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Blog Posts USA Winter

Soul Fire & Feeling Fully

December 29, 2021

Soul Fire & Feeling Fully

Dec 29th 2021

2022 will be the year I focus on what and who sets my soul on fire. While I have almost always approached life this way, these days the older and wiser me has a much deeper connection to what that actually means. There has always only been one path to get here, to this position of soul fire clarity: by allowing myself to feel the fullness of things deeply, which is not often a comfortable task. My world, the world that I saw from an early age has always been a large one. My path has always been one that seeks, explores, travels and shares.

(Jump to the post with the food if the vulnerability stuff doesn’t interest you!)

So, as I prepare to cross the threshold into 2022, I want to acknowledge and celebrate all that has occurred this past year (and all the years before) with a clear perspective on the reality of what I know to be true about this human existence; where there is great joy, there is always great sorrow. As painful as sorrow and sadness may feel, for me, to feel it all is the essence of living. It’s the path to connecting with our authentic selves as well as to the authentic selves of others. It’s the avenue of learning. It’s the ride to discovery. It’s the bridge to growth. It’s the esplanade of peaceful existence and tranquility.

As I approach my second New Year’s Eve in Blue Eye, MO, it’s true that feel a fair amount of sadness as my life’s repetitive and very real sense of loneliness is currently blanketing me. But it’s also true that I feel a great deal of excitement toward taking good care of myself. My sense of commitment to myself feels strong.

I’ve been fairly open about my patterns of spiraling and flailing when it comes to massive (and even minor) changes in my life, a pattern triggered by loneliness born from broken trust in my bizarre childhood and also casually dotting my adult life.

What I am currently experiencing in life – probably only because I am here somewhat alone in Blue Eye, MO – is how much easier it is to control my flailing when I let myself feel things fully, by voicing and embracing all that is actually happening. This requires staying vulnerable and honest with myself and others as I walk through the changes and the sorrow. I’m no different than anyone else; most humans don’t readily embrace life’s changes. But, by nature, I’m so attracted to joy that it’s getting harder and harder for me to stay sad for too long, regardless of what’s happening in my life. Living through the experience of it all is the route through. On this path regardless of what I am experiencing there is a great deal of joy noticed at practically any given moment.

I remember years ago while suffering a significant heartache, a string of people told me, “Time will heal this.” I knew then that this wasn’t true. Time just passes. Healing is an active activity, even if you can’t see it happening. It always requires a direction forward.  That direction starts by feeling fully. Embracing the truth that is the present.

It’s interesting for me, a professional dot connector and pattern specialist, that it’s taken me many years to notice that my spiraling pattern is the exact same every time. Change happens. Loneliness sets in, and I feel any combination of scared, confused, anxious, overwhelmed, stressed, and frustrated. I feel a total lack of control. So, I flail. I wallow. I attack. I get needy. I cross lines. I invade boundaries. I do it all.

In the past I often didn’t recognize what was happening, and I hurt myself and other people with this fear-based behavior. While I am sometimes still guilty of this today, these days I am better equipped to see what’s happening and catch myself before I fall headfirst into the wallow pit of shit. By feeling fully and noticing and accepting my patterns, I can be more relaxed in my own skin. When I am more relaxed, I can both ride the wave of it all (the good, the bad, the ugly) as well as remain cognizant enough to do the work needed to move though the pain without causing too much harm to myself and others. I succeed even greater if people are kind and forgiving to me. They are not always like that.

Soul Fire

I rarely use the word solitude when it comes to my existence because that word suggests someone more secure in her aloneness than I feel I am. I have been comfortable being alone only because my authentic self can’t help but move around this world  seeking, absorbing, tasting, seeing, and participating in all of the vast magnificence that the planet has to offer. It has always been in my nature to see as much as I can of this world and to share my findings. Connecting the dots. The choices I have made have indeed been solitary ones, which can often trigger the loneliness that lingers in my blood.  But,  I was born to set my soul on fire. Since I was little I chose the forks in the road that directed me to this feeling of soul fire. This affliction has always connected me deeply to people while keeping me more isolated on the outskirts of ordinary life stuff.

