varying degrees of light

17) I don't get mad about this anymore, but when people don't like delicious food, I get kind of miffed. That whole "Fine. More for me!" attitude is not how I roll. Please, please, please try a mushroom. Just taste one. This, strangely enough, does not call for the guilt trip (and I'm all about the guilt trip). I don't know. Food - preparation and consumption - is a sacred practice and, I say doubly so when you share with loving people. Bourdain once compared the primal satisfaction of creating food for others to enjoy to that of giving oral sex. OK!

-One of twenty-five things that I wrote about myself on facebook.

Today was Valentine's Day and, moreso, it was Italian food and Frank Sinatra night. We gathered in the small kitchen in our apartment, Paul, Christina and I having had delegated the dishes, sharing the role of chef (Christina was closest to pastry chef; Paul to saucier; I, as it was my kitchen, the expo) and Adam and Travis playing prep cooks. Lots of fun and cramped spaces and calling out, "Travis! Do you have two hands?! Can you stem the oregano?!"

The full menu:

stuffed Baby Bella mushrooms with feta and goat cheese, garnished with green onion (Paul)
bruschetta on rosemary toasted pita (Christina)

One of the best pesto I've ever tasted w/ angel hair pasta(Paul
A simple tomato sauce with Italian sausage w/ angel hair pasta(self)
garlic bread (self)

angelfood tiramisu (Christina)
Cabernet Pinotage - Sebeka 2007
Green tea

While we were cooking, Adam made a comment about Bourdain's oral sex comparison and we all decided to speak plainly, like adults, with Travis nodding furiously. I'd like to do the same here. Preparing food for someone is, I'll say it again, a sacred act that engages every sense, perhaps one more than the rest, but every one of them with every bite.
When the tomato sauce was just coming together, having had started with sauteed onion (already one of the best smells in the world), chopped garlic and canned tomatoes (it's February, and they were naturally prepared), with small doses of Mediterranean olive oil at each phase, a few spoonfuls of Paul's pesto along with fresh basil, oregano and just a little rosemary, and the beautifully efficient noise it makes when all it needs then is to work the flavors out and together, attuning them with salt and pepper, with the steam slowly, steadily rising from the pot, and you close your eyes and breathe it in, the sauce growing darker and darker, more luxuriously red, and it smells like history.
That's what I thought when I smelled it today, right before yelling at everybody else to smell it too. As rich and complex and bold as history, as the story of entire countries and generations of culture - simmering away on a pot in an apartment with five college students in Northwest Iowa. And there were smiles.
All of that, in just one element of one dish of one meal, prepared with the intention of the diner to sense - hear, see, smell, taste, feel - and, with the first bite, to stop and savor, as it nourishes the body and keeps it running, keeps it alive.
Joel Veldkamp once said, over dinner at the Cheesecake Factory in Des Moines, that food is proof to him that God exists because of the beauty of something that can taste so good, to also be necessary for your ongoing existence.
In regards to that, in regards to tomato sauce, in regards to comparing it all to giving oral sex to someone you love, to sitting with friends you love to eat food that you all had a hand in preparing, and not being able to imagine it would taste so fucking good, I hope that, if you're reading this, that you can enjoy what we did tonight. And, especially if you have friends and family over, to relish in providing for them. I mean that completely - if people are eating food that you prepared, you better own that.
We made too much food, even with Matty arriving early and Bailey arriving late, there are jars of gorgeous leftovers. There is an abundance.

One more.

I came home one evening and saw, in the lobby of Covenant's first floor, that Laura and Neal were hanging out. I approached them with tired shoulders and, they looked up with smiles.
"Are you guys dating now?" I asked.
They said yes, still smiling, and I went inside to my apartment to prop open the door and play soft jazz music.
It wasn't too far into the fall semester, I still had a few handfuls of pear tomatoes that had been growing in my backyard plot. Slicing them in half, seasoning with salt and a small amount of pepper, and dousing with olive oil, in the oven to roast slowly, for a long time, and the sugars develop in them, the chemistry of the flavors dance more boldly and, really, I could eat these plain all year long - they're that good.
Toasted pita, a rich goat cheese, a sprinkle of Italian basil-infused olive oil (the basil grew on the front porch over the summer and smells better, more romantic, than hugging a girl), and a few tomatoes. Nothing complicated, really but every ingredient of this night time snack, shared with two friends who have decided to begin an intimate, trusting, terrifying and exciting relationship, every ingredient carefully chosen and applied to a taste that I still remember vividly so many months after.
To play around with after - figs, goat cheese, balsamic vinegar. I've said this too much already, but I love figs. I love goat cheese. I love balsamic vinegar. Imagine how that all works together.