Feed Your Fire Podcast Episode Apple and Spotify Personal Growth and Cooking Valentines Day Recipe Love Tacos

Tacos Are My Love Language

Come with us as we explore a rebranding of Valentine’s Day with inspiration from the universal love language of tacos. This Feed Your Fire podcast episode explores a broader defintion of love that romance, drawing inspiration from around the world.

Listen to the Feed Your Fire podcast episode on Apple and Spotify.

Episode Transcript:

Hello and welcome to Feed Your Fire. I'm Kim Baker, founder of Kim Baker Foods. Today we're kicking off a mission to rebrand Valentine's Day. It's a holiday that creates the level of polarization that we see in the world around us. Some love it, some hate it. Do you need to be partnered up to enjoy it? Is it about chocolate and lingerie?

But here's the deal, love is so much bigger than that, and I think having a day that reminds us to be loving to one another is just what the world needs right now. So join us as we explore what this newly branded holiday could be, as we enjoy tacos, which we all know are a universal love language.

Sometimes language can get in the way of expressing depth of emotion, certainly something as complex and profound as love. Outside of the English language, there are hundreds of expressions of love across cultures. Romantic love—passionate love, only represents a small sliver of that vocabulary, with the rest of the words communicating a connection to ourselves, to our family, to our friends, to God. What's interesting is as I was sorting through all of these different words and what they meant, I was struck by how they were really capturing both the input and the impact of that love that's given or received. Some words capture the peacefulness that one feels when they're in community, connected to one another. Others capture the yearning one feels from grief. Think about how powerful of a day this Friday could be if it represented love in all of those dimensions.

The origins of the holiday actually had nothing to do with romantic love. There are many stories about St. Valentine and its connection to February 14. Those early stories have more to do with compassion and unity than anything else. I love that Valentine's Day captures the spirit of what the Greeks would call Eros,—that erotic sense of love. But why does it stop there? What I'm petitioning for is for its expansion. That the Feast of Saint Valentine come to represent all the different aspects in which love touches our lives and the spirit of celebrating and sharing.

I think that part of what has created this narrow definition of love is our linguistic limitations. In English, we have but one word to express all of what love encompasses. There's a ton of scientific research that shows how language affects not only our perceptions, but our understanding. Language is not just a tool for communication, it's a tool for cognition.

The language in which we operate creates a framework for our brains and when our language is limited, so is our ability to see things through a different lens. So as part of this rebranding exercise, I'd like us to reframe our definition anchoring into a concept of love that we all can relate to, even if that concept exceeds our vocabulary. And true to the holiday’s origins, we are going to celebrate the feast of St Valentine together, beginning right here in the kitchen.

Now this is by no means a traditional masa experience. In culinary school, we did learn how to make handmade tortillas. We are not doing that today. We're focusing on what's on the inside, taking inspiration from traditions around the world, learning not just from their linguistic nuances, but the flavors and ingredients that they bring to the table.

So the tacos we're making today are a miso eggplant taco, and it's very tasty. The first thing we're going to do is preheat our oven and prep our eggplant. So I'm using Italian eggplants because, hey, that's what I know. But feel free to use a Chinese eggplant if you prefer.

Now I cut the eggplant ends off, and then I want to slice them into kind of thick batons. Now, the way I do that is to cut the eggplant in half lengthwise, and then I cut it in half the other way. Then take each one of those and cut them into quarters, and you'll be left with 16 sort of batons, if you will. Now soak that eggplant in salted water for about 10 minutes, drain it, rinse it, pat it dry with a paper towel. Place the eggplant on a parchment lined baking sheet, drizzle it generously with some olive oil, sprinkle it with some salt, pepper and a little bit of garlic powder, pop it in the oven. We want to cook them until they're tender about 15 maybe 20 minutes. While the eggplant is cooking, we're going to prepare a miso glaze. So grab a small bowl, add in about two tablespoons of white miso paste, about a tablespoon of brown sugar, the juice of half a lime and a little bit of water to thin it out and mix it up.

Now, after the eggplant has been cooking for about 10 minutes, I like to take it out and flip each piece over. Then I pop the pan back into the oven for about five minutes, just so that both sides get that direct heat.

Then I take it out of the oven one more time, and I drizzle the eggplant generously with that miso paste mixture, getting everything really coated, and then it goes into the oven. For the last five minutes of cooking, the miso paste mixture will thicken and become kind of a glaze that's on the eggplant, and it's super delicious.

Now, honestly, you could stop here and just enjoy this amazing eggplant, but we're here to make tacos. So we're going to put this eggplant in warm tortillas that I like to heat up right on my stove top, etting the direct flame create just a gentle char. Be really careful here. It takes about five seconds to warm up each tortilla, using tongs to flip the tortilla over and get both sides. You can also just warm them up in the microwave or the oven, whatever you feel comfortable doing.

Now, the key to a good taco is not only the flavor of the ingredients, but the textural composition. Now I'm going to pair the miso eggplant with a few other ingredients. I'm going to make a really quick slaw with some finely sliced cabbage, a little bit of sour cream, some lime juice, sriracha, a little bit of honey and some salt.

I also like to add some crispy shallots on top to give it a little bit of punch. As a shortcut, you could buy crispy onions in the salad section of your grocery store. And then I like to add some chopped cilantro, some sliced green onions, a little bit of sliced radish and some peanuts. And that, my friends, is a wrap, quite literally. Grab them with your hands and dig in.

Whether or not you buy into the idea of rebranding Valentine's Day. It is inarguable that tacos and love go hand in hand. Swipe on any dating site and I promise you will see the connection. So what is it about tacos that creates this universal love language? A practical street food from Mexico that was meant for daily nutrition that spread across the globe and has become a beloved part of our cultural fabric here in the US.

Contrary to the word eros, which is that romantic love that today's modern Valentine's Day is built on, there's a Greek word called agape, which is the highest form of love. It's an unconditional love, one of shared humanity. Agape is expressed in empathy and a desire for good that could be felt and experienced by everyone. And it's this love that Valentine's Day should be grounded in.

It seems that over the years, our limited language set had us associate Valentine's Day with eros, but what it was truly intended for is agape. It's the divine love that St Valentine was honored for. And so this rebrand is not a deviation, it's a return to our roots. This linguistic nuance has such significance, and so as you go about expressing your love on Friday and beyond, we hope that you'll be inspired by the Feast of Saint Valentine that we shared today. Until our next episode, I say so long.

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