I never outright rejected marriage or children or a permanent home or anything like that. I always wanted those things but, more than that, I have been led by a need to move myself through this world in ways that not only made me appear unconventional to others and myself. Early on I felt tiny fibers of connection to my authentic self and, once that connection happened, it was hard for me to do anything but see this path through.

It was on this path that I stumbled into the unique work I do connecting farmers and eaters. The dots in-between those two are often difficult to navigate, but it comes naturally to me. I find great satisfaction in the work I do, and I know I am useful to all involved. It ignites me and it gives me countless creative channels which I cannot imagine living without. I experience no greater joy than when I am creating and connecting to far off places, things, people, flavors. This, for me, is fully feeling.

My Herbal-Roots

I have known since I was 21 years old that fresh herbs, in particular in the culinary sense, set my soul on fire. In fact, it was by growing, touching, smelling, learning about, eating and cooking with herbs that I probably first understood just how much I could set my soul in fire. Something deep inside of me lights up in the presence of fresh herbs. I am enraptured by them, as well as those who grow and use them and I have come to understand, much like mangoes in my life, they are my path to deep connection with others.

My Herbal-Roots, the creative manifestation of my herbal soul, started much like everything else I do, in a fight for control.

Years ago, back in Brooklyn, I wanted to be a cookbook author. That seemed like the conventional path most people who could cook were taking and what I was cooking, herbal cuisine, no one was publishing. I found out quickly that the field of cookbook publishing didn’t have room for an unconventional person and cook, much like most the world has little room for my weirdness.

After spending a good portion of time over the span of an entire year I did write what I thought was an amazing cookbook proposal. I had a well-connected agent and so many important food folks were excited about my venture into this space.

It was odd to me that a person as well-connected as I was in food back then, with a thriving cooking school and food business in the epicenter of food (NYC), couldn’t attract anyone concrete for a book. There were a few interested people and all of them basically wanted to change everything about the book that I wanted to write. Their ideas about herbs and what to do with them were frankly asinine. What I would have produced in a cookbook, had nothing to do with me or my authentic self.  As a financial endeavor, the whole thing seemed rather stupid, if you are not a famous person, it essentially costs you money to write a cookbook.

I never published a cookbook and eventually dropped the idea rather quickly without much damage to my self-image. That process however, which I did with the help of writing coach Dianne Jacob, turned out to be one of the most important things I did for my future self. (Nissa the writer.) Not only did this experience teach me how to take my writing more seriously and gave me access to the Do’s & Don’ts of the recipe writing industry (which I don’t always follow), It helped me connect with why I must write, recipes and otherwise. I write as a means to understand my bizarre existence in this world better. What and who I have seen and how I intermingle with it all.

My recipes, my herbal soul fire is the way I connect all I have seen and all that I feel. It’s how I feel full and worthy and satisfied with my choice and my path. They are how I share my true self and all the joy I feel as I meander through this abundant world, mostly alone.  In my recipe writing I feel seen for who I really am. No cookbook in the conventional culinary world could have ever delivered this as I have been able to through my own volition. My own creative infrastructure.

My Herbal-Roots &  Herbal-Roots were born from this volition and will continue to take the unconventional path as I have, where they go I don’t really know- they are not as concrete as my other work.

Ask & Receive

My bold personality has always made it easy for me to ask for what I want, which is the only way to ever to get what you want. I know it’s not easy for many. This idea is why New Year’s Eve is my favorite holiday (besides my birthday which has the same sentiment, really). I get to think about the past year and all of its sorrow and joy and ask for what I want in the year to come.  I must sit and feel full and reflect in order to celebrate.

