Nourishing friendship with a recipe and insights from some of my dearest friends as we celebrated our 25 year college reunion. What does friendship mean to you? How does it nurture your life? Special thanks to Dana, Marissa, and Emily for sharing their perspectives and friendship and to each person that attended and made this reunion so special. Go Spiders!
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Episode Transcript:
Hello and welcome to Feed Your Fire. I'm Kim Baker founder of Kim Baker Foods, and today we are celebrating friendship, and we're taking our podcast on the road, exploring what friendship means. You're going to meet some of my oldest friends as we celebrate our 25th college reunion together and gather over, you guessed it, a meal.
There's a Spanish proverb that says, tell me who your friends are, and I'll tell you who you are. And that's because our identities are so deeply intertwined with the company we keep. Our friendships are almost like mile markers in our lives, representing a time and place where we shared experiences, when we reconnect with an old friend, we're bridging the past with the present, integrating the different versions of ourselves. And what I love about it is not just the catching up, right,—the learning and the discovery, but also the old memories that had been long forgotten that come back into view.
And while my friends were in town, we met up in Keswick Charlottesville and had the most delightful dinner at Marigolds. The first stop on this reunion was picking up my friend, Dana. I asked her what friendship means to her.
“True friendship is when you haven't seen somebody for a long time and then you just reconnect,” she said.
The moment where we saw each other again - it was as if we had seen each other yesterday, even though it had been years. There's just a common understanding and a knowing. I had made us a fabulous 90s playlist for our drive, but we never even turned on the music. We just talked, and when we met Marissa and Emily for dinner, the night just got that much better. It was one of those meals where nearly everything we ordered was something that we shared. The food was fabulous. There were forks and spoons coming from every angle, sharing plates together. One of the highlights was this giant head of roasted cauliflower that we demolished eating every last bite.
As I was considering what food we would prepare in this episode, I really wanted to stay in a place of receiving. My heart had been so filled by the act of coming together over a meal that was prepared for us, not by us. But then I thought, perhaps there's a way to create a bridge, something I could share with you that was inspired by the meal that we ate together, and that's what we're going to do today.
This recipe doesn't actually require any cooking. It's raw, like the emotions that we share with our friends when we are being our most authentic and vulnerable selves. It's also the type of recipe that you can dig into together. So grab a plate and a fork, because we're about to share this meal together.
We are making tuna tartare, which is one of the appetizers that we had at our dinner. If you've never used raw fish in your meal preparation, this might feel advanced, but I promise you, it's so easy. I use yellowfin tuna that I get from the local seafood store. This is also called Ahi tuna and is perfectly safe to eat raw.
The first thing we're going to do is create a sauce for the tuna. I start by heating up a frying pan on the stove, adding a little bit of olive oil and then some finely diced shallots. Let that sizzle up a bit, and then add a generous amount of soy sauce to the pan. I like to use about a quarter cup. Then I add in some ginger, a splash of orange juice, a splash of lime juice, some hot chili paste, like a sambal, and I let that kind of reduce down.
Once it gets a little bit thickened, turn off the heat and just let it cool down on the stove. While that's cooling, grab your tuna and with a really sharp knife, cut it into very small cubes. Add your cooled sauce to the tuna, and a little bit of sesame oil, chopped cilantro and scallions, and then pop it back into the refrigerator.
You could add in some diced avocado, but we're gonna actually make some guacamole to pair it instead. With the guacamole, I like to make is really simple. It's crushed avocados, a little bit of finely chopped onion cilantro, some lemon juice and a splash of orange juice and a heavy dose of salt, and that is it. That's the recipe.
Now to serve it, I like to grab a ramekin and put the tuna in the bottom of the ramekin first, and kind of press it down, and then I put the guacamole on top, and so there's kind of two layers in the ramekin. And then go ahead and get the plate that you're going to serve it in and flip this ramekin over in it so that the tuna is on top and the guacamole is on the bottom. It just looks beautiful. Garnish it with a little bit of sesame seeds, maybe some chopped scallions, and invite some friends over to share it with.
Small plates and appetizers really set the stage for sharing. It's like a warm-up that gets the conversation rolling and is a precursor to the meatier topics that really enable us to connect with one another. Our dinner was delicious and it was fun, but what it really was—was meaningful. There was laughter and even a few tears. It was the kind of conversation that you can only have with old friends—old friends that know your family, even once they've passed away. They genuinely want to know about your kids and how they're doing. They've seen you make mistakes and get back up. They've seen you struggle, they've seen you learn. They've seen you overcome.
Life is complicated, and to do it alone is not feasible. We are dependent upon the relationships that we share. So what then is the recipe for creating these enduring friendships? I asked my friends to share their perspective.
Emily said, “Well, I mean, certainly friendship makes the good times better and the hard times lighter. One of the things I've learned as an adult about friendship is that they require work, just like any other relationship, and I think I took that for granted for a long time. Being here on our 25th college “wedding” anniversary (LOL), friendship anniversary—you need to make time for friends and be there for friends and really show up.”
Marissa said, “I think my true desire, or my true needs in friendship is warmth, light, peace, understanding, acceptance and not a lot of expectation. Look at our friendship. We pick up where you left off, and there's just an acceptance and nurturing and peace. And it's that feeling that I truly crave from people and that I want to gift to others.”
One of the things I learned as a child observing my mother is that to have good friends, you have to be a good friend. And I learned that in the way she was interacting in her relationships, always showing up for people, and being proactive and warm and inviting. And in true fashion of my mother and in her spirit, when we finished our dinner at Marigolds, the waitress brought over a complimentary plate of madeleines for us to enjoy as a celebration of this 25 year milestone.
That meal set the tone for the entire weekend that we spent together and in the company of other friends that had come into town. It was such a powerful point of reconnection, and it really was facilitated by the coming together and sharing of nourishment—nourishment for our souls, nourishment of our bodies, nourishment of our minds.
And now that each of us are back home and back to our regular lives, I am reflecting on the time we spent together and the experiences that we shared and I'm really struck by how much I learned about myself and them and life in those hours spent together. Each of our paths have been quite different, and hearing and learning about the choices and experiences of each person is really enlightening. It really brought home the idea that there's so many ways to go about living life. There's no one path that's right or wrong or what you should do or what you could do, and how much we can actually learn just from sharing the experiences that we have with one another to broaden our perspectives.
And as we got reacquainted, I was also getting reacquainted with myself as a younger woman. I was able to reconnect with the joyful moments of that stage of my life and give myself grace for some of the mistakes and things that happened in between, and to appreciate where I am today,
And it was a blast, and that counts for a lot! And so I am going to take this tuna tartar that I've prepared with you today and share it with my boyfriend, who got to meet my friends from 25 years ago to bring him into the fold and to integrate these experiences with him and with you.
Special shout out to the University of Richmond for hosting this fabulous weekend and being the catalyst for these wonderful moments. Until our next episode, I say so long.
Feed Your Fire, where food nourishes growth.