Big Game, Hunting, Cowboys & Rugged Stuff…………..

I pride myself on my ability to adapt well to my surroundings, especially when visiting new places that are extremely foreign and different. Certainly when one spends life traveling to various parts of the world (outside vacation spots), you get used to this need to adapt.  I remember my first big challenge in adapting on the travel circuit.  My father, my four brothers and me jumped into a red Chevy pick-up truck with a camper shell, a decked out bed in the back and pulling a travel trailer (you know the type with a kitchen, bed, and a tiny little place for a bunch of people to camp in).  It was our home for about 4-6 months after our initial journey began.  We were headed to Nicaragua on a venture my father has always called (and still does) “The Pierson Fight & Flight for Family Freedom.” We left from Palmdale, California and next thing you know us four American kids were sitting at the border of the United States and Mexico in Mexicali, crossing the border in an experience that would shape all of our lives and the lives of the many others we came across.  As my father went into “La Migra,” the immigration office, a word we became super familiar with on our long journey to Central America, my brothers and me stayed in the truck in a state of utter culture shock. 

I should probably first give you a bit of background on us four kids, to make the nature of the shock more understandable.  We grew up technically poor all over the Los Angeles surrounding area, born in Santa Monica and then moving to Venice, Westlake Village, Agoura Hills, Acton, and finally ending up in Palmdale.  We played sports, were good in school, but our parents fought (the divorce being the catalyst for the venture to Nicaragua – technically it was a kidnapping but we never looked at it that way, and no one ever asked!) It was me, 12 at the time, and my 3 brothers; Axel, who was 13, Olof 8, and Gustav 4. We were a tight knit group of siblings with a massive need for freedom and we still are (close but independent).  Our general upbringing and all of that moving around certainly required us to be adaptive, but this was different.  The journey to Nicaragua not only was our first major  experience of adapting outside of the US, it was an experience that went on to change our lives forever, allowing us to broaden our perspective on what adaptation really means, and has proved to us all that it’s an essential component in moving our lives forward.

To get back to the pick-up truck, there we were waiting for my father who was in the office of La Migra on the Mexicali border.  Everything was written in Spanish (not too foreign for us being from Southern California), and there were tons and tons of small children that appeared homeless running all around like nothing we had ever seen.  Almost immediately after my father left the car, about 15 kids rushed to the windows of our truck, banging on them and speaking to us, holding out their hands.  At the same time, about 6 more of the children jumped on the windshield and started to wipe it with dirty and greasy rags (which we learned later were useless when it rains and you’re in the nighttime jungle and can’t see a thing!)  We of course were confused and somewhat angry, being territorial of our truck, and were repeatedly telling them no, learning that we couldn’t communicate as we understood very little Spanish at the time.  This lasted for about 30 minutes until my father came out, when the children rushed around him, putting their hands out.  He gave them all coins: nickels, dimes, pennies, and maybe a few quarters.  When he got into the car we told him we didn’t ask them to clean the windows and he said, “It’s ok guys, it’s just a part of what we are about to experience.”  He smiled at the kids and we – my brothers and me – were baffled beyond belief at what had just happened.  Two months later, by the time we finally made it to Nicaragua, we were all well versed in this occurrence and knew to give the kids coins before they wiped the windows so that we could avoid the smeared and greasy windows in the rain! 

It didn’t take us long to adapt to the strange new cultures we are experiencing every day.  As we drove through Mexico, El Salvador, Honduras, and into Nicaragua, it wasn’t long before the American culture began to seem a strange and distant memory.  Upon our return 3 ½ years later, we had to adapt gravely yet again, and I am not sure any of us ever really adapted back to the American way.  I think we all still hold a large part of Central America inside of us.  We learned of the need for adaptation and the importance to try and quickly understand the surroundings and the people you are around.  As I continued to travel the world as an adult into small rural areas of South America, Mexico & Central America, Europe and the Middle East to visit subsistence-based locations, I realized I would always use this skill, and that to be able to adapt has given me an openness that allows me to have a full experience of each location I visit.

This year for Christmas I stayed a bit closer to home (at least staying in the United States), and went to Wyoming to visit my brother and his family.  I had been to Wyoming before and knew that it was a desolate and somewhat isolated place.  My expectations were pretty clear going into it and my priority was spending time with my family.  But what I discovered through this trip is how my ingrained ability to adapt has given me an amazingly unique way of looking at and absorbing my experience of the world, as well as really being able to take in and understand the people that inhabit the area.  As a New Yorker, we get pegged as city folk, and while I like that, I know that deep down the person I have become is a product of the world.  This recent trip to Wyoming allowed me to contemplate again the idea of adaption and the necessity of truly adapting with openness.  

The kitchen is no different.  Adaption plays an integral part in the process of preparing food.  It is a process that I have always been comfortable with, and one that I try to teach to my students.  Adaptation is not only integral to how one approaches cooking and the ingredients used, but in how one approaches eating as well.  I had come to Wyoming at a time when I was really trying to make a push towards eating less meat, but Wyoming is filled with meat and a meat philosophy that was a new experience for me.  Yes, they have grocery stores filled with mass market factory farmed meats, which is the real problem with meat and the reason I had wanted to cut back.  But what was so amazing about my Wyoming experience was coming closer to an understanding of the hunting mentality, which has always been one that I don’t understand, but once in Wyoming it started to make more sense.  There is literally nothing around in terms of development, and people hunt and eat bear, elk, moose, wolf, deer, sheep, and other things in the wild, and they eat it and cook it using recipes that utilize the whole animal – nothing goes to waste.  It is indeed their “local movement,” and the actual experience and concept of hunting, for the first time in my life, began to make more sense.  I could feel myself being open to things that I didn’t previously understand by allowing myself to see and experience the perspective of others.  I believe this process of adaptation and openness is the key to moving through life.  It is so important when moving around and meeting other people from so many diverse backgrounds to be open to trying to understand their perspectives, knowing that like almost everything, our perspectives have to change in order for us to adapt.

When Even A Whisk Can’t fix it…………..

But A Drink Might! This blog is pretty therapeutic for me. I find my cooking and my life so interconnected that I realize that the more I “work out” what’s inside my head, the better my cooking gets. As I grow older, wiser and  mature, I think, as I have stated before, that my cooking has more depth, clarity and a subtle naturalness to it that I desire in my being in general. This month, December, the end of the year, we embark on the meaning or shall I say acceptance of failure. Now I don’t want to sugar coat this and make failure seem to be something sweeter than it is. Failure is a lack of success; certainly I’m not a big fan and haven’t found too much satisfaction in the experience of failure in my life nor in the kitchen, but I have recently found it to be helpful.

Let’s start with the obvious dictionary definition of failure:

1. The condition or fact of not achieving the desired end or ends: the failure of an experiment.
2. One that fails: a failure at one’s career.
3. The condition or fact of being insufficient or falling short: a crop failure.
4. A cessation of proper functioning or performance: a power failure.
5. Nonperformance of what is requested or expected; failure to report a change of address.
6. The act or fact of failing to pass a course, test, or assignment.
7. A decline in strength or effectiveness.
8. The act or fact of becoming bankrupt or insolvent.

I will first off admit I have experienced each and every one of these definitions of the word failure so I can attest in this blog, most specifically, that I am well qualified to write on this topic. I have had all kinds of failures in life, everything on this list including bankruptcy and insolvency. My kitchen failures have probably been a bit less than my personal and life failures; however I am now starting to believe that has only been a matter of perception. Failure, despite it’s very real and is certainly not succeeding. But what does “not succeeding” exactly mean and what positive impact if any can failure have on us, in our general lives and then how does failure in our general lives change our successes in the future? These are the questions I have been pondering as of late, due to the same sort of factors I speak about in my blog in general; love, work, family and friends, all of which reflect on my cooking thoughts, ideas, executions and ultimately my failures and success’. I guess my conclusion in all this thinking is ultimately that the energy that one’s takes out of a failure (whether it be positive or negative energy) and puts into the growth or learning process or general meaning of that particular failure, has a direct correlation with any future success on has not only in that particular failed, event, relationship or cake.

So let’s take three examples in my life of recent failures in all different categories and try and breakdown what I am saying or shall I say proving my hypothesis with examples from my own life, my own failures and how they have come to be paths to my future success:

Work I’ve been working on a particular large project in my fruit & vegetable world, one that I thought would be a total success and quite easy to be frank with you. As I entered into this project, everything I knew to be true was not, all I expected was not and I realized I wasn’t equipped to handle such wide spread differences that I was encountering in my daily work life. I wasn’t able to communicate properly with the new people I was working with, I wasn’t able to convey my expertise or expert opinions to the new systems and I wasn’t able to make the progress I set out to achieve. Ultimately I failed. In this case I failed myself, by realizing I hadn’t developed the tools for work failures like this. I hadn’t the people skills I needed in this new realm and I hadn’t quite mustard the patience to deal with the overwhelm I was facing. The good news is as failure began to get underneath my skin I knew I needed to find ways not out of this particular failure, as that was now out of my hands, but I had  to concentrate on what it meant, what my role was in it and how I can deal with this type of failure in the future. Also I needed to address similarities in the general failure I was facing in life  and try to correlate them with triggered behaviors or reactions. When I started to analyze the path and the other similar paths I began to take notice of patterns in my behavior that I needed to change, not for the sake of the work not failing but for the sake of learning better coping skills in the future for the possibility of disassembling future failures on the way. Meaning with my good attention paid to the real behavior problems (my own) that triggered or had a leading role in the failure I would be able to make changes to, not necessarily the failure, but my reaction to it, thus leading to the failures being limited in the future as the general rule of energy goes, what you put it you get out. So changing the very way I look at failures in this case was the pinnacle of what helped me understand that failure in the work place (something I rarely experience) is not only inevitable but invaluable for growth. The greatest lesson on took from this recent work failure would be my problems with reacting and my need to control reaction and this lesson I can also see needed in my cooking, which is often like my work, rarely failures but always room for subtle life changing improvements!

