Within the course of three days, I came into a rather large abundance of oranges from two people whose citrus trees were overflowing. As you can imagine, I wasted no time scrounging around for recipes to use every last one before they started going bad. It was quite a weekend, with no less than five orange-infused treats including cake, scones and sorbet.
"Under the earth the miracle happened."
Consider the onion. You probably have a bowl of them in your pantry, or one or two tucked next to the glossy tomatoes or near the garlic. They wait where we leave them, to be peeled and minced, to give a backbone to our next recipe. All this without the fanfare or praise or notoriety we give to others, sometimes purely on the basis of aesthetics. Figs, melted chocolate, well-styled cheese platters and fizzy cocktails come to mind. The onion, by comparison, is plain and ordinary.
Like young onions pulled from the ground, in our emotional lives there is often more brewing under the surface than is always visible. Some of us are good at hiding this. Others (like me), aren't. I'm not sure why this is, or what about our individual makeup makes us more or less prone to wearing our hearts on our sleeve. Regardless of where you fall on the emotional spectrum, when it comes to the past, food has its way of weaving itself through both the good and bad memories.