Feed Your Fire Podcast Lenox Hill Neurosurgery Cancer Zucchini Blossoms

Finding Joy at the Center of Hardship with Zucchini Blossoms (Lenox Hill Neurosurgery Gala)

Life is full of contrasts. It’s easy to appreciate that texture on the plate but how can we navigate complex situations and find joy? Come with us as we celebrate the contrasts of life, gaining depth and richness from those experiences. 

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Episode Transcript:

Hello and welcome to Feed Your Fire. I'm Kim Baker founder of Kim Baker Foods. And in today's episode, we are going to talk about contrasts and texture and how these opposing forces can come together to create a rich tapestry of experience, whether that's on the plate, are in our lives.

We all tend to appreciate texture on the plate, right? We know how things that are smooth and crunchy, or sweet and spicy— how those contrasts add to a meal and to a recipe. But when we experience those types of contrasts and textures in our lives, it can feel jarring, like an interruption in our everyday life. We crave consistency, and yet, we all know that that's not the way it happens. There are bumps and dips and divots and tragedies and joyous moments. While we seek out ways to have life feel more smooth and settled, it's often the contrasts that make our experiences more beautiful.

Contrasts are not the same as volatility. In volatile situations, there's no harmony in the experience. The contrasts and textures I'm talking about happen at one time. There is an interplay between them that creates purpose, and those two individual contrasting elements actually make more sense when they're paired together. It's like adding salt to a brownie batter where the salt actually enhances the sweetness.

About a week ago, I attended this gala on behalf of Lenox Hill Neurosurgery Brain Tumor Center. And as you know from episode one, this is a topic that's really significant to our family. Josh, my sister's boyfriend, was diagnosed with glioblastoma just over a year ago and has been in the thick of healing and recovery.

The event was extraordinarily beautiful, and I'm not just talking about the venue and the food and the way it came together. It was a very powerful, emotional experience. This was a heavy, heavy subject matter, right? It is a brain tumor center that we were fundraising for, and yet there was so much celebration happening. There was courage and hope and inspiration and passion and drive and support and love filling the seats.

My sister and I spoke about how these moments can oddly make you feel lucky, lucky to be part of someone's journey. They had made a video of Corinne and Josh. He was being honored as patient of the year, and she was being honored as caretaker of the year. And their story, along with other stories that they shared, exposed not only the heartache but the joy. There wasn't a dry eye in the room as they shared these videos and people made speeches.

It became very clear that while we would never choose this pathway, we would never put this type of tragedy on the table for anyone, when you look closer at it, you realize that at the center of it, there's so much more than just the heartache. There's a depth of emotional experience and connection that can only be felt or seen because of that contrast. The darkness is what makes the light visible.

And as I thought about this episode and the recipe that we would prepare today, I wanted to do something that was inspired by that experience. And then when I was in the store, I stumbled across these squash blossoms, and I couldn't take my eyes off of them. The idea of these flowers and nature flourishing seemed like the most appropriate way to tie all of this together. And what I love about this recipe is that inside the squash blossoms, we're going to fill them with cheese and so it becomes this kind of unexpected bite of goodness in the center of this delicate, delicious flower.

So we're going to start by just cleaning them up a bit. I noticed in the bag that I bought, there were actually a few living creatures. So rinse them under water and then gently pat them dry. You'll want to clean the inside and the outside of the blossom. Inside the flower are essentially its reproductive organs. So in a plant that's the pistol or the stamen take that out so you just have an empty pocket.

Now, if I was being a good Italian girl, we would stuff these with mozzarella and ricotta, but I've been living in the South for about 25 years, and so I decided to do things a little bit differently. I bought this amazing pimento cheese, and we're going to stuff the flowers with that. I just use a spoon to gently and delicately put about a tablespoon of the pimento cheese inside each flower blossom, and then I sort of use my hands and just kind of twist the top of the flower closed.

With the flowers assembled, we're going to make a really simple tempura batter that we'll dip those flours into before we fry them, creating this really light crispness. I use a combination of flour and corn starch, generally about twice as much flour as corn starch. I add in a little bit of baking powder (not soda), a little bit of salt, and then some seltzer. The carbonation mixed with the baking powder creates a reaction that will make this a really kind of airy, light batter. You want the batter to be kind of thin, almost like a crepe batter, and you want it to be cold, so I'm going to pop it into the refrigerator while we heat up our oil.

Now I know frying is not healthy, but I was once the fry girl at Maple & Pine restaurant at the Quirk Hotel, and so I have an affinity for using a fryer. So today, though, rather than heat up the deep fryer, I'm going to pan fry these, which means I'm going to take a frying pan, fill it with about a quarter to a half inch of oil and let that get nice and hot. I'm using peanut oil so that I can get the oil really hot, so that the flowers don't get greasy, and the oil can withstand the high temperature.

You'll see the oil kind of have a ripple effect in it, and that tells you that it's getting nice and hot. So one by one, I'm going to take the zucchini blossoms that are stuffed, I'm going to hold the top of the flower kind of closed with my fingers, and dip it into the tempura batter, and then I'm going to gently place it in the hot oil using tongs. I flip the flower in the hot oil a few times, being really careful not to get burned. Sometimes, if you had water droplets on your flower, you may get some splattering, so be really careful.

Once they're golden all around the flower, remove them from the hot oil and put them on a plate that's lined with paper towel and sprinkle them with just a touch of salt. That's all there is to it. Just repeat this with the remaining blossoms and enjoy them hot as you bite into the zucchini flower. You'll see how the delicateness of the flower is offset by the batter and the richness of the cheese.

Our bodies are naturally attuned to these contrasts when we're talking about a recipe on a plate, we can appreciate those textures and flavors that are coming together in unexpected ways. But our minds need more training. We need to practice the skill of looking deeper to find the joy, to find gratitude, to find the dimension in an experience. But here's the thing, once you see it, you can't unsee it. You'll never look at a situation the same once you've learned to really dig into the center to find more.

A lot of times, when I'm sharing about my family, people will say, I don't know how you all managed losing your brother and your father and your mother so quickly. And it was a tragic time. It took years to really process all of those emotions. But it also opened me up. It opened me up so I could look deeper inside. And what I found was that the emotional experience expands and becomes richer the deeper you go. As you blossom, you can more easily find joy in the center.

Josh at the gala said that he believes happiness heals and that joy is something we have to seek out to find. It may not be obvious. And yet, there we were at a fundraising event for brain cancer, dancing the night away. We were in community, surrounded by one another with love and hope and that fundraising might be someone else's future.

Corinne and Josh are such an inspiration, and every day they live in that contrast showing us and teaching us how it's done. I'm grateful to be a part of it and to share the story of their courage and resilience with you, and I'm going to share these zucchini blossoms with a friend as part of a charcuterie board, the ultimate display of contrasts.

A special shout out to Lenox Hills Neurosurgery Center. We're grateful for all that you do to make a difference in people's lives with your medical excellence and your heart. Until our next episode, I say, so long.

Feed your fire, where food nourishes growth.