orange goodness

My kitchen is bright orange. This is the number one reason why I love being in my kitchen. It is bright, cheerful and full of energy. The number two reason I like being in my kitchen is that I love creating things and that is about all I do in the kitchen, with the exception of doing dishes. The number three reason is that everything I do in the kitchen brings me joy, feels completely natural and feels as though God would be smiling upon my moments spent there. It is a place for me to serve my family and friends, it is something I am good at and it brings me great joy to share it with others.

This week I spent a lot of time in my kitchen. I made homemade bread, swiss chicken to share with our friends, shepherds pie-full of veggies and potatoes from the farm, biscuits, no bake cookies, fried green tomatoes, homemade whole wheat pancakes and I prepared and froze extra veggies. The past two days have followed a pattern, clean, cook, eat, repeat. The only part in there I don't like is the clean. However I have found that there is something slightly therapeutic about making cleanliness out of mess and order out of chaos.

The best part about my cooking this week however has been--well actually there are two great things. First sharing it with beloved family and friends. A lot of life happens over food, there is so much laughter, heartache and joys to be shared when you gather around a table with those you love. It is one thing we all have in common--we all eat--so start with that and a lot flows from it. This is why we love having people into our home to eat. Jesus shared meals with people all the time so we will too

Second best part (the part that I originally was going to write about until I remember the afore mention "best thing"). Is that almost everything I made this week was natural, from the earth without any chemicals. I cooked with things that had only, real food in them. Some of them even being right out of the fields here in Cincinnati. I never used to be one to care much about organic, natural foods. I wasn't very concerned about my eating habits and what effect they have on the environment but the more I learn and the more I try the more I want to eat this way. My body can tolerate less and less processed foods. I feel terrible when I eat them. Its not real food and that bothers me. My body was not made to digest high fructose corn syrup, some weird concoction we created to make sugar from corn? weird right. I also know that I am supporting a family in my community who lives off of farming, I know that I am composting my scraps and putting them back in the earth and I know that my friends, family and I are eating what God created. That makes me happy.

This my friends, is why I love my orange kitchen.