Something New and Exciting

meet my friend, Rachel

Namaste,

Today, I'm thrilled to introduce a dear friend of mine who has graciously penned a beautiful piece that I am compelled to share in this newsletter. While I usually talk simple Ayurvedic principles, I promise you’re in for a treat that’s just as enriching.

Meet Rachel, a friend and colleague who has captured life’s changing seasons beautifully. Her insights align perfectly with the spirit of this newsletter, blending wisdom with the everyday.

So, grab your favorite cup of tea or coffee, settle in, and enjoy this delightful perspective of the seasons of our lives.

I hope that you enjoy it as much as I did.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Seasons
By Rachel

I started cooking not to become a Michelin-starred chef, but to recreate the feelings I had as a child—the comfort and joy of being with family in the kitchen, cooking and eating together. I didn’t realize then how much I valued those moments. At some pivotal point, I understood that we spent time together because we loved each other. We were together because we liked it. We cooked together to make something beautiful for each other. It was a daily gift that we could afford and, at the same time, essential for life.

We are all familiar with pivotal points in our lives, moments when we notice a change in ourselves—in our preferences, our constitution, our outlook, and what we want for our future and for our loved ones. This is sometimes conceptualized as rebirth. It happens periodically and, conceptually, doesn’t stop. It keeps evolving as we evolve. This is sometimes referred to as seasons.

I took to working as a chef, and the passion I started with for being with other people in the kitchen, both learning and teaching, has not diminished. The passion for creating something beautiful, imagining the client enjoying it, and, by extension, my family experiencing it the same way, still drives me. Talking and sharing while working, and imagining making the guests happy, is my idea of bliss.

Geetika and I met twenty-two years ago while working for a catering company in New York City. We both loved staging and executing catered events. Sometimes we were peers; other times, I was her boss. Later, when she opened a restaurant, she became my boss. Our shared love of cooking and understanding of the importance of reliability in the kitchen kept us both friends and good colleagues. Although we are similar in age and both from India, we have very different backgrounds, which has become our strength. She is from the north, and I’m from the south. This alone gives us a wealth of material in terms of content, technique, styles, and more.

As time went on, we both changed, as people do, and developed separate yet similar interests within the culinary world. Geetika developed an interest in Ayurvedic health, and I developed an interest in the origins of the food we eat, specifically spices.

We are now collaborating to bring these ideas together, combining our unique skills to create Ayurvedically inspired meals that can heal and soothe the body. I believe knowing the origin and story of the spices we use can create a fuller dining experience.

I will endeavor to make the mystery of seasonings more accessible to you. Knowing that you can use something as tiny as a mustard seed as both food and medicine is empowering.

So, seasons. The season of learning and then the blessing of being able to teach. The season of receiving love and then wanting to send it back out into the universe. The season of youth and energy and then the wisdom to reign it in and focus. The season of losing touch with a friend and then the season of reconnecting and happily finding out that we did not become so different after all. And not to forget, the season of spices.

Wasn’t that beautiful?

Until next time.