Love failure in love is a  heart wrenching experience, I don’t think there is any gentle way of putting it or any way at all to put it that is doesn’t totally suck!  I talk in riddle a lot on my blog when it comes to love, mainly to protect the identity of someone I have deemed to be “the most positive influence to my life”.  There will be no uplifting of this veil here today as to his identity, however I will say that I have recently encountered failure in this particular “relationship”, massive failure, which we will see evolves into growth not that it feels good but it does evolve into growth.  It seems so dramatic and points to some sort of breakup or explosion of sorts, but to understand that this is not and could not be the case, I will first have to give some background to the very nature of the relationship that will help put it into perspective as well as shed some light on the beauty of “complicated” relationships.  This “relationship” I have been a part of   for many many years now has waxed and waned and evolved into many things, but the main thing it evolved into was a nurturing, supportive place for us to be ourselves and grow, evolve into better people.  My cooking over the years waxed and waned as well and as I was nurtiered I in turn nutured my cooking. For whatever reasons our bond was unique and our ability to communicate, somewhat easy, although it required much hard work, especially from my part, as I had never encountered someone so pure in communication (not that he doesn’t has his communication faults) and our genuine care for each other always seemed to trump feelings of anger, conflict  or confusion etc.  The recent failure I have encountered in this “relationship” was all about my problems, my unresolved issues and ultimately my inability to deal with overwhelm as well as my inabylity to  take care of myself.  Essentially what happens to me is this natural occurrence of “shit coming to the surface” when it needs to.  It was time for me to deal with a few personal, let’s call them “quirks”, so that I could take good care of myself and evolve as I needed to. I was stuck and he was my obstacle.   I became stuck in the idea of this “relationship” and was so intoxicated by the beauty of the communication, the care and positivity that it didn’t matter to me that the tangible possibility of being didn’t exist, for many complicated reasons.  My cooking was always stuck as well when I was and I began to realize I had gotten into a pattern that was unhealthy.  I had failed myself by allowing myself to get too deep and now was having a hard time breaking away and taking better care of myself.  The overwhelm, the anger, the negativity I began to drum up often, was sinking me and making even our beautiful communication and connection come crashing down.  I needed to regroup to ultimately take what I am calling a failure; it was a failure at the time because I didn’t deal with it well and turn that failure into something positive.  By really gaining clarity on my role in the failure, by taking accountability and responsibility, I began to realize that it was me, making this a failure and me making it a negative in my life which was prolonging more negativity in my life and brining more failure to  all aspects of it.  There is that negative energy again attracting itself! So without getting to deep into the nitty gritty of my life, I have begun to take responsibility, and  on this slow path I am finding that with the support of this new “friendship” that has changed and evolved from this older “relationship”  and with my constant focus on trying to deal with overwhelm and feelings, the failure has become a lesson, the “relationship” a beautiful story and the future will hopefully offer me more of the beauty of the past with a tangibility that appeals to me these days.  I know my cooking with take with it the beauty of this long adventure as well as detailed wisdom.  Wisdom and change were born of the failures in this  love, which will ultimately give me greater access to real love in tangible ways in the future and this way of understanding my feelings role in my life an patterns led me to understand how it effected both me and my cooking.

 Kitchen I am a feeling person, so many people say and my cooking is and has always been a direct result of how I am feeling in life; work, love, family etc. As I am evolving into a more, let’s call it, grounded person, I am beginning to separate the feeling from cooking and more and more make cooking not about my feelings but about me. The evolution has been great for me to witness, as it has given my cooking more power and my feelings less. Failure is what has helped me realize this, failure has made my cooking inevitably better, stronger, more detailed and it has completely given me a new artistic edge that comes with simple conviction, which I think is an evolvement of the conviction of who I am as a person. The lessons of failure in life have made way for me to learn and grow as a human being and most importantly make a distinction between who I am and what my feelings are. As this has occurred feelings don’t have that great of power over my cooking and I am somewhat free to have my talents in the kitchen separated from my feelings and what is happening in my life. Now this very occurrence ( my feelings and cooking being separated) have given way to the greater realization that I am not my feelings either, which has helped me manage in life better lately. I have found my cooking as of lately to be more whimsical, more grounded and more flavor merging that has surprised even me. I feel like my cooking is slowly evolving into the adult that I am and I am proud of that fact and I know that through my failures in and out of the kitchen I have come to be a better cook and a better person!

 
My New Favorite Tool in the Kitchen & In Life!

There is a pot of Spicy Chipotle Pork Chili slowly stewing on the stove, I am patiently awaiting its final approval to enter into my belly. It’s snowing outside (it’s Oct 29th today if that gives you an idea of the oddity of that fact) and I just arrived on the red eye from LA, where it was 85 degrees and sunny, life is diverse and each moment things change and in some cases drastically, the one thing that has changed most for me recently is my newly “acquiring” instincts in the art of patience. This art of patience I have always thought was impossible for me to achieve in my life, I have often just accepted defeat in this realm and accepted this was not my strong suite and have over the years developed mechanisms for dealing with my lack of patience. Life in the past year has given me some of the most challenges and the most positive growth yet and this current moment of life I find myself with an abundance of walls breaking down, these walls are some pretty major interior ones, protecting my core being. Now I am not going to tell you that the walls simple began to breakdown, I know this is a bi-product of the work that I have done on myself, the attention to my issues that I have placed importance on and the acceptance of the path or journey that I am on, knowing this is a life process rather than “tasks” or “things to overcome”.

My life as of lately has been providing me with tremendous growth and deep revelations of breakthroughs and I can see my cooking being affected through this process and transformation as well. Which for me doesn’t seem odd as I believe in the interconnectedness of all. Like my new nuances in the kitchen I have a great deal more gentleness in my life, toward people, processes and in general. This does not mean I have lost my edge, my verve or my aggressive side, it simply means that the instinct of patience is now a newcomer to the mix and shows its face typically when I need it to. When I think back to my childhood, which I did a great deal of this past month because of a trip to Santa Monica & the LA area, where I was born, I remember being a patient child, especially with all of our animals. So I realize that it wasn’t that I never had patience but my life circumstances and my lack of coping skills and adults to show or emulate the art of healthy dealing, made way for my impatience to be born. And thus many other bad habits and ways of being. We all deal with our childhoods in some way, we all adapt to the shortcomings that we lack as children and for me my defense mechanisms were to protect myself at all costs, rely on my instincts and survival skills first and foremost. This way of being is not conducive towards pensive thought, pros and cons, ramifications or anything like that, it is quite animal actually and I think if I was to be completely honest and this is the first time I have said this or thought about it, up until lately I would describe myself as more animal than human in a weird way. With this new found patience (many other new gifts are being born in me as well lately not just patience) comes a new feeling inside of my body. The way I physically feel things is completely new to me and certainly has a great deal of fear associated with this new “feeling”. But there is also a new trust in myself that is not just about instinct and animal but about intellect and reason and sanity of sorts.

