The love of gardening and a joy of a salad. A young woman honors her mother and the nurturer in all of us.

Often times, when we create something especially mouthwatering or exquisite in the kitchen, we’re asked to reveal our secret ingredient: a pinch of this, a shake of that. The response my mom always tells us is, “love.” Love is a versatile ingredient; it adds another dimension—a subtle flavor, a comforting consistency, that extra oomph, to any dish we prepare.

To my mother—Laura Carter, a small but mighty woman in her fifties, with whitened hair and a smile sweet as honey—food is more than just a source of sustenance. In her world, food is a checkpoint—preparing dinner the final leg, and serving it the finish line of her daily race; it’s her way of self-expression, a projection of who she really is, a representation of her tastes and preferences, and it’s also a gift to all that enjoy it, including herself, that says, “I love you.”

The running joke amongst my friends is that every meal my mom makes will contain something “from the garden,” as she’s fond of saying. We come from a family of Norwegian farmers—people with a fair complexion, of short and sturdy in build, with strong calves made for hours spent crouching in the earth. Most of our traditional comfort food centers around the vegetables grown in my mother’s garden.

Taking care of a garden is like taking care of a child; it’s dirty work, and requires patience and love: first the planting, then the endless watering and weeding, ending finally with the harvest. I’ve helped out many times before, picking peas and strawberries, but my few hours spent harvesting are nothing compared to how many my mother spends every summer turning a handful of seeds into a fresh meal. Her dedication and hard work never ceases to amaze or inspire me.

Vegetable soup, potato salad, and strawberry shortcake are all fine examples of her best dishes, but her specialty, and my favorite, is her Spring Gardeners Salad. My mother can turn simple produce into a work of art. Her salads are beautifully crafted, colorful and bursting with flavor. When dinner is served, and the salads are dished out, my mother always eats hers at the end of the meal. It’s her treat, and she wants to savor it. Other salads can’t compare to my mother’s—not even in the fanciest restaurants—because every leaf of lettuce, strip of pepper, bright strawberry, and bit of carrot was given life by her own hands.

To my mother, preparing a salad is showing someone how much you love them. Her work in the garden gives her personal satisfaction, but her pleasure working in the kitchen depends on the reaction her meal brings. It took me a long time to realize this, but I finally did, and through soups and salads my mother and I developed a stronger bond that we still share today. We love preparing meals together and we’re always looking for a new recipe to experiment with, but we’ll never forget the recipes that brought us together in the first place, or that one special ingredient that makes every meal taste like home.

Emma Carter

Emma Carter is a recent graduate of Stephens College, an all-women's private college in Columbia, MO, where she earned her BFA in Performing Arts. She currently works as an actress and teaching artist in Kansas City, MO. She is a big advocate of self-love, physical fitness, and health. She was lucky enough to grow up with a mother who loved organic gardening, and although she may have not wanted to eat her vegetables as a child she has learned as an adult just how lucky she was, and how important it is to take care of your body.