Chef's special: when a good meal is prepared and shared, not just the pot that gets stirred.

I REMEMBER AS A SMALL CHILD GETTING UP AT DAWN WITH MY SITTO, MY grandmother, to mix the dough for a day of baking Lebanese bread. The ritual took place regularly, with me hovering over the huge bowl as she incorporated the ingredients, then kneaded the dough with all her strength. There were quiet hours while the dough was set to rise, and it was then that we drank our juice at the table, talked quietly, or just sat silently, and came to know each other so well.

Most everyone has stories around food and the kitchen that make the heart quicken, that evoke nostalgia. Certainly this isn't just because Sitto's thin bread tasted so good slathered with butter just out of the oven, though that part was essential. It's also because when we prepare and share a meal together, we enter into communion with each other and with God, taking part in the quintessential metaphor of our faith--we grow in body and spirit. When we nourish one another with food and conversation, we find community, renewal, healing, and hope.

Why are food and home-improvement media the fastest growing media segments in the U.S.? We are searching--amid lives that are too fast-paced and disconnected from our spirits--for what we know can be found in making something good for ourselves and others to eat or in making a welcoming home: the holy connection that takes place when people come together over food or a simple cup of coffee at the kitchen table.

Here are five stories of people who are so dedicated to food and cooking that it is not only their work but their life's passion to experience that holy connection and communion in all they do.

"I don't have spirituality in my cooking," chef Carrie Nahabedian says, as a kind of gentle warning that she's the wrong person to interview about this subject.

But when asked what it is that makes the food so good at Naha, her Chicago restaurant her answer tells a different story: "It's all about the love," says Nahabedian, who exudes a passion that belies not only spirituality but a woman very in touch with how the spirit is alive in her vocation as a chef.

Like many ethnic families, Nahabedian's Armenian mother, grandmother, and aunts played a key role teaching her what it means to make good food out of love. "You go home, and your mother makes you a turkey sandwich. It's delicious," she says. "If you go to the grocery store and buy that sandwich, why aren't they the same? It's what I tell my cooks all the time: You have to put your love into your food."

Nahabedian's approach makes it clear that the role of food in her life and her restaurant is much more than the sum of its ingredients, much more than an experience in nutrition; it's a creation that is a defining aspect of its creator. "Our personalities have to come right out of our pores and into that food. It reflects you. Sometimes I'll taste something one of my chefs made, and he'll ask what's missing. I'll tell him, 'It's just missing your passion.'"

Acclaim for Naha has focused on its exceptional food, of course, but Nahabedian sparks interest in the food world for other reasons as well, particularly the culinary influence of her Armenian family and upbringing. Her family parish, St. Michael's on Chicago's West Side, was featured in Saveur last year for its lively, ethnic summer festival on the Feast of the Assumption. While Nahabedian grew up in a modern American home, she has deep ties to her Armenian roots as a second-generation American. She remembers her grandmother's kitchen, where traditional Armenian foods were made daily. Her grandmother would find places to pick fresh grape leaves for grape leaf rolls. She made her own yogurt and would get the starter from her friends, never the grocery store.

This environment, and the influences of the Depression era, fostered in Nahabedian's family what she calls "a respect for food."

"It's important to my mother that we respect the butter and all of the ingredients," she says. This philosophy amounts to nothing short of a spiritual practice for Nahabedian, whose reverence for the preparation of food and ingredients is pervasive. "The respect does come through in my food," she says. "And not just in the restaurant. It would come through if I were making hot dogs and baked beans."

Food cooked and eaten at home, she believes, has a tremendous effect on people who are working harder and spending more time at work. When they come home they want and need to be nourished in all kinds of ways.

"Cooking food at home has the power to take people away from their troubles," she says. "What better way to show someone you love them than to cook for them? It's truly a mystical power."

When asked what Armenian food she craves most, Nahabedian closes her eyes and without hesitating describes mencha koofta. In this dish ground beef mixed with bulgur and stuffed with sauteed ground lamb and onion is formed into a large patty and poached in stock. "It is so delicious," she says with a radiant smile. "I know how to make it, but it's my grandmother's koofta I crave. She had such beautiful hands."

Anyone who watches the Food Network has likely seen the mother of Italian food in America, Lidia Bastianich, teaching her viewers how to make a simple but sublime pasta or perfectly seasoned fish. But Bastianich's big business of cookbooks, restaurants, and television shows is not just about the creation of a corporate engine. It's rooted in her very personal and deeply held beliefs about the role good cooking and eating plays in a life well-lived.