This year I continue my annual tradition of the Envelope Time Capsule which started in 2018, where I actively write down the good and bad of the year and the goals of the year ahead. Writing down my aspirations for the year ahead is important to me, and I like to go even further by asking for what I want next year aloud, voicing them to others. This method has always helped me manifest my dreams. I appreciate this blog for the same purpose.

When Kianna (my niece) was nine she said to me, “I like that you do what you say you are going to do, like when you said you were going to open the culinary center and a year later you did.”  That was me manifesting. I’m good at manifesting, especially if I can get out of my own way.

My personal and herbal dreams for the next year are big and bold, as is my nature. I will continue to travel the world as it opens back up. I will try and explore new areas of the globe and learn more about some of my favorites. I’ll continue to expand and grow the Crespo Organic mango brand and keep room for other farmers who need my expertise.

I plan to continue to develop my Blue Eye, MO, property into the  current Ger-Nis Culinary & Herb Center. It will eventually be a little herb farm and events center and a part-time home for me. There will be a wonderful greenhouse/bathhouse that is filled with lemons, lemon verbena, jasmine, and other wonderful smelling edibles. The deck around the greenhouse will have planters warmed to extend the season, and it will be a beautiful spot to sit and sip tea or a cocktail or do some yoga moves.

I will have a massive herb garden below the house and edible flowers all over the front. Fruit trees will be abundant and weird. There will be a pool and outdoor cabana with an attached restroom and a gigantic outdoor patio with a big outdoor kitchen with a huge fireplace, a wood-burning oven and BBQ.  A sundeck beside the pool will meander down toward the fire pit, which will be surrounded by sleek Adirondack chairs and have a big rotisserie spit and BBQ hangers.

The place will have amazing educational food events and Supper Clubs, like we did in Brooklyn. Focusing on the same words from my original Ger-Nis motto- local -organic- sustainable – fairly traded. There will be loads of food and farmer education, cooking classes, food photography, recipe testing, and a thriving herbal salt business. And, since I am going big, I will eventually buy the house next door and provide space guests to stay overnight.

Yes, it’s a lot, and it will take more than a year, of course. And as all dreams go, this will manifest differently in its finality, but that’s how it works. You have to start somewhere. I’m confident enough that I am going to let Kianna know this is just like last time I build the culinary center!

My mantras this year are the subject of this post Focus on What Sets My Soul on Fire and  Feel the Fullness of Things with an Open Heart.  My forever mantra to Seek Joy will guide me.

Happy New Year. May you feel loved and feel it fully!

And may you learn to light your soul in fire!

Blog Posts USA Winter

Soul Fire & Feeling Fully

December 29, 2021
December 29, 2021
ABOUT ME
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Noted herb expert, culinary educator and recipe developer. Small business consultant traveling the globe in search of food and cultural knowledge, while working with small, local, organic, sustainable, and fairtrade farmers.

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LATEST POSTS
  • “Different” Chicken Congee
    December 31, 2022

    It’s New Year’s Eve Day, I’m in Miami, Florida where I have traveled with my pets for a little 45-day snowbirding experience (and possibly the subconscious desire to travel to the source and unravel some deep seeded and complicated emotions I have been carrying for far too long). It’s currently 80 degrees and I’m in my swimsuit outside by the pool near the beach with my pets. I have a sweet little menu prepared for a dinner tonight and was just lollygagging a bit when I got a text asking me for the recipe for that cold weather chicken congee I made during the recent artic chill. You remember, the congee recipe that I had labeled one of my best dishes. The one I was supposed to have posted the recipe for already, the one I keep getting asked for. Here you go. I’ll warn you, my congee recipe is a little different. But what do I know, I had never made congee before. But different is who I am and what I do and staying authentic to who I am is a constant goal, New Year or not.

