Food Woolf

I return to my apartment kitchen. It feels like months since I’ve cooked a proper meal. I’ve subsisted on restaurant food and bowls of yogurt with granola for half a year. But now I’m in my kitchen and white linen sunlight spills through the windows and onto the tiled counter tops. I pull ingredients from the refrigerator. There isn’t much–some eggs, a bunch of radishes, a block of cheese, a stick of Plugra butter–but for the first time in a long time, I have time to cook. I couldn’t be happier.

For the past six months I’ve done little else than work. Some weeks there were no days off. Most weeks began hours before the sun came up and ended hours after the sun set. My shifts were spent in the service of others, which made me happy and motivated to keep on, but the work left me little else than an hour for commuting home and washing up before I fell into bed, exhausted. Overseeing a tiny 20-seat restaurant in Santa Monica left my body tired and mind mind hungry for another kind of sustenance.

Prayer and meditation helped me through the especially hard days. I envisioned relief from the daily struggle. Then, a little over a week ago, I received the news I was hoping for. I was given the opportunity to go back to my service consulting business. Thanks to divine provenance, I was regained the freedom to be of service to my loved ones and doing what I love.

I submerge a cluster of red and white baby radishes and their rough greenery in a bowl filled with cool water. I imagine my hands and the rest of me floating in spring water, like the deep spring that fills my family’s granite-ridged quarry in Gloucester, Massachusetts.  It’s good to be in immersed in water, I think, even if it is to wash radishes. The last grains of sandy brown earth that clings to the candy stripe radishes falls away.

I am left with a handful of potential for a simple meal. I pull the green leaves for a simple salad, remove the curlycue roots with a swift slice of the knife, and cut thin red and white circles the thickness of card stock. I stop to regard two radishes left uncut on my plastic cutting board. I’m hungry and can’t bear to wait another moment for something to eat.

Why wouldn’t I satisfy my hunger now? Why wait?

I slice off the very tip of the remaining radish and dip it lightly into a shallow bowl of Maldon. I don’t know if it’s the crunch of the tiny pyramids of sea salt or the burst of white pepper spice from the radish, but I can’t help but gasp a little. The flavors and textures overtake me. Each magnificent bite is a tiny inspiration.

Awestruck, I think that I might be able to fill reams of paper in trying to describe the moment I take another bite, hoping to confirm the magnificent flavors haven’t depreciated. The tastes morph but maintain my peaked attention. How something so simple could be so incredibly stunning makes me mind spin. Then the thought hits me. It isn’t just two simple ingredients–freshly picked radish and hand-harvested sea salt–that make this combination so memorable. It is the final, key ingredient–spacious time–that allows me to taste and appreciate these astonishing flavors.

Spacious time is what I’ve been so hungry for.

Not much time has passed since I finished my work at the Santa Monica bakery and pizzeria. I’m happy knowing I have the next exciting job lined up (more on that later). But in the handful of weeks I’ve had, I have been able to recalibrate and relax

Eating radishes dipped in salt reminds me to keep it simple. Don’t push so hard or make things too complicated.  I have to remember to cultivate and protect spacious time. Why wouldn’t I want to savor every bitter, sweet, and spicy moment?

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