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       The Key Ingredient

      Maybe yes, maybe no …

      Martin has been flirting with me this whole trip. I pretend to treat it lightly, but come on, Martin Harlow? He’s like a piece of found art, rough around the edges but with a form and function that haunts a girl’s dreams. At the moment, I’m not dreaming, although everyone else in the rental van is. I’m the only one awake besides the driver.

      The last leg of the journey is always the hardest. Especially when the journey takes place at the blustery tail end of winter and you’re travelling from the sunny blaze of Los Angeles to the frigid wilds of northern Vermont. After the redeye flight from LA to New York, my production team and I endured a bumpy regional hop to Burlington, followed by a slog in two hired vans to our final destination – Switchback, Vermont.

      It’s my hometown, but I haven’t lived here since I graduated high school. What is home? Maybe it’s not a place, but a moment in time. When I was safe. Secure. Cared for. Home. It’s more than a point on a map. It’s a sensation. A feeling of comfort – feet sinking into warm slippers, hands curling around a mug of fragrant coffee, sounds of birdsong, and breezes stirring the leaves in the maple trees. As my mind wraps around the notion of home, everything else falls away. It simply fades like the ambient noise we deal with on set every day when we’re filming a segment for the show.

      I grew up knowing that the best maple syrup in the world comes from Vermont. And the best syrup in Vermont comes from Rush Mountain. It’s been my family’s business for generations. And now the production is going to set up, literally, in my own back yard – the family sugar bush on Rush Mountain.

      Many times I’ve pictured myself coming back one day in triumph, having chased my dream clear to California and back. I suppose you could say that’s what I’m doing now, because I’m about to begin filming the pilot episode of a TV series I created.

      When we pitched the show to the network, I was asked how I came up with the name, The Key Ingredient. The truth is, I had the name long before I had the show. It comes from the wisest woman I’ve ever known – Anastasia Carnaby Rush, my grandmother. Gran used to say each recipe has a key ingredient – one element that defines it, without which the dish simply wouldn’t be the same, like the vinegar in a red velvet cake, the threads of saffron in paella, or the four pods of star anise she used to tuck into the pasta sauce as it simmered on the back burner.

      What she really meant had nothing to do with a recipe you make in the kitchen. I’ve always regretted that I didn’t figure that out sooner.

      I wish Gran were still around for my homecoming, even though it’s for work and the budget only allows us seventy-two hours for filming. She would have been so happy for me.

      When I was growing up, Gran and I watched hours and hours of PBS cooking shows together. This was in the 1990s, before the food channels that are so ubiquitous these days exploded onto the scene. The older shows were pretty basic – a well-equipped kitchen, an island counter, a chopping board, and four burners. Yet even the most pared-down, simple production inspired us if the chef had a great personality. We loved it when the host would talk of his travels and share the stories behind the food, all the while demonstrating kitchen techniques we could learn from. I learned to fold, cream, julienne and sauté by watching Martin Yan, Chef Tell and Molto Mario, while Gran wrote down the recipes so we could recreate them at home.

      Even back then, it wasn’t just the cooking techniques that drew me in. I was fascinated by the whole idea of a kitchen rigged with cameras so a talented chef or home cook could share their art. I dreamed of being in the spotlight myself, showing the world how to make egg pasta or maple-glazed carrots or rosemary lemonade. Our family photo albums are stuffed with snapshots of me giving pretend demos to a rapt audience of dolls, dogs or grandparents. While other kids were building with Lego, I was practicing my knife skills.

      At the age of nine I got a digital video camcorder for Christmas. When I learned what that big, cumbersome camera could do, it was as if I’d seen the face of God. Not only could I dream up my own shows and episodes, I could film them and play them back.

      Gran was a really good sport about it all. She let me set the camera on its tripod and play unfortunate selections of background music while I interviewed her.

      ‘I was never homesick,’ she said, talking to me – not the camera. ‘This place has always felt more like home to me than the big city. You see, I believe some people are born in the place they belong. Others have to go looking for it. That was me: I went looking, and I found this place. It’s my heart’s home, and I thank God every day that I’m able to spend