The journey of how this new found patience came to be, I think is the irony of it all, the secret to success if you will is so utterly simply it seems like a bunch of bullshit. The answer that I seem to gravitate towards is love, and I am not talking about getting married, holding hands or sex. For me love is something I have always battled with in terms of what the definition is. I am swayed by society and influenced by media and even hallmark for shit sakes, but most of all my confusion came to be because of a lack of it in my life, throughout most of my life. “When you have never seen the ocean, how can you know if it is indeed the ocean you are witnessing?” Now I never wanted to delve into this fact much probably more so to protect my family, mainly my father, but to my father’s defense, he was the one in my life and still is that gave me love and as our family aged together we evolved in that process as people should, learned from our pasts and in the end myself and my three brother and father were the only family I had and thus the only early on love I really know. I know there will be many out there that want to dismiss this, mainly my mother but realistically she was simply angry for her own choices and thus even the love she thought she was showing us wasn’t genuine as basically she had her own stuff going on she avoided dealing with. My mother’s family the same as they abandoned us when the divorce happened and thus send us a subliminal message that we were not loved. Now I don’t think any of this is overly complicated just hard for us to really understand the future ramifications of it all and the “trickle-down” effects that begin to take shape, so minutely and just add up over the years. As I aged I became good at self sufficiency and kept feelings in a place inside to deal with later (which I did, and I thank myself for that) and while I moved through life I didn’t really learn what love was, I thought I did, I felt deep love for many people and not just lovers and men but my brothers and their wives and their children and friends. But I was not great at accepting love form others it confused me. I had no boundaries and no patience to sit and analyze any of it. I had fleeting moment throughout life with amazing examples of people who taught me genuine love and genuine human kindness, this, the meaning of this, I also put away to deal with later in life (which I again thank myself for doing) so I have been absorbing many things in life and basically subconsciously putting them aside until something clicked, which is where I find myself today. I reference on of my favorite saying sin Hebrew often; ha simon nafal, which basically translates to the coin click when a coin drops into a slot. The coin click for me always represents simplicity and yes I know it is not simple, the key to it all is that I have been present and active in trying to make sense of this thing called life. I have been able to do this partly because I invest heavily in the work and sacrifice a great deal in order to achieve this depth within myself but I have also chosen to surround myself with a few others, one in particular who has allowed me a safe loving place where I can move through this journey with love and love real love, the kind that is about, kindness, understanding, gentleness, non judgment, protection, trust, respect, and above all patience. When we can mirror these traits or qualities to each other we can then give to each other a safe place to grow and learn and make sense of these lives we have that are complicated, messy but also amazingly beautiful.
I met a woman on my trip to LA and she was 103 years old, decked out in a bright colored dress with jewels on her ears, pearls around her neck a bright broach and florescent yellow eye shadow, she was amazing, her energy simple and beautiful. She said to me in our discussion, ‘the secret to life is simple, it is only what you make of it”. I used to want to make everything happen at once, my explosive nature is a gift but a quality that needed some patience as well. So as I continue to acquire this new art of patience, I can see my life changing positively as a direct result of this. In the kitchen I think I realize I have the same tendencies that I did in life, quickly produce results top notch results, but as this patience continue to merge into my blood, I can see even my cooking becoming more joyful an experience rather than a task. I can understand more deeply why I need to slow down in the kitchen and I can directly equate my current lengthy personal relationship journey with an unbelievable man to the slow process of caremalization in onions and how that long slow, subtle heat process is needed to achieve that sweet, savory, succulent perfect flavor. All good things need patience and I am glad I was able to grow and evolve in life in order to achieve that as I can see my life benefiting positively because of it.

Don’t get me wrong, lately my patience has been tested in more than five of six ways. There is a substantial amount of change happening in my life at this moment, new processes being born ad this is typically the time when patience is the most difficult to attain and attract, especially for a hot head like me. So as I venture out into this world that continues to challenge me I am defiantly tested regularly even when I am in the midst of learning valuable lessons and this patience lesson is no different. I find myself dealing with a lot of new personalities, many of which I find frankly confused or warped, however I have matters of business with each and items I need to accomplish and need these folks to accomplish it s I am trying to find the common ground or in this case the patience to let it play out as I need it to. To keep my ideals and stay true to myself while giving a larger open to others or in this case a big dose of patience. Its hard and I make countless mistakes but I am trying my damnedest to come through with results all while exercising patience, I think solely I am accomplishing this!

I think life is a lot like cooking, talent is not the issue it’s the effort and faith in the possibility of achievement. We must move forward in life and cooking with the idea that we are able, we must be willing to do the work, really do the work needed.

“I claim to be no more than an average man with less than average abilities. I have not the shadow of a doubt that any man or woman can achieve what I have, if he or she would make the same effort and cultivate the same hope and faith.”

- GANDHI

Discovery of the Unexpected & Added Growth

The weather is now finally turning cooler; the summer is and feels gone.  Fall has arrived and the feeling of change is in the air.  When the seasons change I often feel inspired to discover, especially in the kitchen with new seasonal items coming into our lives it seems like a great time to discover and rediscover something “different”.  For me this something different keeps my mind alive, leaves the stagnation for others and inspires me to go further into life and finding the “unexpected” which is ultimately I believe what feeds my growth, growth in my body, mind and spirit as well as in my cooking repertoire. I feel like when my cooking is easy and open, than my entire being is as well.  It’s true one does not have to travel across the world to find this openness in oneself, this invitation to attract the unexpected.  I guess I am simply lucky that traveling around the world is part of my life and therefore and extra catalyst for my growth and discovery of the unexpected in my life and on my plate.

This past month I had the privilege of traveling to Israel.  As many of you know this is somewhat of a normal commute for me, typically traveling there about 4-5 times per year over the past 8 years.  My travels to Israel have always been for my business.  This fall my travels were somewhat unexpected to Israel.  After closing down my fruit and vegetable company months back I hadn’t imagined that I would be traveling back to Israel for a long, long time.  But then the unexpected came into my life, an invitation of sorts to go back inside the world of produce, the invitation was both exciting and frightening.  Exciting because for sure after an in-depth career in produce for as long as I had, I did in a sense miss it and the prospect of doing something I had focuses most of my adult life on again in order to make income, was extremely inviting.  But the fear was also present as I had become submerged so in depth in my business that I had lost my personal self.  All that I did and tried to achieve was for others, growers, customers, and the overall perception of success at my job, took over my soul.  I have in the last years slowly pulled myself out of that way of life or way of not actually living and my fear was that I was not able to control myself in that world, as one grower said, its addictive this produce business.  So with a great deal of thought and introspective reasoning, I decided to venture back into this world that almost killed me.  But what was unusual was the unexpected pairing I encountered.  I guess the best way to describe it is that old saying you attract what you spend your energy thinking about.  So because I wanted to be in this world of produce in a more subtle and sorter way, this is the exact situation I attracted and thus I think for me this new venture is finally more fitting than any other venture I have taken on in produce to date.  So this unexpected time of my life is exciting and Israel came next with even more unexpected rewards and thus even more growth, not to mention as usual some of the most amazing food I have ever eaten!

 I typically travel to Israel alone and because I go so often “tourism” isn’t typically on my agenda, I have done most the tourism in the past and grew somewhat complacent in my travels there, seeking food and the solace of the sea in most my free time, not to mention a few fine gentleman callers!  But on this occasion I had a traveling companion, and not any traveling companion a woman from the new company I am venturing into a cooperation with who is one of the few woman professionally that I have met that is extremely similar to me.  She is my senior and she has much more experience in certain realms of the business than I but in general we are extremely similar.  She has been in charge and responsible for a large sector of the company she works for, she travels all over the world often and alone doing business with mainly men and has this amazing passion and drive to help growers of cultures all over the world.  She is trained corporately and is well respected in the industry.  I had known her in passing in the industry for some years but on this amazing trip I got to know her and really understand that I am not alone in this business as I had thought I was for so long and I probably was alone in my business, which is blamed for the way my business started, essentially I was alone. 

Not only did I find out so many (pleasant) unexpected things about this woman, we (me and my fellow Israeli produce peeps) also had the pleasure of ‘selling” this woman on Israeli culture. Since it was her first time in Israel and she was about to start a long term relationship with the Israelis, the same one I have had over the last 9 years, the culture, their world was important for her to see and unexpectedly I discovered my connection again to this place I had been traveling for almost 25% of my life!.  For me this “tourism” allowed me to discover so much unexpectedness in myself, not only the rediscovery of my connection and love for Israel but I got to witness so much that I wouldn’t have seen on my own, so much that I got to indulge in, that had she not been with me, I would have passed right by.  Also I have found that the more I travel alone the less I do.  It’s kind of like this circle.  At first traveling alone is an absolute pleasure, however after time, it’s  well, lonely. And the loneliness made me a little stagnant in my travels so I want to take notice and appreciate with full gratitude the fact that traveling with this women brought me back into my discovery mode, my awareness of the unexpected! This unexpected discovery brings one always closer to the or their truth and for one to discover this, you must be looking so I was helped by this lady, encouraged to be looking again.  The reality in the end is the unexpected can be found anywhere just look around, which is much harder to do than we realize!

Pondering the Meaning of Family, Earthquakes, Hurricanes & Gratitude

As I write this month’s blog, an earthquake has just happened, a hurricane has just past through and a lot of feelings about family and friends have been stirred up at the same time.  Events in life, events of mine and events of others have caused me to ponder what family means and within that thought comes the questions of friends as family. The idea of family and friends and the meaning thereof  is  a topic frequently pondered in many lights throughout our lives. Not only coming to terms with who is blood related and what that means to be part of an immediate family, continuously over time but the idea of an extended family or a community as a family and what that actually entails for each of us.  How do we covet these relationships feed them, decipher them, understand them and let them ebb and flow as they are intended to is the difficult part.   I’m no scientist or genealogist but I know that much of what we believe when it comes to family is based on our experiences and the message our society sends to us, especially when we are young.  I as many know have a somewhat unique family story, one of a very small immediate family due to circumstances beyond my control.  For most of my life my immediate blood family has been my father and my three brothers, nothing for the most part.  All of us are close and all of us see family not as blood but as a connection we share through our dedication and loyalty to some really freaking cool people.  This immediate family is growing as my brothers gain wives and as they began to have children, and in addition our family grows as we continue to meet and add amazing people to our “family” spectrum or people we encounter throughout life and who we share with others we care about.  A ”family” in the end can surprise you, those who are there for you truly in the end may not be the folks that society deems are supposed to be there and the lessons and gifts we may need to learn in life or share may be with those who we thought we would interact with least. As usual my blog is helpful for me in feeding and finding more depth to my own soul, this process for me in my life often interacts with food and when it comes to family and friend’s food is large centerpiece, not only in my life but within the lives of people in general throughout the world.   Life lately is moving and evolving in a good direction for me, this is typical as I think I expend a good amount of effort making sure I move forward and not backwards in life, discovering rather than dwelling.  Sure life continues to offer challenges and I continue to figure out how to move through them.  Recently in my life I have gotten to witness quite a bit of controversy within the families of friends, this witness has created a significant amount of gratitude for my own “family pocket “ and even more gratitude for what I deem as healthy beliefs on family and what it means to me.  It’s always a bit controversial to talk about what family means as society, especially our American society, has a lot to say about it and even a lot more judgment of those who don’t play by the American family drum.  I know firsthand about this pressure from society to live as a family unit as society dictates.  Politics today are laden with those telling us what a family should be and who we should love and I think society is paying attention and getting a bit uncomfortable with the conventional and perhaps maybe be showing even a bit of signage towards deciding for themselves what family means to them.  My life for many years gave me societal pressure for my own family decisions and my life with my own “unconventional” family”

