How can you create a comeback from grief? Through our heartbreaks, there are opportunities to transform our experiences to generate more meaning in our lives. In this Feed Your Fire podcast episode, we'll share a personal story and how the creative process can enliven us when we feel lost. We'll do this while preparing a delicious sheet pan meal that is an easy recipe adaptation that helps us experience the power of transformation.
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Episode Transcript:
Feed Your fire, a podcast from Kim Baker Studios that dives into self discovery and personal fulfillment through the shared experience of food. I'm Kim Baker, founder of Kim Baker Foods, and this is Feed Your Fire. It's a bit of a mash up discussion about life topics and food. Sometimes we'll cook, other times we'll just eat, but in each episode, we'll share stories and have a conversation that pushes us further in our relationship with ourselves and other people to us, food is the connective tissue in life, and it's so much fun. Feel free to just listen or cook with us.
Today we're going to talk about grief, but not just the heartache of it. We're going to focus on the getting through it. Grief is something that we all experience at some point in our lives, and let's face it, it hurts. It could be the loss of a friendship, romantic relationship, a job, a pet, a part of ourselves that we had to leave behind, a dream we once held that didn't materialize, or the passing on of someone that you love no matter what you have grieved, there is heartache to overcome, because it's our relationships, pursuits and identities that give our lives meaning, and when they're lost, we ache for what we knew.
I recently attended a grief retreat called Circles of Life, hosted by my dear friend Jennie. She had asked me to speak to the group about my experience with loss and how I had used the act of creating to process that emotion.
Today, we're going to talk about the creative process making something that did not exist in one version of our lives, and how it could be the very thing that allows us to rise into the next version of ourselves and become better for it.
I have found that physical work with my hands allows me to get out of my head and into my body where trauma actually lives. And cooking is one way I have learned to do this. It's the same type of exercise that makes therapeutic, gardens, art, study and writing exercises so cathartic.
When my brother died, this became an essential tool for my well-being. At the time, I was a young single mother, far away from my family, with a one-year old baby, feeling so vulnerable and isolated. And when he died, I needed something that softened the despair. It was actually the pain that inspired me to write my first cookbook to create. I just didn't know at the time how this concept of creation would bear out as a channel for grief. It was just sort of an instinctive process to do something that felt positive.
I wrote the book in the evenings, after work, taking care of my son and practice recipes became dinner. And that's what happened at the retreat. On the last night, the women that attended cooked a meal together using recipes from my book and in honor of them and those listening that are working through this type of experience, we're here with you, and we are going to prepare a meal inspired from my book while we have this discussion.
In the cookbook, there's a page at the end that speaks to the idea that nutritious food, rest and shared company are what build us up. So we're keeping the cooking simple and light.
Today, we're going to prepare an adaptation of the salmon with Brazil nuts on page 13 of “Working It in the Kitchen”. We'll turn the recipe into a sheet pan meal so that it's complete, and we're going to prepare it as a larger piece of fish that's communal, not already cut into individual filets.
The first thing we're going to do is preheat a sheet pan in an oven set to 400 degrees. We want that pan hot while it's heating, pat your fish dry with paper towels, rub a little olive oil all over top and bottom and season it somewhat generously with salt, pepper and some smoked paprika. If you have it, we're going to slice red cabbage and red onions, toss them in olive oil, salt and pepper, and set them aside.
Now go ahead and remove that hot pan carefully from the oven, drizzle it with a little bit of olive oil, and then put the fish skin side down in the center of the pan, and put the cabbage and onions all around it. Essentially, we're mimicking using a hot skillet on the stove, but we're doing it in the oven because it's easier. And with everything together, we're going to cook that for about eight to 10 minutes where the fish is not completely cooked through, and then we're going to add some toppings to it as we finish it off.
The thing about writing this cookbook is that it didn't just help me through the grief I felt when my brother died, it actually brought my whole family together through his spirit.
After Nick died, everything changed. The balance of life shifted, and all of our traditions made his absence that much more pronounced. Family meals and holidays felt kind of empty, and the day-to-day was surreal. When my cookbook was featured on The Today Show, it became a celebration that we shared together as a family. And I'm grateful because it turned out to be one of the last experiences I would have with my parents before they passed away.
This had all happened so quickly, and when my sisters and I lost our parents, there was just no project big enough that could really offset that. The loss, which kind of becomes cumulative, was just too great to overcome with that same type of creation.
As I sat with it, wondering how do I move forward from here, I felt this call inside of me to expand, to somehow become bigger, so that I could carry their spirits within me. And that required doing something I had never done before, something more like reinvention.
I found a culinary school in New York City (The Institute of Culinary Education) that had a weekend program, which was incidentally, just a few blocks away from my younger sister's apartment. I traveled there on Fridays after work from Virginia, returning on Sunday evenings to repeat the cycle again and again for the better part of a year.
My sisters were instrumental in making this happen, helping me with my son while I was at school. And as we came together, we made new memories, and we navigated being a family of three instead of six.
It was an utterly insane endeavor, and there were planes and trains and car rides through the pouring rain, snow storms, a brown out, a marathon shutting down traffic in the city, and any food I brought home was inevitably flagged by TSA. And though I was profoundly exhausted, the feeling was so acute that it filled me with aliveness.
Interestingly, my son reflects on that time in his life as a highlight where he was connected to his family, enjoying things he had never had a chance to do before.
it was a shedding process, letting go of who I was and what I knew, and stepping into new skin with my sisters alongside as we lifted one another up.
Cooking was my meditation, and becoming a chef created a new sense of self. I knew myself to be different. Now the difficulty of the process only added to its authenticity. And so today's recipe is modified from the cookbook because I'm not the same as I was when I originally wrote it. I'm better.
The recipe adaptation pulls from that very idea. The recipe is more complete. It has more complexity. It's more interesting and rounded.
The women that attended the Circles of Life retreat and each of you listening can experiment with your own ideas of creation. What I love about food is that preparing and sharing it is essentially an act of service. You can find your own outlets that speak to you that make you feel inspired, that allow you to transform difficult experiences into something with more dimension.
When I finished culinary school, I launched Pro-Chi. The name was suggestive of the idea of embracing your life force. Lentils have long been a food revered by my family as a source of strength and nutrition, and each of the packages of my product have a piece of my mother's artwork on it.
So as we finish up our salmon, it would only be appropriate to include the lentils as a topping. I'm going to take our fish out of the oven to finish it, I'm going to smear the top of the fish with a mixture of apricot preserves and lime juice, sprinkling harissa lime lentil crunch over top. I'm going to take that same apricot lime mixture and toss it with the vegetables, sprinkle dill on everything, and then pop it back in the oven for about five minutes, or until it's cooked through.
The idea that energy cannot be created or destroyed is a well-known scientific concept, and it's a principle that's drawn me to creative exercises as I've processed grief. When you are holding pain, that emotion cannot dissipate purely on its own. It must be converted, and whatever we make of it, is what lives in us.
I have found it to be really powerful when we use the experience to make something good that actually only exists because of that initial source of negative energy. The person I've stepped into didn't exist before she was born from grief and the transformation of those experiences have made me more, not less, of who I was in my emboldened state, I carry my brother, my father and my mother inside of me, and it is their spirit that's enabled me to grow.
Growth requires fuel, and so I'm going to enjoy this healthy spread of food that we've just prepared to replenish myself. And I hope you do the same. Until our next episode, I say, so long.
Feed Your Fire, where food nourishes growth.