Our Happy Place
It is often said that the kitchen is the most important room of the home. This is certainly the case in our household. Our kitchen is where we congregate at the start of the day and prepare our warm morning drinks. It’s where we exchange stories and discuss subjects ranging from news and current affairs to how to get the squirrels to stop eating our strawberries. It’s where we listen to music that we love, or have some of our favourite shows playing in the background while we work together to fix a meal. And, over the last few years, it’s become a place of intensive learning, as we’ve been training in our late grandmother’s recipes and culinary methods, passed down to us through our own mother.
The kitchen in our home in Virginia Water has always been a natural hub. The windows and glass doors looking out into the garden give us a sense of peace, joy and connectedness. Being surrounded by nature and birdsong means that we can spend hours upon hours in the kitchen without feeling restless or weary. When we do eventually need to get off our feet, our rustic and decades-old rectangular wooden table is the perfect place to sit and have a meal, snack or read. On the table can usually be found a basket of onion and garlic, fresh fruit, flowers picked from our garden, and sometimes – after consecutively jam-packed days – an assemblage of clutter that seems it may just never be shifted.
Though the kitchen has always symbolised warmth and togetherness for us, we have latterly discovered a new element to this. As we’ve started preparing our food for other people, we’ve found it so fulfilling and rewarding to share and extend this warmth to erstwhile strangers. Every Fatayer Sabanekh (spinach pastry) folded, every drizzle of olive oil, every sprinkle of pomegranate – we prepare our meals for others with the same care and attention as we do our own, or even more so. This is the ethos that our grandmother Basima exemplified, and we couldn’t imagine it any other way.
One thing we can’t help but sometimes wish for is to have been able to share this experience with our grandmother, cooking side by side with the chef extraordinaire herself. That being said, the countless stories, quotes and anecdotes we exchange about her on a daily basis mean that she is never far away, and her memory is without a doubt part of what makes our kitchen such a happy place.
