Introductions

Hello.

I am Mo. That name means many things to many people; I would hope that mostly they are positive things. A number of those people have had the pleasure or dismay of tasting various creations and concoctions of mine. I like cooking for people, and baking. Food can also be many things to many people. It is nutrition, it is pleasure, it is why you need to go on a diet (though who in their right mind would exile food from their life?). Food, for me, is also a means of expression. We can make bad food for bad company, we can make food so wonderful and full of heart that anyone who tastes it will be immediately spellbound.

I grew up around food. Pretty much anyone alive has, really, but that isn't what I meant. Sopas, tortillas, chile, tamales, rice, beans, savory stews of rice and chicken, warm Mexican bread with coffee after dinner. Being a first/second-generation Mexican American with a grandmother who loves to feed people definitely has its perks. It is not the satisfaction after having eaten, however, that has made food such a magical thing for me. It is memory. I remember the turkeys at Thanksgiving, each one stuffed with not only breadcrumbs and sage sausages, but also the laughter of my Aunt Eva, and the shrieking of my cousins as they rampage through my grandmother's house. I remember my Abuelita's menudo, because I will only eat her menudo.

I am a magazine journalism major with an additional taste for design and layout. I can say I thoroughly enjoy it, and have had wonderful experiences at San Jose State University, working with professors and students to produce publications that reflect our dreams and aspirations.

I am also minoring in Complementary and Alternative Health Practices. It was the niche I thought I might enjoy. The classes I have taken in order to complete the minor have crushed that idea wholly and utterly, save the wonderful classes 'Magic, Science and Religion' and 'Body, Mind, Spirit' with professor Mira Amiras.

THAT is what I sought. That is what I want to learn. I do not much care for case studies and the scientific disproving of healing traditions older than western civilization. There is a power in those traditions. A power that not only exists within the practice, but a power summoned by the people wishing to witness its wonder. It is interactive. One calls, the other answers.

And so I wondered: where are the witches and sorcerers and healers of our times? Where are these cottages and small, dark rooms, lost in forests that have names older than the first cities - rooms filled with smoke, the smells of strange herbs, bones, boiling pots of water and dark.

Then I remembered two such people that I know of. My two most precious little sorceresses, who with their magic can make any day brighter and any person warm and comforted. They do not live in a forest. Their house is on a nondescript corner, across the street from a park and too close to Highway 101. The hills watching over their town usually wreathed in fog and cloud, burning gold and pink and mauve when the sun sets.

Often you can smell the sea in any one of the rooms in their home, if the windows are open - except the kitchen. That is where the magic is kept. That is where the smoke and Mexican herbs and boiling chile smells are. This, I remembered, was true magic: the placing of your heart into something greater than you, the baking of warm bread or tortillas for the people you love. There are still secrets in kitchens, small, dark things that must be learned, watched and shaped. My Abuelita and Aunt Evangelina are two keepers of such secrets.

So this blog will be shaped, hopefully in my own kitchen with my own important people.