Just Me Being Me: What Are the Milestones that Mark the Map of Your Culinary Adventures?
It takes a lot of kitchen orienteering to find your way to a home that your heart—and belly—will love.
Just Me Being Me is literally just me being me, living my life outside my comfort zone when it happens as it happens. Since I’m a dedicated introvert, this doesn’t happen much, which makes it doubly interesting when it does.
Who cooks in your house? I’m in front of the stove a lot these days, but that hasn’t always been the case.
Maybe it’s a side effect of quarantine or something I became so much more interested in once I decided to take better care of myself. Maybe the griddle and oven in our new apartment inspired me to go beyond my handful of tried and tested recipes.
What I know for sure is that cooking has slowly turned into quiet therapy. Not just the actual making of food, too—I love the whole routine, from prepping to doing the dishes. Creating something immediately useful and appreciated feels so good!
How Many Cooks in the Kitchen is Too Many?
I grew up with too many cooks in the kitchen, literally.
In my multigenerational and multicultural childhood home, my late Tagalog grandmother often baked pastries—I miss her chiffon cakes and her famous Brazo de Mercedes the most—while my mother cooked meals and savory snacks. Ate Josie—my parents’ good-as-family Girl Friday—added Ilocano recipes like gising gising, dinengdeng, and igado to our regular rotation.
I would help out in the kitchen by washing the dishes or doing the menial work, like folding lumpia wrappers or wrapping up servings of polvoron. I absorbed culinary knowledge through mostly passive participation.
There was never any reason for me to learn how to cook by myself. I did the occasional fry up but nothing special. I knew only enough to make midnight snacks for the night owls: me, my brother, and my father. Even when I’d bake cookies, there was always someone helping me out.
Can You Cook Without Looking at a Written Recipe?
For a long time, I was beholden to measuring cups and spoons. There was no instinct involved in my cooking. If a blog post had told me to put two cups of sugar in a meal meant for two people, I would have just done it! As JVN would say: Can you believe?
I suspect that there was a kitchen scare involving me when I was younger. I wonder what I did? It’s the only thing that would explain why women in my family are always so surprised when I tell them about my cooking. They always act like I’m not an adult that can be trusted with a stove and oven. They made sure to instill in me an unfailing obedience to written recipes, too.
Honestly, that part stressed me out. I don’t think I truly enjoyed cooking until instinct kicked in! A huge part of being in the kitchen was tied to people-pleasing—something I now recognize as unhealthy—because I didn’t do it for me. It was always in my head that all I had to do to serve a perfect meal was to follow instructions.
Of course, you can follow a recipe and not have it be a people-pleasing habit, but that’s not how it went for me. I was completely unaware that something was missing from the way I cooked.
Do You Meditate in the Kitchen? It’s a Habit that Will Change Your Life.
Today, I’m making ground turkey meatball soup without following something I found online and without asking my mom how to do it.
This is a recipe I developed myself—with some Sunday substitutions and omissions. I’m too lazy to go out and get a single zucchini from the supermarket! Let a girl live.
See? Substituting vermicelli for misua and not having the correct vegetable for stewing would have been gigantic stressors for me in the past. Now, I’m just rolling with it.
More than looking forward to presenting and eating the dish, I’m excited for that hour and change of puttering about in the kitchen. When I’m preparing food, my brain slows down and I get to enjoy what’s in front of me.
I pay attention to how much of something tastes like, and what combinations make me want to eat more. I get to limit how much fat and sodium goes into what I consume. But more importantly, I’m doing it for myself. It’s always been true that I eat my own cooking, but it’s only now that I feel truly self-nurtured and self-fed.
How surprising that it’s taken me thirty-odd years and a pandemic to figure out this survival tactic. When you bet on yourself, believe in yourself, and become your number one—everything changes.
What the first recipe you created just for yourself? Let me know! I want to try your creative cooking. Send me an account of your first culinary adventure.
Photo by Baehaki Hariri on Unsplash
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