favourite feelings in the kitchen
moments, reads, memories, a kitchen thread in no particular order
~ We all know dining in candlelight, have you ever cooked in candlelight? Or, just had a candle lit near the chopping board on an overcast afternoon, or at dusk? There’s something so ancient and beautiful about the presence of a candle while preparing a meal. In my home, our temple is in the kitchen (and the kitchen is the temple of a home, isn’t it?) and sometimes I love to keep a lamp lit as an offering to my deities before I begin my evening nourishment crafting sessions.
~ The feeling of switching off from work, a shower or a face wash, and then dressing up to enter the kitchen. I love to change into soft, moonly clothing that feels good, to go into cooking. Sometimes, a lot of times, I love to change into clothing that feels hot, a little bit ;) A lip gloss here, a fragrance oil there. I once made a meal with a waterproof charm bracelet and rings on, and it delighted me so much. It’s the fashion designer within, or maybe all the Venusian astrological placements. To me, spending even a few minutes to tap out of work mode and go into kitchen mode, usually by cleansing/adorning/refreshing the body, feels like a portal that transitions into a softer energy. It’s like an offering to the sacred act of preparing nourishment and working with the gifts of the earth to design sustenance.
~ Cooking is never just cooking, is it? When I zoom out from the mundane, tired human lens of seeing it as obligation, I see it as an intricate weaving of necessity with pleasure. It is design. It fulfils a need, it decides the quality of a life and a body, and we craft this with a priority to making it all as appealing to the senses as possible. In process, in outcome. Good cooking is good design.
~ Looking at my handwritten recipe notebook to make something. Watching a YouTube video, writing it down by hand, and then referring to it. My recipe book speaks a language that only I understand.
~ Listening to flamenco, spanish guitar, salsa, cha-cha, nothing feels more exciting than Latin music in the kitchen for me, no matter what cuisine I’m cooking.
~ When someone else cleans the kitchen and I never have to. I’m like an artist who has help to clear out the desk after her passionate hours spent in creation.
~ Laying out old newspapers on my marbletop kitchen counters so I can be messy on purpose, and when I throw them away my counter is shiny as ever beneath it all. But still, having an understanding that if I cook, others clean, is top tier hahaha.
~ Stirring in intentions to call in, clockwise, into food. Stirring anti-clockwise for anything that one wants to banish or release from the partaker. Visualising golden light emanating from a vessel on the stovetop, infusing water with intention. Calling upon the magical properties of vegetables, herbs and spices. Speaking to them brings them to life, gratitude brings them to their fullest powers.
~ My cats, spread out on the ground in the kitchen, exactly in the spots where I need to cautiously step over them or trip. Purr, this is the best place in the house. The kitchen is actually the feline headquarters. Here’s my girl cat doing things she’s absolutely not supposed to do in the kitchen. There’s also biting, scratching, pulling on my dress, and drinking water from the human glass when the human isn’t looking.
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~ After so many years of favouring eloquent, elaborate cooking as an activity of pleasure, I’m beginning to see more than ever how there’s actually no rules to anything. A lot of times, the stripped down, quickly done version of anything is so much tastier.
~ The joy of taking those 10 minutes to prepare and prettily lay out everything you’ll need before you start cooking, instead of the usual opening jars and shelves as you go, as though you’re being shot on a cooking show. I don’t always do this, but I highly recommend myself to do it more often.
~ This YouTube channel gives me life. It’s so inspiring to see Nonnas (grandmothers in Italian) over 90 years of age, having the strength and rigour to just go into the kitchen and cook a meal from scratch more than once a day. A meal with more than just one dish. If they can, so can I. And they drink coffee. And they go for a little walk in the market and get sweet treats. They eat dessert everyday, and they’re healthy and living long. I don’t know what that’s about, but it just fills me with joy. Watching these homely, humble vlogs with not a single slick, aesthetic, high-production value kitchen in sight is just so precious. The ordinary kitchenware, the nonchalant preparation of traditional meals that you just know are so very delicious. The most delicious food we ever taste - from grandmothers, especially - is the kind that’s made without being too pedantic about anything at all. Just feminine intuition.
Reading and Writing on the Kitchen <3
~ Lines from Kitchen Witch by Sarah Robinson, a magical book that weaves food, folklore, fairy tale and the kitchen as an ancient feminine, magical, mystical, sacred space of benevolent witchcraft.
