Diamond - Kale & Caramel: recipes for body, heart & table

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An Imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

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Copyright 2017 by Lily Diamond

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Atria Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

First Atria Paperback edition April 2017

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Interior design by Amy Trombat

Cover design by Ella Laytham

Cover photographs by Lily Diamond

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Diamond, Lily, author.

Title: Kale & Caramel : recipes for body, heart, and table / Lily Diamond, creator of Kale & Caramel.

Other titles: Kale and Caramel

Description: New York : Atria Books, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016046113 (print) | LCCN 2016046868 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Vegetarian cooking. | Cooking (Spices). | LCGFT: Cookbooks.

Classification: LCC TX771.D458 2017 (print) | LCC TX771 (ebook) | DDC 641.5/636dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016046113

ISBN 978-1-5011-2339-9

ISBN 978-1-5011-2341-2 (ebook)

Cooking is like love. It should be entered into with abandon or not at all.

HARRIET VAN HORNE, 1956

This book, and the food and art and plants that live in it, was born out of great longing. From my earliest memories, I was the longing kindI longed for friends, I longed for boys to like me, I longed for my skin to be darker, my waist to be thinner, my parents to be more normal, my self to be cooler. I longed my way into college and, after that, I longed my way into being in love. I longed myself into jobs and spiritual frenzies and entire personas that were not really me. And when my mother got sick and died, then, too, I longed for things to be different. I longed for family. I longed not to feel fractured. I longed to feel some kind of home, sometime again.

I longed for love.

And then, one day, I longed to stop longing. In the wake of utter exhaustionthe mental and physical depletion of grief, spiritual seeking, and emotional hungerthe longing fell away. Finally, I didnt want anything outside of myself. Instead, I began the work of stripping myself down to be made anew. I wanted to be made of freedom, not fear. Action instead of tears. Wildness instead of longing.

It is said that the mind will only truly change when it grows so weary of itself it cannot stand to repeat its machinations for even one more moment. And so it was with me, that the heavier the grief weighed on me, the more I wanted to be free. For years, I let grief subsume me in its shadowy net, allowed feeling to run through me like water. I let myself go through every stage Elisabeth Kbler-Ross outlined for the one who grieves. I wrote dark poetry. I railed against the injustice of having a heart that was broken in one half by the loss of my mother, my best friend, and broken in another by the love I thought Id be with for always. Though my heart has broken many times since, the first strikeand my commitment to emerge from it with some semblance of wholenesswas enough to birth a transcendent will to change. To stop longing.

Because when the heart is broken so many times, it either breaks, once and for all, or, in its exquisitely shattered state, it becomes unbreakable.

What came when I stopped longing was being, pure and wild. Being with food that nourished me. Being with plants and flowers that healed by virtue of their very existence, their wildness. Being, no matter how much my heart hurt.

Theres rosemary, thats for remembrance; pray you, love, remember, Ophelia says as she presses the herb into her brothers palm. Shakespeare knew: The way we remember our humanity is by knowing our relationship to the world around us, to the plants that sustain us.

The herbs and flowers that populate the chapters of this book were each critical elements in a world, a life, that was about being more than longing. Rose soothed a dozen broken hearts, lavender tamed my mind and fought away tears, oregano cleared out emotional detritus, fennel softened the calcifications that kept me hard, jasmine took my breath away, and basil gave it back again. Rosemary grounded my feet on the earth, thyme strengthened my resolve, and mint kept me awake. Orange blossom sweetened my tongue when cilantro reminded me of bitterness, and sage kept clear watch over my hearts truth.

These plants are my pulse. They are my way back, again and again, to the wild.

I pray you, love, remember.

Somewhere along the way, eating beautiful and feeling beautiful took separate paths. We shop in different areas of the store for our food and our body care, when, in truth, feeding our stomachs, our skin, and our hearts is one and the same. In creating Kale & Caramel, I wanted to resurrect this back-to-the-earth belief with a modern twist: an ease and effortlessness in caring for yourself, in living in right relationship with the earth, in eating foods that will make you feel as vibrant as that blackberry basil healing mask makes you look.

The name Kale & Caramel came from my desire to express healthfulness and a sense of luxuriant, delicious play, and over the years it has become a 360-degree lifestyle approach: a means of living in a biodynamic household. Many of the ingredients used transcend the boundary between food and body product, introducing a seamless kind of lifestyle integrity. What you use in the kitchen should be pure enough to apply to your skin. And what you slather on your body should be pure enough to eat. This closed circuit of nourishment will naturally reconnect you with a way of living that is tactile, sensorial, and closer to the earth.