The kitchen is a sacred space, and its purpose is in connecting one to another through food. In my own kitchen, I'm grateful to be the link in an unbroken chain of sharing, a chain that starts with those who grow the food and ends with those who are nourished by it. The kitchen is also a place of creativity and endless possibility, and in it I have learned to embrace contradiction. There are days when I cook with total originality, and other times when I am devoted to the written word. My kitchen can be a place of precise measurement or of throwing caution to the wind. It's where I experience daily success and occasional failure (which we eat, and which I learn from); and my kitchen is where I have learned most about giving and receiving, about letting go and throwing all of myself in and, especially, about striving for excellence and being good enough. The ultimate power of the kitchen, though, is that life is nourished and sustained there. I like that.