Cooking with Intention

I’ve started a new series on Netflix Ugly Delicious, and episode 2 is called Home Cooking.  The episode resonated with me when one of the Chefs said that what makes a meal delicious is when the person that cooks it is cooking with intention. I’ve often felt my best meals visually and palate wise has always been a result from cooking with intention.  Thinking ahead and getting ideas on how to possibly get the correct and best ingredients, always results in praise, but the true underlying intensional action of my cooking is to always draw a crowd together and to enjoy the company I am eating with.
I’ve always had a fascination with food since I was a child.  My father would encourage me to watch cooking shows like the Frugal Gourmet, Julia Childs, and Jacque Pepin, in hopes that the 10 year old me would bake and learn fractions during the process.  Maybe in another life I would have pursued culinary school.  The beauty of cooking to me is the process of creating something wonderful for your audience to enjoy.  It’s such a wonderful gift, the gift of memories through the senses of smell and taste, as well as creating sensations of joy.  As a child watching the cooking shows, and seeing how happy their guests  were to try the end results of the dish made me feel happy and wishful that when I grow up I wanted to have the power to do that too!
I feel so bless to have a partner that equally loves food and enjoys cooking. When we travel we intentionally seek delicious food that is known to that region. Food to me reflects culture and it’s vast differences and similarities.  Globally we all need food to survive, but we also use food to invite people into our homes, to share traditions of childhood recipes, or a meal that was experienced and then recreated to share.
During this whole quarantine period, I started to crave sushi.  My husband and I have not had a date night in awhile, even weeks before the quarantine occurred, life happened.  We were suppose to go on a date night February 29 but my youngest child had fallen ill.  Fast forward 2 weeks and we are under strict guidelines to stay home.  So this past weekend I decided to bring the sushi experience into our home by creating an omakase menu thanks to our local asian grocery store Hmart.
Japanese sushi rice is quite a technical process and I had all the intention of mastering it in 1 hours time- thanks to YouTube and Google., I managed to create a formidable rice that my kids enjoyed and  that served as the base for our fish.  It was so fun to work side by side with my husband to create a feast for ourselves and our kids to enjoy.  For a five and 3 year olds, they did not shy away from wanting to try the raw sushi mackerel and salmon.
Cooking with intention creates such beautiful lasting memories.  Here is one for the books, that one time we were quarantined home for weeks.. but made a sushi feast that we all enjoyed.  It doesn’t rank up there to Umi or MF Bar ( which are our favorite spots in Metro ATLANTA) .. but I’m sure my kids will remember it as one of the best they had as kids.