Rooted in Place

Wild Fermentation and a Movable Home

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I hope you enjoy this essay and the recipe at the end!

On Friday, paid subscribers got early access to my flowerkraut primer, so you can make your own summer floral creations at home.

Years ago, I created a class called Rooted in Place. In it, I explore working with wild foods and wild microbes to cultivate a sense of connection to a particular location, either during one moment or as a way to appreciate that place's changes throughout the year.

Having done this for years and years in my home in Atlanta, I understand how profoundly deep a connection this practice can cultivate. I feel intrinsically connected to the land here, the plants, the land spirits, and the subtle signs of changing seasons. It's a powerful practice, and has resulted in this house feeling "homey" in a way I hadn't really experienced before.

But as I travel more and more, and begin the process of building a home alongside my current home but a continent away, I'm also reminded that "home" can be a mobile, fluid concept too.

It's a truth that comes to me more easily as someone who's moved around a lot than it might had I lived my whole life in one area. But I'm also discovering that continuing my fermentation practice (when I can) while on the road still deepens my appreciation of place, even if my time in that place is short.

In other words, what I teach in Rooted in Place still cultivates a sense of connection even during a fleeting visit.

As I think through my own craft as a cook and a teacher, each shaping my understanding of home, I keep coming back to the importance of feeling a tangible connection to where one is: The sense of grounding that comes from fully being present in place and time, and how this grounding can deepen our emotional connection to that place.

Working with our hands has any number of documented benefits, but chief among them for me is that it asks us to plug into a place and time fully, being guided by our senses as we build something new.
This is part of why teaching fermentation, or why working with wild plants, or the many other hands-on things I do are such powerful practices, and part of why I feel strongly that we can create a sense of home and community anywhere, provided we turn first to ourselves before turning outward.

Creating food by hand connects me to myself: It's a reminder that I am my own and only constant, a home wherever home may be in the world.

When I create wild fermented foods alongside other people, with an eye towards the where, not just what we're creating, suddenly place is viewed through the lens of the many homes and hands present. Creating place becomes collaborative: Between myself, the people I'm with, and the microbes we're collaborating alongside.  

"Home" takes on its community aspect: A fluid, changing concept, that each of us is an active participant in shaping.

Rooting in place: Changing perspectives on the meaning of home

Over the years, I've often felt pulled to connect to the "right" place for me: As though there is an objectively correct answer, and only one, and unless I answer correctly I will not experience belonging or community in the correct way either.  

I think my assumption was that I would feel connected with my home place in a way I never would anywhere else, and while I recognize that finding the "right" place maybe isn't the right answer, I also think it's a common feeling: For most of history, much of our movement elsewhere was limited to a region or maybe a country. We couldn't hop on a plane and be on another continent in a handful of hours.

Many people lived in a place for their whole lives, and we know that there's a deep connection to place that blossoms from this experience: As though one is interwoven into the fabric of place. One becomes a part of the place's memory, its being.

It is hard to not wish for such a thing.

But when we think of history as something we actively build, I think it's worth treasuring that experience, and searching for the treasures one can find in another way of being in place too: That of moving around, that of experiencing far and wide.

What I've found as I've traveled is that connecting to place is just as much seeing the similarities between each one, as it is discovering the uniqueness of that place. I've explored this when writing about Alaska and Iceland, where I got to revel in the irreplicable magic of each place, but also relish the similarities I found, whether between ecosystems or the shapes of mountain ranges.

Finding these overlaps has been transformative to my experience of each place, and a reaffirmation of what I've always known instinctually: Home is where, and what, you choose to make it.

Home is where you are

I left my home state when I was 18, and have bounced around ever since, so this version of 'home' never felt accessible. And, because I hadn't experienced home in the traditional way people have for much of history, it felt like maybe I was doing something wrong.

Was there something wrong with me, and my inability to stay in one place for my whole life? Was I too fickle, too unwilling to deal with conflict or build community, too eager to go on to the next big thing? Would I ever have a lifelong home, if I refused to sit still long enough to "settle down"?

It is precisely this fraught relationship with the concept of "home" that helped me define what home is to me: If I can identify what doesn't feel like home, then what does?

What I discovered is that, while I've been searching for "home" my whole life, I've never actually been without it.

Even when I've just landed in a country where I know no one, I can find a sense of home because I've found home in myself. I know what things I do to find comfort and balance in a place: Sharing a meal, spending time in nature, just wandering the streets and seeing where they lead.

I've been lucky that this has resulted in lifelong friendships and beautiful communities scattered across the world, and what they've taught me is this: home is as much about possibility as reality.

That's part of the joy for me of thinking of 'home' as an active, creative process: Each fermentation experiment, each time I play alongside wild microbes and plants, "home" becomes a process of uncovering and discovering. Together, we are learning what this home place is, what is stable and what is transformed, and what our role is in all of that.

