The Healing Power of Cooking

Cooking brought me back to life.

Ever since I can remember, I’ve always had an anxious lilt. To keep my hands busy, I picked up hobbies frequently to try and keep the worries at bay. I always had a book in my hand or a coloring book within reach. But I think one of my earliest creative, self-soothing endeavors was in the kitchen.

As a child, I watched carefully as my mom made pie crusts from scratch and helped her peel apples with our old-school hand-crank apple peeler. My dad let me help roll out dough for cinnamon rolls, sprinkling brown sugar and cinnamon atop them, and drizzling icing on the rolls fresh from the oven. But I never thought one day that this could be my thing, too.

I’ve always had an obsession with baking— staying home on a rainy Friday night with friends to bake cookies was a staple of my teen years. I eventually graduated to cakes and breads, but I never would feign to call myself a good baker or even describe it as a hobby. I recently read over an old blog post from 2015, where I called myself a novice baker, even though I’d been doing it weekly for years at that point.

It took me years to realize that even though I grew up surrounded by great cooks and with people who loved to share good food, I never really saw myself as someone who had good instincts as a cook. And to be fair, it took me far too long to find myself as a cook, not a baker.

I consistently lived on grilled cheese and scrambled eggs throughout college. I didn’t learn how to cook broccoli until I was ashamedly 21. I always saw cooking as a chore, and not something that could bring joy. I don’t know that I cooked a fully balanced meal for myself until my mid-20s. Not for lack of resources, I had been given the gifts of parents who taught me about nutrition and how to get in all your nutrients in a day. Really, it was likely my then-undiagnosed ADHD making it incredibly hard to start a new daunting task, or to stay organized enough to plan out a grocery list for a meal.

Beyond my dysfunction from an organizational perspective, I have always had a complicated relationship with food. Textures have always been tricky for me, and I am overly sensitive to certain flavors, tasting bitterness where others don’t. I was a funny child, not liking really specific things like garlic and onions, getting grossed out by the texture of mayonnaise, and never trying something as simple as Dijon mustard until my mid-20s.

But in 2020, I joined the bread trend that captivated the world for many many months, as we all learned how to stay home and keep busy. It was odd to be part of something so in the zeitgeist, and to be able to look back and call myself a pandemic bread baker. Yes, I was one of those people looking for flour anywhere I could get it during the grocery store shortages. I even went to Sea Wolf Bakery in Fremont to get a huge bulk bag of flour to tide me over for many months. Waking up and tending to my sourdough starter became a ritual, and one that helped give the days some meaning. I think it even bled over into other areas of my life— I started wanting to tend to more things, and soon my home was full of plants. There I was, tending to my indoor houseplants, my outdoor garden, and my bread. It gave me a sense of purpose and creative fulfillment that I’ve always craved.

But recently, bread baking turned into something bigger. Amid the craziness of the slowed-down-pandemic world, I’ve found cooking to be a comfort. And not just breads and pizza, it’s taken a new turn. I have been cooking with my instincts, simplifying recipes where I’m able to, subbing in seasonal produce, and most importantly, seasoning with my heart and not with measuring spoons. The repetition of cutting vegetables, of slowly building a recipe and seasoning with reckless abandon has become such a comfort. Before the pandemic, I never saw cooking for what it was, a meditation. A simple way of following the seasons, of using whole ingredients to nourish the body.

Now, I’m not saying there aren’t days when I’m fully over it— when I can’t be fussed to chop or mince or dice anything. And that’s when pantry staples and one-pan meals really come in handy. Just because it isn’t an artsy 3-hour concoction coming together doesn’t mean it’s any less impressive. Sometimes the labor of love is just in making sure your loved ones are well fed with a home-cooked meal, even if it’s not the full, destroy-the-kitchen-feast.

I still have a lot to learn in the kitchen, particularly when it comes to embracing simplicity. Sometimes I embark on a multi-hour cooking adventure only to get fatigued halfway through. I am also still learning the basics of creating a well-rounded vegetarian meal, as my vegetarianism is a new feature in my life. Only a few years in, I still forget things like adding a solid protein source to every meal. I want to get more creative with things like adding tofu to blended sauces, or figuring out new ways to add legumes into a meal. But we’re slowly getting there.

Even though my creativity ebbs and flows when it comes to making meals, it is always a grounding place for me to go back to. My relationship to food, cooking, and my body is ever-changing but I’ll always think fondly of my different cooking eras as points of growth in my life.