I started cooking when I was about
ten years old - baking, actually. In the Scandinavian
communities of northern Minnesota, where I grew up, baking is not
regarded as a subset of the culinary arts. No one thinks of it
as a separate skill - cooking is baking; baking is
cooking. When I moved to California after college, I was
always amazed to hear good cooks say "I don't bake." It didn't compute. I was
like an NBA player saying "I play basketball, but I don't dribble."
I always knew I wanted to be an artist
of some kind, but I didn't really know what that meant. As I
progressed through high school and college, I had some successes and
some failures in my path as an artist, but I ultimately abandoned my art
major in college because I lacked confidence in my skills.
I kept on cooking, though, making baked
Alaska in my dormitory kitchen, catering my parents' dinner parties in
the summer, reading and re-reading cookbooks, and generally spending a
lot of time daydreaming about cooking. What I didn't realize at
the time was that cooking was my art. It was the one medium that
resonated, the one that wouldn't leave me alone, the one that kept
jumping up to tug on my sleeve, saying, "Pay attention to me!" It wasn't
until much later that I recognized it for the creative, artistic journey
that it is.
One of the lessons I have learned
along the way is that food is nourishment for the soul as well as
for the body. It is easy to lose sight of this, as I often
have, in the daily effort to get dinner on the table after a long
day at work. How many times have I wandered the supermarket
aisles at 5:30 p.m., in tears, thinking "What am I going to make for dinner
tonight?" One of the books that changed my outlook forever was
Sarah Ban Breathnach's Simple Abundance, in which she encourages
us to find meaning and beauty in simple daily rituals. Her point
is that approaching
daily tasks with reverence and creative inspiration invests them with
importance beyond the simple convenience of getting them done.
Although it would be great to live life
in that state of equilibrium all the time, we all know it just isn't
going to happen. It is, however, the ideal that I try to hang on
to when I find myself faced once again with a hungry family and no good
ideas. And it is absolutely my inspiration when I am planning a
dinner party for family and friends. Although my family is no
stranger to take-out pizza, I believe it is also important to take the
time and effort to create beautiful meals whenever possible.
Thomas Keller, in The French Laundry Cookbook, expresses it this
way:
"Cooking is not about convenience and
it's not about shortcuts. [It is] about wanting to take the time
to do something that I think is priceless. Our hunger for the
twenty-minute gourmet meal, for one pot ease and pre-washed, precut
ingredients has severed our lifeline to the satisfactions of cooking.
Take your time. Take a long time. Move slowly and
deliberately and with great attention."
This website is organized to give you
several different types of menus and entertaining ideas for each month
of the year. The menus are designed not only to take advantage of
the availability of seasonal ingredients, but to celebrate them.
The dinner categories came about because I like to impose restrictions
on myself when I am planning menus. I think it forces creative
solutions that might not have surfaced if one could choose from all
possible options. Plus, it is much more in tune with real life.
When, indeed, are we able to choose from all possible options?
Frequently we need to make dinner using only what's in the pantry, or
with a limited budget, or for someone who can't eat dairy.
So for each month of the year I
offer five categories of dinners, each with its own structure: Dinner and a Movie, Sunday Night at Charlotte's, Romance for all
Seasons, Seasonal Soirees, and Tertulia. Use them as they are,
or as a jumping-off point for your own ideas. Take the time to
go the extra mile to make your guests feel
special, and soon your dinner parties will be the ones everyone wants to
attend.
