We're Greek. It's What We Do.

The people. Always the people. I loved and loathed them in equal measure. I was compelled to fill them with food, with drink, with stories, with song.

And the food. From an early age, it was impressed upon me how important the food was. The work of forming the food with spoons, Yiayia's special wooden spoon, used for folding, mixing, stirring, swatting my cousin's back side when he was unruly. Surely it wasn't the same spoon used on my mom and uncle. We formed the food with our hands, kneading dough; our fingers, forming the koulourakia into the simply twisted cookies that smelled faintly of anise, that tasted like our good Lord had shown us the way, and it was always, only, and ever beginning on our tongues and terminating in our bellies. The sharp knives for scoring phyllo gently, carefully, and reverently moistened with melted butter. The scoring of the phyllo was practiced with surgical precision. A misstep resulted in filling escaping its carefully constructed confines.

Food wasn't just food. It was a story. Sometimes it was a journey. Sometimes the journey was real, and sometimes it was an imagining. We imagined and lived through arguing the virtues of sweet cream butter and salted butter. And if we were purists, we would buy cream and shake it long enough, with enough muscle and determination to make our own butter—which was always the pinnacle of butter and ended any argument between sweet cream and salted butter.

My grandparents' kitchen, with its high ceiling boasted a bright light fixture, a cyclops making sure we were true to form, intent, and heart in every ingredient, utensil, tool, and piece of equipment in creating the food.

The lamb souvlaki was simple. But I went one degree further than any other cook. In cutting each chunk away from the bone, I went back through to look for tendons, and with a fish-boning knife, I cut away the tendon and the unmarbled fat. I was a supplier and consumer, and anyone eating in my kitchen would never leave the table hiding something undigestible under a napkin. The bougatsa was a little more of a trick with the potential escape of the custard through phyllo that was was cut all the way through. This spoke of hurry or nonchalance or inattention, and the food demanded more than going through the motions. The soutzoukakia, the oblong oval shaped meatballs were made with practiced hands combining the meat, spices, wine drenched bread, and cinnamon-laced tomato sauce. The only thing to watch out for with the meatballs was that they were prone to shrinking if the meat had too high a fat content. Indeed, in a perfect world, the meatballs were made with lamb, and those tiny babies still had brown fat, which retained flavor and shape. If ground lamb was unavailable, or if I, the cook, didn't have the patience or mettle to grind the lamb myself, then I opted for ground veal, and if I couldn't find the meat of the tender calves, then 85% lean ground beef was a fine substitute. But my magnum opus was pastitsio, my mother's recipe. My yiayia had been a baker. My papou had been master of seafood. My mother turned out to be a workhorse of the highest order. The production involved in assembling pastitsio in her kitchen was unrivaled by anyone I had had the pleasure of witnessing in concocting a single dish.

Pastitsio was fraught with pitfalls. It required patience, a good oven, a steady hand while cooking the crema. The crema was the layer of an angelic custard cloud that lay upon the top of the pastitsio, and there was nothing as disappointing as a crema that did not stand up atop the meat and noodles. If the crema sank and did not rise to the top, it was akin to fireworks that did not go off as planned. There was the 'ooh,' but no 'ah,' only the sad, perhaps unuttered, 'oh.'

And there were the people. Again the people. The food was never just for me, mine, us, or ours. It was always for them and theirs. And they never watched the expectant look on my face as they took in the labor of tools, ingredients, love, and magic. When I cooked, it was with the simple quest for the look of sheer enjoyment in their eyes when their taste buds and intellect connected. Anything less was defeat. And with all of this on the line, I still cooked, served, and waited with expectation. And the people, sometimes they were delighted, and I delighted, but I saw, from time to time, less than the abject pleasure of tasting, truly tasting, the food. Any of the food. All of the food. And I hatched a plan. A simple plan.

I called upon all my ancestors, the people who passed down the food, the joy, the wonder of the kitchen, the hearth, the home. I dialed into all the history, to a tiny woman. A tiny woman who held sway, who had been a force. She could have been Hestia, or maybe Demeter, but whoever, whichever, she found me, and she visited in my dreams, and she gave me more to cook, more dishes, more insight. And I invited and fed and delighted, maybe 90% of of the people around my table. The 10%, though, vexed, confused, and angered me, and I prayed and prayed to be on the right side of everyone's culinary experience. And in the night, I found it, in the Jordan almonds, kept in a lidded ceramic bowl from Greece. My papou had gifted it to me.

The koufeta, a traditional wedding treat of Jordan almonds, a sugared candy shell covering an almond. Often a favor for guests to take with them following a wedding. Always an uneven number, indivisible as a newlywed couple should be indivisible. I believe we sent each guest home with 7 after my own wedding. Following my dinners, the elated guests would take home a small box with 5 or 7 almonds—prime numbers indivisible by anything but one and the number itself. The guests who were less than impressed, and I always saw it in their eyes, received a small box with some even number of almonds. My patron goddess followed them through the night, into their dreams, and she terrified them for one week. Only one week.

The one week, sometimes it ended well for the unimpressed guest. Sometimes it ended in a week of bad dreams. Sometimes it ended in tragedy. Only my goddess knew how unimpressed the guest had been with the food. The more 'meh,' the more the dreams were unrelenting through the week. When it was a simple case of, "My stomach must have been bothering me when we had dinner," I would offer to have the guests return. The second go round always went better. My goddesses enshrouded my kitchen, delivering blessings over my hands and everything in the evening's efforts.

The worst guest, the husband of a distant relative, a loud, obnoxious German, who shared every opinion on every topic throughout dinner, also felt entitled and knowledgeable enough to share exactly where my meal had gone wrong. He went home with 10 Jordan almonds. He received dreams for 8 days, not 7. And after the 8th day, my goddesses rested. And on the 8th day, the German's stomach, not filled for the prior 7 days, had eaten itself. It was extreme, and maybe only the tiniest bit undeserved. When my relative called about her husband's death, I thought about not inviting people for dinner, to share a meal, to share my food, my heritage, my legacy.

At dinner that evening, my husband and our brood gathered around the table. We shared my yiayia's dolmades with avgolemono sauce. We laughed, told stories, and then I shared the news of our acquaintance/relative's death. "Our gods and goddesses of mythology may not exist as pure mythology. They are a presence. An energy. They are with us always, and they can be called upon. Remember your good manners. Your kindness. Your words can be weapons, but the sword of justice swings swiftly, and will punish you or anyone finding casual cruelty in bandying words about recklessly."

My husband nodded, noting his silent agreement. The candles I had lit to provide a beautiful ambiance to the meal flickered. The flames danced higher, then lower, the constant gold of the flame changed, running through the colors of the spectrum before settling back into the static gold. And we all remained still until I excused myself to bring out the rizogalo, rice pudding, my uncle's perfect recipe.