Several months ago, I was invited to participate in a blogging challenge of blogging my way through the alphabet, which I successfully completed in Inspiritual Reflections. The owner challenged some of us to complete the alphabet, if we had not, or do it again, which I have chosen to do. So this time I am going to blog my way through the alphabet in The Zenful Kitchen, spiritually reflecting on foods, herbs, spices, and other things culinary.
I decided to start this challenge with an ingredient, which has always intrigued me, the artichoke. Artichokes are interesting because from an alchemical perspective, they encourage personal growth and protect a person from negative elemental energies. Women were at one time warned not to eat them, as it was believed they were sexually stimulating.
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Sometimes writing about what is in my heart is difficult as there are times when there are not words to capture what I am thinking or feeling. Every occasionally, when I am cooking, whether it be a dish or a season, something will transport me back into my mother’s kitchen where the aromas and tastes of century old traditions were being recreated. As my mother and I would make rugelach or noodle kugel she would talk about how she learned how to do this from her mother, who learned how to do it from her mother, and so forth and so on. Sadly, my mother’s cookbook lived in her head. Nothing was written down. Periodically, I could get her to write these things down for me and so I have a few. However, the recipes were written in her heart and in her mind. When she began to lose her memory, they began to fade with her. When she died, most of them died with her. However, what I have been coming to realize is that some of those legacies somehow got written in my heart as well.
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