I often talk about my adventure ferment: A ferment that travels with me everywhere I go, and is a constantly shifting, reshaping reflection of my very dynamic and very special life. This ferment is a celebration of my version of home and my version of living: Home as experience, home as internal, and home not as an unchanging point in a timeline, but as dynamic and co-created. Fermentation never ceases to amaze me with its ability to teach us the lessons we need: In this case, that my home is whatever, and wherever, I choose to make it.  

P.S.: "Home" as an action verb

My perspective on place and "home" as embodied is part of the inspiration for the creative residency space I'm beginning to build in Ireland, as well as the virtual residencies and workshops I'll begin offering this year.

Not only will we explore the interconnections between our many creative practices, watching them unfold into pieces of artwork, meals, performance pieces, or whatever else, but we'll be exploring our connection to place through this same lens.

Each of us brings different meanings and experiences to both the concept and the physicality of place, and a different perception of the word home.

It's a powerful concept, to me, to imagine and build and explore a given space as "home" for however long we're all together, while also bringing whatever we bring from our homes elsewhere.

By collaboratively exploring a physical location together, while also exploring and deepening our creative practices, what wonderful/magical things might emerge?

I'll be sharing this new-to-me process of creating such a space on the web and wherever I land in West Cork, as I deepen my connections with community, but also encourage us to craft community using our intuition, creativity, and our talents as guides.

I'm looking forward to welcoming you into one, or both, spaces!

News:

Big news first: I won the Finalist award for Georgia Author of the Year in the Cookbook category! Thank you to everyone who has enjoyed and shared Our Fermented Lives, your support means the world!

Related to home, and the intersections between the places we love, I wrote a piece for Bitter Southerner on our global love of boiled peanuts.

I've started sharing some of my in-process recipes as I develop them for my next two books (paid subscribers get early access to these!) The first, the best vegan feta recipe I've ever made, came out earlier this month.

 I was interviewed by Kate Bernot for Beer & Brewing in this piece about tepache.

I was also interviewed by Cassandra Quave last month, all about Our Fermented Lives on her wonderful podcast, Foodie Pharmacology. You can see her newsletter and podcast link here!

And finally, I was interviewed by Kate Lani Palmisano for Power Dining: This was a really fun interview full of laughs as well as our insights about history, power, and pickles.

Read:

I keep returning to this piece by Kat Kinsman on grief and spaghetti, on losing a parent and both the bigness and the almost mundane moments that accompany a loss on that scale. While we lost our moms in different circumstances, her writing on that experience resonates deeply.

I deeply love practices that collapse the boundary between our work and the natural world, and enjoyed this piece by Betsy Andrews that describes what that looks like when agroforestry is brought into winemaking.

Some other writing I've been savoring recently includes George Stiffman's America Doesn't Know Tofu for Asterisk, Sirin Kale's Memory Lanes: Google's Map of Our Lives, and Rebecca Flint Marx's Nora Ephron's 'Heartburn,' 40 Years In.

As always, I've been enjoying the work of my fellow newsletter writers, too, including Andrew Janjigian's thoughts on + excerpt from Tamar Adler's The Everlasting Meal, Alicia Kennedy's On Creativity, Marlee Grace's Surrounding Ourselves with Good Witnesses, and Janisse Ray's Rewilding List.

Make: Pickled Radishes

My grandpa loved radishes. Each place he would move as a kid, he would plant radish seeds. Even if the place was unfamiliar, once those radish seeds were in the ground, he told me, the place felt like home. He mailed me his last packet of radish seeds, fished out of a drawer or cupboard in his overstuffed garage, and dating back to probably the 1950s. He insisted I plant them and, while they unsurprisingly never sprouted, they did instill in me a sense of associating a particular food with home.

When he died in 2013, I got a radish tattoo, which reminds me to root into home wherever in the world I may be.

These pickled radishes are a good example of allowing our recipes to be guides on a journey rather than a set-in-stone map, allowing us to follow our intuition.

I use this recipe as a guide to make pickled radishes that remind me of my grandpa. Depending on the journey you're on, you might use it to make another kind of pickle, or add different spices. Or maybe you'll just want to halve the recipe (or quarter it).

Radishes

1 q water

1 q white distilled vin

1/2 c salt

2 16 oz bags radishes

1/2 tsp celery seed

1/2 tbsp dill seed

-Heat your water, vinegar, and salt together, stirring until salt is completely dissolved.

-Thinly slice your radishes (or use a mandolin), and add to a large quart jar or other foodsafe container.

-Add your spices, as well as your brine, until the radishes are completely covered.

-Seal the lid tightly and let your radishes pickle in the fridge for at least 4 hours or until they have a flavor you like.

-The sooner you eat them, the more crisp they'll be: I tend to eat these up in about a week, but they will last longer if you need them to.

Note: This recipes makes more brine than you need, so it's the perfect excuse to pickle any extra veggies you happen to have knocking around in the crisper.

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