Kitchen Angels

Kitchen Angels 

Somehow, I understood how this passing garden, was chronicled forever in my heaven.

Kitchen Angels glimpsed through our senses. Although, it’s at the edges of sense where they’re sharpest. When I was twenty, I lived at The Yogurt Farm, not a working farm, but instead a property that students rented. There was a large farmhouse with a garden, and a meadow with trails that led off to yurts along the forest edge. I lived in one of the yurts, with my toddler son, without heat or water, so we shared the kitchen and bathroom with the farmhouse.

I moved to The Yogurt Farm at the Fall equinox, and found a bounty of tomatoes in the garden. A garden, enthusiastically planted, but left to tend itself— although, someone had kept up on the watering— was vegetable wild, with plants twisting and turning against each other or gone to seed, with wet paths from an oscillating sprinkler. I was new to laissez faire gardens, coming from a childhood of straight, weed free rows. 
   
I remember one afternoon, while my son napped, wandering with mud between my toes and the sun shining. I remember the smell of ripe tomatoes, and seeing a lone black beetle cross the path, a garter snake slither, and allowing it all to open between me and life, flora illuminating what was best between us. I was given a bridge between my imagination and experience. I wonder if this isn’t the point? Allowing ideal and reality to marry, because nothing is as it is, just like making love. We are not only bodies, but something more. Our senses poised between giving and receiving.
   
In these places, an intermediary is necessary, and this is where kitchen angels come in. In reality we aren’t separate from life, but this isn’t the way we’re used to thinking. In these bridged places— this no longer equals that; there is no tit for tat, or memos to be filed. In these places, there’s a third thing that lives between reality and imagination. It’s not a daydream, nor is it cold hard facts.  
   
In some ways, it’s all so common— these sublime experiences: sunrises, vistas, a child running, a heron landing. What I notice in these moments is that I’m not alone. They don’t even have to be awe inspiring— they can happen anywhere, anytime, anyplace but I feel unusually alive and in good company.  
  
At The Yogurt Farm, on that autumnal afternoon. It was something about the redness of the tomatoes, yet the semi ripe and green tomatoes, and the rotten tomatoes with  snails attached. The smell between sun and moisture. Somehow, I understood how this passing garden, was chronicled forever in my heaven. It was the angel of connection, between this and that, a spirit of Reality with me. I gathered tomatoes, a whole basket of them and brought them into the kitchen wondering what to make?

More Edible Essays to Taste 

Lovely Tomato recipe from a blue dot kitchen  my sister blog

Two tomato recipes from last summer's Turkish and Greek cooking classes. Learn more about my classes  

Please understand that I spend hundreds of hours testing and writing original recipes.
I want you to cook them, I really do, they're meant for home cooks to enjoy. Please link back to me, give credit, and ask permission if you use them on another site! ​

​© Sidonie Maroon 2019 

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