THE JOURNEY TO TAVOLI
I moved to London from Edinburgh in 2017 and became fascinated by my new neighbourhood’s street food scene, Mediterranean supermarkets and cafes. Exploring the area through food and learning to create healthy and comforting dishes from the Mediterranean became a way for me to settle into my new environment and feel like home.
I already loved cooking and baking but something just clicked when I started creating Mediterranean inspired dishes. It felt so natural, even though many of the ingredients I was using were new to me.
Call it fate but in 2018 when I met my husband Çesk, all of the cooking and eating I had done in the previous year came together to form some of the most special moments in our relationship.
In the beginning, my husband and I didn’t share a common language other than the little English that he knew and the minimal Spanish we both knew. Our conversations were a unique blend of hand-gestures, a struggled mix of every language we knew and a lot of Google Translate. Yet despite this, there was something of an unsaid knowledge that it was meant to be.
It’s hard to express your feelings without a shared language so I showed mine in the best way I knew how, by cooking. With Cesk being far from his family, I started researching and experimenting with Albanian dishes to help him feel more at home (and, you’ve probably guessed it, of course I wanted to impress him a bit too).
I quickly realised that all of the dishes and ingredients I had been exploring in the past year were really similar to Albanian cuisine and all the days of exploring Mediterranean markets and perfecting my baklava really started to feel like fate!
Food brought us together and as our relationship developed, some of our greatest achievements or failures have been celebrated or commiserated over our home-cooked meals and five years on and many trips to Albania and beyond later, I’ve discovered that food is not just a necessity but something that can truly unite people.
Cooking teaches us to be selfless, to be curious, to savour the perfect moments and lean into the challenge of failure and try again. Cooking and eating, be it with loved ones or strangers, brings people together in a way that truly connects them and it can have a huge impact on people’s lives.
The Albanian and Mediterranean way of cooking and eating is founded on tradition and puts health, family and good food in the centre of the kitchen table and transcends into the lives of the people eating there.
In a world where we are often so busy, taking time to connect with our food, ourselves and each other in this way is really something special. I hope these recipes at Tavoli will inspire you back into the kitchen and around your tables, to enjoy the beautiful flavours of Albania and the Mediterranean and that these meals will help create lasting memories for you, as they have done for me.
Enjoy!
Jess x