Last week my goddaughter, Gilda Claudine, called me excitedly to talk about sitting down to write a cookbook. I should have been taken by surprise, I suppose. While we both adore the whole ritual that surrounds food and its preparation, we certainly had never discussed this. I am a teacher and she is a lawyer...the dedication we put into our respective professions leaves us with barely enough time for our families let alone a project such as what Gilda Claudine envisioned. But...until she called me, what Gilda Claudine didn't know is that I had been sending her telepathic vibes about this for years! It took awhile, but she finally received the messages. (I'll explain later!) The next few years we will be running on pure synergy, the conviction that we have ideas about food and its importance in raising a family or simply in enriching our lives.
Let me start by introducing myself. My name is Gilda Valdez Carbonaro. I grew up in Laredo, Texas and now live in the Washington area where I am a teacher in a boys school. I met Gilda Claudine's mother in the eighth grade in Laredo, Texas when she appeared one day in my homeroom class recently arrived from Mexico and barely speaking English. We became very close friends from those early adolescent years until many years later when somehow, we went our different ways. But my namesake, her daughter, and I have always stayed in touch and in fact, for many years have lived in the same area, here around Washington DC, uprooted, as it were, from that place that lives on in our memories of good food and nurture.
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| Gilda V. Carbonaro, San Miguel de Allende 2010 |
It's not that I engaged a curandero to get my idea transmitted to her. Here's what it is: I don't know what is more important in the life of a family than the idea of sitting down to a meal that has been prepared with love and care..one in which there is a collective sigh of relief as the members of that family gaze around the table and dust off the worries and stress of the day and actually talk to each other. I've wanted to shout to the world all my life that eating well is not difficult, nor is it expensive, nor is it time-consuming and most importantly it brings pure joy. My idea to write a cookbook did not take shape, however, until Gilda Claudine called...so the idea grew from my Like Water for Chocolate nebulousness to Gilda Claudine's lawyerly, orderly, product-oriented direction.
So, yes, I guess you could say that when it comes to the food that I bring to the table for my friends or family, I'm a fanatic. I take no prisoners. I think it's partly that I was born like this, partly that I had the good fortune of being brought up by a mother and father who also wanted their food just so, as fresh and honest as can be. I remember my mother back in the 60's receiving an invitation to dinner where they had been promised Boston-style pork and beans (from the can), of all things. My mother was going to be polite, of course, but for someone who had been weaned on frijoles colados this was going to be tricky. It is at my mother's table that I came to appreciate the food and the rituals that I have embraced.
We hope to expose our readers to food that is simple, authentic, and nutritious: comida sana, such as we have known all our lives.
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