(I am a mother.)

Can you imagine, if all you had to make love to was a rubber doll? Gives you the shivers, doesn’t it. Most people would rather just fall asleep and do without.
The thing is, we have to eat. No matter what. If the choice is between frozen and nothing, you are going to get up close and personal with Sara Lee or try to make yourself believe you will feel better if you go for Healthy Choice, so you grab that. Which leads you nowhere good, but full. Food that keeps you alive and food that makes your heart beat are two completely different things. I think the difference is what gets people stuck at the roadblock.
Stock in a box or a block of frozen lasagna does nothing for my mojo. Nothing. Not when I am cooking, and not in my bed either. How charged up do you feel opening up a foil pack of compressed chicken powder with an extended shelf life? Or a man/woman who breathes once at birth and possibly before death?
My guess is, not so much.
You know how when you first meet someone who really moves you, all you want is the chance to have them to yourself, to press your nostrils into their neck and smell who they are, to run your fingers down their side to feel what vibrates, to memorize the sound of their breath. That can only happen with someone living.
Same with food. The closer anything is to its true self, the more you are going to get from it, and the better you are going to be at working with it.
And a lot of you might be thinking, really? What is the matter with you? This is America. We don’t talk about things like that.
I want to start.

I have the rock solid knowledge that a lot of people are unhappy with their food. How they eat and how they cook leaves them joyless. They do it because they have to. And it is easy to think that there is one answer, but how could there be? What makes me sing, might not speak to you at all. Love and cooking, cooking and love, is all about listening to the one in front of you. I want to take the risk of listening.
I started asking my friends how they feel about what they eat and what they cook or don’t cook, to help figure it out with them, one by one.

My first try: Tanika