Teaching Myself Basic Life Skills

Flirting with the idea of seeming effortless, while finally getting over my fears of raw chicken.

All the hard work you do when no one's watching.

That's how you get there.

I like to be good at things — I crave it. I bail if I don't immediately kickstart the process as a prodigy. Maybe I'll start something else, try my hand at another yet-to-be-discovered talent.

I'm a woman of many can-do's but truly good at only a handful. I take nice film photos, write well enough to make a career of it, hold a scorpion yoga pose, and host a mean karaoke party. Everything else? Bonus points, sure, but not exactly a standing ovation.

• I tried theater and acting but grew tired of it after high school.

• Running? F*ck no. But I'll power-walk a 10K and hike 25 miles without breaking a sweat.

• I tried drumming in a punk rock band in middle school—that was a bust.

• Drawing? Dear God, never let my hands near paintbrushes or Procreate.

You get the point.

An essay I wrote at 7 years old. Even then, I only wanted to grow up and do my own thing. Lol.

Cooking is one of those things I always told people I “hated.”

I suppose I meant it as a pompous feminist retort, but really, it was a façade to conceal the truth: I simply didn’t know how. No one ever showed me how to brine meat, measure the simmer time of white rice versus brown, or explain why stainless steel is the surperior cooktop surface.

My parents never taught me to cook. To be honest, they never made a real sit-down dinner at all when I was growing up. I don’t blame them. As a new mom, I understand the chaos they were juggling — becoming parents while balancing a mortgage, full-time jobs, a marriage, and appointments. It’s a lot.

And at some point, as an adult, you learn to fill the gaps yourself. You realize that relying on someone else’s absence as an excuse for your own unfinished growth is lousy. With age comes authority. Cooking is just one small example of this, a surface-level skill that stands for something deeper. I’m still working through other generational traumas, but I’ve outgrown those old crutches that kept me from taking action. Approaching your thirties or starting a family can do that to you. I'm better for it.

So while our family binders were never stuffed with handwritten recipes, my mother always bought organic produce and on-sale flowers to brighten the table. We snacked on fresh fruit, boiled vegetables, and reheated the same protein throughout the week, usually paired with canned soup or warm bread. We were an “ingredient household,” but a healthy one. Where my parents lacked culinary guidance, their care for my well-being always shone through.

Pleasures of an ingredient household.

Post-college, I pieced together overcooked pasta and dry salads, too busy catching flights for photography gigs to notice what had expired in the fridge. When COVID arrived, I excused myself by funneling money into local restaurants and surviving on snacks while my husband completed a six-month wildland firefighter stint with the Idaho Forest Service.

But it was time for a change. Becoming pregnant with Reyna nudged me beyond DoorDash receipts and frozen stand-ins. I wanted to be the mom baking protein cookies for her kids’ soccer practices, the cutesy red-heeled girl gliding into dinner parties with a lovely casserole dish in hand. I knew it wouldn’t be an overnight transformation, but I could at least start somewhere.

It turns out I don’t hate cooking. In fact, I really, truly love it.

And, to my surprise, I’m pretty damn good at it, all things considered.

Pickling vegetables, blending spices, gathering fresh fruits and roots, and arranging the final garnish. Cooking has become my silent yoga class, a private meditation rewarded with flavor. I’ve studied Alice Waters’s The Art of Simple Food as if it were scripture, learning how our seasonal garden can flow seamlessly into our dinner plates. My husband and I share this quiet rhythm: he works the dirt and refines our irrigation while I boil Roselle leaves into fresh Jamaica and simmer stocks from onion cuttings. If we’re short on tomatoes this season, we’ll have collard greens for breakfast. Nature’s rhythm sets our table, and I believe that’s the most vital thread of a healthy diet (I highly recommend The Omnivore’s Dilemma — it’s fascinating).

Farm to table. Bringing my husband and dad's garden goodies to the kitchen.

Meal planning takes work. It’s about knowing exactly what to buy, avoiding overspending, and stretching ingredients across a week’s worth of meals. Add a baby starting solids to the mix, and you’re looking at at least an hour each week just to draft a grocery list before heading out the door.

Now, I like cooking because it’s where science meets creativity. There’s a balance of should-dos and should-nots. The delicate dance between following someone else’s recipe and adding your own twist.

I grew up with a comically yet intensely irrational fear of raw chicken — so much so that it kept me out of the kitchen for nearly a decade. But as someone who loves to travel for good food, idolizes Anthony Bourdain, and craves self-sufficiency — I was done letting fear hold me back. I’ve tackled far more demanding challenges in life than cooking chicken to 165 degrees, so one evening, while Reyna stayed with her grandma (I needed complete focus!), I just did that. My sun-dried artichoke chicken turned out nearly perfect. I was happy and so proud. That moment still keeps me going.

Since then, my favorite go-to recipes — the ones my husband and I savor most — include:

• Herb-Butter Turkey Meatballs

• White Bean Green Chili Chicken Soup

• Classic Americana Pot Roast

• Green Chili Chuck Tacos

• The Simplest Arugula Salad of All Time

I cook because it's healthy, a good habit, and a basic necessity for my family (and myself). Making a homemade dinner has become a hushed, screen-free household meditation before fully winding down for the evening. And years later, when my daughter comes home from school, I'll have perfected the fluffy focaccia as her mid-afternoon snack, and I'll have my wellness juice on the countertop in my still-beloved thrifted citrus decanter.

I want to instill these smallish, intimate rituals in the Carrasco household, and I hope Reyna finds them endearing enough to pass them down to her kids. The best part about food is its neverending formulaic experimentation; you can test one recipe today and an entirely different food group the next.

You gather, you eat, you cry, you sing. Food is ritual; it's religion. It's health. It's... love.