"Food talks to me!" she says. "I touch it, and I feel something. People tell me that I caress food. That's because if I touch something, it communicates to me.

"I always tell my students and chefs that you really have to take in the pristine quality of food. Really focus on it, taste it, look at it, engage it with all of your senses. You will be able to recall that taste in memory when you are cooking. It's like a great university library."

Bastianich immigrated to the United States from the Italian Istria peninsula (now part of Croatia) when she was 12. It was during those early years living with her grandparents that her love affair with and--like Nahabedian--her reverence for food was ignited.

"My grandparents grew everything that we used. I owe the connection I have with the earth to them," Bastianich says. There were olive trees on their property, and from the olives they made their own olive oil.

"The olive tree is godly," she explains, in a hushed, prayerful tone. "And at the same time it is so humble. Olive oil is the liquid of life for me as a Mediterranean."

She remembers the gnarled trunks and branches of the olive trees on their farm and how she'd whimsically find peoples' faces resembled in them as she ran through the olive grove.

Life on the farm instilled in Bastianich the frugality of an earlier time when nothing, it seems, went to waste. "When we ate bread," she says, "my grandmother would brush the crumbs into her hands and feed them to the chickens. When bread fell on the floor, we had to pick it up and kiss it.

We had a reverence for the food."

Her grandmother would take any extra vegetables or eggs they had to the market to sell. She made rounds at local restaurants for scraps to feed the pigs. "It was a beautiful completion of things. I am blessed to have been raised in that way. It taught me patience and sensitivity to nature's rhythms."

The older generation is central to the family unit in Italy; they loom large in raising children and passing on vital traditions. The American failure to bring grandparents into the center of the family troubles Bastianich. "We just don't get it in America," she says. "The biggest source of unconditional love and wisdom is our parents and grandparents. They have so much to offer if we would only make them part of our lives."

In an America that doesn't always embrace its elders, an America that may have lost that thread of family love, Bastianich sees people turning to the table to find what's missing.

"America is finding its inner self with food and at the table.

This must happen for the stability of the culture," she says. "Something as simple as the table is able to do this."

She takes this philosophy very seriously: Bastianich believes in food as an arbiter of world peace. Sitting down to eat together begs us to put our defenses down, to open ourselves literally and metaphorically to what--and who--is there at the table. Bastianich is working on a project involving "recipes for peace" that will bring together, for example, women from warring nations to make and serve the food to negotiators.

"Why do we have business lunches or seduce people over a meal? Because it opens the mind and the body," she says. "I know that food subliminally will make a difference. The message is there. I see it clearly that we need to bring food to negotiating peace."

Sacramentality is at the heart of who Lidia Bastianich is and why she cooks. She finds the extraordinary love of God in the quotidian aspects of preparing our sustenance. "I embrace people through food. I use it to communicate when I love someone, when I want to heal someone and make them feel good.

"What I want out of life, you see, is a simple connection with others, and food is the basis of that. It's what keeps us alive, so food is absolutely sacred. It is our life."

When Peter Reinhart was a young member of an Eastern Orthodox brotherhood, he was assigned to kitchen duty. He cooked meals for the 40 members of his seminary in San Francisco and began baking bread for them. His experience was nothing short of holy.

One mystical occasion of bread baking magnified and foreshadowed what would become a life passion for Reinhart--and make him a premier bread master, instructor, author, and personal coach.

Reinhart had just begun baking for the seminarians. He used Julia Child's cookbook and followed her six pages of bread baking instruction, tending closely to punching down the dough a second time to extend the fermentation. This is the key to better flavor and "crackle" to the crust, he says. Crackle is the sound of moisture working its way out of the hard crust. Bakers call this the "singing of the bread." Attaining this sound, Reinhart says, is the culmination of a pilgrimage.

"I had made bread before," he recalls, "but when this one particular loaf came out of the oven, it had a beautiful glow to it." When he saw the bread, he gasped aloud at its beauty and wept. "I knew that this was as close to perfection as I've ever come. I felt that I had participated in a process of creating something that partook of the beautiful perfection of God, and it became the driving metaphor of my life."

The baking of bread is synonymous with Reinhart's spiritual path. What was an emotional response then became something quite concrete. He started writing about the deeper levels of meaning in the bread-baking metaphor and became not only a teacher of making bread, but of making the self.