 When we speak of sustenance (the overall concept of this blog-feeding myself) we have to think about family and friends and how we are fed by their love, their support and their honesty and genuine care.   What does this really mean than for biological blood family and does action and content mean more than biology and blood?  It’s a tough question for me because I feel this “blood connection” with my brothers, however I also feel like that “blood connection” is really about content and experience more than it is  blood.  I believe wholeheartedly that what makes my bond with my brothers so strong is how over the years we have continued to get to know one another as we have grown and changed and through our experiencing life together while simultaneously giving a shit about who we are and what makes us tick as the individuals we are.  We connected wholeheartedly and with openness.  Our continuous support for each other has grown our bond into what I believe is a unbreakable carbon like bond based on respect of the adults we are today and the experiences we have shared together, throughout a life time.  I am sure that blood doesn’t dictate family and it has taken me years to be content with this opinion.  As a child of 11 years I discovered that blood family doesn’t necessarily always support in the most caring and respectful manner.  Upon my parents bitter divorce many of my mother’s family members kind of just abandoned us because we were supporters of our father and wanted to live with him versus our mother. My youngest brother was four years old at the time and the oldest of us 12 years and we had prior to this event, typical American blood families, holidays, birthdays, $20 from grandma in the mail, cousins playing together, but I wouldn’t have described us all as actually close or bonded and in retrospect I don’t think they truly understood who “we” kids were and thus it seemed all too easy for all to just forget about us.  Now I’m comfortable with that fact as holidays and birthday cards don’t a family make, but the appearance of a family is a powerful thing, especially in our society.  But for me the appearance is the problem with today’s family and society in general.  Families need sustenance, they need to be fed and cared for continuously and with deep open love.  .  I severed ties with my mother  at age 12 and it was actually much easier than one would think and although the world made me feel many things in regards to that act, I finally years ago maybe at about 30 came to true terms with my act at 12 years old and was confident I had made the right decision and today remain confident still.  My mother although blood and although I grew in her womb, was not my family when times got tough for her, nor did she every really figure out how to be our family even years after, nor has she even come close today. The real meat of this story is certainly severe but the truth is we don’t get to choose our relatives but we do get to chose our families and I chose not to choose my mother to be in mine.  Now that’s a long story and only part of my point here so as my normal choppy writing style goes, we are moving on.  When my father took us to Central America I began to discover the value of “family” in a different light, non blood folk and community as “family”. Strangers cared for us in a way that was deep and meaningful.  New Friends were made in all spectrums of life a few of which I have made for life and although one would think that a girl without a mother is a sad thing, I was gifted many remarkable woman all throughout my life, who not only led me down a path of positivity but they genuinely cared and put stake in helping me become the woman I was destined to become and therefore I can give credit to a few amazing women for helping me achieve greater meaning to who I am.  These women guided me to become me without any doubt, without any judgment.  They were filled with words of wisdom and certainly this didn’t mean they agreed with everything I did, they supported fully with love, respect and non judgment and to these women (you know who you are) thank you for my womanhood and my strength.  These woman were and are my family, they are the mothers I chose.

 Friends and family are not always there when we want them to be, not more than just a few of them anyhow. I had to learn this lesson the hard way.  Each person in our life has a particular relationship to us and it changes and evolves as life does and on occasion it leaves us for good.  Again what is important is to always be learning from the many challenging relationships we have.  I have had some relationships that I thought would last a lifetime but ended abruptly in the last five years, but I have learned that it takes nothing away from what was.  Even our “family” blood or relative or whatever, won’t always be there for us.  We all have our own crap going on and sometimes its difficult to see really what is happening in others.  Our energies don’t always match up.  A friend of mine who has encountered some serious setbacks in life lately was disappointed in his family for not being there for him and not understanding him better.  It’s a difficult position for me as I have a hard time understanding why humans can’t be there for their fellow humans, however I have learned that it’s just their shit.  We can love and be connected and there are just times we don’t match up to those we care about and those who care about us.  What’s important in this case is that we live as we intend with conviction, we should expect the most and give people a break when they can’t deliver it.  Paying attention to the fact that as we grow into adults, life becomes a bit more complicated.  When we are children, we need food, water, shelter and love given to us, and as adults we typically have to seek it out and create it.  It’s not easy but it’s crucial to having sustenance in our lives.

 As we grow into adults, we have the tendency to grow further apart from people we cared about and were cared for as children, this is true not only for our “blood” family but our extended families as well and this is when we begin to grow roots into community as family and this notion is a bit more foreign to Americans, but it is a notion that we need to indulge in pondering about more, especially if we want to feed our lives with nourishing sustenance.  Community family made of the friends and family and community in which we live are intended to help nourish us, especially if we work on creating these family environments for each other. As I mentioned earlier a friend of mine who has been experiencing some life struggles as of lately has also been learning the hard lesson of family and “friends” not being there for you unconditionally when you need them most.  But I revel in the fact that in my community of “friends & family” here I Brooklyn, we have embraced him as well as my own family and all shown him that what you need is always there.  I take pride in my Brooklyn community for being  “family” oriented in a way they is inclusive to those that live here.  I think its easier for New Yorkers to embrace this concept since so many of us our transplants.

So much of my “family” surrounds food and I am happy for that fact.  Food is a communal family oriented experience and around the world over, they embrace food, community and family at the same time.  Americans need to do this more.  We need to build families that are not about blood but that are about love and respect for each other, helping one another when we need it and teaching one another what we know.  Above all accepting all without judgment event when we can’t understand them of what they have been through.

 Family for me is my heart so for all of you in my family, with earthquake and hurricane force I show deep and sincere gratitude for all you provide for me and my “family” blood has nothing on this special worldly gift of community!

A Quest for Food Purity Which Lead to the Discovery of Spirit Authenticity

in myself & in others………..

I took a trip this summer with the intent of finding authenticity, my destination was Italy and specifically the Lingurian Coast, or as some are familiar with it as, the Italian Riviera.  My desire to visit Italy was not the average choice as far as destination goes.  As most venture solely into Tuscany seeking the richest and most robust red wines, others seek Pizza in Roma and then of course most salivate for Piedmont, rich and cheesy pastas.  I sought out Linguria and the Italian Riviera for my two great loves; the ocean and fresh herbs.  I was seeking the authentic in life and not necessarily in the way people make food, but their spirit towards life and how food continues to play a major role in their everyday peace and contentment, something I am working at incorporating more in my own life; making it more authentic that is regardless of what is happening in it and regardless of what I am doing in the moment.  As most of my followers friends and creditors know, times have been tough and I am constantly trying to move ahead in life professionally while still trying to grow and evolve as a person and learn and absorb the lessons and that are constantly being put in front of me.  My journey to Italy was a bit impromptu and out of left field as so many of my actions and certainly trips are, but I accomplished what I set out to do and then some.  Finding authentic inspiration and refreshed and renewed energy to keep moving forward during difficult times was my main focus.  My secondary focus was to discover another part of the world and a new culture I had yet to experience.  Italy was the solution and when I took to google out to plan the trip, I of course couldn’t get my mind set off the water (the beach bum in me prevents me from venturing to far from the sea) and in the discovery process I learned about the rich herb culture on the Lingurian coast.  I instantly fell in love before even going, as for me an area set on cliffs and rocks and vibrant blue seas that is renowned for food and culture revolving around basil and pesto, seemed to be the ideal magical location for my own inner authentic search and inspirational journey.

I took all my points from all my traveling in the past years and spent them all on a ticket and hotels and mapped out my journey, trying to get as much of the coast, the herb culture and variety of people as possible.  The trip began in Genoa, Italy, home to the famous Genovese basil.  The idealic Italian city filled with narrow streets and tall buildings with its beautiful Romanesque-Renaissance architecture and medieval yet modern feel engulfs you.  You walk through the mazes of pathways between the buildings dark with hints of bright sunlight at the top feeling as if you will never find your way out, yet this relatively small city, seems to always spit you out into one of its landmark promenades or fountain squares.  This was my first experience with Italians in Italy and at first I was a little taken back, I have to admit.  They were quick, assertive and pretty much could care less about me, that is except a few really old men who proposed marriage and babies!  Their slightly abrasive and disinterested attitude made it difficult for me to find the courage to ask questions and seek out the city’s best food and culture experiences in the short time I had stationed there (24 hours).    I found myself put off by this a little and will admit my first few meals in Italy were highly disappointing. But as all thing sI do and experience and I think in traveling I feel it even more, there is something to be learned and absorbed from that disappointment and lack of understanding.   So I did what I usually do and pushed myself to a point of uncomfortableness vowing that despite the major language barrier I was facing that I was going to find their authentic and my own in the short time I was there!    I began to think of Italians kind of like New Yorkers, busy, set in their ways and moving, when they did stop they were friendly and lovely as can be, my mind and energy opened and my experience became greater.  I learned that shutting down for me is not an option, to keep seeking the answers or in this case a good meal.

