BLOOM My Epicurean Life Wendy and her husband Bob are notable fixtures in the Peninsula's culinary culture. Her love for people and art make her descriptions about food and its preparation part of a joyful embrace of life itself. November 2007

Wendy Brodie

My professional life has centered around the science of food service. I'm advocating food preparation and presentation in a number of ways. I treat my clients as guests. My style is one of sharing culinary expressions in an atmosphere of refined elegance. One central event in our year occurs during our annual trip to France, when I'm a guest chef at La Combe, which is a maison de maître, or Gentleman's House, in the middle of 30 acres set in the midst of a secluded valley 90 miles from Bordeaux. The dining area at La Combe centers on a 400-square-foot French country-style kitchen that has been fitted out with European cooking ranges and appliances. Herbs and seasonal vegetables are available from a potager garden, which is only a few steps out the kitchen's back door.

While we are there La Combe reinvents itself as a resource for culinary adventures catering to a select few fellow travelers whom we accompany on daily excursions of discovery to local wineries, farmers' markets, truffle farms, and great restaurants. Every other evening we have a festive cooking adventure, I develop the recipes, which are divided among the participants. We then work in merry harmony to create a multi-course dinner. The entrees and offerings of each stage of the meal are then accompanied by pairings selected by Wendely Harvey & Robert Cave-Rogers, the La Combe's proprietors.

My life seems to have revolved around Epicurus' philosophy that the greatest good lies in our seeking modest pleasures as the source of serenity and autonomy. This is a view that other philosophic traditions, at their best, come to. The Bible, for example, says in one place, "I commend the enjoyment of life, because nothing is better for a man under the sun than to eat and drink and be glad."

My personal list of values includes a number of things that I'm actually more enthusiastic about than anything to do with food or gracious living. Four other things that I'm passionate about, for example, include (not necessarily in order) my relationship with my husband Bob, our dog Saki, my parents, and my younger brother. The orbits of my life obviously rotate more around people than around food or eating. (And, yes, I consider Saki, to be a doggie person.)

Towards Food as Art
I admire all the arts because I believe that any real artistic endeavor necessarily includes a journey of personal self-discovery. I'm a frustrated designer and at one time intended to spend my life creating fine ceramic images. But in the end I was attracted to the culinary sciences because food always connected me to people rather than simply connecting me to myself. Also, I find cooking to be less threatening than art. My experience is substantially different when sharing a fine brochette that I've prepared with delicious meat, onions, and other vegetables than when watching someone pick up and admire a porcelain object that I created.

I can be cool if my onions fail to satisfy somebody's gourmet tastes, but fine art becomes uncomfortably personal. When someone criticizes the shape of my object it seems like an assault on my soul.

I have to admit that I never actually experienced the stinging criticism that I so fervently feared, but was always uncomfortable at the prospect of subjecting myself to that level of vulnerability.

On the other hand, food preparation admittedly shares with fine art the quality of providing a rich medium into which I am able to pour my creative energies.

I'm more than a cook; I'm a food artist. I revel in the aesthetic nature of food with colors that can be as vibrant and pleasing to the eye as anything that Michelangelo ever splashed on the ceiling of his famous chapel. I can, in effect, "paint" with the colors of many of the foods I prepare, just as artists blend together their colored oils.

For example, I might cut an asparagus down the center, add some new potatoes using multi-color heirloom varieties - russet, pink, and creamy, add some beets, blend together the colorful assemblage, and then sprinkle thyme across the top to create green accents. Making my asparagus dish becomes a satisfying performance - an act of inspiration bringing something beautiful into the world.

Nature in general and food in particular have a sensual quality that I revel in. A photographer, Edward Weston, for example, did a series of black and white pictures of vegetables and classical nudes illustrating how the compositions in both cases shared a common symmetry. Most remarkably, he took a picture of a green pepper that looked like a nude as seen from the back.

My most common and satisfying food creations come as a hands-on process. I have trouble creating a menu in my head, but if I go down an aisle in Whole Foods I might see a colorful bin of yellow beans and think to myself, "Wouldn't that look good with purple!" I might serve the beans as an accessory to a Julia Childs'-type moussaka.

