Calderone - Cook Beautiful

For Victor and Jivan.
You are the foundation to my lifemy greatest champions, truest confidants, and most treasured teachers. Our little family is my gold, my heart, my greatest success, my everything.

Food is our greatest unifier; something we can all relate to, no matter our backgrounds, passions, or palates. The act of breaking bread draws us together emotionally, connecting us to our loved ones and our pasts. A shared meal nourishes so much more than our bodiesit feeds our souls. It ignites our senses. It evokes a time and place we long to hold on to and remember.

My love of food truly brought my entire life into focus. Ive followed many paths, from acting in my twenties to interior design in my thirties. But it wasnt until I embraced my love of cooking, that I found the missing piece of my creative puzzle. Finding my voice through food took time, effort, and a lot of trial and error, but it also offered me the ability to be open: to new ideas, to tried-and-true methods, and to my own creative instincts. The kitchen became a space for invention, a workshop, and a studio. It made all of my artistic fragments finally fit together into one unified vision. That vision, EyeSwoon, is the site Ive dedicated toyou guessed itall the things that make my eyes swoon. Its where I cook, style, and write, sharing everything from design inspiration and recipes to entertaining tips. EyeSwoon began in 2011 as a way for me to chronicle my own creative journey in the hope that it would inspire a journey for others. With this book, that voyage continues.

My path has been far from typical. Im not a culinary school grad and Ive never worked in a restaurant kitchen. But Im super curious by nature and always eager to learn. EyeSwoon has given me the opportunity to cook with culinary gods like Jean-Georges Vongerichten and Jody Williams and work alongside so many crazy-talented photographers, home cooks, and food bloggers. The past five years have given me plenty to absorb!

I suppose what sets my story apart from most self-trained cooks is that my eyes, as much as my taste buds, guide me in the kitchen. My true passionwhat really makes me swoonis creating beauty. Aesthetics guide me in everything I do, whether Im hunting for the most vibrant vegetables at the farmers market or setting a stunning table. I attribute my reverence for aesthetics to my mother. When I was a child, she would turn the most ordinary events into unforgettable experiences by paying special attention to the way things looked, felt, or tasted. I remember the ritual of setting the Thanksgiving table: We spent hours laying out her favorite black-and-white china, pressing the linens, and setting out the candles... and still, the turkey was perfect.

So its no surprise, then, that I believe food just tastes better when its beautiful and made with love. Its the reason that I strive to create a feast for the senses every time I cook. While taste and smell are obviously paramount to how we perceive a meal, visual cues are just as important. Before a single bite passes our lips, our brains are working out an answer to the question: Does this look good to me? Whether were at home or a restaurant, we all eat with our eyes. A beautiful plate of food has emotional power and wholly undeniable magicand my goal is to help you capture that.

I was raised in an Italian-American family in Nassau County, Long Island. Although it was only thirty minutes from Manhattan, it may as well have been its own universe. In our house, family and meals were synonymous, never more so than on Sundays, when the entire extended clan gathered. Our Sunday classic was pasta with red sauce. Pasta was always called macaroni, regardless of its shape, and the sauce was always filled with braciole, sausage, and meatballs. There was always ricotta (Polly-O, never fresh) and a lot of garlic bread.

Though nothing was particularly sophisticatedwe ate frozen corn in the winter and cooked our broccoli until it took on a grayish huethose meals, with their love and boisterous energy, still loom large in my heart as my happiest childhood memories.

After college, I moved to New York and worked as a model and bartender. One fateful night while I was behind the bar, I met a young DJ named Victor Calderone. I was twenty-two when we fell in love, and twenty-four when we got married. Two years later, I was pregnant with our son, Jivan. While most of my friends were focused on their careers or having wild nights out with boys, here I was, a yoga-obsessed twenty-six-year-old with a baby on my hip, unsure of what my future held where my career was concerned. But I did know one thing: Boy oh boy, did I love my little trio of a family. And learning how to feed them well seemed like a natural way to express that feeling.

Though we had a beautiful kitchen, I had barely turned on the oven until I was pregnant with Jivan; it was only then, wanting to be a proper homemaker, that I started baking. The precision and science of my new pastime appealed to my perfectionist streak, and also fueled my creativity. As I continued to learn and experiment, the kitchen became my sanctuary, a place that was as surprising as it was comforting. Id roll out pastry, pump up the music, and sing along as I went into discovery mode, riffing on new flavors and techniquesand having a lot of fun in the process. Since I had a newborn and Victor was often traveling for work, I began inviting friends over to keep me company. I whipped up simple dinners, and while Jivan slept, we enjoyed the fruits of my labor. Soon, cooking became both my creative and my social outlet.

There was no question I was blessed with a beautiful home life. But I felt that career-wise, I was doing it all wrong. I had so much creative energy bursting inside of me, but no matter what I triedacting, poetry, yoga, fashion styling, singing, danceI couldnt figure out where to direct it. To be successful, I thought, you had to be just one thing. And so the question remained: What was I meant to offer?

Victors career, meanwhile, was taking off. He started working all over the world, and Jivan and I tagged along. Those trips were an education: They opened my eyes to new flavors, cultures, architecture, and design. In Morocco, I trawled the souks for rugs and learned to appreciate texture and patina through the new textiles and materials I found. In Spain, I was introduced to the small-plates concept at local tapas bars. In Greece, I sat at a tiny beach shack and worked up the nerve to try octopus for the first timeno small feat for someone who grew up petrified of eating fish!

Although I didnt know it at the time, all of this traveling, homemaking, and mommying was in fact leading me somewhere. I channeled all of the inspiration from my travels into trying new things in my kitchen and designing our loft. I commissioned furniture, hunted for the perfect textiles, and obsessed over color schemes and floor plans. My design sense caught the eye of my friend John Rawlins, who encouraged me to study interior design at Parsons School of Design. I took his advice and eventually, we decided to open our own firm, Rawlins Calderone Design, in 2006.