Cooking
Cultural Identity in Cooking Singed and tattered towels; burnt pots and pans; metal utensils on nonstick pans: my journey with cooking began with catastrophic damage to the kitchen and a pair of immensely regretful parents. The summer before my junior year, I made a resolution to meal-prep all my food moving forward as a personal objective of independence, and the kitchen, with its daunting unfamiliarity, morphed into my unconquered arena. While "burnt" perfectly encapsulates the dawn of my cooking voyage, I gradually found myself able to distinguish between a panoply of spices, estimate ingredient quantities, extract ideal flavor combinations, and incorporate nutrients in creative ways. My dishes ranged from baked falafel salads drizzled with homemade cheese to peppers brimful of chickpea flour stuffing. After a year of cooking, I surprised myself and my family with two entirely unexpected outcomes: for one, I was regularly producing edible, desirable food, and seco...