How can you take home with you?
To me, home looks like a countertop cluttered with an Instant Pot, stand mixer, and rice cooker. It tastes like puttanesca and freshly baked cookies. It sounds like my best friend’s laughter as I fail to separate egg whites. My earliest memories are in the kitchen: learning fractions through recipe books, family gatherings around the stovetop, celebrations, and grief shared at the kitchen island. It’s not exactly something I can stuff into my rolly bag.
This circles back to my original thought. In about six months, I will no longer be at home, nor will I have access to a kitchen for my freshman year of college. How is it that this ritual that I hold so dear will be gone? How quickly will the muscle memory of these recipes fade?
The most I can say about my religious sensibilities is that I’m culturally Catholic but I understand devotion in my own way. The act of creation—the careful measuring, the patience, the offering of something made by hand—feels sacred to me. And while creating something for others is rewarding, creating something with others is truly beautiful. These recipes are more than instructions; they are the way I know and love the people who have shaped me. They hold the cadence of our conversations, the warmth of our shared meals, the quiet intimacy of cooking side by side.
That brings me to what you are reading now: my attempt to archive and honor these people, memories, and creations—not just as distant recollections, but as they are now, evidence of home that I can hold in my hands.
Fourteen recipes later, I’m beginning to understand the scope of this project as one that will never truly be finished, and many parts may remain unwritten. For now, I can settle with this being Volume 1.