  • Nissa’s Christmas Mole (& Tamales)
    December 20, 2022

    I make really good moles, and I don’t think it’s because of my connection to Latin America. Despite the fact that I learned a lot of my flavors in my travels there starting even before I traveled there at 10 years old. I think it’s because, as a cook, I embody what a mole really is: a melting pot of ideas and concepts that continuously evolves. It has no real recipe, no real beginning, and no real ending. I cook, like a mole is. My first mole was a Cherry & Duck Mole for a special Taco Party event at my old cooking school in Brooklyn. From there I went on to create such masterpieces as my Passion Fruit Pork Mole, which came to be while I lived in Ecuador where passion fruit practically dropped from the sky. That recipe is also where I came to use carrots as a source of natural sweetness and a thickening agent (moles generally use a myriad of ingredients as thickeners). I even make mole cocktails and once made a recipe for a Cherry Mole Manhattan. The mole-making process delivers immense pleasure for me and reminds me of the importance of openness in cooking. It reminds me that even in what most consider traditional and culturally specific there is diversity.

  • The Herbal Dry Brine
    November 13, 2022

    As you are probably aware, brining helps create a more succulent meat. I am a big fan of the dry brine when it comes to cooking a turkey or even a chicken. The dry brine is easier and less messy than wet, and it delivers moist meat and a crispy and flavorful skin, which I happen to be a fan of. Adding herbs and spices to a dry brine (salt) adds flavor, texture, and a joie de vivre by creating an aromatic and flavorful experience customized to your palate. The salt on the skin draws moisture from the turkey and then comingles with the herbs, spices and salt and gets re-absorbed back into the turkey, creating flavorful, succulent and juicy meat. The salt and air dries out the skin which allows it to become extra crispy when roasted, and the herbs and spices add extra flavor as they cook and get embedded into the chicken skin by means of chicken fat. If you are lucky enough to get a jar of my Chipotle Cranberry Mezcal Herbal Brine in time for Thanksgiving, you will need to know how to use it. And if you didn’t get one (which is likely because I made limited quantities this fall), you can still make one using the same formula.

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Crows garlic - a specifies of wild garlic. I bought some and planted with all the bulbs I bought, again not knowing it was edible. Im fairly happy and am making my first garden salt when these things go into full bloom, I suspect soon. They don’t necessarily bloom like you’d imagine I guess they look like little tight buds, which fascinates me. They spread like crazy too I guess and I’m totally not mad at that. 

The flowers come on these super tall wiry and strong center stalks. They are super wierd and super cool. Im in love. 

Leaves, stalks flowers all edible. More as more happens. 🌸💐🌿
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Lavender & Brown Sugar Ice Coffee
Makes 2 Coffees

This is a refreshing and easy to make ice coffee using your leftover coffee. The additional hint of lavender adds a touch of luxury and extravagance, yielding a pleasant afternoon pick me up.

Ingredients

1 tablespoon light brown sugar
a few lavender blossoms or 1 teaspoon lavender flowers (dried)
1 – ½  cups leftover coffee
½ cup half and half (better texture than milk!)
¼  teaspoon vanilla extract
2 cups of ice

Directions

Muddle the brown sugar and lavender flowers together in a cocktail shaker for about 20-30 seconds. Add the coffee, half and half and vanilla. Fill with ice until the shaker is ¾ full and shake vigorously. Strain (double straining preferable) into a glass over ice. Garnish with a fresh lavender twig.

If you don’t have lavender growing in your garden, no problem, you can buy dried culinary lavender flowers. I love Curio Spice Company @curiospice  for all things spice related, and they have amazing lavender flowers from Oregon. Which I use in the winter when my garden is dormant.
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I’m so happy to have Jasmine in my life again I can’t wait till my plants grow bigger and produce lots more blooms. I love using them in cocktails.
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I’m a big pineapple, sage fan not only does it attract pollinators and hummingbirds with it’s vibrant fuchsia flowers, but it tastes heavenly, beautiful, herbaceous pineapple essence -one of my favorite everyday uses is in a ham and cheese omelette. It’s so delicious in a ham and cheese omelette.
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Garden leaves salad …. #happyNiss 