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~ I came across this collection of essays, and it had a line about making a slutty pasta sauce that had me hooked at the very beginning. A slutty pasta sauce is a thing, it’s an if you know you know. If you believe in making your own pasta sauce, you know the slutty pasta sauce. ;)
~ Love poetry that includes food, nourishment, shared supper and the presence of a kitchen is so beautiful to me, it’s almost my favourite kind of poetry. The sacral perfection of it.
’s poetry, especially her ways of talking about tomatoes and eggs without salt, is always so beautifully evocative of the threads between food and life. I learn so much from her Substack, and it’s honestly always when there’s a sensual reference to food in her poetry that gets me.
~
is hosting a Food Writing workshop this July, and it’s a lot more than just writing about food. It sounds like a sensual, sacral, evocative writing container where the realms of nourishment - it’s memories, it’s fragrances, it’s sensorial aspects - are celebrated through the medium of writing, and it promises to be delicious.~
has always written such beautiful words about the relationship between women and kitchen, and reclaiming this space as feminine healing. The excerpt below is from a piece in which she ties Saturnian astrology with her journey back to the kitchen. It’s stunning.The way that I resonated with this quote (below) from her piece is not funny. I’ve never heard anyone say it before her, and my heart has been feeling and saying it all the time. I know they’re only being nice, and it’s not an affront at all, but I feel so hurt when people wrestle against my acts of cooking, or caregiving, or gift giving, or anything towards them that requires them to receive. We were all taught that it’s Nice to profusely refuse nice things. We weren’t exactly taught that it hurts the giver. It makes me a little fucking mad, it does, when I meet someone’s resistance by way of insisting that I shouldn’t have cooked food. Do we really need to have all these empty manners where we say the opposite of what we mean? What if we replaced “You shouldn’t have” with a heartfelt “Thank you, this is wonderfully excessive.” Stop telling me to “Please don’t bother” to cook. I want to cook for you. I want to bother to cook what one might deem ‘so much,’ sometimes. And others wounds around receiving need not have to get in the way of how good it makes me feel to have bothered.
- Shivani B, in Magic of Saturn: Releasing karmic cycles, making space and teaching me about long-term relationships
Another piece from Shivani, Cancer: The Mother, the moon, and the moonchild, and all it’s invitations and reflections on mothering, nurturing, nourishing, caring and khidmat, is just as beautiful to share here, especially given that we’re in cancer season right now. I have so many conversations with Shivani about the kitchen, and how that space opens up so, so many portals and assignments of feminine ancestral healing for us. It’s such a joy to witness her writing and sharing about sacral kitchen stories.
~ I am, myself, a cancer moon writing this long ode to the kitchen on a moon day (Monday), on the first day of my follicular phase, on the 1st of July, right after a sickness did a big purge from me. My moon has just entered it’s progression in Leo. It all feels divinely timed. I love how this life is always giving us new beginnings, within our cycles in the body, in the celestial rhythms of the planets, as well as in the containers of our constructed calendars. Any realm you go to, there’s an offering of a new slate to begin with. Mondays have always been the day where I give a little less time to work, and little more to home, kitchen, meal prepping and nurturing the week ahead.
~ I was published in a beautiful book on memories from Indian kitchens. I am not getting over this anytime soon. I shared in here an ancestral recipe from my maternal grandmother, alongside contemplations from heart and womb that I deeply enjoyed writing. It’s about my relationship to the kitchen from the lens of feminine healing and embodiment. You’ll find this in a gorgeous, gorgeous anthology of Indian cuisine that I believe every lover of food must have on their shelf, because all the stories and recipes within are so preciously crowdsourced and tastefully curated. This book is a collaboration between two brilliantly creative forces - Nivaala x The Alipore Post. They’re currently all sold out. However, it’s about to go into a second print run, and I’ll keep you posted on when that will be made available. Here are a few very tiny glimpses of what my piece in there looks like.
Email length limit exceeded, time I was supposed to spend on this exceeded, I think it’s time I wrap up this excessive kitchen post. If you’ve read all the way till here, despite all those distracting links, I cherish you. If you’d like to read more from my kitchen, this post below has been receiving a lot of love!
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The way you infuse romance into life 😍 Surely you must feel like you’re floating ☁️ I love it. We need more of this. It’s not what we do, but how we do it!
Ahhh I love this!! Especially stirring intentions into the food🥰 I always do that✨ and I have my sun in Cancer as well so cooking and nurturing people feels so good to me as well ❤️ can’t wait to read more of your stuff on cooking!