The titles of his books tell much of the story: Bread Upon the Waters: A Pilgrimage Toward Self-Discovery and Spiritual Truth (Perseus Books, 2000), Crust and Crumb (Ten Speed Press, 1998), Sacramental Magic in a Small-Town Cafe (Addison-Wesley, 1994), and Brother Juniper's Bread Book: Slow Rise as Method and Metaphor (Perseus Books, 1991).

Like Bastianich, Reinhart sees his passion for bread as an outgrowth of his desire to connect with people. And this, he says, is profoundly religious. The very root of the Latin word religio means "to be connected to." Certainly the breaking of bread couldn't have a deeper sacramental meaning, extending from our ritualized communion at Mass to the fundamental ways we connect with others by coming together to eat.

"Most everyone has had, at one time or another, a profound experience of breaking bread together with someone," Reinhart says. "The word 'companion' has a Latin root of corn, or with, and panis, bread. When Jesus broke the bread and said, 'Partake, this is my body,' he was saying that every time we eat together we partake been prepared in a balanced way. of the energy of God. In that moment, we are in union with God. That is the sacramentalizing of every moment."

Reinhart calls this "sacramental magic."

Bread is a primary metaphor of sacramentality because of the meanings found in its making. Bread is, in its essence, very simple: flour, water, salt, and yeast. The yeast is the leavening ingredient and literally "enlivens" that which is dead. Without it the mixture is clay. A lifeless lump of clay gets injected with an essential breath of life in the form of yeast. When the dough is baked, another transformation from death to life takes place. New life is created through the death of the yeast, and the resurrection of the bread into a life-giving substance.

"Here we have the reason why historically, culturally, and spiritually, bread serves as the symbol for life and for the presence of God in the world," Reinhart says.

The metaphor of the baking of bread has been a rich source of meaning for Reinhart and many other seekers. But never does his approach lose sight of that most central aspect to his work: taste!

"It has to start there," he says definitively. "We tell students in culinary school that 'flavor reigns.' If it doesn't taste great, you're dead in the water."

The taste of good bread has to do with what Reinhart describes as the balancing of flavors. He suggests getting a very good loaf of classic French bread and an average loaf. They'll taste different, though they're made from exactly the same ingredients.

"As you're chewing the very good bread, you'll taste a bit of the saltiness on the edges of your palate," he explains. "Then you'll experience the sweetness as your enzymes mix with the bread. Swallow, and notice how long that flavor, and the pleasure of that flavor, stays on your palate.

"With every breath shortly thereafter, you can re-experience the taste," he says. When close attention is paid to the experience of eating something that is very good, rather than just eating food to fill our stomachs, we have an entirely new grasp of what we've eaten. Reinhart calls this "an awakening." In it, we're taken from the physical, sensual experience of taste back again to the evocative metaphor.

Who knew eating a good piece of bread could teach us how to get the best out life? Reinhart certainly did. "I love bread for just that reason," he says.

If Reinhart's take on enjoying bread has too many carbohydrates for you, you need only to turn to A New Way to Cook (Artisan, 2001) by Sally Schneider. She relates well to the need for a healthy diet, especially since she has had some health problems herself. But she wouldn't tell you to put aside that exceptional loaf of French bread.

In fact, Schneider's insight about how and why we eat touches most emphatically upon our deeper hungers. "People are hungry today in the deepest sense, and food is about feeding all of that," she says. Her philosophy is that food must taste good in order to truly satisfy what it is we seek when we eat. "It has to do with foods that connect us to culture, to memory, to nature. This is the most nourishing of foods. I wanted to figure out a way to eat well with all of these connections and to do it in a way that is healthy."

Tapping into the blindingly fast pace of American culture, Schneider asks people to listen to themselves more closely. From this, she believes, we will eat better, feel better, and live better. "Well-being is about listening," she says. "A lot of us are very cut off from ourselves, and you can see it in this country by the way people eat. There's the sense that people have eaten all of this food, yet they feel empty because they ate at McDonald's and had no connection with anybody while eating it."

Schneider helps people find specific things to listen for: How does it make you feel to eat on the run? How do certain foods make you feel? "Some people don't discern their spirits--they don't know what that means," she says. "So we use different languages to get at it. Food is the most simple and most elemental of those languages."

A New Way to Cook draws upon Schneider's own background and the foods she loved as a child. She says she's never given up these foods to attain her healthy diet but has revised them to reduce saturated fat or sugar.