I love edible flowers, which can add a pleasant and colorful garnish surprise over a soup or on top of a salad. There are a number of these such as dandelions, roses, nasturtium, geraniums, squash blossom, magenta lace, and pansies -- plus the flowering heads of such herbs as basil, dill, fennel, lavender, marjoram, mint, pea, rosemary, safflower, sage, savory, and thyme.

Magenta lace, for example, is a miniature long thread of the most brilliant purplish pink color. The flower is pleasing both to eye and palate. There are many other colored and flavorful micro-grains. The smaller they are the more intense the flavor seems to be.

Spreading the Joie de Nourriture
My teaching activities illustrate the proverb that "A pleasure shared is twice enjoyed." Part of my satisfaction comes from the act of passing on to others the liberation that my own attendance at cooking school produced. That is, the release from the tyranny of recipes produced by proper learning about food.

My library is filled with cookbooks, from which I seek more to be inspired by their pictures than to be instructed by their recipes. I'm a visually oriented individual, tuned in to colors and textures. For example, one gorgeous dessert was based upon a magenta colored form that had been created from oven-dried stripped rhubarb. As soon as I saw the picture and learned how it was created I leaped in and began experimenting until I succeeded in replicating the beautiful dish.

Somebody said that if you do the thing you love long enough eventually somebody will pay you money to do it. And now produce companies are hiring me to search for interesting and perhaps even exotic ways to use their products. These people are paying me to do the very thing I love!

One particular challenge was to find unique uses for celery. Someone told me about old farmers who on butcher day claimed they "used every part of the pig but the squeal." I absolutely found use for every part of a piece of celery.

For example, it occurred to me to transform the long stocks into noodles. I used a vegetable peeler to create them in the appropriate shapes, blanched them to make them the right color, and hey presto! I had faux noodles completely lacking in pasta's beltline-stretching complex carbohydrates.

I deep-fried the magnificent celery leaves and they were delicious!

I used a blender to create celery juice, and then used the juice to make celery martinis. You could call these "celeratinis," though the term is not very musical.

The residue pulp remaining in the juicer consisted of broken and tangled threads, which I spread out in the oven to dry, producing celery lace. By putting the celery lace through a coffee grinder I discovered that I could make celery powder.

A more radical use involved placing the celery lace between sheets of shaped Plexiglas to make fancy plates or platters.

I recently learned from a student that the butt end of the celery stalk is a perfect stencil shape for a rose.

It's all about people
The quote that perfectly captures my attitude about cooking and life is, "Love is the key ingredient to the success of any recipe."

I've learned that direct interaction with people is a source of strength and renewal in my life. A great part of my considerable joie de la vie stems from my relationship with my husband, Bob.

Bob and I married seven years ago following 12 years of courtship. Our love came to both of us as though finding an unexpected treasure.

I was drawn to Bob as a person with a great capacity to love, but I committed my life to him because of the vast reservoirs of character and integrity that everyone knows him to have.

My life has fallen into wonderful patterns of love, service, and art. The world of food preparation is a vast expanse which I feel that I'm only beginning to explore.

Someday, for example I'll make food paper out of shredded celery, onion skins, and apples cooked in simple syrup and served with ice cream. My imagination is brimming full of ideas I'm someday going to try.

I've always tried to utilize recipes as a skeleton upon which to build a culinary creation based upon my experience and knowledge about food. I might use chives if a recipe calls for cilantro, for example. The results are always interesting and often wonderful. On some occasions they are absolutely amazing.

My technique of experimentation is an adequate philosophy of life leading to growth and development. Alice May Brock, the author of Alice's Restaurant cookbook, once wrote the words:

Tomatoes and oregano make it Italian; wine and tarragon make it French. Sour cream makes it Russian; lemon and cinnamon make it Greek. Soy sauce makes it Chinese; garlic makes it good.

Alice's quote provides an effective metaphor for the richly diverse Epicurean life that constantly provides so much nourishment for me.

I like to think that I am also providing satisfaction for my husband and the other members of the pleasant dinner party that the days of my life have become.

Like garlic in a delicious entrée, the menu of my life is filled with wonderful ingredients.

To learn more about Wendy and her art, go to www.wendybrodie.com or email wendy@wendybrodie.com.