Cooking and Eating...Together

Gatherings via Kinfolk Journal...

“…We recognize that there is something about a table shared by friends, not just a wedding or once-a-year holiday extravaganza that anchors our relationships and energizes us….We have come together to create Kinfolk as our collaborative way of advocating the natural approach to entertaining that we love…consistent with the way we feel entertaining should be: simple, uncomplicated, and less contrived…”

Kinfolk Magazine Manifesto








Previous four images from The Selby: Alice Waters 40th anniversary celebration + The Edible Selby dinner in Brooklyn


Heather Taylor's new webisode series...

It goes without saying that all sorts of magical occurrences are possible when you bring people together over food. It's a powerful thing to create and share a meal with others. It forces collaboration and openness and a bit of humility... When you eat with others you expose your likes and dislikes and habits, you meet a basic human need while also (hopefully) experiencing one of the great human pleasures. It's primal and necessary.

And good food just spurs conversation... Almost all of the juiciest bits of info and the deepest wells of knowledge seem to get shared over the breaking of bread.

I’ve mentioned several times in this space my love of creating and sharing a meal with friends…One of my all-time favorite things to do is entertain at our house, but when you can do it in a collaborative way, with everyone pitching in to create something special and delicious, it produces a really lovely camaraderie.

From a simple family dinner where we clink glasses and share the best part of our day to my friend Buck’s tradition of having a group dance party/clean-up after her (frequent) large and raucous dinner parties, I think this act of "collaborative" cooking and eating is restorative and essential.

There are some really fantastic things happening on the interwebs of late that celebrate this idea of food as the catalyst for a sort of intimacy between people. I'm in love with Heather's new webisodes on L.A. in Bloom celebrating her love of cozy cooking and entertaining...They are so, so good. Similarly, I'm a bit obsessed with the (relatively) new online and print magazine Kinfolk, as it reveres the simple gathering, infusing it with a well-deserved meaning and specialness. (I just snapped up a print version of the magazine in its second run.)

And then there's the matter of Todd Selby's photographs of Alice Waters' 40th anniversary dinners for Chez Panisse, which are sort of blowing my mind... Can you imagine the conversations happening, the ideas being hatched, the awesomeness blooming at those dinners? I've looked at those images countless times in an attempt to soak-up some of that cozy, foodie goodness through photographic osmosis.

Here's hoping...