
which is the story welling up
I remember the colors and their lives
everything takes me by surprise
it is all awake in the darkness

Last night, I blew out a tiny candle on the edge of my plate of chevre cheesecake with pistachio brittle. Every exquisite bite pitted savory against the sweet of fresh Oregon blueberries macerated into a purple syrup. I almost forgot to make a wish, and when I remembered, there was nothing I wanted to wish for other than the exact feeling I had at that very moment. I ate Halibut from the Pacific off the coast of Canada, crisp atop a bed of celery-root risotto and surrounded by a brilliant moat of tangy tomato cream. The amuse bouche popped in my mouth - halibut ceviche atop a cucumber disk, thick local mushrooms giving off heat against the salty crisp of fried onion slivers.

So many flavors. Each taste on the tongue a surprise of satisfaction.

Before dinner at The Painted Lady in Newberg, I walked through the bookstore on the corner. The proprietor was whipping milk into foam at the coffee bar. So many bookstores here sell new and used titles, new and used together. I trolled up and down the aisles - there weren’t many but they were packed with spines. But there was no section of poetry, not even a single shelf.

I couldn’t contemplate buying a thing there. For without the carefully crafted words like sculpture on the page, it could not be a complete offering of thought. The bell on the door rang as it swung shut behind me.

Today I will drive to Portland. No plans, just steering the car ahead. A new place to discover, a new me to become. The sun is still climbing over the hills as I write this. The pink has deepened and now counts a layer of lavender along its canvas. What of the colors of nature? Why imitate what is real? The grapevines look yellow beneath the pine trees and I know that at the bottom of the gravel drive here, my friend the hawk is soaring in circles, screaming his independent cry.