Since this is the first time I'm posting one of my "Notes from the Chef" I thought I'd begin by briefly telling you a bit about them. I started writing these "notes" in 1995 when I decided that my restaurant patrons should know something about the person cooking their food - so I inserted them into the menus. Surprisingly, I've been writing them ever since and in the last several years sharing them with a growing online audience. It seems the kitchen has had much to teach me. These notes reflect what I've learned along the way. They are my musings about food, life and the interrelationship of both. The one below is my most current.

New Beginnings

January 2011

The celebration of a New Year is the oldest of holidays. Who knew?Apparently this holiday goes back about 4,000 years to the times of Babylon when it was celebrated sometime in March. I think March makes more sense than January to celebrate the new. In March – at least here in the Northeast – nature begins to contemplate coming alive after its long slumber and something new unfolds.

For the last several years, I’ve watched the buds on the tree branches that curved over my back deck open up and begin to unfurl their leaves, the cocoon that sheltered them all winter giving way to the warmth and light of the sun that gently coaxes new life.  The wanting of something new; isn’t that our true intent when we make New Year’s resolutions, a custom that also goes back to the early Babylonians?

January 1st, as the beginning of a New Year has no astrological or agricultural significance. It was chosen arbitrarily by the Roman senate in 153 BC in an attempt to stabilize and synchronize their calendar to the sun after years of tampering by various emperors.

For many, the beginning of a new year has always been significant, if only to mark the passage of time. In the time of early Rome, the occasion was symbolized by a depiction of Janus, a mythical king (of beginnings and entrances) with two faces – one looking back on the past and the other focused on the future. Maybe this is why it feels natural to be especially reflective this time of year – we’ve been doing it for over 2,000 years.

Maybe choosing January 1^st wasn’t so arbitrary. It certainly feels like my natural rhythm, as I too sit cocooned in my nest, buffered by yet another major snowstorm. I can’t go anywhere. Nature is forcing me to be still. And in my stillness I can ponder what came before and what is yet to come. I can become like the bud of a leaf who doesn’t know itself as a leaf in January. It’s simply resting and growing, preparing for new life, trusting that someday it will be a maple or a mulberry, a sycamore or a willow, but right now it’s perfectly happy being a bud.

That’s what I wish for myself and each of you – a new year of being perfectly happy as you are, secure in the unfolding of what is to come…and a year filled with lots of cooking, eating and celebrating.

Chef Silvia