My Journey to Cooking

Welcome to my kitchen! I have been making food as long as I can remember. As a kid, I loved to bake: cookies, brownies, frosting, pretty much any kind of sweets. During high school and early college, I made so many batches of chocolate chip cookies, I had the recipe memorized. I didn’t even need to measure eventually. I could just estimate the amounts by eye and adjust until the texture was right. I started to make variations on this recipe and developed a whole slew of different kinds of cookies, just substituting in different ingredients.

After moving out of my parents’ house, out of college dorms with dining halls, and into my own apartment with a kitchen, I needed to figure out how to make something more substantial than pastries for meals. Though my sweet tooth is by no means picky, my favourite dessert was always pumpkin pie, so I naturally turned to my beloved pumpkins! I soon discovered that there are so many things that you can do with pumpkins, and I wanted to try them all! I bought several pumpkins, and I made pumpkin soup, pumpkin pasta, curried pumpkin, to name a few. Every fall since then, I dive headlong into pumpkin season as the squash returns to the grocery stores.

In fall of 2020, I was working from home, staying in all the time, all those aspects of pandemic life, and I realized that was the perfect setup for cooking squash. Simply cut and clean the squash, then stick it in the oven and forget about it for an hour, while you go to the other room and get some work done. Given how ideally situated I was, I decided to broaden my horizons and explore other kinds of squash in addition to pumpkins.

There are so many squashes, and they are so versatile. I followed several recipes, both online and from books, but I usually found myself tweaking them or putting my own spin on things. Eventually I decided to go off book and try my own ideas. My boyfriend ate all my dinners with me, and after a few months of this, he encouraged me to start writing down what I was doing to reproduce the results.