My garden to be clear 🤣💃‼️
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My pink dianthus, that I planted last year, are finally blooming this year. Their bright, magenta and hot pink flowers, mingled perfectly with a new. Recipe I’ve been working on (Actually and old {everybody’s favorite} winter recipe Cranberry Pear Coffee Cake ) I’ve been making a spring version using strawberries and Rhubarb - what you’re looking as is the crumble part (it goes inside and on top of the cake because of course) I make the crumble part of the recipe  super easy to make and I think more delicious because the flavors are melted into the butter - spreading around the flavor@more before it’s cooked. I put the dianthus in after the crumble is fully mixed - they taste like close and nutmeg so they will be perfect (and beautiful) in this Rhubarb, Strawberry and Blueberry Pink Dianthus Cardamon Rose Coffee Cake. - I don’t care that my titles are too long / the information in a title is key. 

Recipe soon- im working on a #mango version as well for summer. That one with verbena.
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This is #joy 

Herbs!
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Did you know the probes petals are edible? They taste like of mild strawberry and peach with a tinge of cloves essence. They are delicious in salads, syrups (cocktails and kick tails) and baked goods and im going to grow tuen for sure. This one I stole from my neighbors yard.
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Lavender Butter Almond Toffee Ice Cream (made with dried lavender flowers)
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I needed some hot stuff this evening so I made a spicy shrimp, squid ink pasta puntanesca kind of thing. 

This is what happens when you have a well stocked pantry and are out of fresh food. The only fresh was some old garlic and the herbs from my garden (mint, oregano and parsley) chili peppers and shrimp were frozen. 

15 minute meal!
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I make a good chicken schnitzel anyone who’s tried it knows that -the secret obviously is the triple threat of #herbalforeplay - herbs in the flour mixture (along with spices), herbs in the egg mixture (along with mustard), herbs in the breadcrumb mixture (along with lots of cracked pepper).

But this impromptu black, chickpea, broccoli salad that I made last night is amazing 

It’s got roasted, broccoli, black, chickpeas, some carrots, a lemon, a garlic vinaigrette and dates, feta lemon zest and sumac - the main herb i used is anise hyssop and the licorice essence mixed with the chickpeas, dates and broccoli- holy wow!
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For me. Celebrating #cincodemayo is about #celebrating the spirit of the #Mexican 🇲🇽 people- here’s a quick history lesson on the holiday and my famous #crespoorganickitchen #margarita #recipe #featuring one of my better ideas—- #mangopit #margaritamix 

And of course a beautiful Nissa #HerbSalt - Diablo Chili Colantro Margarita Salt #salud

For the longer and more in depth hostory lesson head to my #Mangoblog #UnderTheMangoTree and read my post History & Histeria of Cinco De Mayo. 

Link in story
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Instagram post 17996034169808686
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Grab some @crespoorganic dried #ataulfo #mangoes
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Sorry mango people for the delay in my communication but olof and ivin found one of thosenozark barracudas (black snake) and I had to go get scared. 

The good snake was released in the woods and unharmed.
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I’ve had this idea percolating for a while and if you know me, you know that my head is always percolating ideas and then boom randomly I execute it tonight I felt like eating a cookie and even though I’m so busy I took a moment to try a new recipe idea using dried mangoes and pistachios in shortbread cookies holy shit was it fantastic I made a few plain short breads because I didn’t want to miss out on a good cookie experience and I wasn’t sure if the other anyhow I’m gonna continue working on the recipe for mango flavor is amazing in it the way they bake into the butter incredible. You’re gonna love it.

@tedlasso_official  will love these. Maybe I can meet up with @jason_sudeikis in Kansas City and trade shortbread for KC recommendations?
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LATEST POSTS
  • December 31, 2022
    “Different” Chicken Congee
  • December 20, 2022
    Nissa’s Christmas Mole (& Tamales)
  • November 13, 2022
    The Herbal Dry Brine
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