As I traveled down the coast to Rapallo, Portofino, Comolgi, and then to Cinque Terre, I was blown away by the sweeping and breathtaking beauty of the sea but also equally blown away by the lives the Italian Riviera folk lead.  A world where no to go cups exist, a world that shuts down for 2-3 hours in the middle of the day and a world where firework shows go on for over 8 hours at a time and 4 days straight.  I discovered a passion that I don’t typically see in my everyday life and a passion I know exists in me.  I discovered a loyalty within the selves of people, meaning they were loyal to themselves, not looking about what could be or what might be, but a quintessential concentration on what is.  And often times that what is, has been around for centuries and generations.  I had read a lot in the past few years on how Italy is losing many of its traditions to the lure of the big city, television, video games and the new and vast interconnectedness of the world.  And I certainly saw this a bit along the coast and specifically in Genoa, but I also took notice to the simplicity in which most lived, and the celebration of what they had not what they wanted to get or achieve.  A greater focus on attention to detail the monumental HERE AND NOW acclamation just simple exists here and through that I think people are able to have a richer food culture and culture in general. 

The countless people I met time and time again were passionate and filled with knowledge about their food and culture.  Their vibrancy of detail of the historical journey both their peoples and food have been on, was inconceivable to me and beyond anything I had ever heard recited and I have always been in awe of cultures who are so engulfed and knowledgeable of the details of their history.  The Italians were amazing as their history and their food was one.  I began to understand the allure of Italy when it comes to food and food culture and I began to understand how despite my not being Italian I was very much authentic in spirit just like the Italians and I began for the first time to understand that I am a bit of an outsider not coming from a culture with this rich of authenticity of spirit when it comes to food and food culture, but I can continue to seek out the authentic spirit wherever I go and it will continue to seek me out, as it did and happened in Italy and with this cooperation of spirits we can connect ourselves to many cultures as the world is pushing us all to do and perhaps we can convince each other to keep moving in the direction of authenticity in all we do regardless of what we do and regardless of who and where we are.  I myself know that I want my authentic spirit to shine brightly in the work I do, the person I am and for certain the food I create and I want all the authentic spirit I encounter on my journey to be present in it all as well.  So certainly these days my authentic spirit shines brightly with the influences of my Italian Riviera journey and those who I encountered along the way and my cooking will never be the same again.

Thank you Italy for the journey & the discovery!

Get Me Outta That Box,  Come Inside & Get to Know Me
What You See is What You Get Only if We See Eye to Eye

As we grow into these smart sophisticated adults and merge through the traffic of life we have this unequivocal impulse to place people in a box, based on our own observations.  We lend ourselves to be the experts of people as if to say we never heard of researchers living with the guerillas for years and devoting their entire lives to understanding another being or animal.  Somehow, we as layman humans tend to figure that we just simply know more in  than Jane Goodall in a relatively short time, sometimes milliseconds, without doing any of the research or observation that can take a lifetime and even then be proven wrong.  We pass judgment, some innocent and some calculating, all judgments are really not allowing us to live to a greater potential either in our own minds or better yet in the minds of others.  This boxing in, assuming you know everything about a person in a relatively short time based on limited and specific experiences creates a pinball effect of choices, thoughts and they way we pass our judgment of others onto others and certainly dictates quite a bit of our actions towards others.  What is it about human beings (myself included) that makes us think we know people immediately?  And why am I no different with my own judgment both towards myself and towards others?  How do we either get out of the box or invite others in, for the sake of honestly knowing each other?

I talk often about how much I believe honesty is the real key to success in the maneuvering through our personal personas and getting into the nitty gritty of the who we are inside, kind of questions.  For this sector of judgment I find the “cure” to be one in the same.  Getting honest with one’s self about the true judgment we place on others and being even perhaps more honest with the judgment we put upon ourselves, even if the judgment is that we don’t need help. It’s important to spend some time in life thinking about judgment, both how we judge others, how they judge us and what it all means.  Now I try not to take judgment too personally, yet I believe the judgment we feel coming from others has a way of dipping into our subconscious and it’s an important realization, that of understanding the subconscious ways judgment affects us internally and how it lends itself to our own judgment of others.

There are a few happenings that spurred my recent thoughts of judgment.  The first and most important to this rant was that I had being seeing a man who had this assumption and judgment of me that seemed so far from who I am.  He had never really come across a woman like me, independent to and extreme, free thinking to almost crazy and so much free will and curiosity I seemed both too good to be true and possibly insane.  He also assumed that I was this rich spoiled woman, I’m not really sure exactly where this hailed from or why he chose to see it that way despite my honesty about my income, my debt, and my ever difficult world of owning two businesses and that life is never what it appears to be.  He came to this notion in a limited amount of time with a limited amount of experiences that would show him this.  I grew frustrated with the guy and his mounting comments about me traveling quite a bit through the world,  and having nice things and more importantly having the ability to control my job.  He on the other hand seemed to struggle a bit in his own career and life, always bitching about paying his rent and how he couldn’t afford to travel, yet he really wanted to. He didn’t see the reality that was before him in regards to my being rich or poor, he saw only what he wanted to see based on some relatively common assumptions that are never taken further than the surface.  One big thing he latched on to was as a business owner I get to make my own schedule; not that-I work over 70 hours a week, probably more if you count thinking about work 100% of the time and despite the fact I make my own schedule I must get up and work each and every day, I must show up when others don’t and I must always put the work ahead of my own fun.  An example of this is that I had tickets to the Taste of The Greenmarket Gala event the other night and I was so excited, but I was stuck here while a film crew was finishing up filming late and never made it to the event.  Sure I could have made one of my employees stay, but instead I gave the tickets to those employees and did what I needed to do.  The man also hinted at the fact that I must be rich and spoiled due to the amount of travel I have done in the past 10 years globally.  Now I will say this is and has been the greatest perk of my job and businesses, however he has little understanding of the trade off and the choice we make.  I choose to have the life of travel; I do whatever I can and must do as this is for me, food for my soul.  He never latched on to the fact that I have missed countless opportunities for friendships and local events, missed weddings of my friends and families, got kicked out of the co-op for never being around, missed out on knowing my own neighborhood let alone state.  And probably most important is that my love and devotion to travel and the fact that my job took me all over the world, left me content with being alone as I always traveled alone for the most part, work dictated and paid for it and most of the people I knew, couldn’t afford to travel, of couldn’t get time off to travel.  So many of my years were spent traveling through amazing parts of the world either alone or with strangers and sometimes with new friends made along the way, but mostly just alone.  Countless dinners alone, countless drinks alone, countless swims alone, countless everything alone.  This aloneness has come at a price of excessive neediness and excessive independence, it sways back and forth. Nonetheless that is the jist of his assumptions about my travel.  He spent a lot of time judging me instead of appreciating my rarity. Now the strange part of his assumptions or judgment is the life he envisioned me living as a child, this is the part I realized that my own attitude  and way of looking at and approaching life is really what dictated and lead him to his judgment and this realization was what spurred all this judgment thinking (this blog)  in the first place and I’ll get  into that a bit later.

For most who know me, my childhood story is a fascinating one, certainly countless books and movies could be made of my family’s story; Flight & Fight For Family Freedom as my father always called it! But in general my story is one of a sweet J southern California girl , horses, dogs, cats, goats, divorce, kidnapping and Central America and of course a little bit of Minnesota as well.  I am in love with my story, my childhood and all the experiences that it blessed me with, the lessons it taught me that I am still making sense of and above all, I am aware that my experiences are what has made me the lady I am. The rarity this man didn’t spend the time to actually see.  I talk about my childhood quite a bit and realized through this man that the way in which I speak about it is one that leads him to believe I was a rich spoiled girl too.  I talk often about the horses I had as a little girl, I had up to 20 at one time, I talk about the big houses we had with all the land (40 acres at one place outside of Los Angeles), and I talk about driving through Mexico and El Salvador, down into Honduras and Nicaragua.  Camping on the beach under coconut trees, playing in the surf, eating amazing tropical fruits. Swimming in volcanoes and brining our Nicaragua dogs with us when we moved to Costa Rica.  I talk of living on the beach in Costa Rica, in a Plantation overlooking Managua with bougainvillea and mango trees rampant, swimming eating and having the best time ever. I speak about it all with such richness in speech; I realized out of the blue one day this could be the issue; this could be what he is latching on to.  He kept telling me stories about his youth and poverty and how hard life was for him as a child and when I tried to empathize, he assumed I couldn’t because of my “rich” upbringing.

