I’m back! The past two months have been nothing if not eventful, but I’ve finally got the spoons to start writing again. All the time I’ve spent in front of a stove this holiday season inspired me to share the story of how I got into cooking. This will be much less technical than my usual fare, but I hope you find it interesting.
Over the past few years I’ve been making great use of the fact that I’ve got my own kitchen available to me. At first, I was cooking just to feed myself, and largely focused on minimizing effort and cost. Those are still priorities, of course, but since those early days I’ve elevated my cooking quite a bit and experimented extensively with as many different ingredients and cuisines as I could get hold of. Through this process I’ve found that cooking itself has a rather therapeutic effect for me, allowing me to invest time, money, and effort into keeping myself fed and healthy while also expressing some creativity.
Though it’s a bit embarrassing to admit, I definitely started out cooking like a typical college student. As it turns out, frozen food and boxed pastas/ramen are cheap and easy as all hell, and I fell into this routine of just cooking to survive and nothing else. As one might imagine, that got extremely unsatisfying very quickly and was actually pretty bad for my mental (and physical) health. It wasn’t that I didn’t have a taste for better foods, I just hadn’t put in the effort to learn how to make them. Around 2 years ago, I decided this couldn’t continue and that I would force myself to learn the skills I was lacking.
I started relatively simply, forcibly limiting the amount of frozen/pre-prepped items I bought and cooking from ingredients much more often. Early attempts weren’t super flavorful and resulted in some fire alarms going off, but I was definitely improving. At around the 3 month mark, I had quite a few solid recipes that I felt confident making from memory; a huge advancement compared to my starting point.
From there, once the basic skills were sharp, I started asking friends for their favorite recipes, pulling elements from wherever I could find, and writing some of my own. This is where the creativity really began to come through for me, and I began to really take joy in cooking every day. I started hosting regular dinner parties for my friends, and invested in some nicer equipment to make the process even more enjoyable. Today, I’m working on getting back into the swing of those parties after a hectic few months, and starting to focus on shifting the ingredients I use with the seasons to get the best flavors out of each bite.
Through the learning process and in my everyday cooking, I’ve discovered that preparing food is a deeply therapeutic task for me. This is for a variety of reasons, but mostly it stems from the inherent imprecision of the process. In my job precision and reliability are paramount, and being under that amount of pressure to deliver accurate results can be draining over time. Coming home and being able to do things just based on what feels right in the kitchen is a huge release for me, and it’s been a very effective form of stress relief ever since I started.
Beyond just serving as an area where I can learn to accept some imprecision, cooking for myself every day has helped me learn to care for myself and my health. As I’m sure is the case for many, there was a long period of time where I didn’t take very good care of myself because of how the stresses of life piled up. Honing my cooking skills has helped me ease back into some self-care, and brought me insights that I now apply to many more areas of my life.
Perhaps my favorite aspect of cooking, though, has been doing it with and for others. Those parties I mentioned earlier have been some of my most treasured memories, and through cooking I’ve been able to spend a huge amount of time with my friends that I wouldn’t have otherwise gotten to enjoy. Cooking is honestly a great bonding activity, and it couldn’t be more true that the way to someone’s heart is through their stomach. I pride myself on the huge number of connections that have been started and strengthened over my dinner table.
Although a lot of people look at cooking purely as a way to keep themselves and those around them fed, it really can be much more than that. Expand your horizons and your skills and you might find that the benefits extend well beyond your stomach.