Long before I owned a restaurant with my husband, there was a desire to cook in me.  Throughout my life, which has had many milestones, I can mark the turning points of my journey with food.  I would say that food, learning how to cook it, grasping its depths and joys, has been a constant, grounding force for me.  My parents divorced when I was very young, and my father quit coming around by the time I was seven.  My mother worked hard to raise us, alone.  We weren't totally alone.  We had Mama's family.  My great aunt Ruby and my grandmother Lucia, or Nanny as we all called her, lived next door to us for most of my young years.  My mother's sisters and their families lived very close to us too.  Without them, I think my mother would not have been able to do what she did; I don't think I would have been able to raise two kids, working the graveyard shift at the phone company.  But she did.  She wasn't perfect, but she survived it, and she raised us.  My brother still lives in Lexington, South Carolina where we grew up.

Because my mother worked so hard, I had to help out in ways that many seven-year olds didn't:  I washed the laundry, shopped for groceries, and cooked dinner.  Before I reached third grade, I could cook, on my own with only the sleepy eyes of a napping mother watching from the edge of her bed that looked into our small, galley kitchen.  We lived in a one-bedroom duplex that we shared with Nanny and Aunt Ruby.  It was small:  a living room (that housed the dining area), a dining room that we turned into my mom's room, a bedroom that my brother Josh and I shared, a bathroom, a tiny kitchen, and a laundry/storage room.  We lived there for several years, and it was there that I learned to cook, out of necessity.  I would often come home from school and cook dinner so that Mama could rest before having to head to work.  My first creations?  Brownies, meatloaf, hamburgers, scrambled eggs.  I cooked for all of us -- even Nanny and Aunt Ruby who would walk from their side of the duplex to ours for supper.  By the time I was in high school, I prepared many of our meals.  Mama taught me how to make more complicated dishes like spaghetti sauces and cakes from scratch.  For a while in high school, I even had my own "business" selling chocolate chip cookies.  I would sell a dozen for a dollar because what I loved most was making the cookies rather than making money; any money I made just went back into purchasing supplies.

But the most significant food experience came when Nanny got sick with pancreas and liver cancer.  She was given six months to live.  I was in my second year of college at Emory University in Atlanta, and it was a shocking revelation to us all.  Nanny was the bedrock of our family.  The diagnosis was so grim that the doctors didn't even use chemo -- no reason to because it wasn't working.  We began to research alternative methods of healing, and we discovered macrobiotic cooking.  It is a Japanese method of eating and living, based in the Taoist philosophies of yin and yang.  The diet is strictly vegan.  More strict than any regular vegan diet.  The yin and yang elements of the diet require that the body remain in balance at all times, negating all foods that would create imbalance.  Night shades like eggplants and potatoes are not allowed.  Tomatoes are too acidic.  Spices and sweeteners send the body too far away from the middle to even be considered.  To adopt a macrobiotic lifestyle meant changing the way we felt about food.  My family was big on food.  We liked big flavors; our palettes were Southern to the core.  Vegetables didn't get cooked without a slab of bacon or fatback to season them.  Butter was used freely.  Frying was an essential cooking method.  Cheese got sprinkled on everything.  Just my family alone drank a gallon of sweet tea a day.  Macrobiotic cooking changed the way I viewed food, flavor, and life.  I would say that I was raised by a mother who found solace in food, so I learned to eat to soothe (which is an entirely different topic).  Macrobiotics, for the first time in my twenty years, revealed to me that we ate to live.  I adopted the diet wholeheartedly, as did every member of the family.  My aunts, their children, and my mother.  Some of us were more committed than others, but the point is that we all had a revelation when Nanny got cancer.  Macrobiotics helped to keep Nanny alive an extra six months, and she was healing.  The doctors were becoming very optimistic.  Nanny lived with pancreas and liver cancer for a full yea and did not take a single drug for pain -- she didn't feel any.  The natural foods were working their super magic.  But Nanny got pneumonia.  It is then that the hospice nurse gave her morphine.  My aunt Margaret (my mother's oldest sister) and I both feel that Nanny didn't die of cancer.  She died from pneumonia and perhaps the effects of the morphine.  The night Nanny died, I was in Atlanta.  Everyone else was by her side.  I missed saying good bye in person, but she came to me in a dream, at the exact moment of her death, and said farewell.  I loved her.

Each phase of my life is marked by a phase of learning new methods of cooking.  Cooking has been a type of meditative empowerment.  Lately, I have felt a little lost, and I have even lost my connection to cooking.  I am working to try and reconnect with me, and I keep coming back to focaccia.  Matt is really the brainchild behind our restaurant.  I am merely someone who supports him (imperfectly at best), but I do have moments of extreme creativity when it comes to the food we cook.  The blank slate of pizza dough is like music that sings to me.  I get why so many people are so passionate and opinionated about pizza.  The other day a guy called the restaurant and asked how much a large pepperoni pizza would be.  "$14.00," said the waiter.  "Go f*^# yourself.  I can get a pizza at Domino's for less," said the caller.  He doesn't get it.

But I do.  For the past two months I have been making focaccia, documenting my efforts.  As I write about it here, I have communion with myself,  just for a moment.   It makes me a better mom, wife, teacher, person.  The simplicity of writing about my love of food, my current love of foccacia bread will hopefully help me to regain the balance I am missing.