"I grew up eating all sorts of wonderful food: spanikopita, pastitsio, and baklava from my Greek grandmother; chicken pot pies, biscuits, and cornbread from our housekeeper, who was from the South; blueberry pies, Crab Louis, macaroni and cheese, coq au vin, and duck a l'orange from my eclectic mother, who adored French cooking and the foods of her New England childhood. If I wanted to eat something 'junk food-ish,' like a TV dinner, I'd do it once in a blue moon and enjoy the hell out of it!"

She doesn't think people "get healthy" from an ascetic diet of brown rice but rather from enjoying delicious food that's been prepared in a balanced way.

The power of good food to nourish, comfort, and restore is well known to anyone who cooks for others often. Schneider has witnessed this particularly when she has tended sick friends. "I've taken care of friends who were dying, and they put me back on to what wonderful food does for somebody whose body is wasting but whose spirit needs strengthening.

"When a friend with AIDS called Schneider anxiously from the emergency room, she had just had guests for dinner. She wondered what she could possibly do to comfort him, and as she looked around her kitchen, it became clear. She gathered up the pot roast and noodles and then did something extraordinary.

"I took a real bowl and real silverware and a cloth napkin," she remembers. "I took it over to the hospital and bullied my way into the E.R., and I fed him with this real dinnerware. The reason I brought the real thing was because he needed a way for his head and spirit to get out of that scary hospital room. As he ate, I could see his body changing, and eventually he relaxed and fell asleep."

A trip to Hunter's Orchard in Delta Township, Michigan is like stepping back in time. Howard Hunter, at 98, still lives on the orchard in the house he built with his wife, Gladys, who passed away not long ago at the age of 91.

The house is rustic, with a fire in the small sitting room, slate and hardwood floors, handmade braided rugs, a small kitchen overlooking the garden. A plaque on the wall reads, "Whoever plants a garden works hand-in-hand with God." The saying is a kind of summation of what it means to the Hunters to be apple farmers, to take part in the life process by growing the food that others will eat.

When asked why he planted this apple orchard, a man who at the time was well situated in his career as an engineer, Hunter's reply is simple and clear: "We planted apple trees because we liked them."

He points to a framed photo on the wall of himself standing in the orchard. On the back of it, there is a note he has written about a teacher who brought her students on orchard tours, to see a world apart from their suburban neighborhoods. It reads, "This should be recognized as far more than a picture of an individual but rather as an expression of appreciation for the efforts of all of us who tried to give others an idea of what went on at the farm." Hunter had hesitated to put the photo up because he didn't want to draw attention to himself when so many contributed to the orchard's success.

Not unlike Bastianich in Italy with her grandparents or Nahabedian in her mother's kitchen, the Hunters have a striking reverence for the land, its produce, its workers. This includes a careful way of handling the apples when transferring them from the cool storage area to the customer area and then from crates into bags, inspecting each apple to be sure it's of the highest quality.

"The orchard taught us how to raise apples and to cooperate with nature, not control it," Hunter says. That philosophy has at its center a faithfulness that things will turn out fine, whatever the outcome, and that along the way something might be learned.

One unseasonably cold, clear evening years ago, Mr. Hunter's son Stan came to his father and said, "It's a beautiful night, but I think the apples are frozen." Hunter looked at the apples himself and saw that they were frozen but said to his son, "It's still a beautiful night."

Hunter says the orchard has taught him and his family as much as they've brought to it: to take the vicissitudes of farming as a challenge toward strength, knowledge, and humility. "We tried to share with the children who came here what we had learned about growing things," he says. "This, of course, is a large part of what makes for successful living."

His granddaughter, Cindy, sits while her son Tommy plays on the floor. He asks his mother for an apple. As a 3-year-old, he already knows that when he is at this house there is always an apple in close reach. The Hunters had apples at every meal when the orchard was in its prime years--apple salad, apple sauce, fried apples, baked apples, apple cookies. They made use in the house of the "utility apples," apples that were not good enough to sell to customers but were not to be wasted.

"Every time I step into this house or walk through the orchard, I feel a sense of well-being," Cindy says. "I remember one winter afternoon after trimming trees in the orchard with my grandma, I realized that I was immersed in a day that was as close to joy as one can get. It is not unlike what one might feel walking into a church. When I go there I feel protected.

"A great many people have felt this same sacredness when they've come for apples at Hunter's Orchard."

MAUREEN ABOOD is the literary editor of U.S. CATHOLIC