I seldom tell the story of how poor we were in the way that sheds a negative light on our story, our experience and makes the listener come out of it feeling sorry for us all, I don’t know if this has been a mistake or not as far as other casting judgment.  I rarely talk about the absurdity in which my father got and found the horses; he literally found one on the side of the road, he adopted some from the pound, he traded things for them and all sorts of things.  What was always most important to my memory is that he made what he wanted to happen, he was and still is the most positive person I know.  I certainly never talk about the extreme poverty we lived in Central America and how we had diarrhea the entire drive down to Nicaragua (1 month) and about 6 months after that as well until we finally became immune to the water and environment.  Rarely is my depiction of us kids with worms hanging from our asses, or staff infections oozing form craters in our legs and arms, ring worm ( I believe) from touching stray dogs,  mosquito bites from head to toe (giant mosquitoes) , scorpions pricks and thinking we would die,  and yes even machete wounds.  I don’t often emphasize the difficulty that it was to be children and not speak Spanish and not be able to communicate with others. No I seldom mention these parts; I talk about the coffee plantation we lived in as if it was out of Casa Blanca…….but in reality is was a rundown place, beautiful at one time but not our time!  But for me and my brothers this place was majestic and our time in Central America and our story is gorgeous to me.  All of the above mentioned stories I know are crucial experiences to what has made me and my brothers the amazing and unique people we are today.  The diarrhea dissipates, the staff heals up (after shots from my father in our tight little children asses of course), and mosquito bites clear up. I know form my story that the good stuff was all of it packed into what is our story and my positivity to the story and who we are today because of it for me means it was RICH, rich in all of the important aspects of life.

I believe that what this man and what many see in me is my uncanny ability to see the real “sustenance” (pun intended) and indeed that can appear to be a life of riches and in that regard he is correct as are the others as they cast their judgment, after all we cannot possibly know everything about everyone all in one swoop.  I am rich and I have had a rich life it you look at riches as positivity and growth as I do. You see my true personality is one of optimism, learning, growing and positivity.  This way of thinking is I supposed in part is and was created as a form of a protectionism mechanism and probably not until recently was I able to make sense of it and use it to improve.  That’s the thing about protection mechanisms, they are there to protect you and mine have a habit of lifting themselves when I am capable enough to remedy the initial problem.  In this case, being mature enough to make sense of my life.

This judgment is really no different in my cooking and culinary profession either.  I think outside the box and I am positive beyond belief.  There to experience it all and with a strong belief that it is all relatively easy if you remain positive. There are those who doubt the skills of self taught cooks, but we are all really self taught in the end and true richness in life and in cooking is not what we actually put on the plate, as that is completely open to interpretation, but the entire process or journey.  My advice to all in the kitchen is to get the hell out of the box immediately and stop judging others.  I vow to do the same, especially with that lady who is the girlfriend of the NY guy who I won’t name……J

So I guess the whole point of this is that we as humans must really learn to be open to one another and understand we are all at different stages and on different paths but our makeup is the same.  Now in the case of this man and myself, the real problem was that he was stuck in negativity and used money and riches as his gauge for success, a match not even close to being adequate for me, the truth is that this man never got to experience what was really the richness of Nissa, something far greater than money, travel and horses………

Animal Whisperer (Specialty-Ozark Animals)

I have always been a bit “different” from the “norm”, since I was a child this has been my truth.  As a child there was a feeling of greatness that came with feeling more than ordinary.  As I aged the feeling of being more than ordinary started to feel less special and more awkward.  This is my story on how I moved through the journey to my life quest…… A quest beyond the limits of the ordinary.  As I move through life in my 30’s and before I know it into my 40’s I find life is always moving in circular movement, back to my intuitive and knowing self ultimately.  The lessons are coming full force and full circle these days and my memories or shall I say intuitive feelings from childhood are popping up each and every day.  These memories or intuitive feelings are unique to me in that they are not, I remember riding that red bike, or I remember that pony I had or what I got for Christmas.  The intuitive feeling I am having often these days are of a completely different nature.  I remember the feeling of exhilaration racing through my heart while riding that red bike (actually the memory was on a big wheel J), I not only remember the pony, but I remember laying in the stall with the fist little baby pony we had, touching her soft little hooves and looking into her eyes with her long eyelashes…..and feeling great, deep and unconditional love for the first time outside of my family.  I remember the feeling of responsibility and the pure instinct of I being her caregiver and I remember the feeling that I would not let her down.  I have often wondered why my memories of childhood, early childhood that is were so lacking and I think probably because they were too intense for my brain at that time, these days the intuitive feelings and a connect the dots type feeling flood my head, in a good way.  My memories are shooting back and I am beginning to have a clearer and distinct vision of who I was at almost every age and who I am now is responding to those memories as I often need the reminder to move closer back home, to my intuitive self.  I was a very instinctual and intuitive child, I’m not so sure even my parents understood this side of me even then and certainly my mother had no clue, my father probably did but he was distracted by so much in life back then to pay too much attention to things that were this deep.  As I aged I lost my grip on my intuitive nature, not as much as most do and did but I can see in retrospect where I lost it and why.  Most if happened after adolescence. 

I believe I was lucky going through puberty as a child in Central America in some ways, yes there were times like the time when my father brought me to a mall in San Jose Costa Rica and tried to tell the ladies in his awful Spanish about how his niňa needed a “brazeero, or how crappy it felt to not be able to swim in the ocean with my brothers on the days when I was….menstruating and how there were not many people I could talk too about all of that girl stuff! But back to the part that was about how lucky I was being an adolescent in Central America, I missed out on all the bullshit that the typical American teen goes through and I find that time of life to be pivotal in the sense of hanging onto your intuitive nature and even your innocence in a sense.  My life in those days was about, waking up, doing our own laundry, feeding ourselves, going to the beach, doing (maybe) a little schoolwork and pretty much just having fun; snorkeling, hiking, discovering, swimming, fishing, climbing trees, eating tropical fruits and learning and discovering a new culture each and every day.  What was important for us were the basics, nothing more, nothing less.  I never got to experience the life of a teenager in the US, I got back to the US and attending high school as a sophomore and by then I think I was “slow” to catch on to all of it.  Baffled by all that was important, clothes, music, who’s cool and pretty much nothing important I chose to move into sports and kept pretty much out of trouble and out of influence of anything like the others were going through.  Didn’t really have boyfriends and thought most of the bickering, back stabbing and the rest of the topics most common in the realm of the girls was quite stupid.  I had many friends and most my friends were scattered through all realms of the high school hierarchy, I was voted class clown and I believe that is how I managed through the process, with humor as my answer to a lack of understanding of what was really happening.  My instincts and intuitive nature were dissipating at this point and I was starting to like everybody else, look to society for the answers that used to be filled by my intuitive self, now certainly I think I fought the urge hard but in retrospect, I could have done much better.  College was the same for me, a bit more losing of myself, but certainly not even close to the way others around me lost themselves through that shuffle. I continued to make unique choices in my life in high school and college, choices that I didn’t know were part of my quest that would continue to take me beyond the limits of ordinary.  So certainly there were major intuitive forces at play, but I certainly was not connecting with them as wholey as I should have been.  As I moved past college and into a “regular life” I was still making unique choices and as I moved into adult life I began to have some doubts in my abilities, mainly I believe now because I was exposed to naysayers, non believers and well ordinary people who could not think about a journey past that and therefore couldn’t fathom someone who could. 

I belive one of my main struggles of my late twenties and early thirties was this fight to hand onto the belief in the completeness of who I was and that my abilities were infinite.  I mean I could always feel this power within myself but the forces of this world they are strong and powerful and there is always someone trying, even unconsciously to disconnect those on the quest past ordinary.  I have been a fighter since early one, those who know me are laughing for sure at this very minute as my words are for sure an UNDERSTATMENT, but truth be told at least part of my fight has been trying to keep a solid lockdown grip on my intuitive self in a world created by man and marketing wants to take it from me.  As I have aged this idea of being comfortable in your own skin has started to take shape in my own life and beliefs and what it means to me is really coming home to that intuitive self again, not having to hold onto it and knowing how to hold onto it in those important moments as life does and will present to me!  Today I have a complete belief in myself and my abilities and a deep understanding of how that belief plays out in the world in which I live in.  I understand what I need to do to continue to hold onto that closeness with my instincts and intuitive self and I know how to monitor myself and I know that by continuing to be positive about life and all that it entails is partly how I can hold onto my intuitive self.  Another part is to continue to do as I have since I was a child and that is to dream big.  Lack of big dreaming is not a problem I ever had, since I was little big dreaming has been a way of life for me and I to this day believe in every single one of my dreams and in a weird way all have come true and those that have not are still pending and will happen. 

