In this episode of Feed Your Fire, we step away from our world weariness to feed our souls, not the monster. We draw inspiration from Netflix’s documentary, AKA Charlie Sheen, to explore how we can gain greater clarity and control as we prepare a healthy sustaining meal that anyone can enjoy.
Listen on Spotify, Apple, YouTube, and Amazon.
Feed Your Fire Podcast Episode Transcript:
Hello and welcome to Feed Your Fire. I'm your host, Kim Baker.
We're all suffering from a little bit of world weariness right now. Consider this podcast, a safe haven—a politics-free zone, where we feed your heart and soul, but we don't feed the monster. And today, we're focusing on things that feel grounding, with a meal to match. So pull up a chair and join us at this community table.
Society right now kind of looks like a chapter in Charlie Sheen's life, where we're all drinking tiger blood. Everything is about winning, and we're getting further and further away from reality. It's nuts, and it can lead you to a doomscroll spiral. So we're taking a break from the headlines, and we're gonna enjoy a moment of sobriety.
Those close to me know that lately, I've been on a bit of a creative expedition. To the hilarity of my son, I've started tap dancing as an adult, something I haven't done in decades, doing studio art with oil pastels, and I finally learned how to use my brother's camera.
This flow of creativity is providing a positive buffer to the external world, and it's been illuminating this idea of subjective truth, because that's ultimately what art is. The combination of my personal reality and my capability to express that. And the beautiful thing about art is that both of those things can change.
They're not fixed, and they can become a window into a bigger truth. And I think right now what we're experiencing is something like an MMA match between subjective truths with winning being the name of the game. And if you've watched AKA Charlie Sheen, then you know that that mindset is riddled with consequence.
So how do we get closer to a universal truth, something that we can all relate to? That's a big one. I decided to ask Chat GPT. Now “Chatty” affirmed this question, stating that it was big and beautiful. And it provided six pathways to universal truth before asking if I wanted it to build a framework for this. It also provided seven steps to get out of the mess that we're in.
And ironically, none of those things are actually what's happening in the world. And if the world's most intelligent platform that's at our fingertips has all the answers, but they're not acted on, then I would say that it has none of the answers, and that the answer lies in each one of us.
And though food is not the panacea to the world's problems, it's what I'm bringing to the table today. We're going to make a simple salad with ingredients that have a sense of integrity and provide sustenance. It's very accessible and does not require a lot of money. And it's really flexible. You can tailor it to whatever your preferences are.
It's a simple chickpea salad made straight from a can. Now this salad has roasted red peppers in it. And when I looked in my pantry, the jar I had expired in 2024. So we're going to make our own roasted pepper today. I have these beautiful green peppers growing in my garden.
They have yet to turn red, but they will still make an absolutely wonderful addition to our salad. So I'm going to grab one of those peppers and slather it with some oil. And then I'm going to char the hell out of it.
Now I'm doing this right in my kitchen on the stovetop over a gas flame. But you can absolutely do this outdoors on a grill if you feel more comfortable. So using tongs, I'm just kind of rotating the pepper until it becomes completely blackened.
And then I pop it in a bowl and then cover it with saran wrap. This creates steam. And once it's been sitting like that for a while, when you take off the plastic wrap, you'll see that the skin of the pepper just easily pulls right off.
Slice open that pepper and take out all the seeds. Chop it up and set it aside. Then grab a can of chickpeas, drain it, and rinse it a couple of times.
Put the chickpeas and the roasted peppers in a bowl. Then we're going to add in some sun-dried tomatoes that have been chopped up, probably about a quarter cup. Add in a handful of chopped walnuts and a celery stalk that's been really finely sliced.
Now I want you to take some hard provolone and cut it into really small cubes. You can certainly use another kind of cheese, but the provolone gives it like a sharp saltiness. Now I like to also add in some shards of parmesan.
Now we're not making a dressing for salad. Everything's going in this bowl together really simply. Drizzle everything generously with like a quarter cup of olive oil.
Squeeze in the juice of a half a lemon and add in some finely chopped shallot. Add a tablespoon of agave, thinly slice about five or six basil leaves, put them right in the bowl, as well as a handful of chopped parsley. Then go ahead and stir everything together, generously seizing it with salt and pepper.
You can eat this as is or pair it with some chopped radicchio or arugula for some peppery-ness. If you're vegan, skip the cheese and maybe add some olives for that saltiness. You can pair it with salmon or steak.
With this recipe, there are no wrong answers. And that's what I love about it for today's episode. Chickpeas date back about 7,000 years, and they're a staple across cultures and traditions.
Grounding ourselves means finding common ground. And I love using this recipe as an example of how simple that actually can be. In my own personal experiences, I've learned that being right is the obstacle to connection and a driver of conflict.
In the world of food, that's when a menu has no substitutions. And in life, it's the slippery slope where our subjective reality becomes used for influence and control. So consider this recipe a loose guide, where you switch it up however you see fit.
Now, as we step away from the tiger blood we've been drinking into something more sober-minded, then a hallmark of that behavior is recognizing what we can and can't control. One of those things is our attention. There's a famous quote from James Redfield where attention goes, energy flows.
And with every scroll and click, we're giving misinformation more power. And we can make the choice not to participate. I don't think this needs to be a radical transformation in our lives.
But for example, if we agree with Chat GPT that social media is a part of this dysfunction, maybe we should all choose to participate just a little bit less. The algorithm might be their recipe, but it doesn't need to be ours. And maybe we could try to hold space for disagreement.
My older sister and I are near opposites. What I often see as black, she sees as white. But what we share transcends all of that.
And what I’ve come to know is that individually, our perspectives are incomplete. But that in the collective, we get that much closer to Picasso. Until our next episode, I say so long.
Feed Your Fire, where food nourishes growth.