I don't know.

My friend Dara is a master chef. She is one of those individuals for whom food and cuisine are second nature, one who must have been marked before birth by some benevolent goddess wielding a long wooden spoon and wearing a stained apron.

Watching Dara move around her kitchen is like watching a dancer occupy space -- fluid and effortless. I've sighed with pleasure at her curry and coconut chutney, proclaimed my love for her onion torte, and invoked the deity after a bite of her chocolate cake.



Last night we went together to our friend's birthday party, a celebration both of her birth and of the new life growing inside her. Dara and I sat on the couch together, savoring cake and the sweetness of community, talking about food, and about my recent, tottering first footsteps on this path which she's been walking her whole life.

Having read my blog for a few moments before we left her house to come to the party, she'd noticed that I had previously distinguished between the "stalk kind" of red onions and the "round kind." Dara gently disabused me of my ignorance, explaining the miraculous life cycle of the simple onion.

Apparently, said onion gets bigger and rounder over the course of seasons! Those stalks of onions we see now, as well as the thin stalks of garlic that look like green onions, those are actually onions and garlic at the height of freshness, in season! And the round onions available year-round in the store? Those are actually preserved from a few seasons ago! Dara asked, "have you ever noticed how, when you squeeze a round onion, it's not hard? It has a bit of give?" Yes, I replied, incredulous.

She informed me that that's because those onions are months old. When stored well, they are perfectly proper to eat, but the bald truth about those round, plump, ubiquitous onions upon which I have relied so heavily throughout my humble cooking life, is that they are old.

Well, as you can imagine, this changes everything. This new revelation means, of course, that the role of onions in one's culinary stylings is meant to change over the course of a year. When onions are the way they are now, light and crisp, juicy and sharp, they can add a flavor to cooking that is, for lack of a better word, springy. However, when onions have swollen to their spherical maturity, they bring a mellower, sweeter, dare I say autumnal quality to one's dishes.

And I simply had no idea.

There is so much I don't know, dear reader. I don't know how to combine herbs for flavors that pop and saturate one's senses, instead of simply tasting jumbled and overpowering. I don't know what makes a good marinade. I don't know how long things should boil, or simmer, or roast such that they pass into that slim window of perfection, just a few moments shy of limp or burned. I don't know how to store herbs in my fridge so that they don't shrivel so quickly. I certainly don't know the lexicon of food, the way that adjectives and qualifiers nestled next to simple words like "salt," "oil," and "mustard" can suggest a profuse variation of tastes. Apparently, I barely know what an onion is!

Yet this outright ignorance causes me no chagrin, dear reader; instead, it gives me the giggles. I like it. I am excited about it. I rub my hands together with an avid glee at my own lack of knowledge.

Why is that, you ask? Well, first of all, because it means that there is a whole encyclopedia of gastronomical information and experience that awaits me. From here, I can see a whole new horizon of learning, playing, growing. I can anticipate exalted successes and instructive mistakes (where the ratio of exaltation to instruction is perhaps best left unquantified for now).

And second of all, I feel gladness because there is much that I do know.

I know that I love the earthy flavor and astounding hue of purple potatoes.



I know that I love sweet, savory flavors like carrot soup made with rye, fennel and caraway. I know that I feel in myself a bright green energy after eating an especially tasty salad. I know that I feel nourished by warm foods, stewy foods, ratatouille foods.

I know that it's a beautiful act of honoring myself, not a forlorn deprivation, when I remove sugar from my diet. (And I also know, like I know my own name, that it's crucial to keep a bar of 85% dark chocolate in the house.)

I know that I love to crumble feta over sliced olives, diced pickles, sundried tomatoes, and chives, and then scramble it all up with free range brown-shelled eggs.

I know that my body knows what it needs. My rumbly hunger signals contains valuable information, and if I just listen, I can discern exactly how to respond. My body is capable of boundless radiance, pleasure, openness; it is capable of a profound happiness arising from flavors and words and flowers and people, and from simply being still.

This body will always tell me how to care for it. And it's my joyful journey to learn the art of doing just that.

Chickpea Potato Salad

I'm not sure what proportion of ingredients to use, so just play with it, to your liking.

cubes of cooked purple potatoes
chickpeas
sliced fennel bulb
parsley
tomato
feta

dressing:

fennel seeds
olive oil
brown rice vinegar
lemon
salt