There are many people out there (most are not aware of it) that HATE the dreamers of the world and those on a quest beyond the limits of ordinary.  I guess the irony is that I have always to some extent felt sorry for those folks and not angry as much, but it has been painful having so many of them around me and it has been quite a struggle for me, in some ways it would have been easier to hate and move away from those who didn’t understand me, but I am grateful for trying to deal with them in and as part of my life and my journey.  It is quite an impossible feat to shed one’s life of all the doubters and in many cases there are important lessons to be learned both ways. I do believe that it is the self doubt in people that causes them to be negative disbelievers in others.  I was listening to the radio recently and heard the head coach of the NY Jets speaking, Rex Ryan and he was basically talking about how life and the field are the same to him, he puts all passion into it and there are in his life many, many doubters, haters and naysayers, as a dyslexic kid he faced a life where he always felt different, he was probably different in general but I see the point of the negative in his description, anyhow through it all he says he overcame all of it by continuing to learn from the mistakes he made, being genuine and honest (which to me means being connected to one’s self) and by being passionate at everything.  I’m not a football person (although my first haircut did occur by my brother and tin snips, while my father was watching eight televisions with simultaneous football games instead of watching my brother and I) but hearing the Jets coach was a reminder to me that there are so many teachers in life and we just have to be open and listen.  Lately like my memories of childhood instinct bursting back, instances of teachers coming into my life in all forms are rampant.

Like the story of Alex Stupak, which came across my facebook page just as many things do, but this one struck a cord with me and was in a way a teacher or a reminder of how living with passion and living a quest beyond the limits of ordinary is not easy and comes with many road blocks but it is important to keep connected to your source for your own decision of what being passionate means and for your own decision of what path that entails and basically that means saying fuck you to all naysayers and the doubters.  And by fuck you I basically mean remembering that their opinions don’t matter and most of the time the doubters and the naysayers are those who are not on the quest beyond the limits of ordinary and it is a fear of the extraordinary that is the real issue at hand.  The story of Alex was a great one and I am so glad to have come across this story and hope to one day meet him and say thanks.  His story is unique as he was already on the quest beyond the limits of ordinary in the minds of the world, but in his mind and in his heart he was not so he moved and shifted his life until he was and that to me is amazing and a great source of inspiration.

Shedding my own life of doubters has been more difficult as I have gotten older and especially since I have begin to rely on others in business and general commerce.  I have gone through bouts of trying to convince others of what was inside of me and I’m not proud of those times but I have learned a great deal from those times and my quest beyond the journey of ordinary feels more rewarding knowing all that I have learned along the way.  I feel good that in the end I have been able to hang on to my intuitive self and my instincts.  I have of recent begin to remove the clutter from my life both physically and mentally and it has given me new power and that has given me greater access to a more advanced set of teachers and influences as well as a greater recognition of the happiness I already have in me.  Reach beyond the ordinary, it’s not complicated.

Begin to move towards happiness and it will begin to move towards you!

My Sustenance

Love & Loving Friendships

This is the Real Food I’ve Been Missing Out On

We measure sustenance by its source of strength and nourishment providing the backbone of existence be it tangibly in the form of food or drink or those harder to measure entities such as love. I gave my blog this name for one very important reason. Although it’s about food, it’s really about something greater- that is, feeding my soul.  The blog has always been designed to showcase food and culture and its very “exciting” and ever changing, evolving role in life.  It acts as an outlet for me to share what’s going on inside of me, as a means of understanding myself and my placement in this world a little better.  Food and its culture have been so deeply rooted in me both personally and professionally since childhood- despite my absent awareness of that fact at the time.  My blog has given me the ability to equate food with life in a greater capacity which, I believe, applies to us all.

Food is ultimately life. This month houses my birthday, April 10^th, and I turned 38 years old.  I’m closer to the present, closer to the future, than ever before. This month’s blog reflects this birthday timing and takes a deeper look at me and my life than ever before. It exposes many parts of my personality and feelings that breach the food blog norm. I find that it’s all relevant, though, in that this is ultimately where my love of food and food culture comes from- how different people experience life in their different ways all, with the same make-up- of hunger, thirst, humor, insecurity, fear, fearlessness, and, above all, the need to love and be loved and have loving relationships in our lives.

I’ve hit a point in life where time bucked heads with some heavy issues, forcing me to make some major life changing decisions. It’s funny because, despite the fact that life has given me a lot of crazy challenges in the last 6 months, I don’t feel too crazed by any of it, at least not anymore.  Certainly there were moments when fear took over me, but in the end I realized it was just life asking me to take a step back, evaluate where I have been and what I have done and what I have learned from all of it thus far.  It then asked me what I have enjoyed so far versus what I have disliked. Mostly it asked me to take a deep look at what I disliked and what was the real truth of it all, which way is really ahead for me.  What I found was a clear direction for my future.  I knew I had to make a decision that wouldn’t make others so happy and, although that weighed heavily on me for some time, I chose to move forward with more precision and energy than before, more clarity, passion, and ultimately with more clarity regarding who I was and who I’d like to be. Plenty of challenges arise from this, one being the people around you. Not everyone you know is always on board with the same ideas that drive you. The choice is one I hadn’t realized is quite simple. Feed yourself the sustenance you need to thrive, move forward to attain a deeper, more fulfilling life, and within it, happiness. That kind of sustenance is not often the kind that others want to feed you.  As a 38 year old woman I realized that I knew how to feed myself. I simply let life bring me down paths that were not geared toward my final direction.  In food terms you could say I ate a bunch of junk for far too long and despite my healthy diet, my body and mind bore the brunt of this.  Now I strongly believe that every moment before this one was valuable, but that does not mean I didn’t make mistakes or poor judgments. I think it simply means that I took the harder route to learn my lessons, which is pretty typical for me.

I think the main point of this month’s blog is that I know one thing; I need to fuel and fulfill my life with real sustenance.  That not only means that I have to make professional choices that are strictly and innately about my heart & soul passions but that my personal life must be at the epicenter of my “food source” or sustenance.  Love & loving friendships have not been rare for me, but they have been complicated. Like everyone else I carry “baggage” from childhood that I am still learning how to sort out and repack and unpack!  What’s important to note is that getting so caught up in work and what you think has meaning is just another way to forget about yourself inside. With that said, in chimes that old adage that you can’t love someone until you love yourself, and there’s a reason it still comes up throughout the history of mankind. It is true for maintaining love and loving friendships, but where I have seen this adage challenged is through children. We will talk more about that in my kids in the kitchen section.  But inevitably for the last 6 to 8 years I have focused so much on my company and what others needed form me in regards to my company that I neglected the work I needed to do within myself for my personal relationships.  The result I believe was a very professional centric way of relating to people that was unbalanced and opposed to a kind, loving way of a more intimate style of relating.  What does that mean?

In a nutshell, I was “behind the crowd” in all of my relationships, having a hard time relating to others on an intimate basis.  My personal relationships were never as important as the customer or the vendor. I justified that by telling myself about how the little farmer so far away needed me to make a subsistence living. The truth of it all was that I was no sustainable solution for the farmer if I neglected myself. Friendships were strained by quite a bit of new “issues” I was facing- everything from friends wanting to borrow money to friends not understanding my level of stress and ultimately friends not truly understanding the world I was involved with work wise.  It made it difficult way to relate with anyone on top of being so absorbed with my own thing with very little time to devote to others. I wasn’t the best friend I could have been to a lot of people.  I may have been a good friend to Ger-Nis but at a cost, for sure.  Many of the relationships that I neglected were ones that required more from me than I could give, and I often thought it was unfair to ask more from me, on some occasions annoying.  I wanted others to be there for me as I was for them, but no one really understood my new world. Most the friends I had were still going out every night having a good time while I was making million dollar deals and having to teach myself EVERYTHING about business on a grand scale for the first time.  I also made the big mistake of hiring many of my friends, thinking this would be a way in which I could connect with them. As it turns out, it made things worse for most of them.  The real and strong friendships I had were indeed able to withstand this pressure, but there were some that were just lost for good, including the loss of a 17 year friendship that was quite devastating along with another that also hurt a great deal.  In retrospect I was going through so many changes both personally and professionally that I couldn’t keep my head on straight long enough nor get it together fast enough to salvage many relationships. I sit today, knowing I could have behaved differently and perhaps then the failed friendships would still exist or perhaps they would not, but I know that had I chosen to feed myself sustenance, nourishing important personal relationships instead of thinking my journey work wise was all important. I probably would have been happier on my journey. Again, no regrets. I see it for the lessons that I’ve learned, and it is never too late to learn lessons!

Not only were regular friendships hard for me to hold on to but keeping an intimate love relationship was also hard, let alone meeting others that could match my mind, speed, and energy, let alone creative spirit needs.  This is perhaps the most troubling part of lost love and loving friendships problems I have had.  I’m a lady of very distinct opposites when it comes to love and work. Work wise I’m strong, aggressive, clear, determined, and confident. When it comes to love (and of course when it comes to scaling hills for love, getting stuck in deadbeat valley doesn’t really help matters but is inevitable) I am insecure, awkward, passive, unclear, confused, and not at all confident.  But I have been told that I am extremely intimidating to men, as I don’t need their help or support.  I have been told that demands I make on intimate relationships with men are quite heavy. I ask for the one thing men find it hard to give, what one of my past loves called “the inside demand”.  It’s the most intimate requests to ask of anyone- what you’re made of, what’s inside, how you came to be the person you are.   Anything less is just too superficial for me.  I tend to be drawn to creative types, especially musicians, and I find it fascinating to discover where inside of them the music comes from.

In general my creative depth is one that I rarely see mirrored in others, but typically musicians and artists reflect this creativity and it fascinates me.  I am slowly discovering others in the food world with this same creative edge, and it is kind of exciting.  I had an Israeli man in my life for a while who was very “superficial” about feelings but a very deep guy. One day he said to me, “I’m scared that I don’t have enough inside of me for your liking”.  I think this exemplifies the pressure I put on men to share their most intimate selves.  I am what they call TOO DEMANDING OF A HUMAN BEING. I get that from my father, and I am learning to find the right balance of expectations in order to have better, longer lasting, deeper relationships, basically relationships that nourish the soul.  I found one man who was perfect for me in this way who understood this need of mine to know his insides and he wanted to know mine- a solid and deep connection that epitomized everything I needed and had to give to another. But like many men in my life the timing was DEAD wrong. He had already made commitments he felt he couldn’t break, but really in retrospect I think he was just too weak of a man for me. Regardless I think he is the one that got away. As a strong lady I have a very hard time finding loves that have a strong character, foundation, spine- loves that can tolerate the depth of life’s truths.

The dwelling is done. Good news is that I know now that it’s time for me to start to place importance on relationships and loving friendships.  It’s time to let sustenance lead the way, through healthy eating and living, as well as mentally.  As Maya Angelou taught me through her book at age 18, “once you know better you do better!”  I want to do better for myself this time around. I want to have love and loving relationships in my life.  Healthy and giving in both ways……..and certainly for me all the sustenance I give to myself through food or love, from this point forward shall be meaningful! Look out world!

A Fresh Start

Finding clarity in a moment that’s ripe for new beginnings, changes, and twists

This is where the excitement begins

I fear death like everyone else but less and less it seems these days.  I fly quite a bit around the world on planes, and I often (I believe others do as well) believe it will crash in which compels thoughts about death.  I don’t think of death much outside those times, but, as I travel at least 25 times a year via plane, it’s actually more frequent than most, I imagine….. The point being that in the moment the turbulence hits, and you are sure you are “hitting the land” you quickly review your life, your family, friends, loved ones, and my dog Sadie appears in my thoughts too.

 We try in just a few simple seconds to sum up our lives and do what I believe we assume “god” does- justify our existence as a good one or a bad one by our actions, our contributions, the way we loved, the kind of friends we were, how we treated ourselves, the entire gambit of derivatives to this basically mathematical equation. Did I live as I intended?  My answer has typically been yes to all of it.  With a new pocket of turbulence added to my thoughts over the past year that I spend all my time working and none of it focusing on real, deep, and intimate relationships which I actually crave the older I get. The older I get, the deeper I crave these relationships to be, yes I’m one of those folks who believes the older we get the deeper our relationships needs to be- to be even more honest, with more substance, and more rewarding. This includes not only to our romantic and familiar relationships with simple ones from our butcher, the beautician, our mechanic, and all of the gambits of people in our lives.  As I have been considering these angles in life more and more lately when confronting death on planes, it has really made an impression on me each time I “survive” my near death experience. (That is how it always feels… yes, I am dramatic- as most who know me are aware.)  I, like the rest of the planet, fear death to some extent, but I have made a remarkable and, I believe, very deep connection to death and life recently that helps me remove fear of death from the equation, and, therefore, it has helped remove an even bigger problem- fear of life.  Up until the exact moment you really believe you are going to die or could die, we fear death and grip onto that fear tight like the handlebar of a fast moving bike.  But the moment when we really believe we are actually and sincerely going to die, the fear is released and there is a peace that arrives. The fear dissipates.  In letting go of the fear of losing everything and the inability to control everything, I finally find peace in the moment before death in the shadow where what will happen will happen, and, thus, I have this perfect moment of clarity that the moment is ripe for a new beginning, change, or twist where the excitement of my life will begin.

The words “a fresh start,” by nature, indicate some sort of trouble. After all, there is no rational explanation for the desire for a fresh start without the feeling that something is off kilter. Perhaps the Aries in me is also drawn to these new beginnings. Perhaps it’s the fact I believe complacency is the devil. Perhaps it’s because of my massive yearning to experience as much as possible on this planet and make clear contributions to the improvement of life experience in existence rather than simply just taking up space and time within it.  Either way I sit at this moment, having returned from some world travels, Holland (Amsterdam and the various countryside of Holland), Germany (Berlin), and Israel (Tel Aviv), my travels were specific to this new and latest dilemma of what to do next.  Berlin and my time there was the catalyst for my personal revolution of sorts.  Its creative energy, clean lines, and orderly environment were the perfect place to capture the essence of my realization that change needed to occur for obvious and not so obvious reasons, some discovered at that time and some still had yet to be discovered.

Often in life when one is a decision maker, whether it be for their family, a company, or a country… something shifts. Changes are made that forcefully move us to the place inside ourselves which enable us to, first, recognize the need for change and, two, to seek out the best possible avenues for the deliverance of that change.  This is the moment that for me, any non movement or stagnation is the same as death.  I have spent very little time stagnating in my own life, and, although I have come to lead my own company, sometimes it is hard to decipher stagnation from stability, causing me to find myself tricked a time or two lately.  I believe this is the first admittance of my mistake, not understanding the difference between the two, which of course seems so obvious, especially as I write it, but life in the trenches can appear to be murkier and shinier than the reality.  My vision has been impaired, my path was not far off course, but my vision was just simply blurred….by what I am not sure, possible lack of deep relationships that allow us the different perspectives regarding our realities, perhaps by my workaholic nature and not stepping back to take care of myself the same way I have taken care of my company and others in my life, or perhaps I simply was somewhat naïve and somewhat ignorant as we all are sometimes.  Nonetheless I found myself at this moment both professionally with Ger-Nis and personally with Nissa J experiencing major heartbreak over my lack of understanding of what to do next.  Of course without stagnation as a viable option, a fresh start was my only real choice.  I could have, I suppose, have ran away, which has been a big contender for me since youth. As long as I ran to somewhere exotic, I typically felt it was justified.  But, I guess, as I have gotten older I have learned, grown, or evolved enough, to know that running forever, too, is stagnating, despite its apparent mobility…………….a bit more exciting but equal to it. 

In order to achieve this fresh start, I had to first examine what that actually means.  A fresh start is not a doing anything over, but, rather, refreshing your angle on life from a different starting point. It meant that I had to acknowledge, not only how I came to be where I stood at that moment in time, but all that I now carry with me because of that journey.  This is the moment where the acknowledgement of our strengths helps provide the perfect platform for a fresh start. Without this part of the process present, confusion and denial can cloud the path a great deal.  But I had done my work certain that my new starting point had given me ample tools by which to gauge which path I chose for my future.  Some may say that fresh starts and second chances beget failures but when one truly examines “the fresh start” as a fresh start, it is actually deeply rooted in wisdom gained through adaptability. Without recognizing the need for a fresh start, blindness reigns, and, by blindness, I mean massive confusion and an overall cluelessness regarding growth and progression.  As I sat in Berlin and pondered the fact that in a relatively short period of time these people were able to create one thriving city full of a distinct culture and progress with one fresh starting point, I knew that my path too was in need.

A fresh start- a true fresh start- is ultimately the acceptance of what actually is and a true openness to what can and will be.  This is where I finally bring it back to my crashing plane phobia which eventually enabled me to understand what this feeling inside of me was actually a new peace. It was me letting go of everything for the first time ever in combination with believing in myself for the first time ever.  We live in a world where the word failure (especially the USA) is synonymous with shame and inability. This failure is shunned and like a live puppy being sent in the mail far, far away from us (this did happen recently L  in our country where we rarely, if ever, acknowledge and share feelings with each other.  Sharing feelings with most Americans is like walking around in public in your undergarments- “exposing simply way too much.”  I have never been a believer that this method of sheltering each other from the incredible complications of life will help any of us.  Failures and challenges need to be discussed openly in society, our governments, families, friends, lovers, enemies, and everyone really in order to achieve real and positive growth.  I had forgotten about this belief in my business life which eventually translated into an overcompensation of it in my personal life or a complete lack of it.  I became “just like everyone else” in business and that was never what I sought out to do.  My fresh start was what eventually came to symbolize this discussion again both in my personal life and with my business and my business associates.

Interestingly enough as I have been moving through this process between realizing the need for a fresh start and the actually beginning of it- so too have many peoples of the world.  Egyptians, Tunisians, Libyans and soon to the Japanese will begin this journey after the devastation on their Island.  Each of us realizing our own “failures” in our past with what made us complacent and accepting of what we knew was not right, all of us pushed to change and move to a fresh start by pivotal events and all of us inspired by fellow inhabitants of society speaking openly, protesting vigorously, and demanding change all with the lack of fear as if we were at that stage that occurs just before dying where you are simply at peace with that fact and have the focus you need for this great task ahead……………..CHANGE.

As Americans we forget that we too have a democracy and a way of life we need to fight for, and, of course, our lives are very much different for those of the Libyans and Egyptians who have been stifled for so long, but it’s important to understand the relevance of it all; democracy & freedom should have no limits over how much we deserve, we keep going, and, as we make many new fresh starts, each time we begin our journey with more tools, more knowledge, more comrades, and more peace.

A fresh start is ultimately like a hot shower and a clean pair of underwear after a dirty leg of a journey, you will eventually need another if you are on a long journey. I know I am on that long journey, what about you??